So, how much of this “19 min read” was indeed Taiwan-related? These 3 things
The dateline (he posted it to his paper from here)
5 paragraphs about what makes TSMC so special
This highly misleading part in the beginning (emphasis is mine)
The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast and to warn anew that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is incompatible with any move by Taiwan toward formal independence — was just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is.
Based on Taiwan media (and sure, they don’t have to be accurate either), these drills were off the coast of China facing China. But if you want to maximize the drama, you’ll phrase this how Friedman does it. He could have written, “Kevin McCarthy’s meeting prompted China to hold live-fire drills half-a-day’s flight from Honolulu” (and demonstrate that the world is small and flat)
Unhelpful. And I’m annoyed I was fooled/misled by the front page hook to this column
The NYTimes have spent at least the last three years spouting carefully-crafted BS, possibly at the behest of other people, and most likely for much longer; the mainstream media in general seems to see its current mission as selling a particular narrative rather than just giving us some interesting facts about what happened today. I’ve stopped reading them because I assume that they’re either lying or (as in this case) making slight alterations to the picture that fundamentally change what you’re looking at.
What’s frustrating for me at this point is that we now have no way of knowing what’s going on in the world with any level of reliability. I suppose you could argue that it doesn’t matter anyway, since we can’t do anything about most of it, but it’s frustrating all the same.
The media’s job isn’t to inform, it’s propaganda. Basically it’s a means to retain power.
We’re all told that China puts Muslims in prison but there hasn’t been much proof of that… that China’s evil and all that.
I think it’s because America doesn’t want to have to share power with others, they want a global monopoly. China becoming more powerful gets in the way of that.
Yeah, that’s a good example. On the one hand we’ve got people claiming that there are vast re-education camps where entire families are sent to be Sinicized, and then we’ve got other people claiming there’s no such thing and it’s all a fabrication. Neither side is credible. So what’s the truth? They can’t both be right.
Only way to find out the truth is to go to China and take a tour of the affected region. I seriously doubt China’s committing genocide against them, considering that they’re basically Chinese anyways.
It’s not like China’s keeping people out. Anyone could just go to China and see.
Right. That’s where we’re at. You either go and look for yourself, or you remain ignorant. It’s ridiculous that people are being funded to go here and there to report on stuff, and we can’t trust a word of what they send back.
One could argue that America is putting blacks and latino in vast reeducation camps designed to steal their cultural identity and all that, and there would be grains of truth to this too.
There are a lot of Taiwanese who goes to China or does business there, and they all say the same. China is just like any other country, they have their rules and as long as you live your life, nobody will bother you.
It’s only America that wants us to believe that China just wants to swallow up Taiwan (it’s not even in their five year plans, because if it was there would be serious mobilization going on), but people don’t realize that there is a lot of cross strait economic and judicial cooperation going on. If you commit a crime in Taiwan and flee to China you will be deported back to face the music.
Maybe this is why nobody in Taiwan cares about all the “military exercises” China is doing.
You might find this fellow interesting. Shaun is an American based in Shanghai for many years. I’ve met him once (I think) – he’s a friend of a good friend of mine – long before his books and videos. His content has a bit of a China-apologist vibe, but it is clearly borne by being outraged by the errors, mistruths, and inaccuracies that the Western media has pumped out about China over the past 2 decades.
His visits to Xinzhuang a year and a half ago did not show the kind of genocide some of us imagine following American media. That doesn’t mean the CCP or whatever authoritarian power is not lurking underneath the surface. There probably is to some degree – like any or all large government in power for a long time.
Well if some Muslim in China is thinking about blowing themselves up for Allah of course CCP is going to do something about that. Maybe that’s what the so called “reeducation camps” are. In America they put them in a black prison and forget about them, much less try to reeducate them.
I’ve read somewhere that the Islamic countries around the world actually like what China’s doing with the Muslims.
What happens if you are a competent and free-thinking, leadership type of person capable of becoming really powerful in society?
Are you going to follow the rules and expect to be “left alone”?
Sure if you are the average guy with average intelligence making less than 6000rmb monthly nobody cares about you. The real question is if you or your offsprings are much higher than the average, are you going to be content with mingling with the Commies and follow their rules? Do you have a say in China?
An individual in any country is not going to have a whole lot of say… it’s just the way it is, unless he’s very rich or something. Same in China, same in America. Your votes in America matters about as much as the two candidates they give you anyways.
Several Western leaders and powerbrokers have expressed either explicit or implicit admiration for China’s way of doing things. The whole world went completely CCP for a couple of years, running their countries by diktat. They ran massive graft operations, locked people up on a whim, sent police to beat the crap out of them, took away their jobs and their wealth, and attempted to “re-educate” them - there’s a huge shopping-list of this sort of thing that one would expect only in dictatorships. Whatever anyone might think about the motives, the fact remains that the West has no moral high ground left to stand on. They themselves have done most of the things that they claim China has done (and probably a lot worse stuff that we don’t even know about). Some gaping holes in Western culture have been revealed, and it turns out that people aren’t so different. Whoever would have thought?
So it seems to me that China’s rise is partly due to the West’s debasement. They are leaping the bar because the bar has been lowered. Chinese State Media lies, in order to protect the State. So does Western media, and perhaps they always did. So where do we go from there?
China has some deep and serious political and social problems. They do represent a potential threat to global stability. But so does every other government. The present Chinese government doesn’t strike me as uniquely and irredeemably bad, not to the extent that continual shrieking about Chinese expansionism and aggression is justified. This “there can be only one!” jockeying for primacy and the propaganda war being fought in the media just makes things worse.
@Celeborn: watched 10 minutes or so from the timestamp. That guy seems to know what he’s talking about. It’s not impossible that he’s a CCP shill, but some interesting observations there to file away.
The West gone China when the twin towers fell. The laws that were passed essentially gave them dictatorship power.
I wouldn’t have likely been deported from the states had 9/11 not happened, they would have had better things to do than bother me.
All countries have problems but it seems to me that China is at least making an effort to take care of their own people, whereas America has essentially left their people behind (while using propaganda to convince people that they are still on their side).
All three scholars use Britain’s international economic role in the 19th
century, and America’s in the 20th, to illustrate the argument that a hegemon
creates an open world and that its decline leads to closure
