Woke capitalism, it seems, stops at the water’s edge, overlooking China’s persecutions of entire nations while furiously denouncing solitary incidents at home. The same false promises - this time to resume investments in Xinjiang - are once again invoked in Germany and France, while prominent American CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, have resumed their pilgrimages to Beijing and Shenzhen. Free trade was supposed to generate increasing numbers of free traders in China, who would undermine, if not overtly resist, the Communist Party’s absurdly ill-fitting Maoist ideology. After Tiananmen, the secular religion of Free Trade was invoked to resume increasingly large investments in Chinese manufacturing, notwithstanding the catastrophic loss of manufacturing employment to Chinese imports. They always have good arguments against making a fuss about Chinese misconduct. Until, that is, key members of America’s ruling class emerge to explain the utter necessity of more trade and more financial cooperation, easily enlisting perennially needy political leaders, bankers and brokers, but also prestigious academic institutions whose leaders seem to view the FBI more negatively than China’s Guóānbù intelligence service. While formidable warriors, the Xiongnu were easily manipulated once their chiefs became addicted to Chinese silk robes in place of smelly furs, and to alcoholic beverages.Įach time the Party leadership does something outrageous - from the Tiananmen Square Massacre to the mass campaign to forcibly transform Uyghurs and extinguish Hong Kong’s liberties - US sanctions are loudly threatened or even imposed amid talk of decoupling once for all. Since 1989, the Communist Party’s leaders have learned that Americans are very similar to the Xiongnu nomads the Chinese encountered 2,500 years ago. The reason for China’s brazen balloon launch is simple. Nor, it seems, were they particularly worried about the danger of collisions with airliners: both the Airbus A380 and the far more common Boeing 787-8/9 can operate just above 43,100 feet, while one of the aerostats was shot down at around 40,000 feet. First, that the US authorities knew almost from the start they were Chinese because they intercepted transmissions of the data they were collecting and second, that Beijing’s officials who authorised the blatant intrusions were not in the least bit concerned about America’s response if they were detected, or if the balloons crashed to earth. Two things are clear about the four aerostats (“balloons”) that have penetrated the skies above US and Canadian territory in recent days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |