I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/xiaobo-lecture.html

by z3t1 • 9 years ago

227 192 9 years ago

If aren't sure who Liu Xiaobo is or want to learn more, this essay by China expert Perry Link is excellent: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/13/the-passion-of-liu-x...

dis-sys15• 9 years ago

Such censored view is not good for anyone.

"It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is. Given the size of China, certainly it would need 300 years of colonisation for it to become like what Hong Kong is today. I even doubt whether 300 years would be enough." Liu Xiaobo made himself quite clear back in the 1980s. The in 1996, he further argued that

"progress in China depends on westernisation and the more westernisation, the more progress."

Western, independent source here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/nobel-...

I thought China should be allowed to preserve it own culture and independence. Liu seemed to hold a quite different idea.

btw, it must be quite a shock for you to know such fact. I mean please feel free to downvote if you agree with Liu's very repressive view on how China should be colonized by the west for 300 years to get better argument. The whole "progress in China depends on westernisation" also sounds like a cultural genocide to me.

amygdyl4• 9 years ago

I always felt that China simply faced much starker realities and choices than ever we are able to fully appreciate when we complain about the systems they have.

I'm no Sinophile, and I think Great Britain should have built a floating desalination plant before ceding Hong Kong Island. But the little I know about Chinas history, the fragmentation of historically antagonistic races among the Chinese diaspora we call a people, and the immense variety of issues that have developed in isolation unique to their world, I believe all conspire to alienate the most rational observers from true neutrality. My mind blows fuses just contemplating the pressures and tensions that abound seemingly everywhere in their daily lives.

jackvalentine10• 9 years ago

Is he actually arguing that China should be colonised? Or just making a comparison with Hong Kong's development and hypothesizing how long it'd take the mainland under similar yoke and rule.

michaelmrose• 9 years ago

Cultural genocide is an abomination of a term. It misappropriates a word that conjures up unspeakable horror of mass extermination in order to make suppression of cultural activities / works as bad as mass murder. Its about as bad as statutory rape.

eru• 9 years ago

I thought China should be allowed to preserve it own culture and independence.

Alas, the 'cultural revolution' destroyed most of that culture. You can still find some remnants of parts of it in the overseas chinese communities of southeast asia.

xupybd3• 9 years ago

Here's the thing. You don't have to agree with his political views. You don't have to pick a side. But you can still see his treatment as bad. This man is in prison for disagreeing with the government, that is very bad.

TokenDiversity2• 9 years ago

I'm surprised China gets away with so much! They recently banned kids from being named Mohammad. And had Imams dance. I wish our war-mongering republicans would switch their attention to countries that really violate human rights.

EDIT: Of course they do much worse, I was pointing to the fact that not a peep was heard on Fox or CNN.

sidcool• 9 years ago

If one has money and power, one can get away with almost everything.

yurofish4• 9 years ago

Not sure banning kids from being named a certain name really compares to the actual human rights violations at place in China...

sk0g2• 9 years ago

There was a Kiwi couple who weren't allowed to name their kid Lucifer a few years ago. That name is about as religiously charged too. As a bonus, not being named Mo helps you not get picked for random check-ups.

emanreus• 9 years ago

Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Iceland, and others all practice banning certain baby names. It's just that when China does it it's in the news.

In Iceland, if the name is not on the National Registry's list of approved names parents first have to get approval of the name with Icelandic Naming Committee. About 50% of submitted names get rejected. For example Zoe, Harriet, Duncan, Ludwig... all violate naming requirements and are not allowed.

Some countries ban only names that would be degrading to children like naming them after product names or outright insults like Anus or gibberish names like random string. Others have ban rules based on politics, religion, terrorism, celebreties and so on. You can't name child Binyamin and Linda in Saudi Arabia, Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler in Germany, Elvis in Sweden, Rambo in Mexico, Jimmy in Portugal, Lucifer in New Zealand and so on.

theseadroid• 9 years ago

Here's one suggestion from a Chinese perspective: Can you guys fix your democracy first? If you can't set a good example on how good democracy can be, then there's no incentives for any other countries to follow.

You realize that US influence can never achieve anything without the citizens of China agree with it right? Like now majority of Chinese think your political system is a joke. And you know what? The majority of Chinese like those policies that's violating certain human rights. If US can only be ever weaker as time goes by then the values you hold dear can only be more insignificant in other part of the world.

mattmanser• 9 years ago

Fix what? Your government is the one telling you it's broken. Your idea of US democracy has been spoon fed to you by your government. You're throwing stones from a greenhouse.

