Results of the 2020 Census have been released. Some links:
- Reuters summary
- Chinese state statistics service communique (in Chinese)
Here’s a table of the regional change:
| 2020 | 2010 | % | |
| Beijing | 21893095 | 19612368 | 0.12 |
| Tianjin | 13866009 | 12938224 | 0.07 |
| Hebei | 74610235 | 71854202 | 0.04 |
| Shanxi | 34915616 | 35712111 | -0.02 |
| Inner Mongolia | 24049155 | 24706321 | -0.03 |
| Liaoning | 42591407 | 43746323 | -0.03 |
| Jilin | 24073453 | 27462297 | -0.12 |
| Heilongjiang | 31850088 | 38312224 | -0.17 |
| Shanghai | 24870895 | 23019148 | 0.08 |
| Jiangsu | 84748016 | 78659903 | 0.08 |
| Zhejiang | 64567588 | 54426891 | 0.19 |
| Anhui | 61027171 | 59500510 | 0.03 |
| Fujian | 41540086 | 36894216 | 0.13 |
| Jiangxi | 45188635 | 44567475 | 0.01 |
| Shandong | 101527453 | 95793065 | 0.06 |
| Henan | 99365519 | 94023567 | 0.06 |
| Hubei | 57752557 | 57237740 | 0.01 |
| Hunan | 66444864 | 65683722 | 0.01 |
| Guangdong | 126012510 | 104303132 | 0.21 |
| Guangxi | 50126804 | 46026629 | 0.09 |
| Hainan | 10081232 | 8671518 | 0.16 |
| Chongqing | 32054159 | 28846170 | 0.11 |
| Sichuan | 83674866 | 80418200 | 0.04 |
| Guizhou | 38562148 | 34746468 | 0.11 |
| Yunnan | 47209277 | 45966239 | 0.03 |
| Tibet | 3648100 | 3002166 | 0.22 |
| Shaanxi | 39528999 | 37327378 | 0.06 |
| Gansu | 25019831 | 25575254 | -0.02 |
| Qinghai | 5923957 | 5626722 | 0.05 |
| Ningxia | 7202654 | 6301350 | 0.14 |
| Xinjiang | 25852345 | 21813334 | 0.19 |
| CHINA | 1411778724 | 1339724852 | 0.05 |
Key highlights:
Population has grown by 5.4% from 1.340B to 1.412B. Its population was 10M higher than projected, entirely due to Guangdong (which has 126M, not 115M). This is obviously a case of internal migrants not being tracked.
North-East China (Dongbei), as expected, is in the throes of severe depopulation. Heilongjiang, which borders Russia, falls from 38.2M in 2010 to 31.9M now. For comparison, this is a faster rate of decline than what the Russian Far East experienced in the 1990s. This is the region from where the neocons and East European Russophobes were telling you that the Chinese would mount their demographic takeover of Siberia from. Meanwhile, Jilin with 24.1M people now has fewer people than North Korea which is creeping up to 26M.
What seems to be happening is that the entire region, only really settled in 19C, is emptying out towards the sunnier south, especially Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, in a reflection of what is happening in many other countries. On the bright side, I suppose, this suggests that the stagnation in wages and GDP per capita and the ultra-low fertility rates in Dongbei are somewhat exaggerated if the underlying population base has been bleeding out so rapidly.
I was surprised myself… but even as China continued surging in 2010s, Dongbei's GDPcc has barely budged in the past decade even in absolute terms. Even Tianjin plummeted relatively, going from China's richest region, above even Beijing/Shanghai, to <60% of their level. https://t.co/Q270e0JCH9
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) January 2, 2021
NBS statistics head says number of births fell 18% to 12M in 2020, for a total TFR of 1.3 children per woman. China seems to be plummeting to South Korea-tier fertility with a time lag of 20 years. This probably doesn’t have much to do with coronavirus. After all, China only had a short but sharp lockdown which successfully suppressed the epidemic and has since been living in normality. Desired TFR is 1.8 children per woman, and realized TFR is usually at least 0.5 children less than desired, so a recovery in this indicator cannot be expected any time soon. Probably not for decades.
Urbanization rate is at 64%. This is relatively low for a country at China’s level of development and its future rise will be a further dampener on fertility.
So it seems pretty clear that China’s population is close to its all time peak and will start to decline in the early 2020s.
The average age of the population is 38.8 years. For the first time in modern history, it is higher than that in the US.
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Has the Chinese government made a serious propaganda campaign to increase birthrate yet? I thought when the CCP says jump everyone says how high.
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Births falling 18% in a year is massive. Corona has to be a major factor.
The current decline started in 2016 and has been largely world-wide. Thus, it pre-dates covid-19.
There is speculation that both covid-19 and the vaccines cause infertility in some people.
No need to worry. We’re supposed to have SENS by 2035.
The CCP would like that, wouldn’t they?
Reality is good at disappointing their expectations, but its also not like they can try that hard, not when they also have the same challenges internally – if the Party members, who literally are required to act in the interests of the Party aren’t eager to be forced to have two children, how much less could they expect the rest of the population to do so?
I visited Harbin a few years ago and it does not look like Youngstown or Gary, neither does Dalian, and Heilongjiang has had decent GDP growth recently, though how much of that is really productive is a question, but then that is an issue for Chinese GDP data as a whole. I did see quite a lot of empty condos in China, not just in Harbin, and spread out all over the larger cities, though maybe this is not an issue in Beijing or Shanghai. Dalian is a vital shipbuilding location for the Chinese military, its aircraft carriers are built there, so it does not seem to have any serious economic issues in the medium term. Provincial level GDP data in English from the government is very very very difficult to find in a user friendly format.
Like China should find a way so if Google Heilongjiang GDP growth you can find it in the first few links. Changchun is a center for locomotive and the auto industry, and Harbin has heavy industry and aircraft manufacturing, so why should they be in decline?
Ban all sale of contraceptives on the pain of a 10 year labor camp?
China like Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, still thinks in Malthusian terms, IMO. A lot of politburo members were engineers, so I think they are very math-minded about things like per-capita water availability. So, the result is that they think in terms of slowing the fertility decline or gradually trying to ratchet it up to replacement.
IMO, the West is different. Practically nobody is thinking about the math of resource limitations. The real problem is that you can ratchet population numbers up with immigration, and so why bother with natalism? And nobody is allowed to articulate the problem of Europeans not reproducing or of them being replaced. The West seems congenitally unable to solve its low TFR problem because of diversity.
The lower median age of the US is really just a measure of how screwed it is demographically – how many fertile and active blacks it has in the peak criminal cohorts.
Lol, as if.
I wonder what the fertility of Han women in Tibet is, compared to outside it.
Among other things, the following charts by Global Times claim that Han population fell 5% in relation to other ethnicities since 2010.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-05-11/9665d891-18b8-4911-932d-2e7516b4f498.jpeg
A new kind of population replacement: all commies all the time. They should try migrants instead. Many conservatives claim that it is the cultural Marxism driving the migrants and not greed for ever-cheaper labor by capitalists (sorry, I meant to say “entrepreneurs“). So how come commies don’t enthusiastically open their borders?
Something doesn’t add up here, as if the entrepreneurs were actually communists or something like that. Thank god we know that socialism is definitely behind it. Because Venezuela…
It really doesn’t matter whether they want migrants or not in a way, since China uses Chinese and its not an easy language for migrants to pick up. The only way they could change that is to widely adopt and use English, and there’s no movement for that.
China, along with every other country, would be better off with half their current population. As the real estate people say ‘we aren’t making any more land’ nor more freshwater , ores or anything else we require for a comfortable standard of living.
I wonder if the Chinese will ever promote a “Gross Domestic Happiness” model like Bhutan and encourage city dwellers to migrate to the vast expanses of the countryside for a more peaceful, idyllic life where they can be free from the corrupting influences of metropolises?
Your population creates the network effects for goods used for a living standard. Until that can all be automated, you still need people to make your computers.
Certainly not on those levels, China wants to, if not maximize wealth growth, then continue to do so at a significant rate and that can’t be done if they deindustrialize on any level. There is some efforts to promote “new opportunities in the countryside” and try to industrialize the inland areas, but going back to agriculture isn’t likely at all.
At the end of the day, the mandate of the CCP has basically been to “give everyone a good life and triumph over the humiliations of the past.” They can’t return to the past and they have to be very measured in the sacrifices they ask from the population.
And yeah, its easier to maintain top down surveilance and AI-enabled controls in the cities. Glory to the Machine God.
Were I in charge in China, I would be happy with a shrinking population. 300 million people living peacefully within current borders at Japan’s living standards would be a lovely gift for posterity in 150 years time. It would be bad for real estate magnates and toilet paper sellers, but they’ll be OK.
Also interesting to see that the Male:Female sex ratio has not changed from censes since 1963. Wasn’t China supposed to have an excess male problem ?
IMO, it has more to do with other factors:
1.) one-party state (limits oppositional rhetoric/ makes people think past the election cycle)
3.) lower wages
4.) the propaganda or rhetoric niche is already neatly filled by stock phrases
5.) government does not need to use diversity as an excuse for more control – it already has the control.
6.) censorship of movies, TV, and the Press discourages radical political messages
7.) uses accusations of racism as a weapon against capitalism and therefore has an understanding of its potential to be used a weapon against the regime
what would be the expected result if they completely removed all limits on family size tomorrow?
how long until India passes China in population?
“The lower median age of the US is really just a measure of how screwed it is demographically”
yeah it’s mainly about an endless wave of third worlders coming in.
think about how “young” America will become when that Africa wave begins to hit in earnest starting around 2040 or so.
much wow.
Relative increase of the Islamic portion of the population.
Good luck paying the pensions.
China would be plenty screwed with only 300 million, tbh and likely wouldn’t be able to maintain current borders at all and India would completely lolwipe China at most things.
Getting there in 150+ years time would solve a lot of that. Also, India could do with a population of 200 million max. I wouldn’t force these things, but if they go that way naturally, it’d be welcome.
I’d rather my posterity live open and fulfilling lives, than serve as meat to the grinder of my grandiosity. Nukes and modern transportation render population irrelevant for maintaining territory. “Will” is still important though.
lol, good luck having an open and fulfilling life under the bootheel of an enemy.
Nuke do not solve many problems and power, including military power, can be exerted in many ways. Until technology advances such that computers will be able to essentially emulate humans, then humans will still be necessary.
Even much of modernity and the living standard itself is based on production, and that production is based on human hands to build what is needed. Japan without the world wouldn’t have much of a living standard at all(indeed, they wouldn’t be able to live: they don’t produce enough food).
All other things equal, it is better to be rich than to be poor; and it is better to have power than to be powerless.
If Chinese are not “lolwiping” Russia, why do you presume that India, that cant “lolwipe” Pakistan would do so with China?
I’ve understood that ethnic minorities have now almost no limitations with their family size, before they, or at least Tibetans and Mongols had three children limit.
China isn’t hostile to Russia at all at the moment, with no points of competition except for relative minimal things like political influence over Stans. India has a much more enduring hostility to China, one that doesn’t look like it is going to change anytime soon and significant points of economic and social competition. From a status perspective, India appears to have made competition/triumph versus China as a matter of their governance platform.
Pakistan survives heavily due to its allies. But in terms of influence, not to mention economic or research performance, India does indeed have disproportionate power versus Pakistan.
Almost none isn’t the same as having none at all.
That said, it was mostly a quip. In practice, fertility restrictions by the government are not the important part anymore; socially, individuals aren’t willing to have children due to the pressure cooker environment, etc.
Excellent point! But irrelevant if the Chinese authorities really decide to go for it.
When the US elites decided to open the borders to Mexican immigrants starting in the late 1960’s, they forced the US to provide instructions in spanish and provide free translation services etc., which was done not out of kindness, but specifically to make it easier for the rich to import Mexican nationals and drive wages down and profits up.
If anything, Japan is even more linguistically insular than China. Few Japanese speak English: getting along in most of Japan without speaking Japanese is nearly impossible. But a recent plan to force Japanese population growth by massively increasingly immigration details how English will be made the official second language, translation services will be made widely available, all signs will be joint Japanese/English etc. For exactly this reason: to make it easier to import foreign workers.
If the Chinese elites really want it, they will get it.
“Urbanization rate is at 64%. This is relatively low for a country at China’s level of development and its future rise will be a further dampener on fertility.”
Thailand is 50%, Turkmenistan is 52%, Georgia is 59%, Bosnia is 49%, Serbia is 56%, Dominican Republic is 82%, Mexico is 80%. Seems to be about where you’d expect it to be.
“Desired TFR is 1.8 children per woman, and realized TFR is usually at least 0.5 children less than desired, so a recovery in this indicator cannot be expected any time soon. Probably not for decades.”
The Party has to realize that it has to introduce the three child policy soon.
“It really doesn’t matter whether they want migrants or not in a way, since China uses Chinese and its not an easy language for migrants to pick up.”
Semimythology. The Chinese writing system is unusually difficult, but it’s far from impossible to pick up.
I imagine that Swedish or English is pretty hard to learn for someone who has only spoken Arabic for his entire life?
It’s naive to take any data coming out of China at face value. The unexplained delays in releasing these seemingly innocuous numbers are also very strange. So are the wild discrepancies between Census and yearly fertility data. China is probably already experiencing population decline. The cultural changes brought about by shortsighted communist policies are irreversible, and there is absolutely nothing the Chinese leadership can do to increase birth rates in the short to medium term. What would be necessary would be a massive campaign of return to traditional values and of exclusion of women from the workplace – literally back to the kitchen – which will not happen as China today is a much less tightly-controlled society than it was in the 1960s and there would be no will to do so by the already spoiled and materialistic populace.
Chinese middle class wants nothing to do with Maoist ideology. Chinese women are addicted to social media whoring and so are the men. Homosexual apps are booming in China. As the author said, its demographic trends are 20 years behind South Korea, and so are the social trends. There are no traditional groups left in China except for the hated Muslims, and that is a result of hardcore materialism propagated by the Marxist/Westernizing genocidal regime that has completely obliterated traditional Chinese culture and values and replaced them with a mongrelized and soulless society that isn’t much different from what we have in the West.
A little extreme, but mostly true.
AK,
There’s a formatting issue with your table. For example, in the % column, Beijing row, it says 0.12 (which, in this context means 0.12 %) rather than 12 (which would mean 12 % in this context).
If you cut and pasted this from Excel, you should multiply these numbers by 100 to get percentage. Otherwise, you could format them in to percentage in Excel, so that 0.12 would show up as “12 %”; but I’m not sure that you want a % sign after each number.
Imagine it’s 1940. The United States had nearly zero immigration starting after the crash of 1929 (not after 1924, thank you very much), and a low fertility rate.
Compared to 1940 China and India, the United States had a very small, and very much older population.
United States: 130 million
India: 400 million
China: 500 million
So obviously, going forward from 1940, China and India would totally lolwipe the United States. Right?
Significant differences in urbanization and productivity via capital investment at the time; its not an applicable comparison. Industrial(and GDP output) per capita was staggeringly low in China pre-1978 and likely the same applied to India at the same, with agriculture producing a significant portion of total output.
Vast differences in population do apply when the inputs and outputs are more evenly matched per capita. The United States has also benefitted from its network effects to draw scientific talent, which has bolstered its technology and consequently, productivity and gdp.
I guess it would be cool to see what China was like in the Tang or Han when you that only a tenth of the population you had now, and places had a tenth of the people they had now.
OTOH India’s economy is better balanced with respect to leverage and investments.
English, as a lingua franca of the world, has significant power in reducing communication difficulties for good and ill. Sweden has a very, very large English speaking population as well, 80% or so.
The importation of Syrian immigrants into Sweden, of course, isn’t really for economic reasons and the migrants do not contribute to economy in any meaningful way.
They control the media. If they wanted to, they could put out a pretty strong propaganda offensive. Make every mother in a story have five children. Make celebrity actresses have at least three. Make the men who didn’t have any out to be villains, losers, and sissies. They could point to what’s happened to the US and Europe, what is happening in Africa, and make a nationalist appeal.
This leads me to believe that they don’t want to. They are not serious about the problem – or are at least afraid of the solution.
More like in Ming and Song.
They are very interested in maintaining a high GDP growth rate; there’s a lot of fear of the nation “growing old before it grows rich” and the Party is aware that substantial poverty would be seen as renegading on their mandate to provide a good life, opening themselves to all manner of instability.
Unlike the beliefs of many Unz nationalists, there’s no vast ethnonationalist mentality in China as such; as Modris suggested, what people want is generally a good life and to be wealthy: so the most that the government can do is imply and try to subtly promote a child-bearing life, because if they are seen as forcing the population to have children, then the government will actively hated for seeking to “keep them poor.” As it is, much of the urban population is already angry at any pro-natalist efforts that the government attempts, seeing it as a kind of personal attack upon them. Nationalist feelings in China are largely due to the sense of being looked down upon by the “First World” people, but it wouldn’t inspire many to have more children then, as it’ll just make the individual even poorer and more “Third World.”
Having many children is basically seen low-status, icky and the kind of thing that stupid and poor people do. The CCP can alter only some of that, because ultimately, a lot of this is due to modernity as a whole but like I mentioned, its not like the CCP has even been able to do that to themselves. In fact, the CCP can’t even reasonably require their own members to breed because that would likely be seen by the population as an effort to create a “permanent ruling class.”
There’s a phrase in Chinese for this: the “crab bucket.” Everyone in China wants to advance individually and can’t bear to see someone else get ahead, so any crab that tries to escape, gets dragged down by the others. Obviously the CCP has managed some coordination strategies to deal with it, but its a powerful and overwhelming force – and they themselves are staffed with individuals who made the same tradeoff(less family time for more political power).
In the end, every major nation borrows against the future for present day power, but without present day power, they may not able to make it into the future at all.
We’re all in the crab bucket.
In case Xi is reading this blog, I have a proposal for a new family sitcom that could get Chinese people excited about having kids:
I call it the anti-“All in the Family.” Take some witty Twitter character like David Zhang or Yat-Sen Mao and make them the patriarch of a large family located in the US (filmed in China). Many opportunities for “NOT ALLOW”, “correct species”, and “grandparent cry” jokes among others. But it would be easy to insert a pro-family message on top of it all. Then there could be a spinoff where one of the daughters gets married and moves to some underpopulated part of China, and makes it seem cool.
You have made many good points, but with this claim I strongly disagree, though it’s not very visible internationally, there’s a big Buddhist revival ongoing in China, and there’s a smaller, but quickly and alarmingly growing Christian minority. I believe that at least around 1/4 of Mainlanders are genuinely Buddhists and about 5%~ Christians.
Some of you can cite dubious studies or statistics that claim that there are less Buddhists, but then official statistics of USSR showed that Christianity was a minority religion among the Slavs of Soviet Union, so in my opinion my estimation is very conservative. One does gain very little in China by being a registered member of a religious organisation. Personally I was surprised how often old people in countryside of the North, knew basic Buddhist mantras.
https://external-preview.redd.it/2vbJVlbkEr2C7i5s4gtP2CL1xwRkuWtJFhwYZNlnQKQ.jpg?auto=webp&s=047a016cf583edee996e71a616a803e13650e98e
Somewhat off-topic, so please excuse me.
There seems to be a great deal of talk about the threat of overpopulation and the resulting resource depletion/eventual social instability, and the arguments for why This Is A Bad Thing seem sound.
On the other hand it isn’t really an exaggeration to say that, as things stand, demographic growth is essential for economic growth and national power (and thus the wealth and power of various elites), and that WITHOUT continued demographic growth to fuel it, the current global economy eventually collapses.
Has there been any research on how an economy might qualitatively grow in given constant population? Or, on a related note, constant money supply?
It seems to me that the W.E.F. types who wring their hands about overpopulation and peak_ have the most to lose from an actual solution to the problem, and that (since it doesn’t solve the problems of debt-fueled growth or of massive immigration waves) the Great Reset therefore still leaves us drifting towards Mad Max.
Elites want it. Elites always want the cheapest possible labor, that’s what makes them elite. Nothing undermines elite status as quickly as a balanced labor market – that’s why all systems that have a calcified elite in charge always go for importing cheap labor. The ideology is secondary, they just want cheap and obedient workers. You would too if you were a boss.
My point about cultural Marxism was that importing cheap labor and open borders are not a Marxist policy, they are actually the core of the free market capitalism. Calling it “cultural Marxism” is a way for the capitalist elites to push it on others, pretending that there is something “cultural” or “socialist” about massive migration. There isn’t, lot of people get fooled by the likes of Gates-Zuck-Bezos who systematically create a “cultural” open borders meme in order to distract from what is really going on: an importation of cheap labor for the capitalists (=”entrepreneurs” if you prefer).
I think it is also true that NE Asia could unlock a lot of potential by greater cooperation between the countries. What if coming up with a future vision, raising TFR and researching ways to deal with the costs of the elderly was an international collaboration between Japan, Korea, and China? Maybe, it doesn’t seem realistic at the moment, but think of the combined media complexes or the technical power.
But this would require a civilizational vision. For all the talk of civilization which seems commonplace in China, I think that they are incapable of articulating a clash of civilizations, other than some weak hints at the US.
Remember that one child policy? If you’re rich having a second child was a fee. If you’re poor it was a fine. No one listens to hippy communists unless you have copious amounts of Vodka to sooth all that nonsense illiteracy.
CCP can say jump all it wants, most Chinese people will do what they want anyway until a gun is pointed in their face or literally shamed at unprecedented levels (and thus idiocy like social-credit now exists; this is facebook and twitters wet dream come true I imagine).
Though I have to admit, they are long overdue for another public stadium hanging to appease the mob.
Yes, soullessness is a major issue with Chinese culture but its not universal. There are definitely various “fringe-like” traditionalist movements, and occasionally local governments pick them up as well.
The CCP seems uncertain about them. They generally tolerate them, occasionally verge into promoting them(Confucianism, etc), but are suspicious of any organization outside of themselves and ultimately can’t accept anything that’s anti-industrialization(which Taoism definitely can become, for example).
I’m not sure if Buddhists are particularly natalist, anyway: the ultimate form of practice would seem to become a celibate monk or nun.
“1.3 children per woman” – How do you calculate it for just one year? I thought that fertility rate is defined per woman’s life time.
In fact, social shaming actually acts against natalism in China. If a woman has three children in China(and I knew one or two), she would do well to avoid contact with other liberated women would will actively do everything possible to humiliate her and villify her: by having more children than the norm, she is seen as “stealing resources”, especially any subsidies for children, from them and being a stupid smelly parasite of obviously low education and bovine-like intelligence, which is why she’s having so many children.
It would do the CCP good just to prevent such bullying.
Overseas Chinese on Southeast Asian often have 2 or even 3 children. And somehow the CCP got the Chinese to comply with Coronavirus measures. When Chinese in Chinese have a reputation for being more unruly than the Japanese or Koreans.
And Chinese people do not spit on the streets anymore. They can tie economic opportunities or having subsidies to education or health care in how many children your family has.
If China were to emphasize state Confucianism, there would be less emphasis on personal financial wealth, considering the social status of merchants in Confucian culture, although that may have knock down effects on economic growth, although more than half of China’s economic growth right now is just fluff anyway.
Ancestor worship lends itself pretty well to fertility propaganda, IMO.
What is the current CCP position on depicting ancestors as ghosts? Guessing they don’t allow it. Still, that leaves parents and grandparents on the table, and, time travel stories, as well. Like this one that I haven’t seen yet, 2nd highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi,_Mom_(2021_film)
I think quite a bit of is caused by Shandongers and Jiangsu’ers heading back home in their elder years. That was a trend in China before, where Dongbei was “settled” by coolie field labor who’d return back to Jinan to live like “princes of wu” if they were alive after a half-century of labor.
I think a lot of the narrative with Dongbei’s “settlement” has always been expressed in a Western context — smallholders settling the land and making it their own. Most of these folks, as I understand it, spent the entire period from 1820-1940 as tenant sharecroppers on big estates or mine laborers. They later transitioned into industrial workers, field workers, and industrial workers again under the various premierships.
I’ve always gotten the vibe from the Shandongers that living in Dalian/Qiqihar/Harbin was just a resource gathering operation for them, and they’d much rather be back in Jinan, Qingdao, etc. Many do return still.
The Manchu family I married into always made it clear that the idea of the Shandongers thinking that they were too “civilized” for the wild north and its various minorities was still very much a thing.
Shandong, as shandongers are wont to remind everyone, invented Chinese civilization (Confucius and Mencius are local sons)
There are also Chinese Taoists and other sects that are vaguely inspired by traditional religious practices. It’s not uncommon to see Taoist monks and shrines in rural areas and, for whatever reason, around large Chinese national parks.
But these sects, like Chinese Buddhists, don’t usually meet for regular worship, and don’t always have the clearest spiritual and metaphysical notions. In many cases, they evince the trappings of religion without much of the substance. If 25% of Chinese are “Buddhist” and 10% are inclined towards other traditional religions or forms of worship, probably no more than 5% of the population, in total, takes it seriously.
And there’s no way in hell 5% of China is Christian. That would come out to 70M people. You’re off by at least an order of magnitude. Muslims officially make up less than 3% of the population of China, and one sees their Hui restaurants and Hui temples everywhere. Christianity, in contrast, is all but invisible in China, and I’ve come to believe that “the rise of Christianity in China” is a piece of Western propaganda or a psy-op. (Of course, I dismiss the notion that smoothbrains who self-identify as “Christian” merely to spite the government or seem cool to Westerners are truly Christian.)
Whatever the Swedes do for English instruction is working because every Swede I’ve met has had excellent English skills, with most possessing near native fluency.
A lot of people in Dongbei were sent there against their will. Geographically and climatically it is a far cry from the Chinese ideal. It’s also full of Koreans, who can be assholes to Chinese when they can get away with it.
Give the Chinese a choice and they prefer a lush climate with picturesque scenery and relatively mild winters. That does not describe Manchuria, which is for the most part a desolate plain that freezes solid in the winter and is covered with dust from the Gobi desert in spring.
However, the women from Dongbei are better looking. But man are they some hard, mercenary types. And the men have a reputation for drunkenness and violence. Southern Chinese fear them.
There are many millions of underground Christians in China. It’s way more than you’d think from a superficial glance. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few high ranking party members were secret Christians.
Same goes for North Korea. I was taken aback when I realized how Christian the refugee Korean population in China is. It was near universal for them. I think for ethnic Han they’re more concentrated around the lower Yangtze in places like Zhejiang, Henan, Jiangsu, etc.
Nonsense. I’ve been all over Henan, many times, for extended periods of time. I’ve also interacted with the locals. I’ve seen literally zero evidence of any Christian presence, but Hui Muslims — ostensibly a small minority — were visibly all over the place, even in the smaller cities.
If Chinese Christianity is “underground” to such an extraordinary extent, how do you know that it even exists? Second-hand tales? The Economist? I should hope you’re not that credulous.
And, whether or not it exists at all, China’s foreign adversaries are undoubtedly pushing this “Christianity in China” meme to destabilize and delegitimize the state’s governing apparatus. Clearly, it’s in the best interests of the Woke CIA and useful idiots like Tanner Greer to push the meme. (Even though, in doing so, they’re inadvertently establishing Christianity as something hostile to the government of China, and thus worthy of suppression.) And yet one can spend months in China and see zero evidence of Christianity at all.
So who are you gonna believe, Foreign Policy magazine, or your lying eyes?
Meanwhile, in Nigeria…
Simple…. It’s very very cold in the areas outside Harbin. People don’t want to live in the harsh cold. Cities will be more ok than the rural populations in the northeast.
Non scientifically – the amount of Amur (Siberian) Tigers and Leopards seen on camera traps in the northeast has been increasing a lot for almost a decade. That was because of less human activity.
“The West seems congenitally unable to solve its low TFR problem because of diversity.”
I posed that question to someone who wanted to get rid of immigrants in the US. I wondered how they were going to grow the population since the white TFR is below replacement.
But yeah you have a point about East Asia. South Korea – Japan – Singapore are uber-urbanized as well – which makes a difference. But South Korea’s TFR dropped to 0.8 recently. I can’t even fathom.
Like Mr. Karlin noted… China still is urbanizing… So it wouldn’t matter that much. City people have less kids.
But in reality India has probably already passed China in population.
Ok… so why is the fertility rate so low among Han dominated people in Taiwan and Hong Kong – which everyone claims preserved Chinese culture?
Economics.
I was trying to pitch the beauties of Manchuria just on those points: wilderness, snow, mountains, forest, earth and steppe, giant rivers, the frontiers of three civilizations (and four if you count the Japanese) and heartland of a people, to my Muscovite girlfriend, and she just wasn’t having any of it sadly.
On the Mental Population thread I posted on a rogue demographer seeing systematic fraud in China’s demographic statistics. Now that we have the numbers, can anyone look through his claims and see if there’s a grain of truth in them?
Since we’re shrinking populations, let’s hope to see Europe at 100 million and America at 50 million.
Did you actually live there?
Mad Max would be good to clean up the wasteland if the elites think they can live in their post-scarcity bubble.
Be careful what you wish for, those here calling for massive depopulation. It’s going to be granted. (That’s probably on the agenda of WEF, more or less)
The wounds of the Cultural Revolution are still there. Only a Russian-styled cultural renaissance can heal them, one CCP would rather tame and use for its own gain.
This question is another opportunity to try and summarize the difference between “real china” and “anecdotal fake news china”.
The members of the communist party are about 70-80 million people. i.e. around 5%-6% of the population.
http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/4sub1/item309.html
The remaining 90+% of the population are normal apolitical citizens, especially the current young crop that’s supposed to be breeding but instead wants to enjoy life with no responsibilities.
The aforementioned 5-6% of the population—the communist party—are still held together by a “Stalinist morality”, additionally enforced by chairman Xi in the last years.
The higher you move up the hierarchy, and closer you are to the center, the more you’re watched. You’re supposed to dedicate yourself entirely to the nation, to take public transport to work, to live in a modest apartment, and take your family on modest holidays. During audit times whatever institution or branch you’re heading better be able to provide receipts for everything, with not a cent unaccounted for. If at any point it turns out you were taking bribes, or kickbacks, or traded in favors, your family pays for the bullets of the firing squad.
