How do the Chinese see themselves? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Political issues in the People's Republic of China.

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#15149424
I watched these a fair few months ago and made me try to consider what is the Chinese sense of things which we don’t experience or know of in the west?

As it has long been the case but increasingly evident that China can’t simply be ignored like many of the nations around the world for the average insular westerner.
So what is your take?


#15149483
China is going through an economic expansion comparable to that of Japan in the 1980s, when some right-wing analysts predicted that Japan would overtake the United States within a decade. America then imposed a series of economic sanctions on Japan to contain its rise, which is exactly Trump has done last year. What is problematic about China is that it is still a communist state allied with North Korea. But since its economic prosperity is solely based on the trade with the West, China is unlikely to ruin good economic relationships with the United States or Australia by taking over Taiwan or some other Asian islands.

The Chinese are comfortable with their own skin especially when the nation is on the rise. They share one light pigmentation gene called OCA2 with ancient Europeans and its frequency was 50% among European hunter-gatherers. The OCA2 gene is independently involved in the evolution of light skin pigmentation in East Asia and Europe. Two OCA2 polymorphisms (rs1800414 and rs74653330) have been associated with lighter skin pigmentation in East Asian populations.

Image

Fig. S6. Light allele frequencies in ancient and present-day European populations for select SNPs (A) rs2675345, (B) rs4778123, (C) rs2153271, (D) rs3758833, (E) rs12203592, and (F) rs1325132. Nearest genes are labelled at the top of each bar plot.

At SLC24A5, rs2675345 shows evidence of change with both ancestry and time, suggesting that even after the spread of the light allele from Anatolia into Western Europe in the Neolithic (7) selection continued to occur post-admixture. Again, not all of these cases involve an increase in the frequency of the light pigmentation allele over time. The light allele of rs4778123 (OCA2) was at high frequency in hunter-gatherers but lower in later populations (SI Appendix, Fig. S6B). From the manually curated set of SNPs (Fig. 2 D–F), rs12203592 near IRF4 also displays a marked effect of ancestry with higher light allele frequency in hunter-gatherers (SI Appendix, Fig. S6E). While rs12203592 was not present in the UK Biobank summary statistics, another SNP at the IRF4 locus, rs3778607, was present but with a smaller ancestry effect (SI Appendix, Fig. S7).
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/1/e2009227118
Last edited by ThirdTerm on 13 Jan 2021 21:38, edited 2 times in total.
#15149484
Rancid wrote:They see that it is their turn to make the rules for the globe.

I agree.

They see the US and other countries break all sorts of international laws and behave like hypocrites and treat China at times like crap, so think "why can't we do the same to secure out interests?.

China believes they have always had the greatest culture in the world and now is their time to become the global hegemon and lead the world better than the Americans or anyone else.

Many regular Chinese support the CCP because they see all the good things they've done to rise China from subsistence poverty. China doesn't have the view of individual liberty, they have the view that Chinese society operates like a hive where ultimately all work for the good of the Chinese nation where sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
#15153868
What people think about China is a Capitalist country are just living in a fairy land. China is practicing Private property and free market but under Marxist laws. They're generating Wealth and performing imperialism through giving heavy debts to the countries that they couldn't able to pay back like they're doing in Africa and Asia. China wants to do the unite and conquer technique. When they'll be powerful enough, then they'll conquer all the capitalist countries and that's how they'll perform proper communism in the end. Then maybe Utopia.
#15153873
That Ted talk video posted above is pretty good. One of the things it says is that this is complicated.

A year or two ago, a military historian wrote a book (sorry, don't remember the name) about how hard it will be to negotiate a peaceful transition, as China comes into it's own.

So true. But there is no option but to try and pull it off.

In that regard, Trump was a disaster of biblical proportions.

But we have to try. The idea is simple enough, use our influence to make China play nice, while accommodating Chinese needs. Pulling it off will be enormously challenging. China is succumbing to the lure of power. Hard to blame them when in my earlier years we did the same damn thing.

Another thing the guy said is that there is always more to learn. Which is true, but a lot of Chinese culture is not complicated. Most of them were living on farms a couple generations ago, and they are still learning how modern civilisation works.

The Chinese are mad about an ancient game called Go. It's harder than chess and they start teaching it in grade school. It teaches your brain how to think spatially without taking college level advanced math classes. They use it to identify talent early, and that is just brilliant.

So... you want to know more about China? Try this:

https://www.amazon.com/Go-Nation-Asia-Studies-Global/dp/0520276329/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=go+nation&qid=1612042367&sr=8-2

#15153950
late wrote:But we have to try. The idea is simple enough, use our influence to make China play nice, while accommodating Chinese needs. Pulling it off will be enormously challenging. China is succumbing to the lure of power. Hard to blame them when in my earlier years we did the same damn thing.

Another thing the guy said is that there is always more to learn. Which is true, but a lot of Chinese culture is not complicated. Most of them were living on farms a couple generations ago, and they are still learning how modern civilisation works.

In that regard, Trump was a disaster of biblical proportions.


This is where I strongly disagree with people advocating rapprochement.

The West have been trying what you said. They just failed. Spectacularly. This is why Trump was elected and the game-change in the subsequent years.

It's not that you have the wrong intention, no. It's just that China simply does not want to learn how modern civilisation works.

I am afraid I agree with @Rancid and @Unthinking Majority's analysis more.

This is something Trump doesn't, and will never understand. However, counter-intuitively, it's someone as stupid, simple or even evil as him who found the right direction -- and even the new U.S. Secretary of State admitted this.


late wrote:The Chinese are mad about an ancient game called Go. It's harder than chess and they start teaching it in grade school. It teaches your brain how to think spatially without taking college level advanced math classes. They use it to identify talent early, and that is just brilliant.


I am Chinese and I know how to play this game, but I hate playing it.
#15153951
Philosopher101 wrote:What people think about China is a Capitalist country are just living in a fairy land. China is practicing Private property and free market but under Marxist laws. They're generating Wealth and performing imperialism through giving heavy debts to the countries that they couldn't able to pay back like they're doing in Africa and Asia. China wants to do the unite and conquer technique. When they'll be powerful enough, then they'll conquer all the capitalist countries and that's how they'll perform proper communism in the end. Then maybe Utopia.


However, it is equally naive to believe Chinese actually have the idea of Communism and are actually eager to spread Communism as if it's their culture. It just happens that most Chinese had not been trained to respect individual property.

Confiscation and familial execution have been common punishments for millennia, and at least confiscation is still widely agreed upon.
#15153977
Patrickov wrote:
It's not that you have the wrong intention, no. It's just that China simply does not want to learn how modern civilisation works.




I am Chinese and I know how to play this game, but I hate playing it.



Never said it would be easy. We have, in the relationships China has with the world, the basis for keeping this from boiling over into war.

I had no idea you were Chinese. I suck at the game, but I love playing it. I have a free Go program called Leela, and play a few games a day. It is very, very strong, so I have wound up playing with a large handicap on a 17x17 board.

They say, when you get old, you should keep your mind active. That kinda does the trick.
#15153992
China is a competitive, proud country. They really value education and they respect teachers and elders. The Chinese consider themselves to be top performers in whatever they do: business, chess, sports...etc.

They can also be ruthless and mean to those who they don't respect.
#15154297
late wrote:I had no idea you were Chinese.


I don't sound like one, but it is a technical fact.

In fact, this Chinese self-recognition issue is often taken to the extremes.

One side (mainly pro-independence Hongkongers and Taiwanese) are eager to deny their Chinese ancestry (or in some cases, denounce the Northern Chinese as polluted by even more Northern tribes, e.g. Mongol / Manchu / Russian, etc.)
while the other side (Commies) force themselves, as well as others of the same (or sometimes different) ethnicity, to be "proud" of their heritage and culture (with Commie agenda mixed in, of course).

It is the manifestation of Newton's Third Law of Motion in a very sad way.

I believe bodies with more power (i.e. nations / regimes / governments) bear more responsibility, so I place the blame of the above problem on the CCP rather than whoever opposing them, but it doesn't mean I agree with everything the other side does.

My main concern is that the Chinese system and mindset suck in administrating a modern society (CCP is more a phenomenon than the source -- some historical dynasties like Qin and Ming had been similar to the current regime). It's not the ethnicity that matters, it's the mindset which matters, and in this case, I only trust Anglicized or Americanized ones.

In some sense, but different ways, Singapore and Taiwan are both successfully Westernized Chinese countries, although they are not without their own shortcomings (Taiwan has mature Western democracy but with a sometimes laughable pastoral society, while Singapore employs a Chinese dictatorship but more strictly bounded by a British system than Hong Kong. Hong Kong's fall is very much linked to the strength difference brought upon by its accessibility to CCP itself)


late wrote:I suck at the game, but I love playing it. I have a free Go program called Leela, and play a few games a day. It is very, very strong, so I have wound up playing with a large handicap on a 17x17 board.


The "standard" is 19x19, while 9x9 and 13x13 variants are preferable for those wanting a fast game. My father is a keen player of 13x13.


late wrote:They say, when you get old, you should keep your mind active. That kinda does the trick.


This is very true, although the Chinese also have other means to achieve that. Actual mahjong (not those simplistic matching, the real deal involving 4 participants), for example.
#15154301
Wellsy wrote:I watched these a fair few months ago and made me try to consider what is the Chinese sense of things which we don’t experience or know of in the west?

