Open Thread Friday 6-5-2020

A Look at China Part Seven
My intent in the series was to provide basic knowledge to start understanding China and our ongoing relationship with Chinese governments and its people. The story did not begin with the opening of China by Nixon and will not end in our times. Military leaders, policy makers and intelligence services have deep sources of knowledge on China. Most politicians appear to have the same misconceptions as the general public about mysterious China and try to describe China in sound bites.

Maochun Yu, historian teaching at Annapolis provides the best description I have read or heard on Chinese Studies in the United States during a 2015 panel discussion.

(full video 100 min. section on China Studies 38.07 to 40.55)
[video:https://youtu.be/8HA1MPaqPSs?t=2287]

United State government and intelligence agencies has actively been interfering in Chinese matters for some time.

Around my parents birth Office of Strategic Services was active in China.
(10:05 key section 7.54-9.17)
[video:https://youtu.be/s7ffT2KdPHE?t=474]

around the time of my birth CIA was training Tibet rebels in Colorado.
(8.41 min if times short 5.21-6.41)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQzpCQ3afC4]

And within the last 10 years China identified and eliminated multiple CIA operatoves.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVhcBXJK3y0]

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The spark leading both countries to public protests was law and order. In Hong Kong the protests started with potential change in extradition rights. In the United States the protest started to try and halt the rights of individual officers to kill citizens at any time or place without any consequences.

By and large, America’s finest upheld their duty to protect law and order with clubs, teargas and rubber bullets. In three days of peaceful marches and not so peaceful riots, more were arrested than the total arrested in Hong Kong after more than three months of disturbances and mayhem. By the end of last week, 13 people had been killed.

Members of the media covering the protests became deliberate targets of police harassment with teargas and rubber bullets. One photojournalist lost her left eye to a direct hit by a rubber bullet. She expressed being “thankful” that it was not her camera-shooting eye, which would have been career-ending.

In Hong Kong, the Western media were free to roam, run interference for and select the protest scenes that met their needs to report on police brutality while ignoring the rioters and arsonists doing the destruction.

While looters in American cities were indiscriminate and their actions included the random destruction of shops owned by ethnic minorities, the looters in Hong Kong were careful and selective and targeted stores with mainland owners.

The rioters in Hong Kong seem to have been professionally trained. They knew how to make Molotov cocktails to deadly effect and use the umbrella to fend off teargas.

The rioters in Hong Kong were led by experienced advisers who knew how to create mass disturbances. The protests that led to riots in the US were spontaneous and driven by rage.

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Our country has its own issues with Hong Kong extradition process. Hong Kong extradition process allowed Edward Snowden the time needed to avoid extradition to the United States.

Just before sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to China in 1997, the US signed a new extradition treaty with the semi-autonomous territory. Under that treaty, both parties agree to hand over fugitives from each other's criminal justice systems, but either side has the right of refusal in the case of political offences.

Beijing, which gave its consent for Hong Kong to sign the agreement, also has a right of veto if it believes the surrender of a fugitive would harm the "defence, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy'' of the People's Republic of China. In short, the treaty makes Snowden's fate a matter of political expediency not just in Hong Kong but in Beijing.

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Fast reader, slow writer and responding to comments takes more time than creating the diary. I appreciate the time and effort everyone has taken to share their knowledge.

My sources
Asia Times - covers all of Asia with varying view points
CCTV documentaries - the cadence is more Chinese that American
Global Times - China and World news with a Communist Party of China viewpoint
Financial sites such as Reuters when I had a subscription Wall Street Journal

Additional Sources members C99 have provided
China Global Television Network - CGTN seeks to cover China and the world, reporting the news from a global perspective.
South China Morning Post

________

A Look at China Part One Potential Conflict with China
A Look at China Part Two Documentary Series on development of Chinese culture
A Look at China Part Three Timeline of Christianity in China beginning prior 100 AD
A Look at China Part Four Century on Humiliation
A Look at China Part Five Players on the Path to Westernizing
A Look at China Part Six Trade and One Child Policy (comment thread)

________

Open thread all discussions are welcome.

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social upheavals pertaining to law enforcement.

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/06/on-secession.html

and this...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-03/hong-kong-is-being-te...

and an editorial comment from Strategic Culture
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/06/05/washingtons-hong-kong-...

The plain truth is that the world has been shocked by the heinous action of U.S. police officers against an unarmed man; by the relentless repetition of such barbarity against African-Americans in a country which evidently has an endemic racial problem; and the world has been aghast by the gratuitous wielding of military powers to crush subsequent peaceful protests.

It is not “propaganda” to point out that in addition to the above malignancy, Washington has a chronic problem of hypocrisy as shown by its arrogant attempts to lecture China over Hong Kong. (And not just China, but every other nation on the planet.)

Thanks SOE.

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studentofearth's picture

@QMS democracy as Sun Yet Sun mentioned in his three principles without the constant agitation of Western Intelligence agencies.

Principle of Nationalism. By this, Sun meant to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. He blamed China's misery on the feudal Manchus Qing rulers. He later interpreted this principle as unity among the different ethnicities in China to seek independence from imperialist domination.

Principle of Democracy. To Sun, it represented a Western constitutional government. He divided political life for China into two sets of powers: the power of politics and the power of governance. The former may be equated to civil rights such as suffrage. The latter means the powers of administration. He expanded the European-American constitutional theory of a three-branch government into a government of five branches, by adding the Examination and Inspection departments.