Periodically provincial party chiefs with little regular oversight start feeling superhuman and morph into feudal lords, which tends to end in tragedy, the moment the NKVD commissars start doing an audit.
Below this level, in the remaining 95% of the population, the current reality is “Reaganist libertarianism”. On the one hand by 2030 China will have the most evangelical protestants in the world, and of the real “recently converted” variety. On the other hand China’s gay dating apps bring in so much money they are on the stock exchange. Big city gays are doing fine, with the social contract being “just be discreet and we all prosper harmony happy happy big time”.
On the “Chinese Amazon”—Alibaba—you can buy the most outrageous sex toys and BDSM slings and sheit.
https://www.alibaba.com/products/sex_toys/CID205818501.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.0.0.2e1b34c92gCMfh&IndexArea=product_en
The logic is that porn is illegal because it devastates the psyche of the viewer, but sex shops and crazy toys and leather masks and shit are legal, because couples having frequent sex is healthy—a warped Daoist logic.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/11-41inch-Realistic-Dildo-Soft-Silicone_1600111724483.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normal_offer.d_title.422535f04Mf3uU
(Here again it is time to remind the reader that beneath the “modern civilization layer”, China, Japan, and India are fundamentally pagan societies, although China seems to be drifting into the South Korea direction not only in terms of near-mandatory plastic surgery for women and low fertility, but also in the sense of a Christianization explosion)
https://www.chinasprout.com/store/media/BSH004L04.jpg
Orwell, Ayn Rand, James Bond, Huxley, Asimov, Nabokov, Tolkien, Harry bleeding Potter, fucking Twilight—all those have long since been translated into Chinese and are available to anyone interested. In fact, children are actively encouraged to read Harry Potter.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/N60AAOSwJxpfF~yS/s-l300.jpg
All the Hollywood crap you wanna watch—go ahead and watch it. All the western twerking bullshit you wanna gyrate to—go ahead and gyrate.
Was born a dog-faced pony soldier? Go get plastic surgery (lifestyle pioneered by South Korea) and become an online simp-magnet.
The Chinese firewall blocks Google, Faceberg, Twatter, Youtube, Snapchat and the rest (which only stops those not motivated to make the effort to use a VPN), but this doesn’t mean that internally “they have no internet” or that they have “a sad 1990s internet”.
What the locals look at instead of Youtube and sheit:
https://v.qq.com/
https://www.yy.com/
To reiterate, contemporary Han society can be divided into the following broad segments:
1) 5% communist party members who are expected to follow a spartan Stalinist morality code and dedicate themselves to serving and protecting the nation
2) 95% normal folks, who are broadly divided into
2a) Older farts for whom life is Brezhnevist stability without the breadlines, and
2b) Young people for whom life is a cyber Reaganist thrill (or the promise of a thrill, if they are first-generation city folks just out of the village)
So no. When, the government says “you start making babies now”, the young cyber-Reaganist citizens do not start making babies. They buy a mini-poodle or a pet turtle and make heavily filtered online vids about it, then come night time they take out the sex toys and enjoy themselves in ways which would induce strokes in their Brezhnevist parents, who luckily are the TV generation and have no clue.
Chinese TV: https://tv.cctv.com/live/index.shtml?spm=C28340.Pbs6B8UI4UiV.0.0
And in the end, if the government’s pleas have any effect at all, it will be through first impacting the TV-watching Brezhnevist parents, who will then badger their kids about grandkids.
Party>>govt inst>>TV>>trad parents>>cyber kids.
And with this the presentation ends, thanks all for your attention, now let’s hope a less bullshit picture “of our great civilizational enemy” has taken shape.
I’m not replying right now on the role of cultural tradition on fertility in Mainland China/Taiwan/HK Chinese, but cultural traditions’ survival itself.
Speaking as a young “Hong Konger” Chinese with unconventional (non-color coded) beliefs and ideology, I’d say what happened in mainland China with mob rule (Cultural Revolution), is also rapidly happening with tribal political bickering (Yellow vs Blue affiliations in HK, Blue vs Green uniparty squabbles in Taiwan) finishing up the destruction of social and cultural fabric. Cultural memes and Pacificism (like Atlanticism) are already drawing many away from Chinese identity, especially with much of the younger identifying as HKer and Taiwanese and appropriating what remains of local Chinese cultural heritage for their own groups, that end up being dissolved into the post-modern simulacra (not that this isn’t happening in mainland China itself). Add the exodus of HKers to “Five Eyes” liars and the “need” to assimilate to their localities, and I’d say Chinese cultural traditions (as a whole and in its local manifestations) have very dim prospects.
(EDIT: Rahan’s newest comment adds a lot to what I’m saying, but on mainland China)
It will be best for China as a civilizational-state to reform itself into (or replaced by, but almost certainly the process will be controlled by the American Empire) a Russian-style state where traditional culture is restored to its proper place and a much broader renaissance happens than the scattered small steps we have right now. But this depends on how CCP sees the existence of a competing cultural and ideological institution, and how smaller “Capitalist” polities see themselves and their relation to their Chinese heritage.
The most important is the second point.
I’ve lived in Hong Kong for about 10 years.
I’ve spent about six months in and around Henan province, much of that time around Zhengzhou and the surrounding region. (So, also, Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Jiaozuo.) Have also spent some time in Xian, and of course Shanghai and Beijing.
I’m white, for whatever it’s worth. Maybe, as an outsider, I just wasn’t invited to the secret Christian underground churches… But I doubt it.
Really, the Hui are all over central China. You’d think they were more than 10% of Henan’s population. (Hard to complain about it, though, as their food is much more palatable to Westerners than the typical middle-Chinese fare.) But I can’t recall ever having seen a single Church, or any other example of the trappings of Christianity.
There are many Buddhist temples in Henan, such as the White Horse Temple, which was quite attractive — and the famous Shaolin Monastery is just an hour down the road from there. Both were very well-maintained and active, at least when I was there. Those are just two of the larger and more famous Buddhist temples in Henan; they’re the nearest things China has to Cathedrals.
There are also various Taoist and animist temples all over Henan. These are mostly in rural regions and parks. I distinctly remember a “Black Dragon Temple,” which was by a river in a small mountain valley, was perhaps around 12 square feet in size, and contained nothing but a large altar to an anthropomorphic “Black Dragon” statue. The statue resembled a demon. It was interesting. There were many dozens of less remarkable, largely unstaffed, Taoist and animist temples in Henan.
Situation of other Chinese religions, like Taoism and Confucianism is much worse than the situation of Buddhism and Folk religion. Confucianism as organised religion is practically moribund, and no surprise, without heavy support of state, or scholar gentry, Confucianism is nothing, Taoism is doing better, but it was less organised and codified than Buddhism, so very few people have a good grasp of Taoism.
Most Chinese don’t understand well religion, but there is a real spiritual impulse among many, as often full temples during holidays, and the huge building and renovation spree of Buddhist temples and statues in the last decade show us. The education level of Han monks in mainland is very bad, but government offers three year courses for monks in Han Buddhist tradition. Most Han monks are nowadays just caretakers and ticket sellers of their monasteries, they do know basic rituals and pujas, but advanced study of Chan and Buddhist metaphysics is somewhat rare. Pure Land is doing relatively well among Han monks, thanks to it’s simplicity. Situation among Tibetans and Mongols is much better, but their monks are ‘forced’ to include in their curriculum couple hours of studying of Marxism-Leninism every week, not in every monastery though, but it’s common, like a boring chore.
But what you don’t understand Malenfant, that Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism are not at all like your Abrahamic religions, very few Awakened masters truly understand the deep truths of our religions. Even common monks rarely have “the clearest spiritual and metaphysical notions.” Dharma is a long journey from spiritual darkness to light, it’s not like some god will intervene and make you saved at the snap of fingers, and just like that everything becomes crystal clear. No it’s a long road, an endless process. Therefore Buddha taught for everyone according to his mental capabilities. When someone offers food or cash to monks, and prays Guan Yin for the well being of his relatives, it’s as much Buddhism as (Single Point concentration) Shamatha practice of some old and learned monk.
Maybe you are correct, I wrote 5%~, but I’ve never travelled in Coastal China, and in my understanding the epicentre of Christianity in China is there and not in inland North. There are so many Muslim hotels, restaurants and mosques in some parts of Gansu, Shaanxi and Western Inner Mongolia, that one could even sometimes think of being in a Muslim country, but there are almost no Muslims in the coastal regions.
There are a few churches “regulated” by the state and “accepting the ideological leadership of the Party”, but even fewer go there regularly. Most of the preaching and worshipping are in underground churches, which services happen in living rooms and backyards, or (if everyone has a VPN) on their equivalent of Zoom calls. (This is the direction some congregations in the West are taking now that the churches are either still closed or forced to accept only vaccinated worshippers.) Discreetness is a given and you’ll never spot their places of worship without careful tracking.
No words on the magnitude of the size of Christians, hidden or not, but as far as it has a presence in China (with its own large websites), anyhow it is certainly inconsequential in the greater scheme of things and barely a challenger to the Party other than many of them attending houses of propaganda.
That said, much of the underground church network is at least influenced and at worst controlled by churches in Hong Kong better connected to the usual suspects in the “5 eyes” countries (HKers keep borrowing the name of the lying network for the regimes themselves), I’d say thru seeding the ground for Pacificist (just like Atlanticist) ideologies.
Bottom line, modern Christianity in East Asia, after the nativized Nestorian in China went extinct in late Tang, is an agent of ideological imperialism, like how it is in the Philippines, HK, American-occupied Korea and increasingly in China, and it was in pre-socialist Vietnam.
Good points on the state of Taoism and Buddhism in mainland China – the training of priests suffer more or less when the state has malign neglect, rather than benign neglect in Taiwan or co-opting in HK.
Confucianism and Taoism (not the folk religion) can survive as disciplines of academic and ethical studies – what they were even in Imperial times. I’d rather see a revival of these two “religions”, with Mohism and ancestral worship added, rather than “pagan” Buddhism ultimately coming from one of China’s biggest rivals (even tho Iranians were important proselytizers early on). I would prefer Slavic Neopaganism too, even tho Eastern Orthodoxy is good for Russia.
Most of the Christians I knew in China did not have churches. They had meeting places, although I never went to one. I was not really interested at the time.
Most importantly, they had networks. They all knew each other within any given Christian community, but from the outside you wouldn’t notice. I only knew about it because I worked with some Christians.
Like I said, religion wasn’t that important to me at the time, but I was more than a little surprised to find out how extensive Christianity was. There was also a lot of open curiosity and skepticism expressed by ordinary, non-Christian Chinese. They all knew Christians and had a range of opinions about the religion. Mostly, they were interested in whether it “worked” or not. I’m sure you know how Chinese are pragmatic about religion.
Anyway, if there weren’t a lot of Christians, why were so many Chinese talking about it, and how did they all know Christians?
Furthermore, I still watch Chinese movies from time to time, and I’ve noticed some Protestant cultural influence. At least that’s what it looked like to me.
Honestly, I don’t know the numbers, but I can guarantee that there are a lot more Christians than there appear to be at first glance. You wouldn’t notice them like the Hui, because they look exactly like other Han.
It depends, when particular school of Buddhism is less Hinayana and more Mahayana and Tantric, more the human life is seen as a blessing and gift. Many of the greatest masters of Mahayana have not been monastics themselves. On the road to Ultimate Liberation even a monkhood can become an obstacle, for life in monastery is also Samsara. Monastic vows or Vinaya are just an instrument of gaining good karma and preserving Buddha’s Dharma/teachings, but they are not the end in itself, which in Mahayana is Perfect Awakening, Anuttara-Samyak-Sambodhi.
Example? Notions of sacrifice are fairly common to Chinese fiction as a whole: not particularly Protestant.
There’s probably awareness of Christianity but afaik most Chinese don’t even distinguish between Catholicism and Protestants. I imagine it can be like Japan, which finds Christianity interesting as a form of the exotic(to them).
“Christianity is what is missing Gomez—role model christians to convert the heathen Chinese–spokesmen who know the bible and the Book of Mormon–guys like Mike Pompeo—Donald Trump – Tony Blair — Boris Johnson –Tom Cotton —Bill and Hillary Clinton—-guys and gals who walk the talk-Gomez…perhaps Bill and Melinda Gates…the underground pope and many others ” and slowly Bosley Swain’s astute knowledge is converting me—onwards and upwards –how are things in Lol todayMr Blinken ??
I was thinking about groups of people getting together and sharing intimate personal spiritual feelings with each other in an informal setting, and also doing a sort of group confession session. I’m Catholic and we don’t do that. I also didn’t think that was a particularly Chinese thing to do. I saw that in a Chinese movie and I thought “that looks just like what Protestants do.”
It may have been a coincidence, but I thought to myself at the time that the director must have participated in one of those Protestant group sessions. However, Protestantism so permeates American culture that this stuff goes on even in non-religious settings (sometimes to my personal annoyance), so maybe it was used by the Chinese director just to indicate that these were modern, sophisticated people (because they were doing something Western).
Buddhadharma is an Aryan faith, Buddha Shakyamuni was a Scythian man. It seems that you are just a dreamer, why you ask? You can’t really revive such religions like Mohism or Slavic Paganism, only silly larpers believe otherwise.
http://www.jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/viewFile/26/29
Not only that, but all extant Buddhist canons say that the historical Buddha had blue eyes. I could give you other examples, but it’s quite clear that Buddha was a descendant of Iranic/Aryan conquerors of the steppes.
The NGOS and churches that aid Somali type refugees don’t seem to be driven by desire for cheap labour and business doesn’t gain much because of their lack of productivity. More ideological or a grift.
Suppose you could say this kind of immigration is a side-effect of the higher quality kind desired by capitalists. Capital justifies immigration in general under humanitarian/non-racism principles and the low quality migration sneaks in using the same cover.
Surely you realize that the surreptitious nature of this “worship” effectively rules it out as a real mass-movement. China’s actual Christian fraction is probably well under 1%. “I know a guy who claims he knows some guys,” and “they meet in secret Zoom calls behind VPNs,” does not a serious religion make.
Anyway, American Christians love, love, love the “secret Christians in China” narrative. I suspect that this is because it reminds them of the early days of the Christian religion in Roman times, and they hope against hope that what happened to Rome (much to Rome’s detriment!) will soon happen to China. “They’ll become just like us!”
As Ezra Pound so rightly noted, the great tragedy of the Roman Empire is that it rejected its homegrown religion — reflected in the person of Apollonius of Tyana — for a hostile, alien, and Semitic one, however “exotic.” It looks like China is set to avoid that particular mistake. Which is very good, as Christians are to China what Muslims are to France: A hostile and potentially civilization-destroying alien entity/memeplex.
“The average age of the population is 38.8 years. For the first time in modern history, it is higher than that in the US.”
Yes, but those young Chinese have an IQ of 105 and a work ethic (and some have a cheat ethic too).
Those young Americans probably average out to 95 (and some have a steal ethic too, at both extremes of the IQ scale). And there aren’t as many of them.
“Big fight, and who will win?” as Ghân-buri-Ghân might say.
I would posit that it has more to do with the lack of influence of a certain ethnic group that does see ethnic homogenous host societies as a threat and therefore seeks to disrupt them by mass immigration. You know, this special ethnic group that brought forth the Cultural Marxists as well as the original Marx himself.
The theory that specific “capitalist” interests are the main impetus behind mass immigration could only arise from a myopically US centric world view. “Capitalist” interests most certainly had nothing to do with it in, for instance, Germany and yet here we are. Even in the US this factor is clearly secondary. For instance, was it “capitalists” that engineered the reform of the US immigration law in 1965?
Appollonius of Tyana was a lost opportunity. How things would have been different if we stuck with him.
fertility rate among ethnic chinese in Indonesia,Malaysia and Singapore is below replacement rate , the same seem to be the case among the chinese in Thailand . the chinese population in Cambodia,Laos and Vietnam emigrated after the communist takeover
I’ll add one now, on the fly: 2.) the military is given status as a domestic security organization.
There is no political fallout for calling it up to control the borders, as there is in the US. One added consequence is that communist countries are often not optimized places for airplanes to land. The airforce restricts flights to narrow corridors.
also chinese women living in the west have low fertility rate
I think you might be on to something, but the obvious solution for China would still be a full-court press of pro-natal propaganda, to see what that gets them, and balance any concerns about overshooting with a policy setting a maximum of 3 or 4 children, which China is clearly institutionally capable of doing. Even if the propaganda is highly, fantastically effective compared to everything that any government attempted before, I’d expect enough people to produce 0-1 children that a “4 child policy” wouldn’t get you much above 2.0 TFR.
But a pro-natal full-court press, as I see it, is a more difficult challenge than @Some Guy presents. It means eliminating virtually all media that depict singleness, childlessness, female careerism, and small families in positive terms. People with large families are happy, large sibling/cousin networks are priceless, to marry young is grand, motherhood is the most honorable status a woman can achieve, and for the most part everyone who fails to follow these ideals is unhappy, unserious, neurotic, and unpleasant to be around. Plus they’re just following a lifestyle set by nefarious baizuo whose own countries are falling apart and want to undermine China.
But the problem is that if you do all that overnight, it’s not like people will forget the next day that “Friends” is a thing (and I’ve been told it’s popular in China). It might take 20 years before you can tell if it’s really working — how does the generation that grew up with this propaganda live out its 20s?
All due to higher level of incomes relative to indigenes.
A good summary of how China really is. I would add that although most commies are ascetic bores their relatives are often the ones with the entrepreneurial spirit (and connections) to enforce the libertarian paradise-hell on the rest.
Google-Faceberg-Twatter situation: I have asked my Western friends what are the odds of a Chinese web-service having a completely free field for propaganda access in the West. Some admit that the odds for that are low and chuckle. But many – often Ayn Rand followers – simply say that the West “doesn’t do propaganda” and China does. One could call it freedom by assertion , but maybe they are just very stupid people and nobody told them.
And who is this breadline Brezhnev that you speak off? In pictures he is a very fat man, but I have never heard about Soviet breadlines in the 70′-80’s. You are pushing a myth while trying to dismantle another one.
It is a side-show. If you look at the numbers in US-UK-EU, the ratio of capital-driven cheaper labor to the loser refugees is about 10-1. The refugee is just a foothold to allow larger number to “family reunite“, almost all of them provide cheaper labor. Their very existence in the country also puts downward pressure on incomes.
If you believe the cultural Marxism meme, you are buying the oligarch line. They accomplish two things simultaneously: open borders for cheap labor and discrediting any socialist ideas. They even get a lot of natives who are the victims of this process to spout nonsense like “well, I like the migrants who come here to work, I have no problem with it…“.
It is a win-win-win for the cheap labor lobby. And cheaper labor has always meant dysfunctional societies run by oligarchs. The oligarchs only lose power and status when there is a balanced labor market.
True Anatoly Karlin enjoyers know that won’t work. Genetic desired amount of children n shit
Pensions can be paid by a shrinking workforce provided there is both technological advance and increasing labour productivity. China will have both until their population stabilises at maybe around 200–500 M in the 22nd century. Same with Japan and SK. Plus, contemporary humans age well and are able to take care of themselves until they get very old. Only in the last 3 to 5 years of our lives will we be dependent on direct assistance. Some of of us, maybe even the majority, will request euthanasia if that happens. Acceptance on this will grow.
Similarly, Germany does not need any ‘refugees’ at all to make up for its ageing population, especially not from the Bantu or from the Moslem world anyhow. Both are useless, unproductive, and uncooperative tribes who think of themselves as ‘Herrenvolk’ without achieving anything at all except to get into constant conflict with each other and with everyone else they come into contact.
Any population above 50 to 100 M depending on distribution and composition is sufficient for economies of scale in both industry and services. Such a level is also sufficient for defence, as 1% of the population can be set aside for the military if needed. Something from a half to a full million soldiers are more than enough to defend even large territories provided reliable control, command, and communication systems exist. A minimum total size of 50 to 100 M will also ensure that 5 to 10 thousands of extremely intelligent persons (the 0.01% of the population) do exist, who are needed to built and improve complex machinery or energy systems (nuclear reactors, jet engines, etc.) 50 or 100 of these people will be useless for there has to be, at least, a few thousands of them so they can collaborate and work upon each others input.
All in all, a smart nation does not have to fear downsizing in terms of numbers while both productivity and technology advances. Those who still poop on the streets in numbers, on the other hand, can be expected to continue to increase their sheer size, which will not help them to gain superiority. India might be overrun by Moslems in the long-run as it already has been so many times throughout its history, similarly Western Europe (and its offshoots in the New World) will probably, in Houellebecq’s terms, ‘submit’ to both Negrolatry and Islamofascism, as this time both Vienna and Tours have already been silently conquered and there appears no Jan Sobieski to come to the rescue. The US has in effect submitted, their satellites will follow.
Russia and China, and all the small nations allied with them, on the other hand, will stand tall and defend their territories, both militarily and ideologically, even with shrinking populations.
The decline started well before 2016. China had a fertility of over 6 in the 1960’s which plummeted to less than 2 by the 1990’s.
Black Americans have a crummy TFR if 1.7 which is hardly a fertile population if you ask me. The median age of American Blacks is 35, which is a mature population and not much younger than the average for the US.
Europe is fine as it is. In Europe, the problem is the population distribution. Western Europe is a bit stuffed.
The Americas – also could use a bit of an increase
Really, it’s a bit complicated. Some places, like Japan, should have their populations not halved but reduced by 3 times.
heck, really, some of these countries are rather high quality population wise. This high quality population should be donated to lower quality areas, for optimal global development. Nothing like global eugenics to spice things up, eh?
You clearly did not read the article I sent you last time when you wrote me that word salad about “freedom” in the west and “muh evul CCP”. I suggest you go read it rather than embarassing yourself in public with statements about a “social credit score” that only exists in Western feverished imaginations.
Crab societies eventually lead to batina “societies”.
What’s that? Literally a “club” society, as in, a beating stick. Why?
Civilizational equivalent of taking the crab bucket, pouring them all out, throwing the bucket under a dump truck, and then beating all the crabs to death. Inevitably happens when civilizations decay.
It’s not really a society, but more like a black hole of anarchy. Since we’re all in the crab bucket, imagine the future being 1000 years of Somalia meets ancient Greece meets Khmer Rogue meets Deus Ex meets the Mesoamericans. Anatoly called it the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
I call it “anarcho-techno-ultrafeudalism with meat grinder characteristics”
This.
The reason for low TFRs isnt necessairly urbanism or “female education”. Its propaganda. Cities and media heavily propagnadize a careerist lifestyle for women. And women go along with whatever the predominant cultural meme is, naturally being herd creatures. This means that the only way to raise TFRs is exactly as you suggest – release “counter propaganda” that memes fertility, children and family as the highest good and ridicules careerism, childlessness, partying, etc for women.
It will take about 18-20 years (with a new generation) to change the views and see the TFR start increasing.
All US colonies have a strong feminist component, and what is feminism if not “anti-fertility propaganda”? China obviously is not a US colony but it has ended up in a similar trap and the US is heavily funding feminist and LGBT movements in china, in an attempt to play the “long game” to reduce its population.
For a population like the Chinese, “spicy” propaganda memes work best.
Like
As one poster pointed out, Chinese people have become accustomed to “the good life” and see having more children as something only peasants do. No amount of nationalist sentiment in propaganda is going to change this as too many IT workers are more focused on the money rather then country.
However you are correct in what you are saying. Rather then focusing on patriotic glory, simply make it “the in thing” to do. Have propaganda proclaiming how a three kid family is great for you, how its cool to raise a family, show celebrities with their large brood, etc.
Eventually the TFRs would start to go back to replacement level within a generation as people rush forward to be part of the “in crowd.” Works every time.
Heh, I think that there was in fact some province that went that way and began to start with ideas in their schools for girls with “Why do you want to work? Work is something you do because you have to. If you don’t have to work, why force yourself to?”
I imagine they got shut down after other parts of the government found out and wondered why they were telling people to not work and thus, reduce the GDP added from women in the workforce.
Yeah youre absolutely right. People with large broods are seen as peasants. But this is due to the careerist mindset that women are taught, imo.
I agree with the rest of what you said – when famous singers/actors/etc start having large broods people will start imitating and soon being a careerist women will be seen as crass
You might be right about a decades long transition to this sort of thing but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile endeavor, and it’s not really different in principle than the process that popularized sterile careerism in media in the first place. It might not have been the level of explicit natalism one might want, but hollywood was certainly much more wholesome a century ago, and the trope of the miserable neurotic (and evil) spinster was much more popular (this also happens to be a much more truthful trope than modern hollywood relies on).
Also I’ll confess some ignorance to Chinese culture on the whole, but isn’t respect for family, Ancestors and Descendants, filial loyalty etc already very central to a largely confucian culture? That’s certainly the vibe I get from Chinese TV shows I’ve seen.
This focus on GDP is temporary – I think once China catches up to the USA in nominal GDP we will see more programs like this take root in Chinese provinces that wont be stifled by the central government. Right now the entire focus is on economic growth but as the economy becomes stronger and automated women can be safely phased out of the economy
Overly Fecund people being low class is just modernist status signaling, it’s not inherent at all, reverse the elite mores on this issue and be amazed when strivers follow suit.
The idea that people being more wealthy or upwardly mobile must necessarily reduce fertility to me is absurd, in olden times the upper classes were incredibly fecund, why didn’t it work on them? If status signals like this were eternal and impossible to counteract then CCP officials would still be running around with those big hats on.
Eh, family clan is pretty toast. Mind you, the old family clans could be a huge problem, so this isn’t without its upsides.
Confucianism mostly exists in the respect for education and testing, which is still pretty well established but once women were admitted into education, this meant that they were going to be competing with status on testing and credentials.
“Duty to procreate” isn’t too strong; where it is, I suppose, it is to have one child and then that’s completed. One could even make a Confucian argument against natalism: more money spent on children is less money to be able to spend to support your ancestors.
In practice, anyway, its not particularly helpful for natalism. Japanese mysticism probably more powerful in that regard, by providing a sense of meaning that isn’t centered around credentialism and money.
In nominal GDP per capita? Maybe in the year 2500?
Exactly. This is exactly what I was getting it. It also never made sense to me why poor people were able to afford to have huge families whereas the middle class could not. What I realized is its mostly related to status (like you said) – women try to maximize their status in a society by following the predominant cultural fashions. This makes them easy manipulate to do anything – change the cultural fashion to propagandize how great being a thot is and women will act it out. Change the fashion to make it “high status” to be a teenage mother, women will act it out. Change the fashion to how great large families are and how much status that will give women, next thing you notice women will be leaving the workforce in droves and having more kids.
What we saw in the ancient times, was that women were equally horny to now, its just that they realized social status was achievable only through marriage and having many kids.
The only reason i can see for why the elites have not realized this fact of female mentality – is they likely do not have experience with women. This is why pickup should be a mandatory course for men, especially those going into government. Pickup artists will solve the worlds low fertility problem – mark my words
Well, no, this is a lot more complicated than that.
On a basic level, fertility obviously decreases personal achievement. If you have a wife that doesn’t work, she’s not adding money that she could be making into your family. If you have a child, then he will take up some meaningful amount of your time that you could be using to study or network further. Two children will increase that effect, etc. There’s a reason why gays and double-income no-kid couples have significant political power, and that’s because they also generate a lot of wealth and have fewer outlets.
Historically, children, especially boys, increased income due to the importance of manual labor for agriculture. This isn’t the case anymore due to the low value of agriculture to the modern economy, so they are a net cost.
Additionally, social mobility was low. You were more or less what you were born as, and your children roughly so, so if you had aspirations to improve your lot, it’d have to be pretty generational – e.g. you’d have to help your children get ahead, etc.
This is no longer the case, in China as in many places, there are many opportunities for advancement and many of them come in the form of sacrificing time for family. Another result of this is that one is always threatened, too, as you could always lose your job and livelihood to someone else who’s more willing to sacrifice his family time or whatnot. Incidentally, Japan sort of avoids this by staying rather feudal, with “network effects” and seniority handling a lot of staffing. That’s great…but its also a kind of corruption and often affects their economic dynamics. This does leave them with a tfr of 1.4, consistently higher than China/Korea, though, as there’s no point to trying too hard.
And finally, of course, contraception was not a thing. So sex and reproduction was related.
Some elites used to have higher tfr insofar as it was pretty common for the elites in China to have mistresses that were basically second wives, which would have children as well. Of course, other crabs wouldn’t like that at all, so that’s been heavily wiped out(I think an official was recently executed for actions related to that – and China doesn’t really execute people that much, so it was a big deal).
Gotta keep everyone in the bucket.
Opinion discarded.
I’m sure if you asked any regular woman in Shanghai, she’d tell you that its because the poor stinky people are poor and irresponsible and are dooming their children who will be uneducated and poor, so these mothers are immoral and horrible people to bring children into the world and underequip them for success. Also, they are immoral for destroying the planet, there are too many people in the world.
You see, they hate women with many children because they love children and the planet.
And to be fair, being the kid who can’t afford the newest toys or go to the cram schools to get the best grades can be an unpleasant fate. So their concerns aren’t completely out there. But it all adds to the downward spiral.
Imagine taking women’s opinions at face value. Never take women’s opinions at face value is something I’ve learned.
If it suddenly became prestigious to have many children, women in Shanghai would be saying that these poor women in rural areas are heros for being able to having children while not being able to afford them, and how they envy them, etc.
Also, since I don’t want to double post too frequently I want to address something else:
This is only true in the current milieu of most women working. If it suddenly became fashionable for women to not work and have children, salaries would increase for those people that work proportionally as the labor pool shrinks because of a greater demand for labor (esp skilled labor). This would mean that the wifes contribution to family finances would be negated.
So when will the per capita GDP of Japan and the US converge, or the per capita of South Korea and the US for that matter? Or maybe just the GDP per hour worked of Austria or Sweden vs. Japan or Korea?
So, the desperately Western-wished dream of Chinese hordes taking Siberia is less and less likely every year.
Which is why strongly patriarchal societies with little feminism like Brazil, South Korea, Russia, Italy and Japan are all bastions of high fertility. Oh wait, they aren’t, and thus your hypothesis is disproved.
TFR pretty high in Afghanistan, which is not a bastion of feminism. Feminism definitely decreases fertility, but is not the only cause.
But you’ve been on a consistently good record for being wrong, so hooray for keeping it up.
Kazakhstan combines high fertility with a fairly high per capita GDP, Muslim Malays in Malaysia have quite high fertility as well despite being quite well off.
“But the problem is that if you do all that overnight, it’s not like people will forget the next day that “Friends” is a thing (and I’ve been told it’s popular in China). It might take 20 years before you can tell if it’s really working — how does the generation that grew up with this propaganda live out its 20s?”
It takes time, just like it did to change a society from natalist to antinatalist.
You start by showing mothers as desirable role models, and stop the kind of “first woman to do x” stuff which is a staple of BBC propaganda these days.
https://i.postimg.cc/3JqNKfRL/owenfamily.jpg
https://www.my5.tv/our-yorkshire-farm/season-1
fertility rate for malays in Malaysia is 2.2 , barely above replacement rate
Population growth in Europe is not required. Most non-EU immigrants are net tax eaters instead of tax sources, and they’re also culturally incompatible. Native Europeans would have a high standard of living even with a lower population.
You latched onto one word and tried to create a rebuttal based on that.
In all of the countries you listed, Women view careerism in a positive light and are trying to build a career – these same women also consume and are integrated into Western media and live in capitalist/democratic countries.
Many of the sentiments you hear feminists/women in the west say about career – you hear the exact same thing (word for word) in Portugese or Russian.
Feminism is also growing in each of the countries you mentioned, hence recent womens marches in South Korea, slut walks in Brazil and Argentina and the proliferation of LGBT movement in Italy (hence the production of mainstream italian films about gays).
Does feminism exist in these countries? Yes.
Is it mainstream? No.
Does it have any meaningful sway on society? No.
It is the realm of fringe extremists who are generally mocked and derided by the majority. Same goes for LGBT movement.
Feminism itself may not have alot of sway but the ideas are widely accepted by women.
For example there was recently a survey conducted in South Korea where women were asked what they think of marriage – most of them said they were against it as they didn’t want to give up partying/hobbies. This is equally true of Russian women.
Also, just because LGBT/Feminist movements are currently derided, that this will be the case forever. They are rapidly growing and the US is putting huge amounts of resources into growing these movements everywhere it can.
What about by the male population? Most middle aged Japanese and Korean men are allergic to feminist ideology. And also, Japan’s birth rate has been below replacement since the 1970’s. Japan in the 1970’s was anything but feminist.
None of the anti-natalist arguments in favour of vague achievement are very persuasive, they hold somewhat for women (who are very rarely extremely accomplished anyway, and as a rule it’s probably better for those 1/1000 broads to reproduce more than less anyway), but they don’t hold up at all for men. Children really aren’t very expensive, and if the wife takes care of them they don’t take THAT much time, it’s bullshit man. Just striver cope, anybody with any real potential can still excel in their field and have 3+ kids. The ultimate proof of how cheaply and easily kids can be raised is that dirt poor dummies regularly pump out 6 – 8 and spend almost no time worrying about them.
That’s because they’re a favored ideological fetish of the ruling class, Eunich’s having political power in ancient dynasties wasn’t a sign of the superiority of the eunich lifestyle either, just a peculiarity of the regimes. This is the same deal, having slightly more disposable incometo blow on booze and bug chasing didn’t allow for more effective ability to acquire political favor, being the favourites of the politically powerful because they’re gay did. Hispanics and blacks wield quite a bit of apparent political power too, same story. This is all a measure of how useful blackness/gayness/foreigness is to the political elite, not a measure of demographic quality, and the whenever the needs of the US gov butt up against any of the “power” of these pet groups we see how illusory it is.
As to no-kid couples, your logic’s backwards, strivers strive, and part of striving is sterile status signalling, flip the selection of signaling and suddenly the political strivers have plenty of kids. Not the results of the paltry disposable income they save not having a kid.
It’s a rust belt problem, the local administration and workforce have become too accustomed to the state-owned capital-intensive manufacturing sector (which is barely developing), hard to expand the economy beyond that there.
Workers are totally unwilling to work for more than 8 hrs a day, bureaucracy is corrupt and lazy. In coastal China local governments have set up specific courts/offices to serve tech conglomerates, whether this is good for the society as a whole is up for debate, but from a economic growth viewpoint, certainly better than having to pay a bribe everywhere.
Estimated out-of-wedlock births in Brazil are >60%. I would define that as a matriarchy, which probably fits the high number of copies of African genes.
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-births-rise-worldwide
How much political pushback would there be from banning vanity plastic surgeries?
At the very least, there should be a “luxury tax” imposed on them.
This is in agrarian society where children provide useful labor on farms. Infant mortality is also considerably higher.
On paper, feminism isn’t mainstream in the US. A majority of women don’t identity with “feminist”, though a majority of younger women do.
In practice, feminism is imposed mainly as judicial and corporate policy, rather than as legislation. Feminism is wildly popular among women with postgraduate education.
And while for many women the label “feminist” is toxic, they still support most of the policy goals of feminism.
Observing from afar, gender relations in ROK seem to be much more toxic than Bluestans in the US.
I know that… It was a rhetorical quesiton to Modris. The claim is that mainland China got rid of traditional Chinese culture and that’s why birth rates are dropping. Taiwan and Hong Kong are always held up as places that kept traditional Chinese culture (which was true prior to the 1990’s) but they have very very low birth rates.
Japan in the 1970s was feminist. Middle aged Japanese and Korean men aren’t generally anti-feminist and it doesn’t really matter of any are, because they are in control of precisely nothing and will roll over for whatever society tells them.
Lol, what bullshit.
Feminism is mainstream in all these countries, just as much as in the USA and Europe (including Slobic countries). You’re obsessing too much over a noun.
I agree with much of what you wrote – but I fear that won’t happen. Simply because technology is so pervasive now on the mainland. Modernization lends to selfishness. it doesn’t matter what culture. I mean Russia’s fertility rate is not exactly booming either (in 2019 it was lower than China)… Unless societies return to pastoral lifestyles – I don’t see birth rates going up in any advanced societies.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Sorry but you are incorrect. State approved churches are readily seen in cities and are well attended. An equal amount are the unseen “underground churches”…. Those are the churches linked with foreign ministries most often. I mean you can even see Christian videos of festivals in Israel where the most numerous flag you see flying are People’s Republic of China flags. Many many Chinese Christians go on tours to Israel now every year. Check the stats of Israel’s government if you don’t take my word for it.
If you think that Southern Europe has little feminism, then you’d be wrong. There has been an ongoing Americanisation of the local cultures since the last century.
Affluent Han Chinese (including excess males) may have moved to foreign countries.
You have no intuitive grasp of numbers.
Jiaozuo, in Henan, has a population of nearly 4M. Let’s be generous and round down to 2M for the built-up urban area and its environs. It is an unremarkable but fairly modern and comfortable central Chinese town; it’s a Chinese analog of the American midwestern city.
Jiaozuo apparently has six churches within its city limits. Most of them are small and out-of-the-way. If we’re generous, this is one church for every 333,333 inhabitants.
New York City — not known for its religiosity — had 6160 churches as of 2018, or one church for every 1353 inhabitants.
And the average Jiaozuo church is probably smaller than the average NYC church.
You could spend a month in Jiaozuo and never stumble across one of those churches. In fact, if you don’t make an effort to seek them out, you’re sure to miss them.
As for Chinese travelers to Israel: 156,100 in 2019. (And 2019 was the last good year for travel.) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/06/c_138683026.htm
In the face of China’s nearly 1.5B population, 156k is a rounding error. Besides, how many of those are Christians on spiritual journeys, and how many were construction or agricultural laborers? Or visiting scholars, or tech workers? I’d bet that less than half of them were on Christian business.
169.2 million Chinese people travelled abroad in 2019, so 156k is a fairly small number by any account.
None of this is compatible with the notion that Christians are 5% of China’s population. It’s much more compatible with the notion that they’re 0.5%, or less. I’m not saying that Christianity doesn’t exist in China — just that it’s smaller and more pathetic, and less romantic, than many people would like to assume.
Jean Raspail predicted it, and it seems this literary legacy has prevented noticing of the demographic data.
Most US Democrats, even Jewish ones, still seem to think that Arabs have twice the fertility rate of Jews in Israel, which hasn’t been the case since the 1990s.
No, it is the Party’s materialism which is pathetic. They should not be so proud of the technological terror they have constructed.
When it comes to religious attendance, Russians are about as observant as the French. Many Russians might claim to be social conservatives, but they divorce and abort at higher rates than the decadent Americans. In their defense, they don’t partake in the cannabis culture now widespread in the West; but alcoholism is still higher (Western wine aunts quickly closing the gap).
The error of perestroika was that CPSU elites weren’t cut in on ownership of foreign business setting up, and an ideological aversion to making knockoffs of Western consumer products. The CPC played this hand better, and brutally suppressed the West’s attempted color revolution in 1989.
The other story is collapsing Slavic birth rates, which would have run the risk of a Muslim majority USSR.
While ROK is increasingly debauched culturally, a turbo-West even more cringe than Canada; Japan has stagnated since the 1990s. China is more apt to follow this path, unless a surprise military victory over Taiwan/US happens. The success of such a victory would be like the British golden age after defeating Napoleon.
Of the reigning Communist parties, none is more hostile to religion, and Christianity in particular, as the Chinese. The Puritan spark is sadly an ember these days, but it is this hostility which makes the US Right so implacably opposed to the Party.
On the contrary, the immantization of the Machine God is the most beautiful thing to possibly emerge.
It depends on which kind of future you’re envisioning when speaking about a much lower population level than what exists now. Is that one with extremely high living standards, sort of a near-post-scarcity technological quasi-utopia, achieved with relatively natural development of demographics; or one brought about prematurely by the WEF, which results in most lives collapsing back a level a bit above subsistence, only a sufficient living standard for the “outer party”, and wealth for the elites, a neo-medieval system?
(Maybe there’s a third scenario: neo-luddite rewilding under vast stretches of anarcho-primitivism leads to much lower carrying capacities and very sparse population, but at least more content tribes)
Economics and demographics are downstream from ideology and the culture it produces.
Sadly only this fictional Politburo was punished
… while the developed parts depopulate enough to fall apart!
It’s not just birth rates – technological development, coupled with capital accumulation, is inherently anti-ecological. If WEF hadn’t started the end of human civilization, decadence or Singularity would have been, sooner or later.
Specializing in artificial and anti-ecological development is the greatest mistake the human species collectively has made. Just look at the Great Filter to see how it turns out for every advanced extraterrestrial species that possibly existed.
It is an approximation. In the current population you look at birth rates for women aged 16, 17, 18 and so on. You also calculate the likelihood of surviving to 16, 17 and so on.
You then imagine a cohort of 100 women aged 16, and calculate how many children would they have in today’s conditions (dunno, maybe 3 from the 100 women).
You calculate how many of them would be alive at 17 (maybe 99.9?), and apply the fertility rate of today’s 17-year old. That gives you another 3 or so children from these 99.9 women.
You do that for each fertile age. Add the number of hypothetical children, divide by the number of hypothetical mothers (100), and that’s your approximate TFR.
There is no guarantee that women aged 16 today will have the same reproductive yield when they will be 40, compared with women who are aged 40 today, but I don’t think anybody bothers to estimate historical trends and to factor them in the model.
It’s all the time Henan that, Henan this, with you. Absolutely no one of us is claiming that Christians are numerous in inland North, I’ve been in Henan and some other Northern provinces, and Christianity is very minor there, but Im not such an imbecile that I make one province or area of a huge country into a rule, and claim that because I saw how things are in Qinghai, they also must be so Zhejiang or Fujian.
I dont know how many Christians there are in PRC, but what I know is that one cant make conclusions in regards of all of China based on Henan alone.
About 15 years ago the thing one kept hearing was there would be unrest in China and that is what would stall it’s growth. Didn’t happen, and one doesn’t have to be Gunnar Heinsohn to think the one child policy was beneficial for political stability. Worth it so far for China, and the question of aging population must not ignore the countries other than China. Currently 65 or older:- China 13% , US 16%. While it is true that in thirty years 28% of the Chinese population will be 65 or older, Japan is already at that point.
The balance of opinion among the policy elite articulated by Charles W. Freeman Jr, (former US diplomat and Sinologist) seems to be that it given what China’s economic growth will lead to it becoming , it is an opponent best avoided. In other words, America ought not to start something it will inevitably finish with it being trounced. I think that an awareness of such projections is what lies behind superannuated strategists’ desire to concentrate on Russia and only talk about China in terms of it being a problem for Russia.
As vice-president, Biden privately scoffed at the idea of China even becoming a peer competitor to the US. Two years ago he publicly said that, and I am sure he still believes it. In the context of the Sino-Soviet dispute, China was deliberately built up as an anti Russia force by America. That policy has not altered as evidenced by Biden’s reversal on using utilities using Chinese equipment, and rescinding restrictions on investment in Chinese electronics firms. The Wuhan institute of the Bat Lady and its gain of function research was subsidised by US government money for goodness sake! America’s policy towards China is a zombie marching on regardless, but it’s a source of profit for a certain class of Americans.
I wasn’t the first to bring up Henan. Upthread, Bill P said:
Henan is a good example and benchmark, though, as it’s an historically important “core” region of China. (As opposed to, say, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Liaoning, which are on the periphery.)
Offhand, I would think that Guangdong is probably the most Christian region of China — but still not very.
Modris, what you wrote is sadly true.
The Malay and the Kazakh have no inclination towards endogamy. The Kazakh are even strictly exogamous, meaning they never marry their cousins. Hence, they are like Russians. Exogamous nations are located on the fringes of the Moslem world and have no problem with Western values. They are able to create fairly organised and productive societies while even maintaining a relatively higher fertility.
In the core, among most Arabs, the Afghan, in Pakistan, Sudan, or Somalia, on the other hand, you have high rates of cousin marriage which keeps women ignorant (and men unproductive). Here, not only fertility is much higher, but they also remain in constant conflict with each other as well as with everyone else they come into contact.
Why would anyone want the Chinese population not to decrease, including the Chinese themselves?
But nowadays much of the historic periphery is more important than a historic core region like Henan. What happened there is more important for the future of China than what happens in Henan.
Both live in secularized, post-revolutionary societies.
But there are notable differences.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/247514/why-france-is-losing-one-religious-building-every-two-weeks
When will the French follow the Russians and reverse this trend?
The sheer coap in the replies here is unreal.
China has the same TFR as White people everywhere. Slightly lower perhaps.
The horror! They can’t feed themselves, they can barely provide enough water. They can shed a few hundred million people. Sadly they won’t do it the right way (letting Corona-chan murder boomers) but again, they’re just too many people.
But they got nukes, and a great economy. Hopefully they ramp up some mildly eugenic natalist policies over the next 20 years and they’ll do alright.
China doesn’t need to outrun the bear. It needs to outrun us. And we have the same problems as them, plus zillions of dumb and hostile immigrants making it worse.
In support of your point, let the record show that J.S. Bach fathered 20 children by 2 wives (widowed by the first), 9 of whom survived to adulthood, some of whom were distinguished musical successes in their own right.
And he wasn’t a damn farmer. He was born into a musically-distinguished but essentially middle-class family and largely had to make his hay as a performer, but still found the time to compose perhaps the greatest oeuvre of all time.
Its rather a simple solution imo – modernization leads to women statys seeking. This means they will follow popular trends, wear what is popular, say and think what is popular.
It seems very few have realized that this is how women think (mainly bc theyre simping for women) and there have been pilot projects in some Chinese cities were there was strong propagnda for women to pursue motherhood. This will not become a national affair while china seeks to increase its GDP. However, once its past that phase I can see the birthrates going up within 18-20 years
I concur – stories with families in them are more complex and harder to tell. That’s why you get a lot of characters who are singles or orphans, widows, and widowers.
And I think you’ve also got to hit the guys with at least a little propaganda. Probably, kind of difficult in most of the genres that men favor. I have quite a hard time thinking of a movie were Jackie Chan was the father of a nuclear family. IMO, you don’t want men to idolize Indiana Jones or James Bond, but still, you want to promote masculinity somehow.
Personally, I don’t think it can be done overnight, the full propaganda drive. You want quality, or else people will look down on it. And people have got to try to figure out how to tell quality family stories, and how to promote them. Maybe, it would be an idea to have a family movie award show, where prizes were given for promoting different relationships, like grandfather/grandson, mother/daughter, etc.
In 1970s Japan, the average man did only 7 minutes of housework a day. Japanese media from that time (commercials and such) always portrays women as housewives and men as breadwinners in the traditional gender roles.
Even today Japanese men do less than half an hour of housework a day compared to 2 and a half hours for Swedish men and less than 5% of babies are born out of wedlock.
None of this screams feminist doctrine to me, but it doesn’t stop their TFR being under 1.5 births per woman.
Northern Song, the unsurpassed pinnacle of Sinitic civilization, began with fewer than 100 mln. China’s total population fluctuated just under 100 mln from Han to Song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China
In the novel Water Margin, Wu Song 武松 slayed a tiger with bare fists, precisely because there were still tigers roaming in Shandong.
Depiction of Wu Song by Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川國芳, master of ukiyo-e style 浮世絵 painting
https://imgur.com/a/MuL497e
Before PRC, Qing was the first period of exponential growth at much above 100 mln. That then let to tons of Malthusian associated problems namely Taipings.
With automation on the horizon, 500 mln is more than enough. 100 mln would be unimaginably idyllic.
Comparing like to like is important:
Japan is rather impressive for keeping TFR at 1.5 in spite of a highly modern society and has been able to do for for decades, they’ve even been able to raise tfr to 2.8 in Nagi-cho through direct payments and a more agricultural setting.
Compare that to South Korea, where feminism has made much more extensive incursions and has a tfr of 1.089 and is predicted to be 0.86. Female participation in the work force is higher, and their hopes for attainment are also higher; whereas Japan’s basically caps advancement for everyone(and women have it much more so).
But I think also as spandrell noted, tfr steeply plummeted in Japan the moment that women were given legal rights after WW2, and its the same trend in other Asian states: basically, the moment that women accumulate status outside of having children, they sharply reduce their childbearing.
Humans, not just women, always seek status. Its just the means of gaining status change depending on the environment.
Basic logic can refute this.
Let’s take Lanchester’s laws on military force and apply it to politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws
In a linear law of force, two forces apply force to each other: the larger force prevails through greater numbers. In the square law, the larger force applies exponentially larger force against the weaker side.
This also applies to politics and work. Between two individuals of approximately equal caliber, the individual with greater amounts of time and resources will prevail in a competition, and if the competition is for something zero-sum, like for a single job position or for a promotion, this means that the individual with a child or children will be at an disadvantage against one who is childless. In a zero-sum competition, the winner also takes all , which means that the loser will no longer have a job, be impoverished and be subject to the political whims of the winner.
Nor does adding “exceptional individual” change the equation: all other things equal, the exceptional individual with children will be at a disadvantage against another exceptional individual without children.
As for historical cases:
Historically, children added to wealth via agricultural growth. Additionally, it was more acceptable for fathers to spend no time on them at all: neither is the case now, and the father has at least a legal responsibility to support them, which means that his financial resources will be reduced in competition against someone without children, and certainly be less than someone who also has a working wife.
Math is a beautiful thing.
Sounes like you’re making shit up, to me.
Japanese media in the 1970s, and even more so in the 1980s, portrayed women as independent and single. But the majority of Japanese households didn’t have a television until the 1980s, so TV doesn’t have much to do with anything.
There were also a lot of foreigners in these commercials. By 1994 25% of actors in Japanese television ads were Westerners (O’Barr, Culture and the Ad, 1994) which is a real thorn in the side for white nationalists who think they’re unique in having a media that disproportionately casts minorities. The only difference is that unlike in Japan, most people who watch TV in the West are racial minorities.
It looks like you made up those housework stats. Swedish men spend 1 hour on housework, plus 45 minutes on car maintennance. Japanese men spend about 30 minutes.
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00546/wives-do-seven-times-as-much-housework-as-husbands-in-japan.html
https://www.thelocal.se/20110831/35874/
But that’s not telling us anything, because Japanese men do about 80 hours of overtime at work weekly, whereas Swedish men typically work only 30 hours a week. It would appear Japanese men are doing more housework than Swedish men, given the obvious (Japanese men spend way less time at home than Swedish men).
Which fits with my perception of Japanese men: they are like domestic machines, from the moment they get home they get right back to work alongside their wives, and this typically involves an ungoldy amount of tupperware being stacked frantically.
A bit of personal experience on fertility rates and women’s attitudes thereto; I am Irish, born forty years ago, from a family of four children, as was completely unremarkable in that place and time. (Our neighbours (about 8 km away) who had 21 children, that was remarkable!) I remember discussing our respective family backgrounds with a late-twenties/early-thirties Ossi (a German woman of East German background) in about 2007, and, while this was foreign to her experience (1-2 children would be normal for her), I didn’t pick up any dismissiveness or contempt. That was probably because the West German approach to having children was closer to .ie than to .dd, and Wessis were wealthier. Hard to change that dynamic in China.
Not disputing your point. But Japan may have experienced demographic transition much earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period#Population
This would place them actually earlier than France in experiencing this.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/rite-of-spring/
To reduce housewifeness, countries desiring such reduction could circulate this daunting list of the 38 daily chores of a housewife. (I recently reviewed this on Mothers Day, in appreciation of my own Mother). Link below lists the 38 daily chores, in case you are interested in presenting it to a prospective wife you are dating, to gauge her reaction.
https://thevintagehousewife.me/daily-schedule-for-the-50s-housewife/
Typical Russian man
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DbcGttKu2DIk&ved=2ahUKEwiD9ZDsq8fwAhU3SBUIHWmHCE4QFjAAegQIAxAC&usg=AOvVaw29mV5_u5fYR3xylOW2NyIC
I agree with all that. I also think this actually expands into a broader and more interesting question than just “What should China do?” Some of these lessons could be applied to any place where rightists are able to take control of media.
But as for telling stories with large families, the recently most-talked-about show on TV, Game of Thrones, comes to mind, if you focus on the House Stark story. I’d even argue that there were moments when it taught a pro-natal and pro-family message: “The lone wolf dies but the pack survives.” And the paterfamilias Ned Stark, father of five (or six), was set up from the beginning as an admirable and masculine character.
One problem, among others, is that his wife was not the character all the female viewers admired. They much preferred the various childless butt-kicking babes, of which there were many. And while it seems an easy answer to just eliminate the butt-kicking babes and make the motherly characters more sympathetic, I suspect you’d inevitably lose most of the female audience if you did so. Though maybe that’s what needs to happen — you kill the “butt-kicking babe” as a trope, and as a result men’s and women’s entertainment become more sex-segregated.
China’s TFR of 1.3 is slightly lower than the least fertile Europeans (Southern and Eastern Euros) and considerably lower than that of NW Euros.
And what’s more, this figure is inflated by the CCP (in other words, COPE). The real figure is probably closer to 0.9.
LOL @ thinking you will ever alter people’s life trajectories with the media. For one thing, white peole don’t even watch TV and they don’t take it seriously as (niggers on welfare) like you do.
Time to quit the coping, puto. You’re gonna have to use physical force to get what you want.
Can’t Jew your way to glory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#Children
Women particularly seek status, particularly by following the predominant social norms. Change the social norms and you change what women compete for.
Women are also easily manipulated to do whatever those in power want them to do.
TV is not only form of media.
Influence youth by getting pro-natal shows (similar to friends) made on popular streaming services, have celebrities’ endorse large families through social media like instagram, tiktok (or whatever new thing pops up). Have schools, universities, corporations promote pro-natalist policies.
This is how the ‘feminists’ work on manipulating women to reduce their fertility.
It’s not hard to hit males with pro-natalist propaganda and males will rapidly fall in line once two preconditions are achieved:
Show various sorts of heroics/war movies with the father/son/brother protecting a large family through glorious last stands and self sacrifice. This will subconsciously influence men to follow suit.
Also, its not hard to make interesting family movies for women. Make it a rom-com style where a woman tries to find happiness through her career, but very soon realizes how shitty it is and how unpleasant the other women pursuing this path are and finds love and then fights for a good man and finds happiness in raising children and a large family.
Haha. You described the plot of the literal Nazi romantic movie of The Four Companions.
https://letterboxd.com/film/the-four-companions/
You can see the comments for the modern consideration of such work.
Women weren’t manipulated in to having fewer kids, and that hilarious shit is never going to work and will never happen. Women would laugh it off the airwaves in a heartbeat.
LOL!!! You’re a riot!
Turns out the solution was to alter reality by putting out some TV sitcoms, to create a pro-natalist matriarchy. People will fall in line and become baby making machines because… Movie says so.
This autistic dipshit, “Xi-jinping” is precisely what one becomes after watching too many movies. Does the alt-right produce anything but terrible judgment and miscalculation anymore?
Has Japan collapsed with 28% of its population over 65 years old? In 30 years China will be in the same demographic position, but AI will have replaced humans in much of manufacturing. The smart money is on China overtaking the US before then. Opinions to the contrary represent the same old skepticism on continuation of Chinese growth. Shorting China will prove to be the quintessential suckers’ bet, just as shorting Japan already has, time after time.
Ha, it’s fascinating to me that there are places on the Internet where people watch Nazi movies and then comment on them as if they were discussing “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
Plywood is not a serious commentator, having proven among other things that vampires are responsible for serial depopulation.
You’re assuming women have the intellectual capability to realize thats happening.
But reality proves you wrong. Why do you think women fall for memes like welcoming violent muslims into their country that will rape them? Because elites manipulate them through media and propaganda and they don’t realize its happening.
Now turn that capability into an actual useful direction and manipulate them to have kids
Now I know. Thanks for warning me. Will stop responding to the clown
Because the majority of women havent been raped by a Muslim, will never be raped by a Muslim, and haven’t met anyone who ever has been.
This poor dummy thinks women are incapable of resisting propaganda, but doesn’t that realize he himself fell for the right wing’s.
Please face it, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic.
Sounds like you have me confused for someone else. I’m pretty sure I’ve never types the word “vampire” on this website before and a search of my comment history ought to demonstrate that.
In fact, ironically, I recall that you and I reached full agreement on this very subject just months ago. You and I both agreed that the developed world’s fertility rate cannot be raised and will continue to decline and stagnate for quite a while. You then went off on a tangent about artificial wombs as a dying hope to overcome African birthrates, and I didn’t respond, out of respect for the sensitivites of a heartbroken adult who yearned for artificial wombs as a solution for his broken society.
For someone who values “serious commentators” you sure seem to appreciate the Sci-Fi bullshit.
Ah, apparently there was a Sam Coulton who had very similar arguments to yours. At any rate, artificial wombs are hardly science fiction:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/paper-review-artificial-wombs/
As far as media is concerned, it does influence people, both in the obvious and in the more subtle way:
https://sevencircumstances.com/why-we-think-that-fictional-characters-are-real-part-7-of-7/
Fiction works ultimately by invoking a kind of trance state by which we at least momentarily come to associate with reality, and in doing so, creates emotional connections and expectations. Its the same reason why commercials work: they gradually overload the availability cascade in the brain.
AI automated persuasion strategy ultimately will likely approach such methods.
https://i.imgflip.com/48s52t.png
I unironically like this John Plywood gem:
Not only do vampires cause depopulation, but mountains and forests are evil in themselves.
Such a based take.
Tbh a lot of his takes are immensely entertaining
Feudal settings with familial coats of arms are a pretty good way to tell stories about extended families. But I wonder whether China having had more centralized authority would mean that these types of stories would not resonate as much with the Chinese.
The Korean zombie movie Peninsula ended with what I though was an interesting exchange:
As the characters were being flown to safety in a helicopter, the UN guard tried to reassure the little girl who had lived with her mother, her grandfather, and little sister in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested SK.
Guard: In a few hours, a whole new world will open to you.
Little girl: the world I knew wasn’t bad either.
I think men have to be leaders to a certain extent, and this comes back to the question of masculine role-models. One idea might be to remake the movie They Live, but where the sunglasses show people drinking soy with soy faces.
I think chick flicks can be made on a smaller budget, which arguably should make mass propaganda easier, for women.
It is not only Russia that Americans think will be destroyed by immigration or the lack of it. They believe the USA ant only it has the Holy Grail when it comes to integrating immigrants. They don’t think Europe can do it, and they don’t think China can either. That is why American strategists assume demographic decline is an insolvable problem, but only for everyone else’s country. Trump spoke up against the foundational myth of the state, which was considered unforgivable because if China does not collapse from lack of working age Chinese or the stresses of mass immigration, the US’s current trade with China will be seen in hindsight to be suicidal.
Japan has not collapsed despite having the population age structure that China will have in 2050. Moreover, there is apparently a scaling law in which cities get more efficient as they get larger, and maybe countries do too. Japan has a tenth of the population of China. America kick started Japan’s economy and let the thin end of the Chinese wedge in because of the Vietnam war. It was the begining of the end for the US in every way.
A concluding comment on an extremist totalitarian natalist system, with carrots and sticks:
-> family tax breaks halving taxes for each child born after the 1st child, and a total tax waiver for the 5th child and afterwards;
-> pervasive propaganda campaign that aims to subconsciously alter expectations of child-bearing, while blocking out anti-natalist propaganda;
-> a bachelor and barren womb tax, set at 10% of the net worth in the 1st year of legal age/marriage, then increasingly confiscatory (+10% every year) until reaching 95% of net worth, pauperizing and driving anti-natalist elements to desperation;
-> setting up a natalist police to criminalize anti-natalist behaviors;
-> stripping females of most rights and defining them as property of their parents, legal guardians, husband or the state (if there is no legal guardians);
-> large-scale development and deployment of cloning, artificial conception and birth technologies, preferably taking up as much focus and budget as the military-industrial complex.
The goal is a minimum TFR of 3-4 children and preferably sub-Saharan tier fertility, with possible additional eugenic selection, at minimal loss of the existing population outside of anti-natalist elements. This can be done until hitting the Malthusian limit of the carrying capacity under the extant technological base of each society.
This would be impossible in most existing societies at this stage and likely to be morally repulsive, and I do not advocate any of these measures or personally support them outside of much milder versions of the first 3 policies (going back to the fields and raising fertility there sound better). But if any of the natalists took power anywhere, they could force them onto the populace, in addition to the usual roster of totalitarian policies (giving unwanted elements free helicopter rides, strict Soviet-style movement control, capital and monetary controls, economic planning), but with a natalist spin. Ugly, but effective.
The WASP in the US couldn’t integrate even the white immigrants (or basically every White outside of WASP), think the Irish, Italians and even Germans. It was only generations of the immigrants’ own assimilation under the predominant culture when they were integrated. Nowhere can first-generation immigrants of whatever skin color assimilate beyond superficialities – that is a liberal lie.
The only basis of solving one’s own demographic problem is, clearly, one’s own demographics. And living with it is one of the ways, and Japan was doing it right.
Also, don’t forget Japan is still occupied by the Americans and Americans didn’t want an economic challenger, and this is the fundamental reason Japan’s economy was crippled in 1990, besides the state failing to change track.
When the French morons realise the harsh truth about “Laïcité”. It made the ordinary ethnic French
*indifferent to the mass immigration of Muslim cheap labor that began during the last century, while allowing ‘jus soli’ citizenship for their anchorbabies (that gave the ingrates the freedom to act out without getting deported)
*too lazy to raise French children as practicing Catholics in an intact family with married parents, while letting them be brainwashed by State Schools into following deviant lifestyles
*susceptible to anti-Catholic propaganda by the (((Usual Suspects)))), while forgetting about the behaviours that got (((them))) expelled from France multiple times
Every single ethnic French person should read this warning everyday when he or she wakes up:
SIN MAKES YOU STUPID
This is one of the reasons France was doomed on 1789. Sheer, continuous demographic collapse for 200+ years.
Semi-OOT. In the nearly inevitable WWIII, what’s the probability of there being no genocides against the Chinese?
How will the Chinese genocide happen? Will it be a coordinated affair (like the “Holocaust” or the Armenian Genocide), more piecemeal affairs of mass killings at the fronts, or what happened to the Germans after WWII (assuming an unlikely Chinese defeat)? I won’t expect allied or neutral offshoots of Chinese (like Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Canadian-Chinese) will be spared – most likely they will be interned like the Japanese when on allied soil. As a Chinese somewhere in between I need to be mentally prepared for this to happen.
Got the idea after reading polls about skyrocketing anti-Chinese sentiments.
I don’t know that that’s the problem — not a China expert, but from what I understand of Chinese historiography, it obsesses over periods when the country was divided and glosses over periods when central authority was secure.
But it seems that polygamy does make these stories harder to tell, particularly if your goal is to reinforce values of monogamous families. We moderns can still easily relate to the dysfunctional family of Henry II of England (The Lion in Winter, great flick, I enjoyed both the original and the remake). Or the treachery of Richard III in killing his nephews. But with oriental despots it seems there was barely a family to speak of, the sons being all half-brothers that were basically strangers and thus there wasn’t really a taboo around killing each other when the need arose — or in the case of the Ottomans, systematically.
A similar point was made years ago in 28 Days Later, where you have a father/daughter combination joining the crew. One of the characters observes something to the effect of: “To them, it doesn’t really matter that the world ended because she still has her dad and he still has his daughter.”
So what youre telling me is that media and TV has NOT influenced an anti-natalist view amongst women? LOL ok then
Lets ignore the fact that TV/media propaganda influences fashion, and influences what lifestyles are viewed as desirable.
Also, lets ignore the huge budgets countries like USA and china put into propaganda. I guess theyre all idiots because there is absolutely no way that TV/media can influence viewpoints or the mind
some provinces/regions of China have a tfr below 1(Beijing,Shangai,Tianjin, Jilin,Liaoning,Heilongjiang)
You clearly dont know womens nature too well. I suggest you stop simping to women, and then you’ll see how easily they fall to manipulation due to their herd instinct.
I agree that men have to be leaders, but what we see is that men end up simping for women due to a combination of their natural protective instinct and their “gentlemanly” upbringing. Women end up exploiting this. Moreover, it seems that women currently control the dating/marriage market and men follow suit with whatever the women want to get a whiff of some of those sugar walls.
If there’s a “World War III” in this century, it will presumably consist of China either taking Taiwan (more likely) or failing to take Taiwan (less likely but not impossible) and some naval skirmishes with the US. The rest of NATO + Australia will back the US but not actually do anything. Probably over in less than a year.
If there’s such a thing as an anti-Chinese mass killing in this century, it will take probably take place in Africa, or possibly Southeast Asia. Anything else is fantasy. The West would have to be unrecognizable for such a thing to be possible, and why would Chinese, of all things, be the target? I could only imagine Chinese being targeted in the US if it was an environment of all-out racial chaos and Chinese just happened to be caught in the crossfire, perhaps due to being classified as “white-adjacent”.
Apparently the problem is not that bad. Turns out lots of people were declaring their daughters late.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/delayed-registration-and-identifying-the-missing-girls-in-china/0759987A48A37E3D2CFE157778747E33
Yeah, there’s little sense responding to Plywood, but he’s not a pure troll. I might guess that 45% of his comments are pure trolling (i.e., just insults and nonsense), 45% half-trolling (usually asserting a somewhat defensible and interesting point and then defending it with nothing but a string of insults), and 10% mostly sincere observations.
IMO, this was fairly common even in Europe, as women often died in childbirth, and men remarried multiple times. Of course, this doesn’t get you the same ratio as polygamy, but I’ve wondered how much it was responsible for brothers killing each other (I.e., that they were really half-brothers). Though, I guess it is much easier to idealize a story from a female perspective without polygamy.
TBH, I didn’t care for 28 Days Later. Partly because it was a rip off of Day of the Triffids, which I thought was a better story (the novel.) Didn’t really like the style of zombies or infection. Also, dislike seeing suicide depicted in film. Lastly, and probably most importantly, I felt they had replaced a white woman (Day of the Triffids) with a black woman. Makes me really resentful anytime they do this in a European context (don’t care whether they have their own population at 2% or even if it were 51%). And, by doing this, I felt it really turned the bad characters into some commentary about sexism, patriarchy, and the racism of white men.
That is partly why I like to watch East Asian movies. I think lack of pro-diversity messaging just makes a film, even a bad one, much more watchable. If it is bad, it encourages a mental exercise on how one could make it better. I think we would all do better to avoid the often explicit insults of pro-diversity messaging.
IMO, WW3, if it happens, is much more likely to be mainly a civil war within the West, perhaps, extending into Eastern Europe. And I view it as unlikely.
I don’t see the prospect of a war over Taiwan as being very likely either. Europe didn’t go to war over the Anschluss, and that was before nuclear weapons. Nor do I think the prospect of a genocide against overseas Chinese is likely, as China has both nuclear weapons and a growing ability to project power.
Biggest prospect for a genocide is against whites in South Africa, I think. But even that, I don’t perceive as being likely. I think there will just be a high amount of violence and discrimination against whites until they flee, like in so many other places.
How much of a bribe will it take for Moscow to agree to sell, Oniks, S400s and Kilo class subs to Taiwan? What will China do if say, that happens?
On this, I have to disagree. Unless Taiwan surrendered before shots were ever fired, the US would have to do something, because if not it would undermine the alliance system and the reasons for the existence of the MIC. We built all these weapons to fight China and didn’t intervene when China took Taiwan? Seems like a recipe for defense budget cuts, and you can’t have that.
Assuming Taiwan is basically indefensible at the moment the PRC chooses to strike, I think the way out of the crisis is the US deploys its navy, there’s some skirmishing. China makes some concrete promises to a Hong-Kong-like treatment of Taiwan (which I think they’ve promised anyway), and the US President + MIC declare victory and take credit domestically for forcing China to good treatment of Taiwan in what was otherwise an unwinnable war. Then China gradually backs down on its commitments and eventually fully integrates Taiwan. By then the US President who agreed to this is out of office and the new President blames him for not doing more to secure Taiwan’s freedoms.
I think the furthest Russia is willing to go is to sell military equipment to India. I don’t think they would ever sell to Taiwan because the costs would probably be greater than the payoff. Simultaneously, Taiwan would not buy from Russia, since it is sort of a vassal of the US.
You’re counting niggers and assorted third worlders inside the European figures. The native birth rate in Southern Europe is 1.2.
As for your claims of “inflated by the CCP” I can only lol.
Probably look at Indonesia or Malaysian riots: tacitly tolerated by the government but unofficial, with murder and violence most actively practiced by opportunistic gangs.
The way I see it, the costs of defending Taiwan are greater than the costs of conceding Taiwan on the basis of ethnic similarity.
A skirmish would likely mean carriers sunk, which would mean significant damage to perceptions of US power. Then there is the fear of a more general war. The US is pretty unstable now – imagine if China put resources into trying to destabilize it. I don’t think that the country is functional enough to have a draft, and I think Washington knows it.
Kinslaying was condemned – although half-brothers did strive heavily against each other, their fathers seemed to be distressed enough that it was memorable; the man who would become Emperor Taizong killed his brothers after a long rivalry, which seemed to have triggered his father to fall into depression. Taizong himself appeared regretful for much of his life(and how it affected his father), and sought desperately to prevent his sons from trying to kill each other.
At any rate, Chinese relationships tend to have a lot of complexity, complexity which fiction likes to explore in the sense of duties and obligations, often extrafamilial or involving non-blood fictive kinship, both by playing the tropes straight and then deconstructing them(thus the many stories of loyalty to an ideal versus loyalty to a person, etc). Just pulling something pretty modern from say Honkai Impact:
The duty of a teacher to her student, which in this case goes as far as sacrificing her life.
The duty of a someone who was saved to, then, repay the world.
It then deconstructs that:
That it can be righteous to be “selfish” and prevent the world to be saved, to save your friend/lover through your own sacrifice
The one commonality really is a fondness and underlying belief that sacrifice is the basis of all things, though that is also deconstructed as well:
Where all of the pain and struggle of above, is supposed to give one a chance to escape this eternity of suffering and sacrifice, and finally hope to “have it all.”
The economic danger of an aging population, is the increase in the dependency ratio (falling proportion of people active in the labour market).
Currently China has a low dependency ratio, but with an aging population this could become a problem in several decades.
This problem of increasing dependency ratio from aging population can be mitigated by raising the pension age, and enabling the old people to continue working (as child labour can mitigate the problem of high dependency ratio in the opposite direction) .
For old people to continue working to later and later ages, requires that they are healthy and that they have been provided with good working conditions.
If China wants to mitigate this future problem of an aging population, it needs to focus on improving the working conditions and health standards of its industries, and the workers.
China should prioritize reduction of its addiction to coal (which would improve air pollution), improvement and enforcement of regulation in areas like food safety (likely a cause of the zoonosis resulted in coronavirus pandemic), and things like far stricter regulation in the use of industrial chemicals.
E.g. Furniture in produced in China often offgasses high levels of formaldehyde, benzene, etc. So it is likely that workers in the furniture industry in China are exposed to poorly regulated levels of such kind of chemicals.
If the workers in sectors like the furniture industry are experiencing unhealthy working conditions now, then this will reduce the ability to greatly raise their retirement age later on, and would prevent the chance of mitigating the problem of aging on the dependency ratio.
Yes, the fertility in China will not be likely so low in reality.
To know the fertility rate (which determines what will be the future population number, according to the stable population theory) requires the woman’s fertile years to be completed.
Concept of the “total fertility rate” is an procedure that is used to estimate what would be the likely completed fertility rate of a woman that passing through the current number of births per woman in each age group, in the reference period (which usually set as a current single year in e.g. UN database).
It doesn’t reflect what would be the fertility rate of any real women, as the real woman is not moving through the age-specific fertility rates of one particular year (unless she would be a type of time-traveller).
For any particular year, the “total fertility rate” can be very inaccurate, if you compared to what will be the completed fertility rate, as the trend for births relative to age is not likely to be constant across time.
In the 21st century, it seems to have become popular with politicians and journalists, because it gives some real-time story, and also (it might be more cynically inferred) the volatility of the indicator, increases its potential for producing clickbait headlines about fertility booms and crashes.
This happened in Russia where the authorities’ policy of “maternity capital” seems to have not much significant effect when we look at completed fertility rates,* but it had coincided with rise in the “total fertility rate” that resulted from rise in age of mothers having births (many mothers who had delayed births in the 1990s), and this was useful material for the government self-promotion.
Although policies like “maternity capital” has been a good and correct policy in the Russian Federation, mainly the real reason it has been successful in was to help reduce the poverty rate. This was discussed in one of the Gaidar forum videos (I believe in 2019).
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/71-eligible-gen-zers-dont-qualify-military-due-obesity-and-other-reasons
So Heilongjiang’s per capita GDP growth rate is 7 to 8 percent the past few years when you factor on population decline to the GDP growth rate? About the same as Guangdong or Jiangsu adjusted for population growth.
Should our goal be for people to work more than that most of the time?
So they frequently leave their husbands and wives or murder their own unborn children. But thank God they don’t smoke that weed. Good priorities.
It doesn’t have to mean carriers sunk — if the US Navy is hanging out far away in the Indian Ocean, it means losing what you’re prepared to risk. I could see it going a lot of different ways. But I think if it came to war, the ideal way for it to play out, from USG’s perspective, is that China tacitly agrees to play some sort tit-for-tat game where both sides are worried about escalation, the US Navy mostly operates out of the Indian Ocean, a few Chinese sites of negligible importance somewhere are bombed (which the US media present as being of vastly more significance than they actually are — perhaps a small airfield or two somewhere in the South China Sea), maybe a few submarines or destroyers are lost, and a few dozen aircraft are shot down. And then Taiwan agrees to surrender, conditionally, and an armistice is called. And USG says we gave them the best fight we could, but they weren’t prepared to fight.
If the US really, really isn’t prepared to participate in a war, then the prudent move would be to put all the pressure it could on Taiwan to surrender without a fight and make it look like Taiwan’s idea so the US can step back and say “We weren’t prepared to interfere in Taiwan’s sovereign desire for re-unification”. Probably guarantee cushy sinecures at think tanks in the US to everyone in the Taiwanese government.
For the record, the Anschluss involved a pro-Nazi coup and an “invitation” for German troops to enter Austria. For the US to stay out of Taiwan, I think something similar would have to happen. Could USG even collaborate with the PRC to pressure Taiwan into this outcome? Possible.
No I think it’s you who lacks grasp. The US is Israel’s best friend for decades. The US only sends about 850k tourists. Most people go to Israel either for business or religious pilgrimage.
Again – go see for yourself the next time they have international religious festivals in Israel and see how many PRC flags you see flying. You seem not to understand nuance. This is a new trend. Just like new Christians in China are a new trend.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Israel-welcomes-record-breaking-455-million-tourists-in-2019-612456
“New York City — not known for its religiosity ”
That is absolute nonsense. Immigrants in NYC are well known to have all sorts of religion. You are going by cliche and not facts on the ground… Whether in NYC or China. Most people in NYC don’t live on Wall St. or in Times Square. Brooklyn was literally built around churches. Where do you get your ideas.
In any event – I’m not asking you… I’m telling what I know on the ground in China. The idea that 5% of China is Christian is absolutely possible. And it is absolutely growing. Both in the state approved and the underground ones.
You are correct… The idea he can’t believe that there are 70 million Christians in a country of 1.4 billion – I don’t know what to say. He probably thinks there are no Muslims if he was only in Guangzhou… Except there are mosques – that even foreigners attend. But the Muslim population is not huge – but they exist in Guangzhou too. But according to that anecdote then there couldn’t be 30 million Muslims in China – which there are.
The best source of arms for Taiwan is domestic, followed by Israel.
The US has been unwilling to sell the F-35, and Taiwan needs some form of missile defense which the US also won’t sell. The problem is that the Israeli missile defense is actually American. But their drones are not.
If I understand correctly, the security guarantee that the US offers Taiwan is quite weak compared to Japan’s. The main weight of it seems to be to allow Taiwan to buy US arms and to not let Taiwan be embargoed or boycotted. It doesn’t seem to protect against war. And the treaty has a direct political out, in that it specifies constitutional processes – i.e. seeming obliquely to reference the power of Congress.
I don’t know how easily the Chinese air force could dominate the skies, but if they could, I wonder how effective paratroops would be. Once they got boots on the ground, I think sentiment would be against any involvement.
The question is, would empty rhetoric be enough face-saving for a regime that idolizes democracy? (More or less, seems to have been for Tiananmen.) Or would it trigger a full economic bifurcation? Maybe, the story would be muted in the press, as being against the interests of the elite. A bifurcation would probably mean the end of cheap electronic goods. Now that inflation is coming, that might be bad news for those in power.
I expect that the Chinese won’t make a move for about another ten years. Ten more years of US decline, and chances of US intervention, will be zilch, IMO. If I were them, I would wait for the Tubman twenty to circulate for at least a year.
You’re simply wrong.
There’s an obvious Muslim presence throughout China — one which would be readily obvious to any traveler in the nation — despite the fact that they number “only” at least 30M.
There’s no obvious Christian presence in China. If they really numbered 70M, which is ludicrous, you’d see them everywhere. Instead, you see them only in the propaganda pages of Foreign Policy, in small churches that number only a few in each large city, and in the fever dreams and fantasies of people such as yourself.
Shanghai apparently only has 30 churches and 120,000 Christians: http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zt/zjxy/t36494.htm
That’s less than one church per 333k inhabitants. It’s not far off from one church per million inhabitants. (And get a load of the rest of the subversive propaganda at that link. Female pastors, etc.)
Que “they’re all on secret zoom calls” cope.
You are a fantasist. You can wish and hope that a thing is so, but that doesn’t make it so.
There is a 110% chance of global Chinese pogroms and genocide when WWIII happens. Chinese from Vancouver to Sydney, Kuala Lumpur to SF Bay Area will overnight find the hard glares of their neighbors turn into spontaneous stabbings, lynchings, and shootings. Blood and boba milk tea will fill the streets. Taiwanese and Hong Kongers will blame Mainlanders as they all step into Zylon B showers. China will be no more, a barren irradiated wasteland from which not even lizards can inhabit for the next 10,000,000,000 years.
If you want to hear more, you’re going to have to purchase my upcoming book, “The Coming Defeat of China” by Gordon G. Chang, coming soon to bookstores near you!
These are either overwhelmingly urban or in the Dongbei.
NATO sitting on the fence probably, but Australia? Japan might have a good chance of joining because of lingering sentiments over her former colony. India will cross into liberating Tibet too and “evict” the Han Sudeten-style. Worst Korea, 50/50, as far as entangled into imperial alliances. Even the more US-influenced Chinese offshoots (HKer and Taiwanese particularly) will turn on their own brothers.
Don’t forget the Nanjing Massacre and how revisionism goes in Japan (even as many arguments on the Holocaust can be used for that event as well). Unfetter the frontline troops, and you’ll have indiscriminate slaughter (I guess with the tech the US/Japan have now it will be like the bombing of Dresden.
Almost everyone on this thread are discounting the possibility of false flags to draw more parties into a war against China (maybe in Japan, Worst Korea and Australia?), and even the immediate incident to the war itself. I’m pretty certain the war will be deliberately triggered by Taiwan and/or US elements there to stop China before the US itself unravels – a “burning the jade with stone together” situation.
TSS’s joking aside, he/she’s spot on on the effects of propaganda and just about everything – just look at what happened to the Germans east of Oder-Neisse Line after WWII, and guess how much of propaganda was in the mind of the Red Army and local collaborators when committing atrocities. Even in a China victory, for the duration of war lots of Chinese in “allied” territories will suffer like the Japanese did in WWII, not to mention Hong Kong turning into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Taiwan purging everyone suspected to be enemy-connected. And finally, MAD.
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On can argue about Pearl Harbor being a deliberate attempt to get into a war, but in regard to China, the United States of America has repeatedly been taken by surprise and seen itself drawn in and trounced militarily, and diplomatically the the US has been defeated by China right down the line.. The CCP won the Chinese civil war because the US cut off arms to the nationalist forces in 1947t. The Korean war hardly began because of America drawing the Communists into a trap. The entry of Chinese troops into combat against Americans in Korea was due to the US Deep State completely underestimating China’s willingness to uphold their sphere of influence even if it entailed war against thermonuclear armed super-power America by a China that was a third world country lacking the Bomb.
In the event, a Chinese army lacking heavy weapons, motorized logistics or air support steamrollered US forces with amazing ease and despite a massive use of artillery and bombing that blasted the Communist’s front lines back to their starting point. America was forced to threaten use of nukes to get a ceasefire with no more than a stalemated ending. Vietnam was fought hamstrung by with the knowledge of what China could and would do to preserve the security of its borders, and through Nixon’s concessions to China in order to get their help in ending Vietnam, China entered the world economy and got access to capital and technology. Now they are thrashing the US economically.
Taiwan has no thermonuclear weapons, so China can invade it any time it likes. All Taiwan has to do is declare independence and China will fulfill their warning to invade Taiwan if it declares independence, empty US threats to use nukes in defence of Taiwan regardless. America is not going to use nuclear weapons first in any war, certainly not to defend Taiwan. Moreover, the Taiwanese leadership understand what would happen to them and their families if the Chinese invaded; they could not be stopped from doing by conventional means. I don’t think China is worried what would happen to Asians in America; for example I think San Francisco is down to get nuked by China’s ICBM’s if the balloon goes up, even though many Chinese live there. China would win a conventional war in its own back yard, and their nuclear weapons are a deterrent to the US going nuclear.
Ironically as mass immigration will be destroying the US sooner rather than later. I am actually accelerating my forecast for the US, the Obama-Harris regime has actually worsened the border situation and budget deficit faster than I imagined.
Unfortunately managing population growth is not as easy as programming an industrial PID controller.
False comparison. It dropped to 1.3 during Covid. It was 1.7 in 2019. 2022 will give a clearer picture
You make good points… But part of the reason the population is aging so much is because life expectancy has increased so much. In Shanghai it is around 82 already. China installs 1/3 of the industrial robots in the world because they saw this coming. It now graduates the most college students. People under 30 for the most part are not working in factories – unless they are supervising robots (see below). China is no longer interested in being an economy of thousands of workers sewing socks.
But you are absolutely correct China needs to up the retirement age. To me that is one thing they are slacking on. They have been talking about it for years – but nothing… Anyone turning an adult today should automatically be 65 right now. For people in the workforce already it should be raised on a graduated level. I believe Japan is raising theirs to 70 – but China has a couple decades before it reaches Japan’s level of aging
Israel risked the US wrath by working with the PRC on defense in the 70’s and 80’s. The PRC is also the new major investor and infrastructure into Israel nowadays. I mean Israel even rebuffed the US recently by allowing the PRC to build a port near where US Navy ships dock. Risk all that for the ROC in Taiwan?? That would be an economic loss. It would also potentially be a security loss because then the PRC might simply sell loads of weapons to Iran. And might change it’s stance in the UN Security Council. It just wouldn’t make sense for Israel on any level.
Hi, just curious: what is your background exactly? Did your parents flee China circa 1949? And do you use Twitter by any chance?
You simply don’t know what you are talking about.. Christians don’t stand out by their dress and food the way observant Muslims do..
The Three Self Patriotic Church is the official government sanctioned church in China and is acknowledged to have over 20 million members. The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association has millions as well – though less than the official Protestant Church.
None of those numbers include the un-sanctioned churches – which have more people than the official ones. You simply don’t know what you are talking about… Sorry.
I guess the tour guides who say all the new Chinese traveling to Israel for religious pilgrimage got it wrong too. I again tell you to go there during a festival. The same way you see the small crowd at a “holy site” waving PRC flags – so you see them being the numerous at the festivals. Don’t take my word. Unless you really think it’s some conspiracy to fool some unknown group
I like being obscure a bit. My parents did, I suppose, if being swaddled out as toddlers/very young children counts as fleeing. I don’t use Twitter.
Fair enough. I’ve been lurking around Unz for a while and can tell who could plausibly be Chinese/Asian.
How do you feel about China now? Many Chinese that came to America during that time were of a rarefied crowd– only 105 people a year were allowed– but their descendants are at best indifferent towards anything that’s happening in the PRC.
That was 4.55 million tourists in Israel ie four million five hundred and fifty thousand, you innumerate buffoon.
Well, no, they didn’t come to the US then; they were in Taiwan or South America – one of them was the daughter of a diplomat in Taiwan.
As for China now, its a complicated place, of course. I’m not fond of its totalitarianism, but I’m less fond of what liberalism has evolved into being.
You’re still seeing me as an Pacificist fry?
Nothing can contain China’s rise, the most Americans can do is to throw bumps at the trajectory.
Yet more lockdowns and sterilizing COVID vaccines?
My guess is fertility normalizing at a way lower level than the potential of the resulting socio-economic level after 10-20 years. See the post-socialist fertility shock.
Heh. My yellowface isn’t a lie.
Let me be honest – HKer outside of the color-coded (Yellow vs Blue) political binary here, young and being maddened daily by Dissident Right thought. (still, blind Trumpism or neocon shilling is a requirement of being Yellow – which disqualifies me)
Many my age have quitted Zuccbook and started using MeWe, which is just the same crap without data farming and algorithms. Some read Breitbart, but not a lot read Mises and AIER (there are more Taiwanese studying Austrian economics), and I dare say I’m nearly the only one reaching Strategic Culture and of course, Unz.
Oh boy.
If you believe that, you’re officially retarded.
That may be “acknowledged” by the usual suspects, but have you ever checked the source? (I’ll help you out: There is none.) And does it seem plausible, when sanctioned churches in Shanghai number roughly one per million residents?
Don’t overdose on fantasies and copium.
Western publics are being inundated with race-hatred aimed at the Chinese. The situation here in Austfailia, where racists and Sinophobes in particular run the media, politics and much of the elite power structure, is quite beyond belief. The utter lie, exposed by five minutes research, that the Chinese are committing ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang is supported 100% with not a murmur of dissent, by our entire power elite. They even outdo the USA in villainous hatred and lies spewed at China. As in all things Evil in this failed state, the Murdoch cancer leads the way, and the Zionazis and Sabbat Goyim there now vomiting agit-prop for Israel, are the greatest Sinophobes. Hardly surprisingly.
I suspect genocide by thermo-nuclear war or bio-warfare is firmly on the Western Atlanticist elite agenda. Even a China purged of the CCP will replace the West as leading global power. Even a China broken into pieces will still outdo the decrepit West. A return to 19th century conditions is now impossible, so, in order to ensure the God-ordained Eternal Rule of the White Gods Upon the Earth, Seres Delenda Est!!!
Oh those dreaded words! I still remember, back around the middle of the last century. “I’m late,” she said. Fast-forward thirty years and my buddy was trying to get a baby started. Calls the doctor up: “Find any sperms?” “Yeah, three, but they’re not wriggling much.”
(On Seres Delenda Est, Seres probably refered to Northern [i.e. tellurocratic] China and Sinae Southern [i.e. thalassocratic] China. So in time, the once again “legitimate” China Washington proclaims to be [or the Nationalist-DPP regime on Taiwan*] will be Sinae while Seres is regime-changed with carrier groups and missiles, in the wet dreams of neocons.)
(*But here comes the question: will Taiwan declare independence, only to be forced back into being the “Republic of China” by the American imperialists?)
I just wanted to add some nuance to this comment as I am of an Asian family that has been in America for a very, very long time and that has observed the different immigration waves.
First, the way in which many Americans have assimilated, Asian or otherwise, is to out-marry. For Irish, Italian, Jews, this means the weakening of cultural ties towards one ancestors, but it does not necessarily result in the subsequent generation falling within a different racial– as opposed to ethnic– group.
For, Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans, it’s the opposite. If you “assimilate”, it means your kids act, look, and think “white”. It’s by phenotypically resembling, as much as possible, the existing population. Anything less results living in a racial enclave in which behavior is aggressively mandated (see Woke Azns). And worse is that like the blacks, such Asians slowly start to believe that it is normal to live in such an enclave and forget what Asia proper is like. It is a pitiful existence in which one will never experience the highest levels of engagement with society because they ultimately identify with nothing.
One might wonder: “why do Asians keep coming if they can’t assimilate?” Well, one, there isn’t a transfer of information between different generations of Asians: Koreans in Queens probably don’t realize that Japanese-Americans had already started returning to Japan in the 1930’s for better job prospects. America, by definition, attracts people that think learning such information instead of making more money is a waste of time. So it’s unlikely that most Asians will ever become aware of their own history, and to the extent that they do, they will likely respond with “this time is different”/”America is exceptional. Ironically, they will have internalized a very American trait: a linear view of history that posits that anything in the past is bad, less developed, and not indicative of what could happen today.
Second: some Asians, particularly females, might realize this, but are simply too narcissistic to care. They would rather take the 15% salary bump than preserve cultural coherence between generations.
Hi, I responded to another of your comments below. Do you have email, Twitter, Wechat, etc.?
People here keep referencing Japan. Regarding Japanese “elites”:
I am one step removed from a branch of the Imperial Family. I regret to inform you that the youngest generation– the princesses– attend or have graduated from “International Christian University”, a liberal arts college founded in part by Douglas MacArthur. It is in many ways an American school in Japan, with graduates speaking great English but with little real affinity towards traditional Japan.
Regrettably, they seem to have adopted the “international school” approach, one in which graduates superficially resemble locals, but are pure globalists at heart. It’s very unsatisfying interacting with said individuals as they tend to be materialistic and completely alien to and detached from local Japanese culture. They also don’t go through the local school system and instead enroll in prep schools that guaranteed admittance to a top private university, usually Keio. .
More troubling is that many “elite” Japanese that I’ve spoken to, locals that have advanced internally and have graduated from Tokyo University and so on, do not seem to have a conceptual framework by which they can process the existence of said “international Japanese”. The Japanese media does not help, only providing snapshots in time that never reveal the true nature of such individuals. They do not seem to have much experience dealing with globalists that seem like kin up until the very last moment.
In America, non-elite admission to an elite institution usually involves a paradigm shift in which one realizes that what they thought was the upper class is really just the upper middle class, and the true upper class, far from being an upward extension of the rest of society, is in reality an alien presence that knows no national boundaries. Japanese elites seem to have not gone through this process.
Are you a Muslim Indian, or an African?
I am leaning towards Muslim Indian. What would be your caste?
His dislike for “Austfalia” and his pro-China stance suggests he is Chinese, at least in my mind.
Sounds like a bunch cope by Americans that commies are beating them at their own game
Africa is supportive of Chinese because China builds stuff for them and gives them cheap phones rather than regieme changes.
With the way the west is now, genocide against Asians is VERY possible
The US has no security guarentees with Taiwan unlike those it has with Japan or SK. In fact it has a policy of “deliberate ambiguity”, which has so far resulted inn taiwans independence – which imo had to do with the PRC being too weak to do anything.
However even the Pentagon now admits that the US would lose a war in the SCS. Which is essentially seeing a scaling up of destabilzation efforts in Tibet, Xianjing, etc.
One thing I do not understand is why China does not put more money into US destabilization as the US does to all the countries it does not like.
From his comments about Jews, Palestine, and Europe, I’m inclined to think that he is Muslim. A lot of Muslims seem to see China as a possible golem to crush the US, and that is how I would account for what seems to be his pro-China sentiment.
Many Muslims in Australia are from Turkey or Lebanon, so I guess that is another possibility.
China has had the world’s most unregulated and unhealthy industrialization, and it’s possible that their labour force has suffered (relative to countries with a more well regulated industry).
We noted other things, like the low quality of Chinese products (e.g. electronics), and often dangerous designs, which compete via low price – could indicate symptoms of a culture of low regulations and “cowboy capitalism”, which we see in their food industry.
However, there is some indication of change in China. Here about the situation of the food industry in 2014, when China was trying to improve state capacity in this area and to impose new hygiene legislation, although they were not sufficient to prevent the probably cause of the current coronavirus pandemic. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971214014970
There is also hopeful signs of more prioritization to public health in terms of reduction of the air pollution crisis, in the adoption of electronic buses in Shenzhen:
But there is a negative indicator in this story, which is that much of the electricity may be generated by burning of coal, which will nonetheless contribute to air pollution.
The other possible negative qualification, is whether the real interest in their promotion of electric buses has been to boost their manufacturing industry, rather than to improve the health of citizens.
Japan is also lucky that it seems to have world’s most physically health population, that enables the country to reduce dependency ratio by increasing its retirement age.
In the earlier stage of industrialization, Japan also had infamous pollution crises (e.g. Minamata disease), as well as “external shocks” to public health (e.g. atomic “experiments” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the yet the overall health of the workforce has been sufficient to raise retirement age into the 70s.
So perhaps the health of China’s population will also able to survives the problems of air pollution and low safety.
In my job, which is at beginning technical level of work, it’s at least civilized enough environment and lifestyle, that I could probably continue working until I was 90 years old (although there might be quite a lot of professional changes in the years until then).
On the other hand, if I was working as a coal miner (or perhaps producer of particle board furniture in a country with insufficient regulations), then it’s possible that I would not be able to work beyond age 40.
Historical development of car industry is always interesting to watch.
For example, life as a worker in the German car industry, seems quite civilized today – to such an extent that I feel almost like I would like to work in such a factory.
I’ve never worked in a factory. But for my amateur eyes, it seems to have a lost a lot of the nightmare qualities that the Charlie Chaplin films have satirized about factory life of a century ago.
Factories of automobiles today, can appear almost like a quiet environment.
I think a lot of White nationalists see China in this way too, and that accounts for the general pro-China sentiment on this site.
One of the ironies of White nationalists in America is that there is an inherent lack of racial and civilizational pride in looking to a foreign race and civilization to conquer you and save you.
In a way, it’s an attitude that reflects the decadence of Western culture even as it styles itself as an attempt to transcend Western decadence.
Even as White elites seek to elevate Blacks, White nationalists elevate China. The common denominator for all Whites these days is to elevate some foreign race, which one depending on your politics. It’s quite a peculiar mentality. Even the American alt-right attitude to Jews is really a backhanded compliment (a huge one) and another example of lack of self confidence.
If you think about it, the narrative that Jews destroyed your culture reflects much less racial pride and civilizational self-confidence than the idea that internal developments led to your civilizations decline. The European story is one of greatness and tragedy, of hubris leading to self destruction, one of the great stories of the world in which Whites themselves are the main protagonists – to substitute for that a story of weakness, fragility, and victimhood, with Jews having most agency and Whites in a role of passivity – what kind of personality would prefer that?
I hope, when Jewish cultures enters it’s inevitable decline, the story we tell ourselves is one where we are the main agents and not the passive sufferers, and I hope it is a story of greatness and not weakness and fragility.
European nationalists seem much healthier. They don’t obsess over Jews and don’t elevate China, although they retain a healthy caution towards both.
Oops, if I could edit the post – I mean to write sentence as: “China has had one of the world’s most unregulated and unhealthy industrialization”.
I wouldn’t imply that life had been that much healthier for the ordinary workers and the general ecology, during industrialization in the Soviet times, or Victorian England.
You obviously know nothing about China’s development. You have no clue that Christianity in one form or another had been in China for 1400 years (originally from Persia and not from western missionaries) . A minority – but there nonetheless.
They are not “hidden”. They just don’t advertise their churches as someone else already explained to you. You are simply too dense to get it.
It is very easy for 20 million people to be “unseen” in a crowd of 1.4 billion. It is also a fact that unregistered churches have been cracked down on since Xi got into power because China fears foreign intelligence infiltration. If they didn’t exist there would be no crackdown. You are deliberately obtuse.
“In order to raise the retirement age, also requires professional retraining, and ability to provide a both psychologically and physically healthy working environment, for the population”
“On the other hand, if I was working as a coal miner (or perhaps producer of particle board furniture in a country with insufficient regulations), then it’s possible that I would not be able to work beyond age 40”
Agreed…. But again – this is not the China of 2021. China Mobile and Huawei are already using 5G to have unmanned labor in coal mines to reduce the need for manpower (as noted people are moving away from the coal rich regions into cities)… This was from last year… It has already ramped up to other mines and will continue further.
http://en.sasac.gov.cn/2020/06/24/c_5145.htm
易富贤 He’s not a „rogue“ but a paid shill for globalists and gets quoted in FT. Most of the Sinosphere is calling BS on the aging population, demographics dividend argument— the West wants China to have a bloated population so that its per capita productivity gets stuck in middle income trap.
You can go to any 3rd-tier cities in PRC today and the only thing not first-world about it is the environment and crowdedness.
The way to converge to Germanic Europe is smaller, highly educated population so people have work-life balance and space for themselves to think independently.
By then low cost production can move to Vietnam and global South.
And even if China shrinks by half, it still has a huge base to start from for a pro-natalist drive.
Also, on the Guan Official Youtube Commie Channel, one guy was discussing why China needs to be careful to lift to 2 child limit, because some populations may breed much faster, He was being sly and didn’t refer to to which, I think you can draw your own conclusions.
AI can’t replace human debtors or human spenders. Factory workers are an insignificant thing. Japan’s growth has certainly collapsed since the 1990s. China won’t be overtaking the USA in 30 years on GDP per capita.
It was 1.1 for most of the 2000s. Beijing inflated the 2019 data to cover for its failures as a government. See the SCMP article for more details.
The real TFR in China has always been around 1 during the 21st century.
Well, I think there is a scalar attraction to China. Even multicult liberals seem to reluctantly experience it, but now among them it seems to have turned into an envy, and, moreover, among some of them, a desire for the US to become a multicult China, with a billion people.
What puzzles me about pro-Muslim Chinese sentiment is how it seems to be more martial in nature. Personally, I can’t conceive of any big battles with the US, or of the Chinese in a million years ever wanting to get involved in the Middle East.
For this part, I would say “whites”, rather than “white nationalists.” Though I will concede that I think both groups, the main one and the subset, suffer from a lack of identity and from, as I see it, the same root cause: namely, there is almost a total lack of a modern Euro cultural sphere. It would not surprise me if Israel’s indigenous identitarian production (not counting Hollywood) was greater than the whole of modern Euro identitarian production in the West. (for example, not counting anything that has a black in it)
In your view, what would be the mark of this theoretical future decline? Is it a power function? Haven’t Jews already declined, in a socio-moral sense?
To be fair, there are less Jews in Europe, and it is also more dangerous to mention them.
There are “patriotic” Christians ie CCP approved kind (I believe it is not the theology that concerns the Party). They are not exactly rare. Personally I know about a handful of young Christians and I also encountered old lady Christians. The percentage among the general population is likely small though.
On Christmas eve, local churches in my city are usually packed, but I think most of them are there not for Jesus. There are even newly built modernism looking churches. Christianity is definitely here, it is also clearly a minority interest.
I read about underground Christianity in China from a few books. I cannot imagine that they are popular.
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I think that’s definitely true. China’s social control and totalitarian aspects are unfortunately deeply appealing to our liberal elites as well as the alt-right, and are very much in keeping with the mood of the moment, which seems global these days.
Paradoxically, the “anti-China” sentiment in the mainstream press will be used to adopt Chinese methods of social control and totalitarian organization in America, I believe, because they will be “necessary” to combat China.
On some level it’s bigger than China or the US, who are both caught up in larger trends shaping humanity. The world seems to be moving away from the period of exploration, discovery, adventure, and openness that characterized the last 500 years, and towards a period of hermetically sealed communities – in an intellectual sense – that is too afraid to tolerate dissent, discussion, or debate.
At bottom humanity seems to have exhausted it’s tolerance for risk taking and adventure, for the time being, and is entering a period of retrenchment. The Chinese system, at bottom, is hostile to “adventure”. How fearful must one be to desire such control.
One sees anxiousness and the quest for absolute safety in the physical realm gain momentum, it will also gain momentum in the intellectual and political realm.
It is of course delusional. It is also humiliating – as China is currently interning its Muslims.
This shows lack of civilizational self-confidence among Muslims as well, just as it does in the case of American alt-right. I often find the two groups to share an atmosphere of simmering resentment, sense of inferiority, blame of others, and hope to be rescued by others.
The Muslim world, for all the splash it’s making, is very much a culture in decline. The very hyper-aggression that characterizes Muslim society today is the opposite of the calm self-assurance and sense of successful future that confident civilizations project. It is incohate lashing out.
Yes, Whites have no identity, so they try and “piggyback” on the identities of other people. That’s basically the decadence of the modern West. I just found it darkly amusing that people wanting to transcend the loss of civilizational confidence cannot help but reproduce it and become a shining example of said decadence! This means the root of the problem lies on the level of some subconscious assumption shared by all Whites, left as well as right, that is never challenged because it isn’t even perceived.
This, my friend, is the price of science. That is, science not as technique, but as metaphysics. Science is “deconstructive”, by definition. It criticizes, analyzes, and takes apart.
But can you put Humpty Dumpty again?
The Jews may have played an outsized role in this, but the technique was invented by Whites, and set in motion by Whites.
Now science as technique was adopted by Asians, who did not adopt it as metaphysics, and who therefore did not apply it’s rationalist deconstruction to their own societies.
In other words – the West applied rationalist critique to everything, including their identity. Asians delimited the sphere of rationalist critique.
Perhaps the West can do likewise and allow an organic identity to grow once again without applying to it the scalpel of rationalist critique?
It would be only a matter of delimiting the sphere of reason. And it could be done by reason critiquing reason and finding that it is fallible. This has already been done by Western philosophy, and the result have only to be popularized.
Understanding that reason is not a God, we can use it provisionally, to develop technology, and limit it’s sphere. It’s the naive belief, long since demolished by philosophers, that reason is the total road to infallible truth, that makes a God of it, and we allow ourselves to be destroyed by it, rather than use it for our health and vitality.
Jews have definitely been affected by the general decline of the West, whose civilization they are a part of, but not nearly to the same extent, and some groups very little.
So for the most part, Jews right now have civilizational self-confidence. They are happy and proud of who they are and see both their identity and way of life worth keeping. They also continue to produce capable and motivated people. Decadencee would set in when these things were substantially diminished.
However, different cultures produce different patterns of decline, so I doubt Jewish decline would resemble White decline – but then Jewish genius never soared as high as White genius.
The White pattern is to go higher than everyone else and crash lower. Since ancient times, however, Jews have exhibited a more moderate pattern. They don’t go as high, but they don’t fall as low.
In general, moderation is affiliated with longevity, and extremes with an early death.
There’s never going to be a “pro natalist drive”. Once you go above 3rd world your women aren’t reproducing no matter how much corny propaganda and online comments you make. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Come on, humor me. Where’s the source for your prior claim? Have you ever checked it? Or do you simply believe whatever propaganda you want to believe?
You say that the sanctioned church has 20 million members, but in Shanghai — one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the nation and indeed the world — they have, to a close enough approximation, one sanctioned church per million inhabitants, and only 120,000 members. Thus less than 0.5% of the city’s population even nominally belongs to this sanctioned church. Does this not strike you as odd?
It should, but I know that you are innumerate, so I’ll break it down for you: 0.5% of 1.4B is 7M, not 70M or 20M. As to the total number of Christians in China, that’s a much more reasonable and believable number, and it makes perfect sense when also considering the number of Muslims at roughly 30M, the number of Mosques in the country, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were less Christians than that. I think the notion that there are 70M “real” Christians is a joke. Pure wishful thinking. Anybody with clear eyes, common sense, and a healthy distrust of propaganda should be able to see this.
Being a Christian in China is at best curious and worst suspicious. So who is “hoping”? And what do you call a “real” one??? I would bet that by “real” there are as many “real” ones in China as there are in the US. It’s not a social club like western church go-ers.
In any event – go to China and go ask the Ministry how many belong to the official church.
Also go ask them if and why they are cracking down on the numerous unregistered ones and ask them why.
Then come back. Tell them there are only 7 million and the will probably laugh at you. then you can lecture them on why they are wrong… Yes please tell them that all the clergy they approve doesn’t exist either
There’s a non-zero chance of pogroms against basically every race in the West right now. Go to the gym, learn to use firearms, and know street smarts. If SHTF I hope orientals in the West have the initiative and self-reliance of our Asiatic brethren the Finns in WWII.
Indeed. I can speak much on this, the intro reading is Matsui Iwane’s wiki bio. CCP Commies play up their role in the war (and downplay KMTs), in which they contributed to maybe less than 5% of Japanese casualties. There’s whole cottage industry of TV shows of fake battles of the 8th Route Army.
One salient fact is that whereas the most notorious Nazi atrocities took place throughout until the end of the War, especially on the Eastern Front. Nanjing Massacre, took place in 1937/8, at the beginning of the war. Which indicates lack of pre-meditation. The Dwarves took pains to avoid repeating a breakdown in discipline after their victory in Battle of Xuzhou and Wuhan shortly after.
There are also no equivalents to Commissar Order, Einsatzgruppen, Generalplan Ost, etc on the part of the Dwarves.
I’m not sure I would put it in the same terms. There is more social rigidity. Perhaps, less of an appetite for spontaneity or standing out, but some accounting needs to be done for the fact that 56% of Chinese school kids in a recent poll said that they wanted to be Taikonauts, compared to 11% in the US wanting to be astronauts, and vlogger/Youtuber being the main choice in the US at 29%.
I believe it is partly related to terminology. The Chinese I am sure, do not think of themselves as “yellow”, or at least not to the same extent, but as “Chinese” or “Han.” I think you could similarly say people who identify as “brown” do not have a strong identity. IMO, skin color is really only a label that favors blacks as a broad group, and then only in an economic or political sense, not in the sense of a society with a healthy mental state. That is why I favor the label “Euro.”
I think this is definitely true to an extent. For example, why AfD are Zionists. Or, why in Northern Ireland, the Republicans identified with Palestinians and the Loyalists with Israel. Or to take it out of the context of the ME, why conservatives will still invoke MLK, as though he is one of their saints, even though he stood against meritocratic precepts. Western Euros seem to have a modern reluctance to promote their own heroes. I wonder whether it would also be true of the Chinese.
Yes, I do think skin color – race – is simply too thin a concept on its own to base a deep identity on. It’s never been done in history.
This modern attempt to base identity on race or skin color alone is, to my mind, one more example of the modern decadence.
That’s not to say race isn’t important, but it isn’t enough.
A deep identity is a complex thing, and one of it’s main features is that it cannot be “planned”. An identity that is rationally constructed is shallow and will have no staying power.
A true identity is one of those things that you have to let happen. However, you can create the conditions for it to flourish. And one essential condition would be a commitment to not apply rational critique to certain spheres of human experience – and that can only happen if the fundamental limitations of logic, well known by philosophers, are popularized and made the basis for a new popular culture in which reason is seen as useful, and as it’s proper sphere being the development of technology, but as no longer having the “God-like” status of granting us access to transcendental truth.
There has to be “space” in which an identity – a culture – can develop free of the cutting axe of reason.
Yes, the Chinese are in their “striving” phase while the US is slowly moving towards it’s “enjoying” phase.
Or put differently, the Chinese are in their “becoming” phase, and the US is moving towards it’s “being” phase.
“Being” phases of culture generally involve the development of the arts, refinements, and pleasures of life. Personally, I a lm glad for us and think we are getting the better end of the bargain 🙂
However, Chinese striving today seems to me to not exude the same spirit of openness and novelty seeking that characterized the last 500 years, and Chinese society as a whole to be characterized by anxiety and the consequent need for extreme control that anxiety evokes.
I also see signs China may have adopted science as metaphysics – in which case it’s internal self-implosion is a matter of time. But I am not sure it has.
There is this human need to identify with a tribe, and if your own culture suppresses that for you, you’ll find it among foreigners.
George Orwell noted long ago that the British intellectuals of the 1930s had “leapfrogging” loyalties towards the Soviets, while they despised Britain.
Their attempt to demonstrate their exquisite rationality and self control had only resulted in self-deception – they were still, at bottom, tribalists, like all humans, only now in a more complicated, self-deceptive way.
This also accounts for much of the fascination educated Westerners have for third world countries and indigenous cultures. It’s the fascination of living in a culture that has not deconstructed itself through rationality.
I suspect it also plays a part in educated Westerners wanting to import non-Western cultures. Having deconstructed their own identity, they crave contact with people who have not.
I have spent the past few weeks living on the edge of a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. These people are for all intents and purposes a pre-modern culture, and I get the same satisfaction observing them as I used to get in Cambodia or Thailand watching the local culture.
I know I could never live like these people, I would find the social atmosphere and restrictions unbearably oppressive, but I am fascinated by them. There is a palpable vitality about a culture that has not yet been deconstructed by rational critique, and that has it’s feet firmly planted in the rich soil of human nature and emotion.
I’m not pro-natalist as I’ve stated my view that 500 mln population is more than enough. In fact I think China would have still been ascendant if Mao didn’t push for population tripling after 1949.
You win ok lol. I’m even pro “elite” white immigration, “elite” as in preference for females who look like Elle Macpherson
Being “yellow” is a western conceit. Some of us are paler than southern Euros in the winter.
But nothing wrong with the color, its associated with Yellow Emperor, radiance, auspiciousness, etc.
I wonder if, in a sense, this would be like looking at your ancestors. I mean, for a Jewish person. (I’m not sure how much they would vary from the typical Jew, say 150 years ago.)
For my part, I was recently looking at old historical pictures of some parishes where my ancestors lived. And I found one or two of them oddly moving, even though I could not recognize any of the individuals, and it is likely none were related to me. It was inspiring to see the essential vitality and dignity of people, many of them shoeless and in tattered clothing. In one of them, large families posed, among the tumbled walls of their homes, after the crowbar brigade had evicted them. And I thought to myself, “These people would have laughed at any problem I ever had.”
One of the strengths of the Chinese, IMO, is how they still seem to revere their ancestors.
Another strength is how they seem to maintain some level of benign superstition. In my view, you cannot do away with superstition, if you attempt to do so, it will only lead people to believe in hexes.
“Gweilo” and “ang mo” are basically color terms aren’t they? Though, interestingly, as far as I can understand, most terms for ethnic (racial) exogroups don’t have anything to do with coloration.
Anyway though, when travelling to strange lands as a foreigner, personally speaking, I would consider it an honor to be called anything that does not apply to most of the world or Africa. I think the real weakness is just in using color terms for yourself.
Actually, I am noticing the Hasidim are physically somewhat different than the modern orthodox community I am familiar with. There are a decent amount of classic Jewish/semitic types, but I am shocked at the high incidence of blond hair and blue eyes. It sometimes seems to me that half the children are blonde and blue eyed. I joked with a friend of mine that Hasidim are the true Aryan race lol. Blond hair is fairly common among the modern orthodox too, but not at this rate.
But on a serious note, I am convinced that Hasidic Jews have a significantly higher infusion of northern European blood than any other Jewish group, and yet are more exotic and un-Westernized than any other group of Jews. I wonder if DNA tests were ever done on Hasidim.
It’s a lot of fun looking at old pictures of places your ancestors were from, because with a little effort of imagination you can imagine yourself living a completely different life, more like theirs.
Yep, seeing the basic conditions people used to live in, and even the deprivations they experienced, is a fantastic way to get perspective on your life. Third World travel is also good for this.
And one sees too, that lack of comfort and luxury, far from being a curse, is a source of vitality and dignity. Your ancestors may well have been stronger and happier than you are, not despite, but because of, their simple lives and deprivations.
The best times of my life that I look back to with nostalgia, was staying in some bare bones, fleapit of a hotel in India or SEA, travelling with very little money.
Great point, and very much speaks to the points I’ve been making about rationality being applied too broadly on Western culture.
The Chinese have not adopted science as a metaphysic, but only as technique – what I simply mean by this is that the Chinese do not apply rationality to everything. They limit it. They are pragmatic about it. For the West it is a source of transcendent truth.
But as Goethe says in Faust, ” Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life.”
Jews right now are a varied bunch, as they ever were. Your assertion that they are a great, undifferentiated, mass all marching to the Zionazi tune, is deeply ‘antisemitic’. Of course the ‘confidence’ of which you speak is akin to that which Germans felt up to 1942, as they crushed lesser peoples (Poles then, Palestinians now)and stole their land as ‘lebensraum’ (Russia then, Palestine now). ‘Pride’ in war crimes, cruel murder of children and arrogant contempt for International Law, is just like Nazi pride in their undeniable achievements in the 30s, and comes before adversity, as the proverb says. As for ‘haughty spirits’-no-one beats the Zionazis for brutish arrogance and contempt for the good opinion of others.
Do you want a bet, racist? The USA is a sewer full of arrogant, violent, turds, and needs to be split up into five or six smaller states, the better for humanity. The Chinese have been through that many times, and the US hopes to cause it again, so I recommend you swallow some of your own medicine.
Utter mendacious atrocity-denying, filthy, crap. The Three Alls Campaign from 1942, targeting areas of CCP guerilla activity, killed at least three million. And it was totally premeditated. Not to forget Unit 731 etc.
I have FB and Twitter but those aren’t used for politics – they are actually anime a/cs. I’m on MeWe and Gab too but those aren’t used at all, and I prefer not to be disturbed.
This.
A good argument for abolishing the monarchy – it’s been hollowed out by globalism and no longer resembles the genuinely nationalist and spiritual one pre-1945.
“one of”? Almost every country in its industrialization stage is/was dirty and sickening. It is probably just the postindustrial West viewing Chinese industrialism thru a “Green” lens (I won’t say you said that with this attitude in mind).
500 mln, if you can at least keep the level of development. Not much further (like what WEF wants – 90% at a level a bit higher than subsistence!)
It’s hard to be pro-something-that-doesn’t-exist. Women who look like Elle Macpherson are an underclass in East Asia.
What you want and what is “needed” are two different things. Please don’t confuse your desperatation for a global need; most people prefer the United States over China, globally.
All truths but with some qualifications:
As in an economy producing for the common man. An economy producing for the elites, not so much.
Individually insignificant and replaceable, but I hope the old Marxist dream isn’t lost on you.
It was because of the state failing to change track, which was exploited by the American overlords to keep Japan weaker than potential and in line, in additions to demographic collapse. China can’t avoid eventual demographic collapse, but it can try changing tracking – cue dual circulation and building your own consumer economy. Remember the old “400 million customers” promotion blurb? And America’s an rival trying to get into the way of China, instead of the overlord already in the way, in Japan’s case.
China won’t be overtaking the USA in 30 years on GDP per capita.
It doesn’t need to – convergence with Worst Korea is more than enough to surpass the USA in aggregate. And who can say if USA will actually stay at the level in 2019, with all the Biden-WEF smashing of the economy.
Ah. Humanity will be better served if the linear thinking of time is abandoned – the trend won’t be up indefinitely. 成、住、壞、空 – one of the good Indian concepts Buddhism introduced into Chinese thought.
Three Alls Campaign is standard anti-partisan/insurgency tactic. This the case with Americans in Vietnam, the PLA was even accused of this in Sino-Vietnam War. You can’t tell me that compares with Einsatzgruppen which is killing for the sake of killing.
When you take off regular uniforms and blend as guerrillas, you are by extension putting civilians in harm’s way. The KMT for instance did not pursue this tactic.
Also, the commander of Northern China Area Army that carried out Three Alls, Yasuji Okamura 岡村寧次 mostly conducted himself professionally since after WWII he was immediately retained by Chiang as advisor.
Unit 731 and in general usage of bio/chem weapons was vile and Dwarves deserved to be nuked for it. They even knew it was wrong and against samurai ethos. In a Chinese film about Battle of Changde, there’s a scene of 2 Jap generals arguing whether it was Yamato-damashii 大和魂 to use chemical weapons. They ended trying a banzai charge first and when that didn’t work fought dirty and used gas.
You can even hang the Yellow River floods and 1942 Famine as indirectly caused by Dwarve war-mongering but Dwarves was not exactly effective at genocide since by 1950 China’s population was at all time high 500 mln+ Whereas the Slavic people never recovered population-wise.
Lastly, Chiang did not pursue revanchism when he had the chance. Whereas you know what happened to the ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe post-WWII
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/cap-2013/#comment-4503786
China was at the first stage of demographic transition right after WWII with high birthrates making up for all the losses suffered (and this is why the “Mao containing pop boom” counterfactual is not completely feasible – the best you could do was to suppress the population growth rate from 3% pa to 2% pa).
The Soviets were much further down the road of the demographic transition – birth rates were already falling sharply following death rates (not counting mass casualties during WWII and earlier ofc). Central-Eastern Europe and the Baltics, even more so – Czechia and Latvia were near the tail-end, like Austria and Scandinavia, and Estonia saw zero population growth in the interwar period, sooner than Finland.
So it seems chinese birthrate is even worse than the japanese.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/china/2021/05/china-210511-globaltimes04.htm
Japan:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-fertility-rate-drops-to-the-lowest-level-in-12-years
This always spreads doubt about the system in China, since neoliberalism hurts birthrate like everything, and it also makes me doubt about China and Japan richness, since their people are so attached to their phones to play games (hint: phones are cheaper than PC and consoles).
Also, it seems the southern China province are increasing population, while the north is dying out, this is gonna create much problems later on.
Anyway, hope both countries can learn from Vietnam and destroy the overwork culture, that’s absolute cancer.
We should have ceased all immigration decades ago. Letting in de facto colonizers from the Billion-Plus Club (red chinx, street poopers, afriorcs) is suicide.
Well, I don’t think strategic ambiguity means the US can back down without losing face. It just means that it loses less face than if it backed down on Japan or SK. Also both of those countries are understood to be under America’s nuclear umbrella, while Taiwan unequivocally is not. The Pentagon will still feel very strongly that it needs to do something, and I believe this will result in tremendous pressure from the entire MIC to make the President act.
I think destabilization is first of all, not always easy to do, and I expect China would be a lot worse at it than Russia when targeting Western countries (and Putin’s efforts have so far been less-than-brilliant), aside from possible use of Chinese immigrants as a Fifth Column.
But also even if effective, it’s a tricky gambit that’s prone to backfire, unless you know for a fact the opposition is much less dangerous to you than the party in power. I don’t know that Britain was funding any of the French opposition in 1789, but we can imagine how creating domestic problems for Louis XVI might have seemed a sensible British policy at one time. Yet the result was a much more dangerous France for the next 25 years.
German support for Lenin was probably the best destabilization play ever, even if unconscionably evil, yet it still didn’t win the war for Germany.
As for USG’s support for destabilization, I think USG (and its allies, such as Soros) just sort of can’t help themselves with a lot of the things they do. Much of it is true believers spreading an ideology they believe in and trying to aid what they perceive as other true believers overseas. When we think of USG cynically supporting people who openly don’t subscribe to its ideology, we usually think of USG’s pro-stabilization efforts, above all the Arab monarchs and dictators.
Which is why its such a concern to the US that China has a greater manufactering capability?
Lol. White Nationalists are some of the biggest haters of China. Because White-nationalists are fascist in political leanings, and despise all things they view as ‘Communist’ (mainly due to Cold War propaganda).
I have never seen a white nationalist elevate a foreign race, and I used to give money to White Nationalist organizations similar to the Proud Boys (as do many Asians ironically).
If anything, Asians financially support WN organizations but the WN organizations do not support them.
The European story is one of civilizational inferiority – Europe was a dirty backwater until well into the 1700’s. Asia and China as a whole was ahead of it scientifically, culturally and philosophically.
What allowed Europe to “get ahead” was the opportune discovery of wealth in faraway lands and the plundering of these lands. Not some ‘inherint greatness’ that can be attributed to Whites. Whites stole the technology of the Chinese, and plundered it as well as the rest of the world to build their civilization. White history has been a tragedy for the rest of the world.
China is no more ‘totalitarian’ than the West. In fact, in many ways its ‘freer’ ironically. There is extensive propaganda to minimize this fact (just as there was extensive propaganda during the Cold War to minimize the impact of Soviet labor laws to the eyes of Westerner’s for example, to reduce the likelihood of social instability). The US has been far more totalitarian for longer than China or even the USSR, it is just better at talking it away.
For example, the US flies drones over its cities to monitor the travel patterns of citizens, has some of the highest incarceration rates in the world, operates “political prisons” (black sites) on both the sea (prison ships) and in foreign ‘allied’ (vassal) countries, records and reads the messages and phone conversations of ALL of its citizens – this is something that even during the darkest days of Stalins purges the NKVD never did. It has some of the most well developed propaganda outlets throughout the world which it uses to influence public opinion at home and abroad.