As it has long been the case but increasingly evident that China can’t simply be ignored like many of the nations around the world for the average insular westerner.
So what is your take?



I watched these videos, and the second one was quite good. The part I found most enjoyable was from 46:25.

However, the bit I found most relevant was the bit about Confucianism. Confucianism is basically ancient fascism, and is the predominant philosophy of East Asian countries, including Japan, the two Koreas, the multiple Chinas, etc. Confucianism is a very powerful ideology, and it is quintessentially authoritarian, but it gets a pass for being ancient. And, I would wager that most people reading these words have no idea about confucianism (and I myself have only a very superficial knowledge).

I had been meaning to post here to illuminate this point.

And by the way, I'm tepidly pro China, might as well throw that out there, and I lived in China for 2 years (I also lived in Tokyo for 7 years, and I lived in Seoul for a paltry 3 months along the way).
#15154302
late wrote:Never said it would be easy. We have, in the relationships China has with the world, the basis for keeping this from boiling over into war.

I had no idea you were Chinese. I suck at the game, but I love playing it. I have a free Go program called Leela, and play a few games a day. It is very, very strong, so I have wound up playing with a large handicap on a 17x17 board.

They say, when you get old, you should keep your mind active. That kinda does the trick.

17x17? Why not 19x19? The standard board sizes are 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19. In ancient China, only the 19x19 board size was used. :eh:
#15154303
I tried playing those Chinese board games with my Chinese girlfriend, in the bar that she owns and runs by herself 7 days a week, and she kicked my ass continuously. It was like when she explained the rules and I understood a little bit, the losses just got worse. A bad experience, that. Just joking.
#15154307
China sees itself as resuming its rightful place at the table. It will not Westernize, but it will modernize and rival the West - something we haven't properly felt with since the Siege of Vienna. China has no interest in replacing the West, but it also has no desire to accommodate it or be subservient to it. Either we can accept them as equals or we can't - and I suspect it is the latter.

The Chinese see themselves in somewhat heroic terms - as redefining, for the Global South, the terms of the struggle against Western powers. It will likely try to remain positioning itself as a global leader particularly in this arena. As for foreign relations, I don't think war is inevitable. Outside the Yuan Dynasty, which wasn't even Chinese, China hasn't embarked on grandiose imperial projects outside of its area. It prefers to trade and exist peacefully (though of course, on their terms, as befits the greatest civilization on Earth). It is a very insular culture, and as long as it manages to secure its strategic position I don't see them having many ambitions beyond the first island chain and the South China Sea. If they do replace the US as a superpower, they will likely take up the American position in securing global sea networks, but I doubt you'd see as much Wilsonian drama. America and the USSR, all things considered, were deeply ideological and crusader empires in ways that China simply is not. I sometimes wonder if this fanaticism is simply something inherent in Abrahamic cultures? You get a few exceptions now and then in history - Khmer Rouge, or Imperial Japan - but for the most part, Asian cultures are much more laid back and pragmatic on matters of belief: ideology and religion.

I don't think China poses an existential threat to the West. I think it does pose a serious threat to Western oligarchs, and their position on the global pyramid. Which indirectly does mean it poses an existential threat to the West because those very oligarchs have no problem sacrificing millions of us to maintain that position.
#15154320
Fasces wrote:It prefers to trade and exist peacefully (though of course, on their terms, as befits the greatest civilization on Earth)


It is exactly their terms which is unacceptable and seen as slavery.
#15154322
Ah, the trademark Hong Kong hysterics.

Hong Kong isn't any different, and never has been. It was a colonial dictatorship before, then an oligarchical one, and it'll be a CCP one in the future, and nothing significant will change at either step. A nice scapegoat for incompetent city management, though.
#15154323
Fasces wrote:... incompetent city management


On the part of CCP's imperialistic desire and their incompetent collaborators, which itself is at least partly because competent people do not want to take part in this fraud and oppressive regime.
#15154336
Patrikov wrote:On the part of CCP's imperialistic desire and their incompetent collaborators, which itself is at least partly because competent people do not want to take part in this fraud and oppressive regime.


This is not true. Hong Kong has 1 major problem. It is no longer special. With every passing year, as China develops, it regresses into becoming just any old city. There is nothing unique or special about Hong Kong that means it will be a paramount city of privilege for all eternity. It benefited from unique circumstances for a unique period of time that is in the past, and never coming back. Hong Kong's problems stem from the local elite and the local populace stubbornly refusing to accept this fact.

The simple truth is that China is not any more authoritarian in any meaningful sense than Colonial Britain was, or Hong Kong's transitional authority is, and life in Hong Kong is not that different than any other tier 1 or tier 2 Chinese city beyond an inflated sense of self-importance - though even Shanghai and Beijing have that.
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