While US democracy isnt a particularly good form as it puts too much power in the executive branch, it's overly partisan and two-party, there's nothing fundamentally broken about it. There's disadvantages to proportional representation, which would break the two party rule, and as we see with Trump, an autocratic president seems, in reality, pretty ineffectual when the other arms.of government start balking at their demands.

pavlov8• 9 years ago

And you know what? The majority of Chinese like those policies that's violating certain human rights.

How do you know this? It's impossible to measure the support for those policies when discussion and criticism of them is not permitted.

There is a way to measure whether policies are actually supported by the people. It's called multi-party elections.

chj2• 9 years ago

The majority of Chinese ruling class who send their children to US surely think different.

amygdyl4• 9 years ago

I wish I could recall the source, one of the dozens of histories that I read published almost contemporaneously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the paraphrase was "If for one day our people were once to cease stealing from one another, we would have attained the goal of our utopia for all time."

First spoken by Kruschev in his infamous "thawing" address to the party, and repeated apparently verbatim by Gorbachev in his speech announcing Perestroika.

I may have been muddled in the detail, but I only meant to convey the sentiment.

I am prompted to recall this, because of the recent inferno of a high rise in London which claimed a appalling loss of life.

The culprit in the death toll is suspect cladding which massively multiplied the blaze. .

I too lived in such a high rise, formerly a project and since 1994 privately owned.

Anyhow few years ago in our building, two floors above, a similar fire erupted.

Well we're spared inevitable casualties only because the defrauding of the building funds had ensured that the minimum work was completed.

That flat is owned by a kingmaker of British politics and the 2 bedroom apartment had just been moved into by a young Italian woman, who I slack jawed observed receiving 8 beds counting the space in doubles and a sofa bed for good measure for the tiny kitchen. Criminal overcrowding absolutely known by all owners of the properties. Shortly after my life and everything around me was systematically destroyed and I was continually imprisoned upon a forged court order and suffered multiple attacks I was lucky to survive, one clearly engineered with massive coordination of the prison staff, and one time a senior judge point blank telling me to forget about bail or trial.

I'm in total agreement with the necessity of sorting out our so called democracy. We simply don't police the rules that are supposed to protect us, and I am just barely recovering testament to corruption overriding every protection society is supposed to afford to protect the politically privileged while they steal

sctb• 9 years ago

Taking threads like this even deeper into nationalistic-political-religious flamewar territory does no good. Please don't post like this on Hacker News, it's not the kind of discussion we're here for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

zuolan• 9 years ago

As a Chinese, I need to clarify some facts.

I think that the Communist Party of China made a really big mistake, which caused a serious impact on China's national image. But I also do not agree with Liu Xiaobo's political views.

Finally, China's political environment indeed bad, but most of the Western media coverage distorted the facts, including the Liu Xiaobo event.

23lk4jj4j24• 9 years ago

As someone who visits China almost every year, and has spent quite a lot of time there including for study please consider what I'm going to say not as a criticism, but an attempt to help you understand how your words will likely be received.

You haven't clarified any facts, you've just made two statements of opinion without any supporting evidence or greater explanation.

colordrops6• 9 years ago

As someone who lived in china for 9 years, and married a Chinese woman, perhaps you could recognize that you might live in a very specific bubble in a culture very different from China, and that the perspective is so different that reaching out and trying to understand this person's world view might be more productive than tritely dismissing the comment on technicalities.

I hate China's government and the way they operate but I also recognize that the world is very complex and cultures are ancient and have very different but also successful mechanisms of operation. On the same note I would not write off an American's perspective because the president is a wack job.

stenl• 9 years ago

It's fine to disagree with his political views. That's precisely his point: the freedom to disagree is the foundation of a free society.

What facts were distorted? That he was jailed, multiple times, for defending freedom of expression? That he died in custody? That his wife Liu Xia was under house arrest for years without charges? Or was it his role during the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre? That he negotiated the free passage of students from Tiananmen, saving many from the advancing tanks?

dis-sys15• 9 years ago

There are certain views that should never ever be publicly stated, e.g. Liu said China needs to be colonized for 300 years to get better, is it just free of speech? sound quite repressive to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/nobel-...

tsukaisute• 9 years ago

。

Sorreah• 9 years ago

This user was downvoted for his views which are the rough equivalent of "she was asking for it".

To see this as people simply being closed-minded to different cultures is really myopic.

I personally refuse to hold people to different moral standards because they come from another country.

matthewmacleod• 9 years ago

I’d argue that they are not being disagreed with because of what is “socially acceptable”, but because their comment added no additional facts or information, and was instead just a couple of opinions without much to inform them.

gentro2• 9 years ago

You ever get the feeling this Nobel Prize and the western media's fawning coverage of Liu Xiaobo is really just about westerners making themselves feel better?