I’d be surprised if China is capable of doing half of that – because if this ever came out this would be the end of the Chinese regieme. But the USA gets away with it for a few reasons: 1. being the “richest” country in the world 2. having USD as international reserve currency 3. having a powerful expeditionary force that allows it to strongarm nations into following its interests. The main aspect of US totalitarian power lies in the USD as international currency however, as it artificially props up its economy and makes it a great destination for those seeking economic prosperity (most immigrants don’t care about nebulous concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’).
“But on a serious note, I am convinced that Hasidic Jews have a significantly higher infusion of northern European blood than any other Jewish group, and yet are more exotic and un-Westernized than any other group of Jews. I wonder if DNA tests were ever done on Hasidim.”
Where and when would this influx of Northern European DNA have entered the Hasidim? What was the nature of this influx do you presume? I think it is more likely that it is selection for traits that is common in Northern European populations, without the Hasidim being significantly more Northern European than your average Ashkenazi Jew. The genes that express traits like blond hair and blue eyes already exist in the general Jewish population.
In 2000 the US threatened use of nuclear weapons on China if it invaded Taiwan, China simply threatened to retaliate to any nuclear strike against China with a Chinese nuclear strike on the continental USA (all this was in veiled diplomatic language , but the meaning was very clear). Hence the US has already lost the kind of superiority that lets it credibly threaten China with nuclear weapon first use. It might also be mentioned that China attacked US forces during the Korean war when China lacked nuclear weapons, and similarly in 1955 China attacked and took Yijiangshan Island . So China was quite capable of conventional gambits against nuclear-backed powers even when have any nukes of its own. It does now. Anyway, Taiwan is a part of China: the Taiwanese government does not deny that. Taiwan is safe unless it declares independence; if they do China has said it will invade, so Taiwan will not.
Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to nuclear war. Nuclear weapons are a dubious deterrent to conventional attack by a power that has nuclear weapons. Hence Nato had all those tanks and artillery, and wanted much more to be secure, because the threat of an incredible action is not a credible deterrent.
https://youtu.be/x99njmZxaMA?t=45
The most fantastic part of this movie is where the Soviet leadership are supposed to think that the US, Britain or even France might use thermonuclear weapons to in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
An American first use of nuclear weapons is very unlikely in any scenario, because first use of nuclear weapons is not going to make a conventional aggressor (whou’d have considered the possibility) retreat; what they would do is retaliate at a higher level. Initiating what would predictably be an inexorable and escalating series of reciprocal thermonuclear strikes. The US starting this over Russia’s (or China’s) conventional invasion of a third country is something America simply would not do. Even those countries being invaded like France are hardly likely to prefer a nuclear suicide pact to being occupied (Poland was occupied in WW2 yet still exists). Nuclear war is not the winning strategy for America because after an attack on NE Asia or E Europe–quite possible both–it would be able to fight a conventional global WW3 and win. Hence American superiority in any conventional WW3 has been what keeps the peace. Nato became extremely concerned during the early 80s about masses of tube artillery (its always artillery with the Russians) that gave the Soviets approaching a 10:1 superiority, which was considered enough for a standing start offensive without any giveaway preparatory moving up of refenforcements prior to the begining of hostilities. But as already mentioned the Soviets knew they could not win the subsequent conventional world war that they would certainly be in with America, which would not first use but would retaliate to Soviet use of nukes. The use of nuclear weapons has no military purpose inasmuch wars cannot be fought with them, but conflicts can and will be be fought in the shadow of them.
Destablisation is very easy, you just sock it to them, then ask their friend if he wants some too. Russia destablised Ukraine by invading and annexing a part of it, which also destablised Nato because in return for giving up nuclear weapons, Ukraine had been given security “guarantees” by America and other Western countries which proved to be completely worthless. Ukraine is run by an Armenian technocrat and a Jewish comedian. Nato countries in eastern Europe know very well that the organisation’s charter leaves it up to each individual member country to decide whether another Nato member has started a war and thus need not be assisted in it. which is a get out of the obligation card for any state that does not particularly want to fight Russia in its front yard (IE all states). Does China need a lot of Chinese living in Russia to, for example, drive across land to the Sea of Okhotsk, and stop after capturing Vladivostok. which would be a tempting limited operation to slap down a Russian leadership that was getting too friendly with America. Russia has a lot of battlefield nukes, but the first use of them in a conventional war would be unlikely to save the Far East territory around Vladivostok.
China would be able to use North Korea as a proxy to attack the South and then assist it while claiming to be officially uninvolved in the same way as Putin has used Russian speakers in the western Donbass. China also has Pakistan to threaten India with. The problem with China is an incipient one because they are not yet in a position of having a strong enough economy to fight and win a global conventional war, but it is looking increasingly certain that they will be in a generation or so. The naysayers predicted civil unrest in China on the basis of the Tiananmen Sq disturbances, but that was more the last gasp of the large pre one child policy young pop than a guide to the future. China’s future is demographic decline. but with political stability, because these are two sides of the same coin. Without a drastic change in trajectory, China’s strength will inevitably begin to Finlandise countries on its borders. Finland benefited from its relationship with the USSR. I think the Middle East will be seen as unimportant to America in a generation.
Jealousy and resentment are ignoble qualities, and giving even your enemies their due is the mark of someone who has overcome his petty narcissism.
I’m Jewish – I have no problem admitting that the European intellectual contribution to the world dwarfs that of the Jews.
I am not even assessing the relative value of civilizations. I myself prefer traditional Chinese civilization with it’s Taoist slant. I think men live better and more happily with such a philosophy.
But it is an incontrovertible fact that Europe made more intellectual discoveries in quite literally every field of human endeavor than any other people.
Now, it’s possible to not even view this as a good thing. For instance, just as the modern Chinese need for such extreme control betrays massive anxiety and insecurity, the European need for such control over the physical world may betray a similar level of anxiety. Men with low levels of anxiety who accept death are not so anxious to figure out how to control the world. They prefer to enjoy it.
From the Taoist scale of values, striving for superiority, knowledge, and control are the mark of the inferior man.
On the other hand, engaging with the great minds of the Western tradition gives the impression that a substantial proportion of them were not motivated by anxiety but by the spirit of adventure and sheer exuberance, the spirit of play.
It is only in the modern West, with the ascendancy of bureaucracy and bureaucratic science, that that element of the Western intellectual tradition that was always about anxious control won out over the spirit of adventure, and with that the ability to make major discoveries was lost. The need for safety (to be securely enmeshed in rules, protocols, algorithms, etc) triumphed over the capacity for risk-taking. But this is a global phenomenon.
Appearance and substance are often in an inverse relationship – that’s a Taoist principle. Striving for greatness may mask feelings of inferiority.
As for China, in no field does it come close to the modern Western accomplishment. Most conspicuously, not even abstract mathematics, for which Chinese supposedly have particular aptitude. And perhaps that reflects the greater ability of traditional Chinese culture to provide a way of life that leads to contentment and satisfaction and the Chinese lack of accomplishment is a mark of it’s superior culture.
Of course, modern China is different. If instead of taking the path of wisdom you suffer from feelings of inadequacy and the need to prove yourself, the best way to make China achieve great things is – make your people unhappy.
Make them dissatisfied and discontent, like the West had been unhappy for much of the modern period 🙂
That is part of the story of White greatness. It’s not a simple morality tale. By reaching so high they ended up damaging both themselves and so much of the worlds cultures.
I did not say White history was a simple story of improving the world. But it is a dramatic story of restless discovery and accomplishment in which Whites are the star actors. It ended in tragedy – and that can be a sobering lesson about hubris.
But it’s a thrilling tale. To throw that out for some petty tale of victimhood and resentment strikes me as self-hatred.
I’m guessing it’s Slavic and to a lesser extent Germanic. My friend jokes that there must have been a high level of rapes.
Is a thousand years enough time for a dark Semitic people to develop pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes? I don’t know. It could be. But then why aren’t regular European Jews as fair?
Another idea occured to me. Maybe the modern orthodox were less insular and those with fair European traits intermarried at a higher rate – or at least a big chunk, so there are fewer fair blonds among the modern orthodox (I would guess 20%).
It could also be accidental. Both groups recieved the same level of European blood, but for some unknown reason, perhaps entirely fortuitous, Hasidic marriage and fertility patterns perpetuated these traits better.
It is a mystery.
I am cackling.
UNZ finally gets a few anons who are able to troll the zionazi zionist trolls.
This has been very entertaining.
I didn’t say “sit on the fence”, I said “not do anything”. I think the most powerful ship in the Australian navy is a lone destroyer. In a naval war, the difference between 0% and 100% effort from Australia is a rounding error to anything the US Navy does.
But the rest of this sounds like Sid Meier’s Civilization stuff, even without the fact that China has nuclear weapons. No one is launching an invasion of Chinese soil against an intact Chinese state. That has been suicide for basically all of history (with maybe a slight exception during the late Qing) and is more suicidal today than it’s been for a while.
Though if China ever did collapse again due to its own internal forces, I have little doubt that external powers would seek to separate Tibet, and perhaps some other regions, from it permanently. But they wouldn’t be prepared to invest much blood in the matter.
As an early part of China to industrialize, isn’t Manchuria full of older factories in outdated industries. Like other coal based regions in the world a lot of factors from productivity improvements to environmentalism will be causing decline in work and business opportunities. It’s on the periphery so doesn’t have Wuhan’s opportunties for diversification. Presumably people remember where their ancestors came from and are heading back to their ancient home after the recent boom in construction steel that ended in 2011.
Gweilo means “devil guy“, not a compliment but not reference to skin color.
Earlier Euros like Marco Polo considered Chinese no less white than themselves. White/yellow/black/brown is a paradigm from 19th century Euro race scientists, Gobineau et al, when China was no longer an object of admiration.
Empirically this paradigm has scientific basis and works well but could use some updates/refinements. The weakness of this paradigm is that weighs too much on nature and considered many racial traits to be immutable.
The Chinese race paradigm is Hua-Yi distinction 華夷之辨, or Sino-barbarian dichotomy, which is focused on culture rather than phenotype or genetics. This paradigm also works well because its allowed China to assimilate many other races and rejuvenate and remain resilient over millennia.
But this paradigm must also be revamped because of what we know about HBD, and because whites/Japanese are not like any barbarians previously encountered.
Personally I prefer the designation “yellow“ any day over the nebulous and gay-sounding “Asian“.
Not according to “his” or Buddha’s mental capabilities, which are are limitless, but according to others’ mental capabilities.
I thought that you are an orthodox Communist? Strange that you have such traditional views in regards of women’s position in the society, were not Mao and Stalin very much for gender equality and women’s participation in workforce?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3e/84/5d/3e845de0b7f54302927c94609d4aa49c.jpg
https://cp12.nevsepic.com.ua/62/1353961683-0435802-www.nevsepic.com.ua.jpg
These are paintings of Buddhist goddesses, I think maybe Guan Yin, in a modern form by a Chinese artist Zeng Hao.
There are indeed no color-coded “races” from an American viewpoint, but ethnicities broadly divided by three major (sub-)races (Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid) and under subtler differences in physiognomy and physical/mental/intellectual capabilities. There are also cultures that more or less cover, overlap with or split them.
What each ethnicity needs to do is to recognize their own capabilities and limitations, build solid foundations in their own cultures, and strive for their best – while respecting everyone else as part of the same human race and not degrading anyone, self or others. (I might sound “woke-ish”, but True Wokes always elevate minorities and the marginalized, who they see as perpetually oppressed, into divine status)
I would suppose a (slowly) declining overall population isn’t an entirely negative thing, if a state maintains it’s demographic balance, not relying on immigration for population replacement, etc. Population being power and all that, but from China’s extremely high base I doubt even a decline of several million would change matters much, and it’s not as if India will ever poses any kind of threat or challenge to anyone except it’s neighbouring co-ethnics.
China doesn’t seem to be afflicted with the same social pathologies of hikikomori or ubiquitous plastic surgery that plague S. Korea or Japan, although iirc, it still has one of the most skewed gender-ratios of any major country that hasn’t experienced a recent war.. surely there must be some problems arising from that beneath the surface.
Well, I enjoyed this post (and I’d never seen Octopussy, but that clip was fun), though I disagree with some of what you’re saying about deterrence.
This isn’t illogical by any means, but I think the reality is more nuanced and unpredictable than that. The US and USSR at least hoped to maintain a credible threat of nuclear retaliation in the face of a losing conventional war (though the USSR made a “No First Use” pledge in the 80s, the US never did, for precisely this reason).
For one, you can signal your commitment: “Better dead than Red.” I have little doubt that many Americans (and not so many Europeans) believed it would be better to glass the planet than to let the Soviets rule it, and that even the loss of Western Europe was too close to Soviet domination of the world to be allowed to happen. My Boomer father (who hated Communism more than words can express) believed this fervently, and I recall him intoning “Better dead than Red” whenever the USSR came up in conversation in the 1980s.
The NATO allies seem to have been somewhat afraid at times of how far the Americans might be prepared to take the “Better dead than Red” philosophy, so I have little doubt that the Soviets took it seriously. And you don’t have to assign a 100% probability to your opponent being sincere in his commitment to a massive nuclear first use in the event of war for it to affect your behavior — if there’s even a 10% probability, then is it worth risking an invasion?
I’ll admit though that America hasn’t done much to signal a commitment to retaliate against a PRC invasion of SK or Japan. But then again, if those threats were real, then China would be both more powerful and more aggressive, and America would be a lot more worried about China, and perhaps more signaling would happen, more anti-Chinese propaganda. Or perhaps not. Right now America isn’t configured to worry much about foreign threats, our focus is on our domestic enemies. But things can change in 20 years. I believe firmly in American decline, but a lot of people here seem to overestimate how bad of a situation the US will probably be in 20 years from now. Most likely, things won’t have changed all that much — our institutions will have simply progressed towards dysfunction roughly as much as they did in the last 20 years.
I also don’t think this has to be inexorable. You can attempt tit-for-tat. It’s quite possible the invading country miscalculated and thought that nuclear weapons were off the table and that the threat to deter a conventional attack with nukes was a bluff, and as soon as the tit-for-tat begins, they’ll be prepared to reconsider and recalculate. Or, sure, it might lead to mutual destruction.
In any case, none of this has ever happened, and in the end a lot would come down to the individual psychology of the leadership of the respective countries, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to make such confident statements about what would happen. And that very uncertainty is a deterrent in itself, a Pandora’s Box that no one really wants to open unless he has nothing to lose.
No doubt that’s true, but I think we were talking about propaganda offensives. Obviously once bullets start flying, there’s no limit to what you can do to your enemies.
Much of corporate America has already been Finlandized by China. I don’t know about, say, Japanese corporations, but I imagine they’ll be there soon if they’re not already. Though governments can still put up more resistance, and I wonder if at some point the US government might try to ban its megacorps from Chinese kowtowing (as part of the bifurcation some describe). I suspect Japan’s government would be more inclined to resist Finlandization than SK’s would, since SK is much more geographically vulnerable and has a history of kowtowing to China.
I suspect that low TFR translates into accelerated societal dysgenics. Maybe, it isn’t so – it’s tempting to believe that the trannies, etc. are being weeded out, to the betterment of race, but, in my view, it is sort of a distraction for the greater losses on top.
I’d do more than suspect it — I think it’s basically a certainty that this has been true up to this point. If fertility is low-status, then low-status people will be more fertile. Unless status is negatively correlated with what is conventionally thought of as good genetics (fat chance), then the result is dysgenic. And I don’t think it’s changing: plenty of trannies come from good families. I know of one who recently graduated from Princeton. To be transsexual is high-status.
Though “eugenic” and “dysgenic” are probably doing a lot of simplifying here. Not all “dysgenic” outcomes are created equal. Nature is, at present, aggressively selecting for people who are either ignoring modernity’s advice to not breed or hearing that advice and actively telling modernity where it can stick it. My hope for the future is that nature is primarily selecting for some human characteristic besides a simple intellectual inability to make consistent use of birth control.
Broadly speaking, I’d suppose it has more to do with biological life strategies r vs. K, uncertainty, and lack of community and culture than it has to do with social hierarchy. Some people are wired to worry a lot about resources or the future, while some people aren’t. Also, some people are really shy (including many NE Asians), while others are really extroverted. Historically, we’ve never had a dating culture. Most marriages were arranged.
People today have a lot of noise impacting their thought processes, even as they must face problems, which didn’t exist in former times. I think it is more a noise or confusion problem. In my view propaganda would help because it assists people to deal with noise and with priorities, more than it causes people to change their evaluation of social rank.
Under what circumstances would China possibly ever want to invade South Korea or Japan??? East Asia is simply going back to what it was for most of history… Both looking up at China and Japan always looking down on Koreans. For most of history it was China guaranteeing Korea’s safety from Japan (and Ryuku – now called Okinawa). It was only after the decline of the Qing that Japan had a free hand to conquer. Not that hit hadn’t tried before….
The only way China attacks (not invades) either is if the US fights China and China attacks its bases on both. In fact – they just are finishing naval drills in the Yellow Sea – East China Sea – South China Sea at the same time (I’m shocked a western news site reported it fairly so the link below). Everyone is clear on what those drills mean. The “beef” China has is not with South Korea or Japan. The “Taiwan card” was played by Trump and is still being played by Biden. If someone interferes with Taiwan China is showing it is ready to fight from Japan all the way down the so called “first island chain” that the US seeks to keep China hemmed in by. Other than that – there is no real beef.
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-navy-holds-intensive-combat-drills-three-surrounding-seas-1576529
Yeah, I agree it never happens, though the hypothetical outcome of it happening is relevant to other considerations, such as whether those places allow themselves to be Finlandized.
Excellent point. HBD conventional wisdom is that orientals are high M/visual, lower V. But the Imperial Exam is entirely V. Someone like the polymath Shen Kuo would have to also concern himself with passing exams and bureaucratic factional battles.
Today orientals are somewhat underrepresented in Fields Medalists (only 3 Yau/Tao/Ngô). But contributed to 2 out of 3 recent generational breakthroughs, Zhang Yitang in twin prime conjecture, and Shinichi Mochizuki in whatever he did lol. (3rd one being Grisha Perelman and Richard Hamilton for Poincaré conjecture) And no, there’s no obvious pattern that orientals are better at geometry vs. number theory/algebra.
HT here who sums it up well.
bold mine
https://gmachine1729.wpcomstaging.com/2020/12/11/some-thoughts-on-greek-persian-arab-indian-and-chinese-science/
https://gmachine1729.wpcomstaging.com/2020/12/11/why-the-japanese-after-1700-given-another-500-or-1000-years-could-have-discovered-calculus-and-modern-science/
*The physics Nobel laureate Hideki Yukawa had studied Confucian/Taoist classics.
Yes, I have made the point about the Chinese exams being literary myself when arguing against the HBD understanding of the Chinese ability profile. It’s an excellent point, thanks for bringing it up.
My general understanding of traditional Chinese culture is that it was extremely literary and had a mild Taoistic anti-technological bent (which I share lol), so I have always been skeptical that the current East Asian proclivity for STEM reflects a particular ability profile rather than a cultural choice to acquire the only type of Western learning that would allow Asia to compete with the West and remain undominated by it.
In other words, the Asian turn to STEM, I suspect, was compelled by brute necessity, not any particular affection for it, or, necessarily, aptitude. Well, the aptitude is certainly there on the concrete level, but I don’t know how much it drove the Asian turn away from their traditional literary culture towards STEM, let alone being the primary factor, as often asserted by HBDers.
HBD is correct that people have innate limitations and aptitudes, but its explanations are often too simplistic and attempt too much to “apotheosize the moment” – i.e, be ahistorical and pay too little attention to development – in it’s effort to extract timeless “essences”. HBD is too Platonic lol.
As far as I understand it, the Chinese have long been noted for a “pragmatic” bent, and Buddhism is considered to have undergone considerable modification in China towards a less metaphysical and more concrete and down to earth creed, the result being Chan.
A development I am very grateful for as I am very inspired by Chan 🙂
Indian Buddhism by contrast is full of extremely lush and elaborate metaphysics and is highly imaginative.
But there is a less noted aspect of Chinese thinking that I think is reflected in Taoism and that I also like – a deep appreciation for mystery and acceptance of vagueness.
Western culture attempts too much precision, and the next intellectual advance may be to start paying attention to things that cannot be precisely formulated, yet seem highly relevant.
A culture more comfortable with vagueness might play a leading role in this.
It is generally considered that the West excels at abstraction and the Chinese at the pragmatic and concrete, but I think for the enjoyment of life the Chinese have the advantage here. The Chinese connection to the concrete has left them firmly planted in human nature and the emotions.
It is ironic though that the Chinese in the 20th century found themselves possessed by the demon of an abstract system.
But a signal does not have to be honest, and because talk is so cheap and might work, bloviating bluster ‘averrals’ of a full court press nuclear First Use as soon as the Bear put a claw across the Iron Curtain were entirely sensible. However, the threat ceased to be of massive all out thermonuclear strikes when the USSR achieved parity in ICBMs (maybe they even had superiority at one point) because it simply was not credible that the US would be willing to blow its own brains out to save Western Europe from being occupied by the Soviets. The idea had become that to deter an invasion, the Americans would use a battlefield nuclear weapon, which was supposedly presumed to cow the Russians into stopping, but was much more likely to result in them retaliating by using a somewhat larger battlefield nuclear weapon. The Spartans were perhaps more convincing for being laconic.
Russia actually had all those tanks and incredible amounts of tube artillery well forward where they would be useless for repelling an attack but in place to administer the traditional Russian overkill bombardment preparation for an offensive. Also masses of FROGs aimed at Nato airfields meaning that nothing needing a runway would even get off of the ground. All this enormously expensive hardware (conventional armaments’ are relative to nukes very costly) was preparation for a conventional offensive and victorious conquest of Western Europe up to the English Channel, yet completely redundant in a nuclear war. Even an assumption of a 10% probability that Nato would swiftly turn to nukes in a war with the USSR would have seen the Soviets decide to concentrate on ICBMs, but they didn’t.
I think the assumption was that Nato would not first use any kind of nuclear weapon, especially because the Germans didn’t think America fighting an escalating tit for tat thermonuclear campaign across Germany was necessarily preferable to it being occupied by the Soviet army. If the Soviets had attacked, they would have done so after considering what they would do in the eventuality of a Nato (actually US) use of any kind of thermonuclear device, even a mine: quite obviously the Soviets would have decided to stop conventionally while reacting with a larger nuke, daring Nato to continue the escalation to city for city, American city. In practice, tit for tat always contains an escalation, and once you go nuclear, you go nuclear for good. The fact is the USSR never invaded Western Europe, but as I said I think that was because of a total predictability of the ultimate consequences of sucedding, while they were pretty sure no one would initiate MAD, they feared the strength of the US economy; a global conventional war fought against the most powerful productive capacity on Earth was a war the Soviets could not possibly hope to win.
Putin’s Donbass campaign was one of political destabilization against Ukraine with very limited objectives territorially and resources dedicated to it have been slight. It worked: the country is at its wit’s end and being run by a Jewish comedian bleating for help as Western security guarantee solemnly made when Ukraine became independent have been shown to be worthless, although good value for money for those making them because talk is cheap. If Ukraine had nuclear weapons could it use them to resolve the Donbass situation? Nukes have no military purpose, wars cannot be fought with them.
In about a generation China will possess the worlds most powerful economy, and the US will be be unable to win against China, not just on the Asian mainland but in a global conventional war. Once that happens the US will lose its attraction as an ally or ability to get commercial advantages, and begin to be bullied by China. Biden represented Wilmington, Delaware, where most Fortune 500 companies are incorporated because they are allowed to do what they like . Corporations see China as a source of profit or at least increased share value. The Chinese get technology transfer and capital investment, while corporation get access to an expanding market and projectably massive increases in share value, although profits are very difficult to repatriate from China. Buffet made 600% on his stake in a Chinese electric car maker subsidized by Federal environmental grants to US cities. Productive capacity is increasing in China and getting much more advanced, with no end in sight, and they have a more subserviently homogenous population. Biden does not believe China is any match for America, he has went on record repeatedly saying that he thinks they cannot compete.
The basic American delusion, which is shared by almost all US strategists brought up in the foundational myth is that America can integrate different group and raise them all up. High quality immigrants on tap will ensure the US continues to have a technological edge. Shortly before becoming president, Biden even said the US had a demographic advantage over China, although the proportion of old people in America is significantly higher than in China, which has an additional advantage in being less ethnically heterogenous . To turn the demographics around, the importation of immigrant into the US is going to need to be be so vast it will create a wild swing in the power of ethnic groups and perceived political imbalances, especially in who is being taxed to pay for those who do not work. Moreover, these immigrants are going to be all highly educated people who will be net contributors, or is it presumed that automation will not reduce the need for manual work by 2050? Is America going to use human wave attacks against the Chinese?
Semi-OOT, from personal sources: the Nationalist-DPP regime in Taiwan is learning from the Californian playbook and piling a “COVID spike brought by a stray Indian” on top of contrived electricity shortages. Seems like they’re acting out their instructions a year late – there’s no need for the Chinese to reclaim the island right now, just wait until DPP runs things into the ground and receive the inevitable refugees.
(One of the reasons why I say “5 Eyes” liars is them (UK, Canada and Australia in particular) promising great prospects for HK immigrants while actually giving them the exact same deal in HK under the British deep agent, Carrie Lam – vaccine casteism and eventual pauperization. There is practically no difference between emigrating and staying, except for the impressions created by Anglo-American-WEF propaganda.)
Technically speaking, it’s not actually possible to borrow from the future. That is, you can’t step into a time machine, travel forward in time, pick up the resource, travel back to the present and put it to use. What “borrowing” from the future really entails is sacrificing potential future benefits for present benefits. (Eg, someone could have invested for his retirement at age 30, but he chose to live it up instead, and now at age 70 he’s penniless.)
Its an entirely valid strategy in a competitive environment, nature does it often.
The male strategy of higher risk and conflict for reproduction and a lower(or sometimes, almost completely absent) life expectancy is widespread across multiple animal kingdoms. It doesn’t matter if, for example, continuing to make your soldiers be noblemen that use melee weapons(as in the Thomas Jefferson letter) would ensure that you have braver and stronger soldiers in the long run for your country, the first nation that equips tons of civilians with cheap guns will beat them in the battlefield.
So the only adaptive strategy is to do the same. Sacrificing the future for present advantage is, for better or worse, is valid and often unavoidable.
China should just come out and say it: if you move to the UK, the state ideology is that you must worship trannies, gays, and black criminals. Not just the ones there, but the ones from the US, as well, like George Floyd.
Reason is in fact the road to infallible truth because the world in its entirety is an inmense machine and reason can find the details of all those mechanisms. Reason may fail because it is often incomplete, and it is often incomplete for two reasons. Reason 1 and reason 2.
I didn’t mean to dispute your original point, only to express my dissatisfaction with the (rather widespread) use of the word “borrowing” to describe that behavior.
(In this post, you have introduced the word “risk,” and – lol – me being me, I can’t help pointing out that sacrificing something is not the same thing as risking it. In the former the loss is certain; in the latter it is not.)
In other words, it is fascinating to observe the recalcitrant vitality of simpletons going about their backward ways without having to reason about the true nature of things.
Considering the harsh meritocracy prevalent in current China, I think you are wrong, they are applying rationality in all aspects that matter. On the other hand, how can you be pragmatic about not applying rationality to everything? Being pragmatic means being rational, because being pragmatic is about accepting that which works instead of insisting on implementing that which should work.
Eh, the future is always uncertain so technically everything is just matters of risk. E.g. you could do something to die today, and be resurrected in the future: the odds are very slim but its not impossible.
Male spiders obviously employ this strategy: they have a high chance of being eaten by their mates, but its not impossible that they survive(although they only have pedipalps to mate once more). It is adaptive in their situation.
For the most part, for a nation to try to maximize its ability to produce is adaptive in competition to other nations.
At least he’s only observing them rather than recommending them as a viable alternative. That’s a step up for the Aaron that I know.
Read Kant.
Unfortunately, he has not been influential in the Anglo-Saxon world, whose culture now dominates the world.
And yet there was a period in the early 20th century when Anglo philosophers did take him seriously. Bertrand Russell thought that Kant’s demonstration that we cannot “know that we know”, and his demonstration that logical statements inevitably lead to self-contradiction, was the great crisis in the legitimacy of Western science that threatened to unravel it. He worked hard on the problem, but could not find a solution.
What happened was, a collective closing of the eyes in the Anglo world, an agreement to pretend and forget. Nearly all of us are still 19th century positivists, even though philosophy – and science itself – has long moved on.
Godel later showed that no system of logic can prove all it’s propositions from within itself, but must simply “assume” some of it’s starting positions. This remained a curiosity and did not have widespread cultural impact.
Western man chose to cling to 19th century positivism.
Nagarjuna, in India, did the same thing as Kant, but in the East, this became the basis of the culture of educated men throughout the Far East and did have widespread cultural impact.
It is time for a similar revolution in the West.
A pragmatic person follows the concrete good in any situation and does not fanatically adhere to abstract principle.
If subjecting your culture to rational assault destroys something good, something worth living by, the pragmatic person not a slave to principle will not do so.
The West has experienced rationality and science as a great and continuing “martyrdom”. Western writers have deliberately preferred “truth” over the concrete “good”, and quite self-consciously understood this as a “martyrdom” – i.e, great suffering for the sake of principle. The picture science drew of the world was bleak and harsh, traditional culture was analyzed out of existence, and ones worth was measured by how much one could stand to admit these harsh “realities”.
In the Genealogy of Morals, in a long essay, Nietzsche made the point that science, in the West, was a form of asceticism, and heir to the hairshirts and monastic cells and bread and water diets of medieval monks. The whole essay is an exploration of the ascetic impulse.
Once you internalize the fact that the “mind can’t know that it knows”, and that any logical proposition will contradict itself if it’s implications are fully drawn out, this martyrdom become more farce than tragedy. At best a noble but unnecessary act of self-flagellation.
I’m not suggesting we abandon logic and science. Only instead of becoming a martyr to it, make it be a good servant to us. If being overly rational in some area harms life and joy, just don’t do it. And this can only happen if we accept that science and logic are not a source of transcendental truth – which means accepting, with Taoism, that mystery is final – but just one more tool animals like us use to nose out way through a world we can never fully know.
I am Chinese from a southeast Asian nation (although some in this forum dispute my ethnicity , although if these blokes met me in person, they wouldn’t second guess my phenotype as definitely at least northeast Asian – with fair skin, dark hair , “typical” slanted eyes with epichantic folds etc etc). Since “racism”(ie discrimination against the Chinese community, viewed as “economic elites”) is Government policy here and pervades our politics, the Chinese community here have varied attitudes towards either PRC or Taiwan/Hong Kong/(USA). Generally , I am quite concerned about PRC since I consider China as ultimately my “motherland”, my roots.
My views on “being Chinese” and China were partially influenced reading books by the late Lin Yutang(there was a period of time when I had an “identity crisis” and later became “race conscious” ) – albeit most of these influences are likely obsolete and outmoded. Anyhow, I am a “product” of “multiculturalism” thanks to past European Imperialism in southeast Asia : my mother tongue is not Mandarin(although I can speak this, I can’t write Chinese) or a Chinese dialect but an English Creole related to “Singlish”(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish) and I also speak a Malayo-Polynesian Creole language very fluently. I am “culturally” from a distinct sub-community within the southeast Asian Chinese diaspora called the Peranakans(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peranakans) although genetically , the Malayo-Polynesian component is pretty minimal in my case, most of my ancestry is Southern Chinese.
And some more for the blokes who disputed my ethnicity :-
https://says.com/my/fun/how-to-crush-a-chinese-bananas-soul
Probably these reveal too much about who I am.
And partly, my life experiences shaped these (some of them seemingly “paradoxical” )ideals/ view points :-
Anti – multiculturalism (as an ideal for a country; my maxim is the world should be multiethnic and multicultural but the best society in a country is monoethnic and monocultural (or a dominant ethno-culture in a “stable” multicultural state[which arose due to historical reasons]- the American or Western liberal ideal is thus antithetical to mine)
Race realist / race conscious
Against Islam
Anti-woke / anti “anti-racist”
Anti social liberalism
Anti LBGTQ(did I miss anymore alphabets)
Anti feminism
Anti West ( I used to be a West worshiper but now the Western political elites promote and influence the world with ideals I totally disagree with, the collective West is now ideologically and politically my “enemy”)
As for China, my ideal is for her to be a great power(but never a superpower or worse, lone superpower ) to be sovereign/ independent culturally, ethnically, politically ; to be pacifist rather than imperialistic( we should not emulate America or Western European imperialism) and at peace with all nations, especially with neighbouring nations( the Koreas, Japan , India , Russia, Mongolia etc) – I dislike the idea of a powerful China forcing our culture or will on other nations; to ultimately match or better the West in science and technology ; to revive our culture – more socially conservative yet technologically innovative + revival of our ancient ones ( eg hanfu, social etiquette etc) modified for our modern age . Just too many other things to elaborate.
I admire many aspects of the previous European cultures( I love European classical music, art, architecture , the scientific/mathematical achievements ). There are many good things from these previous cultures which us Chinese should emulate – especially the innovative spirit and love / quest for knowledge(especially scientific and mathematical ones). During the period when I was a West worshiper, I always looked towards Europe – that’s motherland of these European cultures, not America or other “European colonial states”(Australia, Canada etc). Nowadays , I consider USA, as the lone superpower of the West – as enabler of liberal ideals( which I consider decadent) to Western countries (and the rest of the world) . USA projects its own angst as an unstable, fluxional multicultural state as a model society and culture to emulate.
I consider current liberal Western Cultures as debauched , decadent and will lead to ethnocultural suicide and I am concerned that the Chinese in China(especially the young) are influenced and just as bad(or worse) than their Western counterparts.
Ok enough of my rants.
Sorry, nowadays I read comments in this forum but don’t comment that much anymore. Too tiresome to counter opposing views and I don’t want to be addicted to commenting in this forum(which easily happens).
Not a lot of life and joy when people with more guns shoot you.
I want to walk back the aggressiveness of my comment.
I don’t want to change society and there is no “way” the West “should” be. I am a pluralist who firmly believes different strokes for different folks.
If you’re happy being a positivist than I’m happy for you. If you think logic gives you the truth about the “thing in itself” than I’m happy for you.
The bane of our times is people arguing over the “one right way” and forcing it on everyone else.
My reflections should only be of interest to those who feel that positivism is inadequate and are searching for an alternative.
True.
But there also isn’t a lot of joy in life when you’re always anxious about trying to stop people shooting you, and that’s your whole life.
Like I said, one must be pragmatic. We should use logic and science to achieve practical control. That’s it’s proper sphere. To do that you don’t need any metaphysics about transcendental truth. You just experiment and do what works (of course you need imagination for this too).
For instance, architecture in the modern West was expected to reflect the spirit of science, and all artistic embellishment that gave pleasure and joy was eliminated, as well as a human scale that was familiar and enjoyable.
There was no “practical” reason for this. It was an act of pure “worship” of a god.
I would rather science be a good servant than a God we martyr ourselves for.
You shall be martyred for the Machine God. Glory to Steel.
To be fair, if Marx’s interpretation of Hegel was the main alternative, I’d go with Anglo empiricism any day.
Ultimately the argument is psychological, and although Hegel was getting close to figuring it out, he never quite got there. The Anglos, for their (our) part, chose to be conservative in the “I’ll believe what my own eyes tell me” way. It was a good choice at the time, although it’s hit a wall recently.
Quite. On the other hand, peasant class North West Europeans have been dating after a fashion since the Empire of Charlemagne when the Catholic Church began to require the formal consent of the Bride and Groom to the marriage. After the Black Death peasant women were free to take work wherever they wanted and most spent 10 years or more as servants (hence the word -maid for so many jobs) before marraige.
One of my friends from work is from that group. She’s from Singapore, and she’s great. Total right-winger, looks awesome in middle age and she’s married to a guy who raises Scottish Highlands cattle. I think her brother is kind of big in Singapore cinema.
Once she asked me why white guys like cows so much. I told her we’ve been herding cattle for at least 5,000 years, so it’s in our blood. I compared it to rice farming for Orientals.
The problem is the British empiricist negative turned into a positive. It went from a purely negative statement I won’t assent to anything unless I have sensory evidence to a positive statement nothing exists that I cannot see with my senses.
It went from liberating one from imprisoning beliefs to imprisoning one in a limiting belief.
Intellectually, all negatives are freeing and liberating and good, and all unqualified positives are imprisoning.
The scientific revolution began when people freed themselves from the imprisoning beliefs – positive affirmations – of the Middle Ages, and admitted they simply did not know. They exchanged a positive for a negative. They agreed to be content with experiment – with what worked – and laid no claim to knowledge.
British empiricism went from a wonderfully liberating force into an imprisoning one.
Hegel came very close to non-dualism, but never quite got there.
But the desire to know the truth is also a very human emotion and all we have to satisfy that desire is our ability to reason.
In fact, I would say that this emotion is often even stronger than fear. We fear knowing what the fate of the universe or of our own life is but we can’t avoid trying to know it anyway. Although certainly some people prefer to believe whatever placates their fears and that is OK, as far as I’m concerned. I think I’d like to be able to control my emotions in that way and, paradoxically, by controlling my emotions, be able to overcome my reasoning ability.
I actually agree with that. The desire to know truth is one of our strongest passions.
But if you keep on searching for truth, you will eventually find that you can’t know it. That was the significance of Kant. He wouldn’t accept compromises. He just followed logic wherever it led. He wasn’t afraid to do that.
So the paradox is those with the greatest passion for truth discover it can’t ever be known. If you’re really serious about logic you’ll find that logic starts saying opposite things. If you’re not really serious about logic and truth you’ll accept it at face value.
Western philosophy was a big effort to really find truth. How do we know that we know. What is reason really. And truth ended up being – we can’t know.
So you start very serious about truth. But the end result is that you become rather playful about truth.
Nietzsche used to have this great phrase – everything great ends up overcoming itself. I read Nietzsche as a teenager and didn’t really understand him, and later I was repelled by his macho posturing. I haven’t read him in decades but lately I am suddenly remembering so many of his sayings and understanding them for the first. He also has a book called The Gay Science, in which he described a post-Kantian approach to science that is playful rather than solemn. I didn’t understand it at the time but it makes total sense to me now.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman was ludicrous and his attempts to give mankind value through an effort of will even more so, but he did have a wealth of insights
Now, this doesn’t mean believing whatever makes you feel good. That’s the mistake of religious people and the new woke crowd. Even Kant made this mistake – he used his philosophy to say ok now we might as well believe in religion because we can’t know anyways. But his philosophy didn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t mean believing that truth can be arrived at by non-logical means. Religious people after all believe they are in possession of the truth.
It means something like the line in Chuang Tzu “wandering at ease through the world”. You don’t believe what makes you feel good or that truth can be reached noon logically. You simply accept the mystery and wander at your ease through the world, approaching all beliefs and thought systems as only approximations and shadowings of something you can never really know. You do what works. If a bunch of formulas help you fly a plane you use them without thinking there aren’t some other formulas that won’t also work or that this expresses anything ultimate about the nature of the world.
You can also then approach religions not as giving ultimate truth but as ways of living and as symbols of aspects of the human experience, and as more or less attractive or not, profound or not. You don’t need to refute them and you can play with them.
It’s a different approach to life, and I think it may lead to a better way of living both in terms of having a better science – finding out what works not what’s true – and in doing justice to all aspects of our being without denying any of them and becoming a martyr on the name of a truth we can never know.
I have a long time ago noticed that your attitude with eastern philosophy is quite similar as that of a whore’s with a new expensive clothing, they are just ornaments for your narcissism, their deep truths don’t really matter to you. Still Kant’s and Nagarjuna’s philosophy could not be any more apart from each other. When Kant claimed that we can’t know things in itself, Nagarjuna claimed that things don’t have an independent existence, their existence arises from their relation and dependence on other things, after all no thing is beautiful, ugly, small, big, soft or hard in itself, but only in relation to something else, therefore their nature and meaning arises from their dependence on other things.
There is a Buddhist school of philosophy, established by Arya Nagarjuna, Madhyamika, the Middle Way, it’s called, and there are two sub-schools of Madhyamika, Prasangika(consequentialists) and Svatantrika(autonomists). Both schools do believe that we human beings can understand the truth of highest meaning or “paramartha satya” by means of logic and reasoning, either through autonomous syllogistic reasoning of Svatantrikas or negative dialectics(reductio ad absurdum) of Prasangikas.
So once again you are talking out of your ass.
This is not a nihilistic teaching, or that people should just not care about things, no, no, if Nagarjuna’s philosophy is true, it means that through our acts and deeds we have a power to change the very nature of reality, after all nothing and no thing exists independently from us, or from anything.
Sorry this is a hyperbole. Kant is a fulcrum point in Western philosophy.
https://imgur.com/a/kZRL05H
You are now getting into mathematical logic and these, Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, are both very precise statements.
Bertrand’s paradox was resolved with this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory
If you are a mathematician, then stop me, but I’d like to caution drawing too broad generalizations from precise math statements.
Anglo-American academic philosophy which descended from Logical Positivists, reduced philosophy to specific problems. Maybe that gap can be filled by ideas in Taoism and Buddhism. But its program of mathematical logic started by Frege is an end to itself.
Nagarjuna calls this the doctrine of Emptiness. He systematically shows that any specific claim you make about reality, is false, and it’s opposite is equally true. He liberates you from all claims about reality.
The quote above sounds like it is a “positive affirmation”, an actual description of the nature of reality rather than a negation of any specific claim we can make.
That is why, at the end of it all, Nagarjuna says even Emptiness is Empty. I.e, don’t take Emptiness as an actual positive description of the nature of the universe. Emptiness is supposed to liberate you from all other ideas, if you now take it as a description of the way things “really” are, you have once again imprisoned yourself.
He says for the one who, after carefully following the steps of his philosophy, succumbs to seeing Emptiness as a positive descriptor – such a man is lost, and there is no hope for him.
Alas, AltanBakshi, you will not be getting very far in this incarnation my friend 🙂 But fret not. We all get there on the end, and there is all the time in the world. No hurry.
Kant was clearly one of the turning points of Western philosophy, and for a time his ideas were engaged by nearly everyone in Western philosophy.
But his basic insight, that our minds don’t have access to ultimate reality and that our logic is only a provisional tool, has not been absorbed into the popular intellectual culture as similar philosophical developments have in the Far East.
Intellectuals in the West are still basically 19th century positivists, and much more so the average person.
Relativism and postmodernism could not have developed without Kant, of course, so in a sense Kant’s thought did have tremendous impact in the Anglo world, but I would argue has not been absorbed. Popular relativism and postmodernism – and much more so Woke culture – very much engage in positive affirmations about the nature of reality.
Woke culture is much more like AltanBakshi’s idea that we can control the nature of reality – it has been turned from a liberating negative into an imprisoning positive.
Even Kant took this step.
Nagarjuna warned against it, and even in the East it was a real danger.
Let me give you an example of East and West differences here on the level of popular culture at it’s most vulgar.
Jared Taylor, in his book on Japan, mentions that Japanese men have no problem paying for a “girlfriend experience” with hookers. He mentions that he asked his friends don’t they care that the affection and love isn’t “real”, that’s it’s just an appearance, and his friends were bewildered at why appearance shouldn’t be enough.
Of course they knew the romance wasn’t “real”. They paid for it.
A classic Westerner would have despised the experience for not being real. A Woke Westerners would have insisted it was indeed a real experience (he gets to define what’s real). The Japanese guy was simply indifferent to what’s real and content with appearance.
Ok, but anxioms are unproven. They are assumed.
What I am talking about is something different. Bertrand Russell was grappling with Kant’s demolition of the basis of our ultimate knowledge.
To summarize, where would these vast numbers of highly educated demographically advantageous Top Men be coming from? China? India?
Soviets saw the mistake of integrating women into the workforce and tried to reverse it in the 60’s but it was too late by then.
There is no contradiction between Communism and Traditionalism. Most tribal/traditional societies are communist in nature.
It’s not nature selecting for it, but rather capitalism. As I have mentioned before, women have been brainwashed into thinking career = high status. To reverse this population dysgenic trend is rather simple and would take a generation – there needs to be brainwashing that fertility = high status as well as discrediting of feminism at a national level.
This is a fundamentally cowardly position – just like ‘pacifism’.
The bane of our times is that enough large countries are ‘pluralists’ such as you and don’t try to force their culture on America – as that is the only way to stop its imperialism.
I want to apologize Mr Altan for being condescending in my reply to you.
One of the unfortunate features of our times is this sense that each of us is fighting for the one “Truth” that we must then impose on everyone else. It creates hostility, defensiveness, and ill will.
I find it hard to resist falling into this hostile and defensive attitude myself, and the need to “prove” my philosophy correct. But I think you’d agree that in Buddhism everyone is on a different level and a doctrine that is liberating for some may be imprisoning for others, and vice versa. All doctrines are just rafts.
I understand life is difficult with a lot of suffering, and many people seek refuge in various beliefs and traditions. When someone like me then challenges these beliefs, they understandably feel threatened and attack.
Please make a mental note that whenever I make any remark about Buddhism, I make no claim to any authority and only offer my own interpretation. As you know, I do not consider myself a religious Buddhist but only inspired by Buddhist ideas.
The last thing I want to do is challenge ideas that give you comfort and consolation. If you regard me as badly mistaken, simply see me as someone on a particular level who needs different medicine than you.
One of the most beautiful things about Buddhist and Hindu culture is it’s ancient tolerance and sense that it is not so much a question of right and wrong, but rather that everyone is on a different level and everyone needs different medicine.
A society organized on this principle would be so much happier and have so much less conflict. Such a society would be the opposite of totalitarian and would accept a plurality of ways of living and attitudes towards life as valid for different people.
The Hindu caste system became grotesque, but originally it was an attempt to organize society on the basis of catering to the different spiritual needs of different human types. Some people are on a level where war or wealth accumulation are still needed for their spiritual growth, and to impose an ascetic ideal on everyone would retard the spiritual growth of such people.
The traditional East Asian social arrangement was a work of social genius – pay lip service to an agreed upon formal culture, and privately indulge your proclivities and personal character with discretion. The existence of two worlds, a “fixed”, rigid, public, official, world of decorum and accepted rules, and a “floating world”, where none of that applied and freedom ruled. Too many Westerners have not understood this beautiful system and have seen only the formal rigidity of Asian culture.
A pluralistic society also leads to more discoveries and more experiments in living. After the current age of anxiety and fanaticism passes, I hope we return to this ancient principle of tolerance.
I guess this really depends on whether you believe people have innate characters and dispositions, or in the Eastern sense, if everyone has their own karma they have to work through.
Blank Slatists have always been totalitarians.
I guess it also depends on whether you think ultimate truth is knowable – if you do, you might think you have found it. If you don’t, you won’t be so arrogant.
The old conundrum faced by liberalism that no one has ever been able to solve – can a liberal society be tolerant of those who are intolerant and seek to impose their way on everyone?
There has never been a good solution to this conundrum.
Probably, in the end, even the totalitarian personality has to have periods where it expresses itself and the world sways to the best of it’s drum.
Capitalism is pretty natural.
“Totalitarian Personalities” are engines of social selection. They are those who know and understand they are capable of imposing their will on those who they view (and who often are) inferior. Democracy is a form of social ressientiment of the inferior to the superior. And is wholly unnatural.
Just like in primitive societies, the strongest will rise to rule, so too does the “totalitarian personality” rise to rule. It is a form of capitalism where those with ‘natural aptitude’ become richer than others (at least according to theory)
And it is precisely for this reason why Eastern societies (as did many others) viewed merchants as scum and ascribed them low status? Or why some societies tried to do away with it entirely (through the laws of Lycurgus for example) viewing it as a ‘social disease’?
Primitive societies had a communist social organization (for the most part)
Well, it’s worth noting that the Chinese Legalist school ruled for the shortest in all of Chinese history, a mere 14 years, and that totalitarian regimes always seem to be defeated by more liberal regimes.
And yet, totalitarians never seen to learn the lessons of history, and every few generations totalitarians emerge again, only to be defeated.
And that’s fine. According to the Hindu/Buddhist notion that the world is the education of souls, some souls need to taste of absolute power to the full before they can mature past that.
In such a view, it is necessary and good that totalitarianism arises every few generations.
After today’s crop of illiberal regimes get defeated or collapse – and this may well include America soon – there will be followed a period of pluralism, where new ways of life are tried and new discoveries made.
And then you totalitarian types will arise again for a while.
In the very wise and beautiful Chinese I Ching, a wise person is alert to these trends and adjusts his life accordingly, and there are periods where the wise person must retreat from the world instead of futilely fighting against the grain.
“Always” as in when? The last 30 years (with the fall of the USSR) is hardly an indication because of the totalitarian policies that the USA employed to bring down the USSR.
The other ‘totalitarian’ regiemes that fell, never fell because the people ‘thirsted for liberty’ or some bs like that. Rather it was concerted, covert action by stronger states that fomented unrest and brought them down.
Totalitarianism has lasted thousands of years (in fact since the dawn of civilization, where the strongest rose to rule the city states). The recent ‘defeats’ are a result of a ‘liberal’ regieme imposing its will on everyone else.
Which is why I said that totalitarianism is the engine of social evolution as when one totalitarian regieme falls a new and stronger one arises to take its place (if allowed to without outside interference) that then conquers the weaker states around it or imposes its will on them.
They’re natural to the environment that we live in. Large insects were effective when oxygen levels were higher, and no longer adaptive in today’s world with lower oxygen levels.
With greater productive capacity of the economy dependent increasingly on machines and high mobility provided by technology as well as a much more interchangeable workforce along with a vastly more anonymous population, tokens used for exchange(“money”) are increasingly a greater value than previous equivalents used for exchange such as social value and trust – which is what you see in societies that engage in what is known as primitive communism.
And of course, societies that scale are more powerful than societies that don’t so ultimately capitalism is as Nick Land noted, a speciation event ; it is a method of organizing that ensures its own promotion, quite independent of the humans who may play as agents within it, ultimately leading us to develop into something quite different from who we are.
For a more concrete example, imagine how historically a chief might need bodyguards and form a primitive unit of force with them, but he’ll also have to be worried with their various frivilous human and organic concerns: jealousy, fears, distractions, philosophical concerns ,etc, etc. It becomes complex and cladistic , requiring many connections that are ultimately beyond easy calculation.
Now imagine if the same individual only had to command robots – this is significantly simplified by the purity of purpose of said robots, who are not distracted by concerns of jealousy or reproduction or the like. This would be much more effective. With the advancement of technology and the increasing importance of capital investment to productivity, this latter situation much more resembles reality.
Time to open your veins and remove the totalitarianism of your body’s blood filtration and control.
Relative liberalism always defeats the totalitarians of their time.
Christianity is more liberal than Roman paganism, Islam more liberal than Arabian paganism, Judaism was more liberal than Babylonian religion and local paganism with human sacrifices. Liberal Greece defeats Persia.
There is a sweet spot for hardness. The culture that is somewhat “soft” – but not too soft – always defeats the culture that is too “hard”.
But the “hard” guys never see this. They always think maximum hardness will ensure victory.
Totalitarians have their victories and they make a splash for a time, but they never win in the long run.
Liberalisms victory is never final, and the hard people always rise again.
That’s the drama of human life. The good always win, but only just, and the bad guys always rise again.
It’s in all the books and stories.
And as I said, it is just as well that the bad guys are never fully defeated.
The newer conundrum is that while it’s all well and good to be pluralistic and to allow people to indulge various sorts of cultural identities and folkways in an abstract sense, when people from these differing backgrounds and identities share actual living space, they often find they don’t actually like each other very much. “Hate” is generally too strong a word for the resulting attitude, but it’s certainly a long way from any kind of genuine appreciation.
Eg, while it’s not very demanding to tolerate your local African contingent when they live across the other side of town and their numbers are small enough that when they do branch out, their presence still isn’t felt that much; but it’s something else entirely to have to share the street with large numbers of them, even if you don’t go full 1488 nutzi over it. On a much milder level, I find the Chinese a mostly harmless bunch, who I’m quite happy to see sticking to their own, but when there’s too many of them, it all starts to feel a bit pointless, as in “why the fuck should I have to live like this?”
The only “solution” liberals have found is to pretend that it’s all somehow some huge blessing to be surrounded by people utterly unlike yourself (except in some presumed “shared values” sense), rather than acknowledge it as the royal pain in the ass it actually is and admit there is value in apartness. (They’d rather lose an arm than admit that of course.)
It’s natural to our current environment, but not to human civilization as a whole. There have been periods of time when proto-capitalist (i’ll just call them capitalist for simplicity) states have arisen in the past and collapsed and the capitalist system disappeared with them, only to be replaced with another form of social and economic organization. There is no indication that the current environment will persist once the main engine of current capitalist progress disappears (the USA). It is quite possible other (more efficient) systems of economic organization arise.
The point is – political, economic and social systems that take over the world then disappear without a trace are usually driven by a civilization artificially and cannot be used to draw conclusions over its long term viability.
I see no sign that technology is disappearing, and that is the main mover, not the United States.
Your point is valid.
Totalitarianism emphasis unity too much, and liberals emphasize pluralism too much.
I’m coming down here on the side of liberalism, but I absolutely value the need for social unity as well.
That’s why the traditional, classic East Asian approach was a work of such political and social genius. It was a beautiful compromise that satisfies both our need to belong and our need to be ourselves. They also satisfy our desire to be socially responsible and soberly adult and be wild and anarchic and socially irresponsible.
The principle of unity is affirmed by having a formal culture with clear rules and rituals – and very many of them – that everyone is expected to learn and adhere by. This is the aspect of Asian culture most noted by Western conservatives. I actually support that kind of thing. At it’s best, it leads to gracious manners and less friction. Shared rituals and customs cement a common identity and create a feeling of stability and security in the social realm that is invaluable.
And then you have an informal “floating world” where you can let your hair down and be yourself, and form a “tribe” with like minded people.
Let’s face it. “Tribes” are just as much groups of similar people within a an ethnicity as they are intra-ethnic. A racially homogeneous society is composed of many sub-tribes.
In Japan, you can be an extremely hard working and responsible businessman with a wife and family during the day, and go drinking with your buddies at night to the point of blacking out and puking and acting ridiculous, and visiting brothels.
In a sense, American society is much more totalitarian in that expects perfect social responsibility and sobriety all the time.
Modern Israel also shows a somewhat effective compromise between unity and pluralism. On the one hand you have a string national identity and a core of shared rituals and practices and religion, on the other extreme ethnic diversity and local cultures.
Where it recently has broken down was at the worst fault line – the group that least shared in the unifying element.
In modern America, ethnic diversity leads to social breakdown because the principle of unity was too underdeveloped. In this context increasing immigration is absolute folly.
And modern liberals have moved too far away from the need to recognize unity and are developing a unified totalitarian outlook that is truly pernicious. The worst of both worlds instead of the best.
It’s a dead culture that will collapse under it’s inability to provide a satisfying way if life.
Technology is not the main mover. You are mistaken. Technology does not necessarily mean a capitalist system has to be in place. In fact technology significantly simplifies a central planning, gosplan style, apparatus – as computers become able to conduct large amounts of very complex calculations and make decisions on them.
Neither is social atomization a necessary component of technology, rather it is a symptom of US style capitalism where capital controls the State. And technology is enslaved to this system. Much like the US founding fathers seperated the Church and State, there is a necessity of seperating Private Capital and State. Once this occurs, many current ‘unsolveable’ social problems become rather easy to solve.
But let’s not forget that Nietzsche and especially Kant rose to prominence thanks precisely to their outstanding reasoning abilities. And Goedel was justifiably called the God of Logic. Their conclusion that reason and logic are insufficient to grasp the ultimate truths is in fact a product of their own logical reasoning, not of their disdain for logic.
I happen to agree, at this moment in time, with that conclusion but I’ve heard many modern top physicists say that we will finally have a full understanding of the universe. Sean Carroll or Lubos Motl come to mind.
I guess that most people, including most scientists, don’t care too much about the ultimate limits of our reasoning abilities and just try to continue to understand things as best as they can, which makes sense because it leads to very good practical results. From a societal perspective, scientific progress leads to constant improvements in our material quality of life. It may even lead to our being able to escape the fate of our solar system. And what emotion is more natural than than of self-preservation?
From an individual perspective, perhaps people were happier in Medieval China but I wouldn’t trade the comforts of modern life for that possibly happy but materially miserable life that they must have led. Likewise, I think that trying to understand things with my limited mental abilities is generally better than abandoning myself to a careless, playful life where I only care about satisfying my pasions. The former enables me to acquire practical knowledge of what is best for me and my family in every sort of aspects, from medicine to finance. I wouldn’t be able to distinguish a good doctor that can cure my child’s illness from a charlatan if I had abandoned hope of understanding the world due to these philosophers’ belief that ultimate truth cannot be known.
Maybe the big question is not whether humans, in our current biological configuration, can fully understand the universe but whether some evolved organic life form can ever acquire that complete knowledge. As long as we hope that the answer to the second question is affirmative, there is no reason to abandon our quest for additional knowledge because it can enable us to break our current biological limits and evolve towards a more advanced species than can grasp what evades us now.
With all that said, I respect your adherence to some Oriental schools of thought. As you said, yourself, life is hard and one must choose whatever one believes to be best for oneself in this ephemeral transit through life that nature provides us with.
Please understand I am not trying to misrepresent or appropriate your religion, and I am sorry if you think so.
I would preface every remark of mine on Buddhism by saying that my reflections are just personal interpretations and inspirations and I don’t pretend to any authority whatsoever.
Please take this as “being said” when I discuss Buddhism.
I am aware that Nagarjuna answered his critics by saying his philosophy actually creates the greatest possible freedom of action by rejecting the idea of static, fixed entities, and that without emptiness it is impossible to develop or change in any way and become a Bodhisattva.
This is an interesting aspect of his thought that should recirve attention, and functions on a specific level, the realm of action.
However, there is a deeper level in which the significance of saying nothing has its own “core” and is relative to everything else means that ultimate knowledge is impossible, only relative, provisional knowledge.
Indeed in this view no “things” exist at all – and that implication is explicitly spelled out in later Buddhist texts. If no “thing” exists, the “thing in itself” is a meaningless statement, and certainly we can’t have access to it.
The lack of a core and the non-existence of things means there is no fixed and final reality behind appearances we can access. It is anti-Platonism. It destroys the common sense notion of a fixed reality we can someday discover.
And them the final and most significant turn of Nagarjuna’s philosophy is to “rise one level” and survey itself, and decide that it too is empty. This is an example of Nietzsche’s statement that everything excellent transcends itself in the end.
But what does it mean to say that a position or a point of view is empty? That the very concept that things are interdependent is empty?
It is one thing when we say physical things out in the world are empty. But what does it mean that a point if view is empty?
It can only mean that even this point of view is not an absolute, but only relative, and interdependent on everything else. So even this ultimate point of view is not, in its own, the final statemrnt about how reality really is.
He destroys his own position and we are lift – literally “nowhere”.
Abiding “nowhere” is another theme fruitfully taken up by later Buddhism as well.
But I will not be offended if you regard this as the ravings of a lunatic 🙂 Indeed I am attracted to the notion of “crazy wisdom” and think it has much to teach us
I actually agree with your points, I think that Confucianism was spot on with it’s attitude that merchants are parasitic.
Btw there are some high lamas in my school who believe that ultimately Communist system is better than a Capitalist one, from a Buddhist point of view, for Communism is based on moral principles, but Capitalism is by nature amoralistic.
Still ultimately no societal system can be definitive or ultimate.
Technology is indeed the main mover. The material circumstance that it drives ultimately forces society to fit the confines that it has created.
It may be that technology ultimately can centralize planning. Right now, its effect is to increase the productivity effect from capital investment and thus decrease the value of alternate currencies such as social trust, etc.
