As I’ve said: the Chinese have literally zero conception of Western culture.
One of the fundamental aspects of this is this: Chinese understand the concept of cultural norms, and they understand that different cultures have different cultural norms. However, they are seemingly incapable of understanding the concept of a “culture war,” because they do not have any kind of analog of that in their own society, where culture is entirely determined by race.
Despite whatever gibberish you hear coming out of the bottomless pit that is Mike Pompeo’s mouth, Taiwan has more or less the exact same culture as China.
(Yes, they do allow gay pride, on the orders of the United States, but the people there hate it. Polls, which I don’t really believe, show that at least 70% of the population opposes homosexuality – in fact, the push for the homosexualization of the society is driving larger portions of the population to support reunification. “At least they don’t allow this gay shit” has become one of the number one arguments of the pro-One China party in Taiwan.)
This inability to understand multiple cultures within the same society is leading to some very weird English media statements by the Chinese, including a recent one that mentioned George Floyd.
Here’s another example:
Twitter actually deleted that post, for reasons that I can’t really even begin to grasp. Apparently, Twitter is arguing that… Islam is right about women?
The conflict between the Chinese and the West is just going to keep getting weirder. Apparently, some Chinaman involved with the English language presentation of Chinese culture – which is a totally new thing, by the way, which the Chinese only thought of doing a few months ago – is misguided in his thinking.
China is not a feminist country, and it is not a pro-black country, and this sort of thing is very easy for the West to deflect. I’m actually surprised that the Twitter team deleted that tweet, as it would have been a Schelling point for both feminists and Moslems, as well as other “human rights” groups, to attack and denounce the Chinese as representative of everything evil.
Rather than try to appeal to liberal values (which is literally impossible), and obviously rather than try to appeal to conservative values (which is a good idea for Russia, but also literally impossible for China), China should be attempting to portray itself as a pillar of stability in contrast to the chaos that the Western world has created. That is the only angle that makes any sense. That is why their Afghanistan tweet against Australia hit the nail so hard on the head and created such a stir, causing all of these people to freak out.
That tweet said “well, we never went around the world and started a bunch of bizarre, nonsensical wars in the Middle East, costing trillions and killing millions of primitive cave people for no reason.”
The West has no response to that, because they did start all these wars. It’s not an issue of culture, it’s an issue of just basic global stability. A normal person, from any country, with any background, can look at that and say, “yeah but China’s right, they never invaded all these countries in the Middle East – you people did that.”
The wars are a really good, easy point to hit.
Other points that do not involve confusing culture war issues:
- China has more social and economic freedom than Western countries
- China is helping their peasantry to achieve middle class status, while the West is driving their middle class into poverty
- China is combatting corruption, while the West is becoming more corrupt
- China maintains social stability and harmony
- China doesn’t engage in bizarre forms of domestic oppression
None of those are partisan issues, none of them are hot-button social issues, none of them involve pandering to Western values.
They are just things that are generally agreed upon as being good, universally, just as starting wars in the Middle East is universally agreed on to be bad.
Of course, the West can just say “you’re lying,” but eventually, that is just going to come across as ridiculous. Western governments are locking people in their houses, they’re continuing to start wars, they’re transferring trillions of dollars from the middle class to the wealthy. Everyone sees that happening.
China should be saying “look, we’re just over here doing our thing – we’re not a threat to you” rather than trying to come out with some lunatic “actually, we represent your values better than you” nonsense. Theoretically, eventually China is going to have to create some kind of global cultural presentation of themselves, but that is going to be a lot easier in another decade or so when the majority of the population of the West has been forced to accept that democracy has failed.
The worst thing that China can do right now is try to enter into the culture war fray, talking about George Floyd and Islamic feminism. It’s just stupid, on every level, and if you didn’t understand how Chinese brains work, you would be even more baffled by it.
Obviously, it goes without saying that China’s domestic propaganda should be the opposite – they should absolutely push the culture war stuff in their own country. I don’t know if they’re doing that or not, but they should show videos of child trannies and of blacks rioting, they should show military on the streets attacking civilians and say “these are the people who are claiming to be morally superior to us.”
But hey – I don’t have a dog in this fight.
I just find it interesting, on an academic level.