Principles of People's Livelihood. The concept can be understood as social welfare. Sun hoped all peasants could be given farmland on which to work. He also suggested imposing control on capital so that individual capitalists couldn't manipulate the nation's economy and hence affect people's livelihood.

The discussion on secession was interesting. I don't think the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has as many methods to force a democratic vote to a predetermined result. Many dissidents appear to believe the myth of voting as the voice of the people in the Western world.

Defenders of the CCP often seek to deflect criticism over the repression of separatist views by drawing comparisons to the West’s own secessionist movements, denouncing what they perceive as some Western countries’ hypocrisy. “Do you think the United States would allow Hawaii and California to declare independence?”, they ask. (This particular comment was taken verbatim from Twitter). As the debate over Hong Kong becomes more contentious, more comments like this are popping up on social media, but this line of argument is not new.

There are two glaring problems with this particular tack. First, whatever practical obstacles may stand in the way of, say, Texas or California independence, Texans and Californians are free to express secessionist views.
...
Scotland also evinces the second big flaw with the secession whataboutism, which is that there are actual instances of Western countries telling one of their regions they are free to go.
...
To answer these questions, look not to the CCP’s views on China’s territorial integrity, but rather to its complete disregard for the will of its citizens. After all, China’s citizens cannot vote for their leaders so why should we expect they would be allowed to vote for anything else?

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

enhydra lutris's picture

in a bit. Hong Kong must've been a strange place, and must, in some respects still be. I remember that when British rule was ending truly vast sums of money were expatriated from H.K., much to British Columbia. One cannot help but wonder how much the people and resources of mainland China were exploited to generate it.

China studies somewhat existed at Cal when I was there and I knew some people taking courses in it, maybe even one or more majoring in it. Some, of course, were Chinese_American, which would be natural, but I always wondered how many, if any, were prepping for a career with the CIA and/or diplomatic services.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

studentofearth's picture

@enhydra lutris exploited from China. British Hong Kong financiers served the world.

From the 1960s through to the 1980s, the Vietnam war and rising Asian economies generated both legal and illegal wealth. Hong Kong was a law-abiding money laundering centre for all of that treasure, whether you were a dictator looting your government’s treasury, a general running a jungle heroin lab in the Golden Triangle or everyone else in between.

Air America, the CIA-sponsored air transport network, was the US government-enabled platform for contraband smugglers. And when the war ended it left a network of contacts, clients and willing couriers who intimately understood the banking landscape.

Hong Kong’s banks of that time offered the best in money laundering services.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

ggersh's picture

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/05/roaming-charges-mad-bull-lost-it...

+ What MAGA America doesn’t seem to understand is that when fascism comes, it will come for them, too. Black, red and brown America have been living a version of this repressive condition their entire lives.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

studentofearth's picture

@ggersh By the time MAGA individuals recognize they are the next exploited group there will be no one left to assist them.

I also liked this paragraph from the link.

+ It must come as a rude awakening to these retired generals, some of the most self-regarding people on the planet, that after giving orders for 30 or 40 years, now no one really cares what they have to say. Removed from the chain of command, they are impotent to change anything, even the autocrats they protected and monstrous policies they helped set in motion. (Fortunately for them, they can still get rich selling US-made weapons and spy-ware to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Australia and Singapore.)

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

@studentofearth

media has tried to create
in order to convince the world
democracy is freedom
market capitalism is good
socialism is bad
war is good
on bad enemies

most I know reject those ideas

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lotlizard's picture

against the wishes of its people, nor done anything about the ongoing Turkish occupation of half of Cyprus … And where to even start regarding the West’s backing everything Israel chooses to do to “police” the lives of Palestinians …

The biggest U.S. “success” in punishing non-alignment with its empire still seems to be the 1965 regime change in Indonesia, whose bloody slaughter — the “Jakarta” solution — continues to go unquestioned and unatoned.

In standing up to anti-Chinese hate and persecution — including recurring pogroms against Chinese as “the Jews of the Orient” in Southeast Asia — Beijing sees itself as filling a moral vacuum left by the rest of the world, much as Israel positions itself as Jews’ only reliable bulwark against endemic antisemitism worldwide.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/11/beijing-wont-let-indonesias-chinese...

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studentofearth's picture

has been exposed to the world. The expanding worldwide protests in support of the US protests has spread at a surprising rate.

Intersecting circular paths keep appearing of our intelligence services taking over the roles of British, French and German colonial activities after World War II. The your link discussed fundamentalist Islam's growing influence.

This has been fueled by decades of funding from Saudi Arabia, which has poured billions into the construction of mosques and pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) that promote its austere brand of Wahhabi Islam.

During the Jakarta election, Ahok’s political opponents used the public’s growing piety as a weapon against the governor and his ally, President Joko Widodo. Like other Chinese in Indonesia, Latif Yulus, the café owner, now fears that the politicians and Islamist radicals who railroaded Ahok will cause further difficulties for his community in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2019. “In the end, they will target the Chinese,” he said.

Ahok was in many ways the ideal target for sectarian troublemakers. Ethnic Chinese have been a part of Indonesian society for centuries, but have long been perceived as occupying a privileged perch in the country’s economic hierarchy.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.