The issue is less of “what controls what” but rather simple efficiency. Historically, state allocation of capital resulted in inefficiency which made it less competitive. The dominance of the United States is due to the efficiency of its capital to produce various goods(including cultural goods) versus rival systems of organization. Whether one considers the memes/ideas it produces as “good” or not is less relevant than the fact that is successful.
It may be that with greater computerization and metrics that this trend could alter. At any rate, I do not believe that such centralization would resemble what we traditionally consider as communism.
Don’t flatter yourself. For millionth time, you are not challenging my beliefs, I actually would be quite happy if you would do so, but no, you are just constantly making false claims about my religion and it’s holy figures. Irritating, but not challenging!
My posture is purely defensive, I am not trying to impose anything upon you, I am just trying to make it clear for everybody that your thinking does not represent anyway any traditional school of Buddhism.
According to Buddhism all beings have been for eternity in Samsara, we have already been everything. So it’s not about “education of souls.” It’s about right view and right acts, which do lead us out from Samsara. There’s lots of wisdom that does not lead us out from uncontrolled existence, which is Samsara.
There are many common points agreed upon by all Buddhist schools outside of Japan.
All Buddhist schools believe in:
-Four Noble(Aryan) Truths
-The Noble(Aryan) Eightfold Path
-Three Jewels of Dharma
-Four Seals of Dharma
-Pratityasamutpada, Dependent Arising
-Three Ages of Dharma
-That there are three types of beings that have attained bodhi or enlightenment, Arhats, Pratyekabuddhas and Buddhas
-Three Marks of Existence
-Tripitaka/Tipitaka, Buddhist canon, it is same for all schools, with minor variations, the difference between Theravadins and Mahayanas is that Mahayanas believe that there are also Sutras out side of the Tripitaka, which are also Buddha’s speech, Buddhavacana, and there are big variations in last portion of Tripitaka or Abhidharma between the schools
-Fourfold division of Buddhist community, monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen
-Vinaya or monastic code
Here are just some basic things that do unite us, there are also many, many others, like Brahmaviharas, Riddhis, etc, etc.
Anyway if someone’s philosophy is not in harmony with previously mentioned points, then it’s not Buddhist Dharma, simple as that!
I have no quarrel with this and freely relinquish any claim to authoritative interpretation of Buddhism. You do a great job explaining the more traditional and mainstream approach to Buddhism, and you do everyone here a service drawing a distinction between that and what I’m saying.
You even help me understand certain things better. Thank you.
I know I can never actually challenge your views, and I would hope never to do so.
It is not my intention to make false claims about your religion and I will say again that my reflections are merely interpretations that represent no one but myself, and that I am merely inspired by certain Buddhist writers – and not others – but am not in any way a practicing religious Buddhist who represents the mainstream.
You do good work here clarifying these things and you should continue.
Absolutely, you are very correct. But who could transcend reason if not precisely the men with the strongest reasoning ability? Only those with the clearest vision see furthest, see beyond.
It’s often been said the great scientists who know most are the ones who realize how little we understand.
I absolutely agree. This is the proper sphere of science, extending our control of the physical world. This is a very practical aim and does not involve apotheosizing science.
I probably would prefer to live in Medieval China, but that’s just my rather eccentric preference 🙂
Please don’t misunderstand me. My position is not that we should abandon our quest for “what works” and simply indulge our passions, only recognize that “what works” is not “truth” about the ultimate nature of reality.
I think this simple recognition will have far reaching effects in every area of life, but certainly doesn’t entail abandoning the quest for figuring out our world.
Even if it isn’t transcendental truth, it’s a fascinating quest, and from a practical point of view inestimable. I even think admitting it isn’t a quest for transcendental knowledge will make us more successful in this quest as it will open up new vistas and permit new methods.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
All I’m doing is developing a perspective that makes me live better and more happily. That’s it’s sole justification. I would never dream of imposing it on everyone.
My perspective may be of interest only to those not satisfied with the various mainstream perspectives on offer, that’s all. I often stupidly fall into the ” must change the world” mindset and come off like I’m legislating for all of humanity, but that’s not my considered opinion.
It just means that we can not have a view separate from conditions and phenomena, that all our views are non-static and dependent.
Ding an sich is a meaningless statement from a Madhyamaka point of view, or even a nihilistic statement, for such view reinforces the separateness of phenomena, a view that asserts separation of subject and object which is impossible to overcome. Do you now understand how foolish it was for you to compare Kant and Nagarjuna?
Now you are speaking well, well done, this is a proper insight, if all things exist in relation with something, then is it not so that even Buddhas and Nirvana are just a fabrication or illusive in their nature, just grander forms of illusion? Ha, ha, ha, maybe there is no final statement, maybe the final statement is that there is no ultimate? These are now very serious questions, there is a view, or a sub-school of Madhyamaka-Prasangika that asserts that all is illusion and nothing is beyond this illusion, it is precisely the problem that we input such qualities in this reality, which are non existent, like subtly thinking that we or others possess a permanent nature. Yes, this school asserts that Ultimate Truth does not point to transcendent reality, but to the transcendence of deception, that we have so falsely asserted the nature of our reality, that our view of it is absolutely and utterly confused and mistaken!
However you seem to have a nihilistic bent, therefore teachings of this school would do no good for you. Remember that according Mahayana Highest Wisdom can not be attained without immense compassion for all sentient beings! There is no spot, no dot, in our reality where Buddha Shakyamuni has not committed good deed for well being of all sentient beings, for three Mahakalpas he toiled for welfare of every being. It is necessary to have Bodhicitta, mind aspiring for awakening of everyone, before the truth is revealed, there is no greater treasure than Bodhicitta!
Three Principal Aspects of the Path
by
Lama Tsongkhapa
I bow down to the Venerable Lamas.
The essence of all the teachings of the Buddha,
The path praised by the Conqueror’s children,
The entrance for those who desire liberation.
2. Listen with a clear mind, you fortunate ones
Who are not attached to the joys of cyclic existence,
Strive to make good use of leisure and opportunity,
And direct your minds to the path that pleases the Buddhas.
An end to attraction for the pleasures of cyclic existence
is unattainable.
The craving for existence also binds beings.
Thus, from the outset, seek renunciation.
4. Reverse attraction to this life
By reflecting on how leisure and opportunity are difficult
to find and how life is ephemeral and without span.
Reverse attraction to future lives
By repeatedly thinking of the infallibility of karma and its
effects, and the miseries of samsara.
Admire the splendours of cyclic existence,
And remain intent on liberation day and night,
Renunciation is born in you then.
Selected Texts for Study, Reflection and Meditation
However, renunciation, if not tempered by a pure
mind of bodhicitta,
Will not bring forth the perfect bliss
Of unsurpassed Enlightenment;
Therefore, the wise ones generate the excellent
mind of bodhicitta.
Swept up in the current of the four powerful rivers*,
Tied by strong bonds of karma, so hard to undo,
Caught in the iron net of self-grasping,
Completely enveloped by the darkness of ignorance,
Born and reborn in limitless cyclic existence,
Ceaselessly tormented by the three miseries**,
Thinking of your mothers in this condition,
Generate the supreme mind (of bodhicitta).
Although you train in renunciation and the mind of bodhicitta,
Without wisdom that realises the ultimate reality,
You cannot cut the root of cyclic existence.
Therefore, strive to understand dependent arising.
10. One who sees the infallible cause and effect
Of all phenomena in samsara and nirvana,
And destroys all focuses of apprehension,
Has entered the path, which pleases the Buddhas.
Emptiness is the understanding that is free of assertions.
As long as these two are seen as distinct,
You have not yet realised the intent of the Buddhas.
When these two realisations are concurrent,
Where the mere sight of infallible dependent origination
Concurrently destroys all modes of grasping through
definite discernment,
At that time the analysis of the (profound) view is perfected.
13. Furthermore, appearances refute the extreme of existence;
Emptiness refutes the extreme of non-existence.
When you understand that emptiness arises in the form of
cause and effect,
You are not captivated by the view of extremes.
14. O my child, once you have thus realised,
The points of the three principal paths***,
Seek solitude and cultivate strong determination
And quickly reach the final aspired goal.
Lama Tsongkhapa has a perfect understanding of Sunyata, he became a Fully Awakened Buddha six hundred years ago.
*Four powerful rivers: (1) river of attachment; (2) river of aversion; (3) river
of ignorance; and (4) river of wrong view.
**Three miseries: [Skt. tridukkhatā] also referred to
as the three types of suffering – (1) suffering of suffering [Skt. dukkhadukkha]; (2) suffering of change [Skt. viparinama-dukkha]; and (3) all-pervasive conditioned suffering [Skt. sankhara-dukkha]
***Three principal paths: (1) renunciation; (2) bodhicitta; and (3) the view
of emptiness.
Hey don’t go from one extreme to another! I don’t like such essentialist statements, you have a potential to challenge, but you have not yet done so, for one reason or another.
At least our discussion is this time much more civilised than it has been previously. Thank you for that!
Technology is but a tool and is subservient to man. Man has never been subservient to his tools. Technology may alter mans behavior in an environment with no other external controls. In the case of the West, religion is dead. And every social restriction has been removed in the name of Capital. This creates an environment where technology can ‘take over’. But again, this is not necessary. We can see that in those cultures with strong external control, technology is subservient. In a system where Capital is controlled (a separation of private Capital and State) technology will also have a subservient position.
Again, just like a potters wheel makes the creation of pottery easier and faster, that does not imply that somehow value of alternate currencies decreases.
No. The dominance of the United States does not lie in some magical ‘efficiency’ of its capital. There have been more efficient countries (such as Japan), that never surpassed it. Rather the dominance of the United States lies in 1) an advantageous geographical position making invasion difficult 2) plundering of the wealth of colonies throughout history 3) selling arms/ruinous returns on loans when other countries where at war 4) theft of technology/human capital 5) protectionist policies 6) superior military forces that can enforce protectionist policies worldwide
On the contrary, a Soviet style system with modern supercomputers to power calculations and planning would be a force to contend with.
This is in error and ultimately this has little to do with the system of governance.
Kaczynski once posed this little parable, which is incredibly useful here. He imagined two chess players vying against each other.
Now one day, one player uses a computer to help him with his moves. The computer is great, with this tool he can easily win the games against his rival. So to beat him, his rival also gets a computer and now they are both assisted by the computer.
Eventually they both rely on the computer to make all of the moves. So who is truly making any decision? Sure, one of them could unilaterally refuse to use the computer, but then he would only be choosing to lose.
It certainly does. The early Luddite movement was actually a kind of worker’s right movement, a communist movement if you wish: it protested the wipeout of linen and fabric industry that once was produced by their wives, sisters and daughters in cottage industries, which were replaced by the highly efficient(and dangerous) waterwheels often employing child labor and could leave terrible injuries upon the children.
It also served to benefit the water-wheel owners, who could only build them because they had invested a lot of capital, and thus the means of capital investment affected by this technology changed the overall distribution of income and power.
Of course, it is stupid to destroy waterwheels. A society that succeeds in destroying water-driven power will just end up with less production overall, and be defeated by a society that does not destroy it.
And so, you see that man is not really in mastery of anything. The technology comes into being, the technology drives societal change, and the technology forces a change and anyone who doesn’t adopt it in an efficient way, gets overrun by those who do.
Xi is wrong, of course technology does shape us, a child who has grown up with smartphones and video games is totally different from children who have no access to such technology, but isn’t your view also bit too extreme? Some people use technology in a very unproductive way, like mostly for leisure and some are very creative with it, similarly some cultures are more productive and creative with tech, but some like Arabs and Latinos are just passive consumers of technology. Still Latinos, Arabs and some others like Subsaharans, are not “losing” completely or disappearing, even though they have lost technologically, thus there are also other non-technological factors shaping our destinies.
I couldn’t agree anymore, you are speaking the truth!
Let’s pray for the swift victory of China and Russia, may the beast succumb, may humanity be free!
All the talk on libertarianism vs totalitarianism, “Capitalism” vs “Socialism”, technology vs primitivism, contests between social organizations, are all rooted in the contrast between simplicity and complexity, and all the manifold manifestations of them in the human existential condition.
The real problem might be the human being maladapting to the products of his civilization, simple or complex, and the solution is either transcendentally philosophical, immanentizing ideological praxis, or moving onto new forms of existence (maybe transhumanism). I might say, cast part of the civilization down, and fill in the gaps with more biologically sensible forms.
Buddhism is (in my idiosyncratic and unlearned understanding) above all that – indifferent. Taoism too, but with a more immanent attitude.
There will be a time, millions of years later, where Klaus Schwab is gone, we are gone, and everyone’s heirs are gone – Buddhists will find their souls reincarnated as members of another species, or other life forms; Taoists will see everything as permutations of the Tao, returning to the Tao too.
But every human, including even the Buddhists and Taoists squabble over how to live the best in the meantime.
I don’t know. I’m too young to ponder over all these.
Let me propose a reappraisal of our mental or ideological relationship with technology and capital for the Great Awakening: a move from “abstract” capital to concrete capital, economic or social.
The reason why we end up with the Great Reset is the over-abstraction of capital, in the way capital is financialized and eventually “dissolved” into a post-capitalistic system in Schwab’s agenda. Clearly, to reverse this, many are moving back from the “abstraction” of capital to “concretization” of capital – a change in the mode of production from the intangible to the tangible, from the centralized to the distributist, valorized to mutualist. The examples are quite well recognized: instead of replacing industrial meat with insect flour, getting food from communal permaculture and agorist smallholders; instead of cheap goods on Amazon from China, getting goods from artisan production and DIY work; instead of going out after taking the jab, coming into private and communal social activities out of the sight of state enforcers; instead of fiat and CBDC, bartering and occasional crypto use (and I’m only describing an Americanized view of economic and social cooperation – each culture having its own strategies).
I’m trying to start conceptualizing the economic strategies of mass resistance to institutional post-capitalism – I really need help on this.
I acknowledge that certain groups, like Jews, were able to take advantage of and work with flawed, evil and self-serving members of other groups like my own. So, they are neither the original reason nor the only, but an obnoxious one certainly. Having said that, I believe a people’s destruction and collapse are ultimately their own. If a people’s leaders betray them, it shows the people didn’t produce very good leaders, and if good leaders are unable to bring about positive change, it means the people are not very good. This isn’t true for all time, of course. It may just be an era or a moment in history or the result of particular choices (like mass immigrants the 19th-century.)
As for China…I’m just happy with any country that is able to be sovereign and successful on their own terms. China, like Russia, has a scale to that sovereignty and success that is impressive. This is separate from my own family background which makes me just plain fond of the Russians and Chinese (warts and all, I have no illusions about their faults, historical and otherwise.) Much of China’s growth is, if anything, a reminder of what America could have been doing, but stopped and hasn’t done since the 19th century. Rather than begging them for salvation, I say Americans at some point ought to pull themselves up and do something productive. No need for enemies, just healthy competition, ring the country in rail lines, bring industry and mining back here and military parts, and smile with teeth made of neutrality and nukes. Oh, and conquer all of North America.
I can’t speak for Taoists, but in regards if Buddhadharma this is a gross over simplification. Because things truly lack their own nature, no moment in our reality is exactly the same, even the laws of nature are result of previous states of existence, therefore we can deduct that there has been realities with a wholly incomprehensible logic, even logic is conditional, or what we deem to be logical is based on causes and conditions, and those are under a constant fluctuation. But now I am wandering too far.
It’s not that Buddhism does not care in which kind of society or system we do live, it’s just that beneficial change for better on a collective level is very hard, so better first to change oneself, such change will lead to societal changes on the longer run. As an example Mahayana Buddhism does believe that there are so called Pure Lands, which are more blissful places than even heavens, those lands have originally been Samsaric realities like our world, full of pain, decay and suffering, but in those worlds beings have worked for trillions of years for welfare of others, which has led to a point where a whole reality has transcended on a higher plane of existence. There are Mahayana texts which say that one day through hard and laborious work our very own Saha world system will become a Pure Land of Buddha Shakyamuni, after all ignorance and selfishness are not inherent qualities of reality, but conditional. For beings that have developed the loving kindness of Buddha, this world is already a Pure Land for they have a pure view and they see the ultimate wish of every being. What is innate wish of every being? To be happy, it’s just that we do not understand true causes and conditions for genuine and lasting happiness, because of that we behave in a way that leads to planting of new seeds of Karmic misfortune, and on, and on the cycle goes.
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“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” (not strictly) is the feeling I get when I read Altan’s responses to discussions of Buddhism. He imposes demanding standards on participants. As a teacher, I imagine he’d be a hard taskmaster.
Well, Kant’s ding an sich is noumena, not phenomena. The idea is that some things, like God, are beyond our powers of perception. They are transcendent, hence Kant’s “transcendental idealism”. Because of this, there are certain limits to what we can discern through reason, which is why Kant named his main work “Critique” of Reason. This fits into Christian philosophy, which probably explains why Nietzsche was so annoyed by Kant.
This is known in Western philosophy as nominalism. It’s actually the dominant philosophy at Harvard (e.g. Daniel Dennett), and has been for a couple centuries. It was originally imported to Europe through an Islamic school of thought, and was eventually embraced by Martin Luther, among other early Protestants. William of Ockham (you know, “Ockham’s razor”) was its most famous early proponent.
One could say that the American elite has been strongly shaped by this nominalist POV. Indeed, the idea that “gender is a social construct” and other such fantastic notions seem to naturally flow from this kind of thinking.
It is doubtful that a globally dominant China would refrain from items (2) through (6) in the post you were agreeing with.
Under such circumstances, people might be free from the pressure to conform to the globohomo/clownworld value system – finding themselves globally outcompeted by a dominant China might even cause libtards themselves to abandon these values – but how much actual “freedom” would ensue is, in my opinion, rather open to doubt.
For one thing, just consider China’s heavy-handed reactions to criticism today. Can anyone seriously expect this to lessen when China grows more powerful?
There simply aren’t any. It’s escapist fantasy from top to bottom. There’s nothing new about this reaction either. There have always been people terminally dissatisfied by the operation of the society they were born into. Their fundamental problem is – and always has been – that far too few people agree with them. They’re left clinging to their faith that surely at some point the masses are going to “wake up” and see things differently. Imo, no, not surely at all.
(Please note, I am referring to mass resistance here. You are individually free to “resist” (ie opt out) in all sorts of inventive ways.)
I suppose its more important to consider that technology always has an effect, not necessarily one that you might consider positive: e.g. widespread availability of cheap and safe birth control most likely depresses fertility in populations with higher self control and increases fertility in populations with lower self-control.
But generally speaking, even from a low base, technology will increase effectiveness of the individual and you have to compare like to like. Most Africans may not be on the cutting edge of technology, but ones with guns still beat the ones who don’t have guns, for example. There’s always going to be a human component to this, but the relative importance of the human component will vary.
This is similar to the exploration that honor values were once extremely important due to a relative low mobility, the importance of land to wealth generation, and thus the importance of various notions of martial valor to defend land. As the productive capacity of land becomes less profitable than other forms of wealth generation such as concentration industry, so honor becomes less important(since you don’t need to defend the land) and merchantile values rise in importance.
Yes, once you surrender desire for any particular outcome and are no longer trying to change the world it becomes much more easy to be civil and compassionate towards everyone.
My own emotional state had not caught up with my own philosophy 🙂
You also begin to see that however horrific someone’s opinion or behavior might appear, everyone is just trying to be happy
This is interesting and comes close to my view, but falls short in that it actually makes assertions about the nature of ultimate reality.
For me, compassion arises spontaneously when I no longer desire any specific outcome and come to see the world doesn’t matter all that much. Then I see all human conflicts as just echoes of people’s confused and tortured quest for happiness and I feel compassion rather than hate or aversion.
Thanks for the exchange.
Eh, China doesn’t really do colonies or widespread world empire in that sense, but I also don’t know if that’s really a modern thing to do at all. The US doesn’t outright occupy nations either, it can usually accomplish what it seeks through some variation of “rule-based community”,etc.
It’ll probably be a lot less irritating than having transexuals as the holy ones.
“We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx…”
“Our great computers fill the hallowed halls…”
“We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx…”
“All the gifts of life are held within our walls…”
“To understand all is to forgive all.”
Apparently that’s a fake buddha quote, according to the site fakebuddhaquotes.com – which sounds like something AltanBakshi would maintain, haha. It’s actually maintained by someone immensely knowledgeable about Buddhism, and who can read Pali. I’ve made it a habit to check that site every time I come across a pithy Buddha quote – surprising how many fake attributions are out there. Personally, I tend to like the fake Buddha quotes better than real ones. 🙂
Anyway, going back to your point, it’s not that hard to be compassionate and forgiving when you’re considering what motivated someone’s behavior as an outsider; it’s much harder when you’re the one on the receiving end of it. I have given the forgiving approach an honest go, and it did indeed help keep me on an emotionally even keel. However, over time, I began to feel that I was allowing myself to be walked over – because why get mad about something since you know you can forgive it. My natural tendency is to get angry, and I think I’m happier when I just let myself do that, so that’s what I’ve gone back to doing.
“To understand all is to forgive all.”
Apparently, no one knows where the quote originated, but Tolstoy used it most recently, I think.
Several good points here.
Yes, not caring and always seeing the bigger picture does make it harder to defend your rights and avoid being exploited. This is a problem I’ve struggled with recently – the more I develop my philosophy, I am realizing the harder it is to live this way in normal society, which is based on greed and aggression.
This is a serious problem, and I’m coming to the conclusion that it isn’t possible to live this philosophy in mainstream, normal society, especially if as I do you live among particularly ambitious people in a big city.
At the very least, I’m thinking of moving to a relaxed small town with less ambitious people, but I am also seriously considering buying one of the larger SUVs and converting it into a mini-RV, and taking up life as a wandering vagabond out West. More and more this appeals to me, but it’s a major step. I have some money saved and I can always do some work for friends or some seasonal work to sustain such a lifestyle indefinitely.
But the basic idea is, genuinely living according to these quasi Buddhist/Taoist ideas probably requires a genuine detachment from society, or at least accepting a very marginal role within it.
And this may be a good thing, but I would never impose that on everybody.
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In the Buddhist traditions that I favor, you’re not supposed to mess with your personality and the best thing you can do is be who you are. Simply relax, and be who you are. Never fight it.
Only, you sort of learn to laugh at yourself and you realize that you doesn’t really matter. You develop a kind of “second sight”. You’re angry, and you don’t even try not to be, buy on another level, you can kind of laugh at yourself and not take yourself seriously.
Has China effectively banned crypto? Is it following India’s example?
I’ve thought about doing that in retirement. That’s still a good few decades away for me, but no harm in thinking about it now. And if I do well enough investment-wise between now and then, maybe retire early.
Why settle for SUV size? That’s tiny. I’m thinking like a “Class C” motorhome would be the sweet spot for me between size and maneuverability. That’s big enough to include a travel partner (be it lover or just friend) without feeling cramped but still park it where normal cars park without seeming too obtrusive. (That’s my impression anyway.)
I think I’d have to do it in America or Europe though. (So I hope they’ve either had their civil wars by then, or postpone them till I’m dead lol.) In Australia, there’s just nowhere I really want to visit. I mean, I enjoy road trips with people, but I do it for the company and the fun of the trip rather than for the destination. I’ve been up and down most of the southeastern coast and everywhere just feels the same. The people look the same, talk the same, do the same things, and the natural scenery doesn’t interest me. I think I would get bored very quickly. America and Europe have more variety.
I don’t know about that. What if you’re an asshole and you want to stop? I was quite an asshole when I was younger and it got me into quite a bit of trouble. I’m actually lucky to have gotten off as lightly as I did before I wised up.
Seems your natural instincts are correct. Even if they are not, your only chance is to go with them because figuring things out from first principles and thereby modifying your behavior is too slow. Your instincts are either good or bad. Throw the dice.
This time is likely different – a extremely simple and inertial way (not getting the COVID vaccine) with serious ideological justification and lots of paths going forward is here.
I don’t think it’s so different at all. Serious ideological justifications have always been there. I could cite works from the 1960s – and even earlier – that read like they were written yesterday. It’s actual alternative pathways that are lacking. But don’t let me dissuade you; if you feel so strongly about it, hey go for it. If nothing else, it can add meaning and purpose to your life, which is more than many a ‘mindless consumer’ can claim.
Because they didn’t in fact preserve that of traditional culture which mattered for fertility, in his words:
Whether they did or did not preserve other aspects of traditional Chinese culture is not very important here.
Great for you to try putting forward corrective proposals, instead of pathetically beating around the bush like most people. But the list is redundant. Just item 5 will suffice. And how totalitarian could it be? Anthropological summary: Women are meant to be property. Feminine sexuality summary: Women want to be property.
Only impracticable for those lacking nukes/decent military (while the Fag Empire is around).
lol, stop excusing yourself already. Patriarchy is Love. Patriarchy is LIFE!
You do. A species, various races.
I remember reading about this. No, while adultery charges existed, the sentence was related to corruption first and foremost.
That’s great that you’re considering doing this.
I actually currently own a class-C RV, and I agree with you that it’s the perfect size for comfort without being too lumbering and inconvenient. I’ve been on many trips in it, both with friends and alone, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
There’s a special feeling being in some inhospitable desert in a storm and you’re perfectly cozy with all the amenities in your brightly lit RV, which is almost a cabin. This is the best choice for the vast majority of people. I tend to scoff at the people with the gigantic bus-type RVs, to need that level of luxury seems crazy to me, but honestly at least they’re wandering and out of the cities, so good for them.
The only reason I want to downsize to an SUV is because I’m increasingly drawn to “minimalism”, and something about wandering and living out of an SUV has a kind of “romantic” appeal to me. It seems more adventurous.
And since this is partly a spiritual kind of wandering for me where I give up the comforts of normal life and immerse myself in nature, I am drawn to the idea of it being relatively basic. Heck, there are people out there living out of Toyota Priuses (not homeless either but wanderers).
Finally, in America to find areas of true isolation and remoteness you need a four wheel drive vehicle. You can easily enjoy solitude and natural beauty in America in America without venturing off paved toads, but I would like at least 20% of my time to be in these truly rugged and remote areas that few make it too.
But these are just my own peculiarities and would not be suitable for everyone. As long as you get out there and are enjoying yourself you’re doing it right for you. Everyone has to decide what specific degree of comfort they want and there is no wrong choice. Even the big-bus people are having a blast 🙂
Sure, lots of people evolve and change over time. I know I have. I regard this more as a cutting away of the superficial and revealing of my true personality rather than actually acquiring anything new.
I was also an asshole for a big chunk of my younger life, which I regret, until I gradually evolved beyond that.
To evolve and change according to an inner, natural, and organic process is healthy. That you feel an inner desire to no longer be an asshole is what I am talking about and one should heed that call.
What I am really taking about is the idea that one must change oneself in accordance with some religious formula on the promise that you will receive some kind of heavenly reward. This rarely works and just puts you in a futile struggle and probably makes you a worse person.
I know many people who are trying to “improve” their characters because religion or some secular social creed says they should and it makes them unhappy and never works.
But surely one should respect ones inner promptings to move in a direction if change and follow them. It’s sort of like the Taoist wu-wei, follow the natural course of action without imposing on it. I am merely against the idea of twisting your personality into some shape predetermined by religion or society.
And even then, if some people wish to do this, it is not for me to stop them. I merely offer an alternative perspective.
https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1395656425536475136
Interesting how much it varied from region to region.
That’s good as far as it goes, and certainly more respectable than the typical American alt-right narrative of a naive, gullible, and weak people completely brainwashed by Jews, but I think there is an even grander, more interesting, and more glorious tale to tell.
European civilization, in it’s restless and gloriously bold quest to criticize and understand everything and ultimately dominate the world on the most profound level, not just physically but mentally, ended up criticizing it’s own foundations and identity out of existence and disconnecting itself from the source of all life and motivation, the human emotions, in the process irrevocably transforming the entire world and giving mankind unprecedented power over it, and causing tremendous – and unintentional- damage to the health of all traditional cultures around the globe. Oh, and conquering the whole world also.
Refusing to take responsibility for your decline would not only deny you the glory of the achievement, it would also mean that you could never start the process of recovery, if you don’t understand what went wrong.
Assuming, of course, that I’m right.
I mean, that too. It can be nefarious interlopers (Jews, and these days, other ethnic interlopers), corrupt elites, decadent/weak people, value shifts, “logical extremes”, financialization, meta-materialism, karmic punishment for past successes and sins on the independent soul and national soul level, and imperial overreach. Each responsible for their own, oft overlapping, portion. One can, and should, be aware of and target them all.
Having said that, I’m content with a Russian and Chinese-style reforms. No need for labor camps for any one ethnoreligious group (we don’t have a Xinjiang to deal with, which would be a different issue). Just reforms and punishments for the elites and people that establish a healthier, genuinely normal society. Reactionary, Conservative, Progressive, Reformist and Revolutionary in its values, depending on the values in question. Maybe a couple thousand publicly flogged and executed bureaucrats and disappeared tech-leaders, some billionaires who flee to London abroad, etc.
I’m not against recognizing all factors, but I think the most important one is the ideology that is the consummation of the main trends in Western culture.
I am sure there are opportunistic Jews and other ethnics who seized on the breakdown to further their own ends, and there is nothing wrong with mentioning this, but the main thing is – I think – the criticism and dismantling of the modern ideological consensus. (And left and right are far less apart than we might think)
Anyone conversant with Western intellectual history, knows how things like the Enlightenment, rationality, science, the romantic reaction, and perhaps even Christian dualism, developed into the current ideological consensus.
So to get healthy again, I think we have to question certain basic assumptions of Western culture. For instance, a culture that uses logic pragmatically is going to be very different from one that mistakenly believes it can provide access to eternal, transcendental truth, and that will have far reaching effects on the ability to develop a healthy, organic, and integrated culture.
I would also question Western metaphysical dualism.
Without this unsparing self-analysis, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere. Practical reforms will not work as long as the basic metaphysical structure is left intact. Revolutionary fervor will just break out again and again. Purely practical reforms are just an attempt to dam the river. It is possible, that over time, the harmful underlying assumptions of Western culture will simply fade away on their own without being analyzed, and I suspect this is the most likely scenario.
Brittany should have been annexed into a Celtic confederation to help sustain those rates.