China will get democracy one day. It will be because a large swath of Chinese people want it. Although there have been some high profile dissidents in China over the last 30 years, including Liu Xiaobo and the 1989 students, most Chinese are probably not ready for their message of political openness. They're still focused on lower levels of the Maslow hierarchy like shelter and food.

These dissidents have the bad luck of poor timing. In another 30 or 40 years when China is fully developed, their ideas may be well accepted among citizenry and party reformers.

mc322• 9 years ago

You ever get the feeling this Nobel Prize and the western media's fawning coverage of Liu Xiaobo is really just about westerners making themselves feel better?

Not really. Imagine if the Nobel institute only granted the prize to Europeans. Imagine the furore that would cause. Now, sure, the winners have often been controversial. Here, I can't disagree. I mean, what's not to like about someone who wants to change their own country for the better?

gentro2• 9 years ago

Sure, the man himself seems beyond reproach, and I admire his courage. But in another sense that's just what I mean, that we can sit here, read this news, and nod approvingly at this man's actions.

But beyond our own consumption of this narrative, his efforts are pretty much irrelevant to any eventual democratization in China.

jknoepfler• 9 years ago

Under what conditions, exactly, do you think democracy originally came to be? This is a really bizarre, historically nonsensical comment that is unnecessarily dismissive of people who have sacrificed lives or livelihoods to pave the way for fundamental human rights in their country.

taway_1212• 9 years ago

Democracy used to include only middle and upper class people (i.e. you had to have some wealth to be able to vote) and was only relatively recently extended to everyone.

mozey• 9 years ago

most Chinese are probably not ready for their message of political openness

Isn't this exactly the problem. Someone else deciding what you are ready or not ready for. For me democracy is about everyone having a voice, even those on the lower levels. There will always be different levels.

pavanred3• 9 years ago

We can't just simply discount the effect of the Nobel prize and world media coverage of Liu Xiaobo. I am reading the book Perfect Hostage by Justin Wintle, it's about the life of Aung San Suu Kyi. And, yes there were a lot of Burmese people and their leader who fought fearlessly for democracy, but I think in addition to that there is a real sizable effect of Suu Kyi winning the Nobel peace prize and world media coverage following it. Whether you like to attribute it or not, I think the effect is very real. Suu Kyi was house arrested for few years when she was awarded the Nobel prize, this was followed by many other awards and recognition, the world media coverage about Suu Kyi and their cause increased and so did the general awareness about the plight of the people and their struggle, and so did the diplomatic pressure from other countries, sanctions, embargoes etc. I know the situation of present day China and Burma in the early 90s is very different but I think the point still stands.

amygdyl4• 9 years ago

I absolutely agree with your premise.

But I cannot help but feel saddened, to reduce the prize to a level of the publicity it conveys.

Neither can I eradicate the thought that awarding such a prize in this manner surely is felt as a provocation by the Chinese government as you rightly point out that the sole effect is of publicising and canonising a man whom they are, by their values, imprisoning justly for admitted subversion.

rimliu• 9 years ago

Just yesterday I heard someone talking about Liu Xiaobo on BBC. Sorry, I did not get the name or anything else, but I assume that was woman from China. She said pretty much the same: before the Nobel prize he was just one of the many, not particularly interesting. After the prize he was singled out and his wife was put on the house arrest.

jdietrich3• 9 years ago

Suu Kyi gained her freedom, won an election, then ignored a genocide.

Democracy is not magic. A failing state is a failing state, regardless of the system of government. Great rebels rarely make for great politicians.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/rohingya-muslim... https://theintercept.com/2017/04/13/burmese-nobel-prize-winn...

joel_liu2• 9 years ago

There is an assumption that the "One person one vote democratic system is the best system for any country in any stage". However, the data just don't support this assumption.

https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_...

metaphorical• 9 years ago

I found this to be quite condescending -- "lower levels of Maslow hierarchy".

Have you considered that perhaps most Chinese people are "made unready" for democracy simply because of the extreme suppressions by an authoritarian regime?

Or have you considered that perhaps food, shelter, and openness are not mutually exclusive -- that one must have one in order to have another?

bildung• 9 years ago

But it's true, equally so for the U.S., by the way. People with high income are twice as likely to participate in the democratic process as poor people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

It also makes perfect sense if you look at the post-medieval revival of the democratic idea: It was the emerging middle-class, rich people, who demanded participation in the governing processes.

narrator• 9 years ago

This assumes that Chinese will want to be more like the west. Maybe this would have been true when China was economically underdeveloped, but as living standards improve they might care less what outsiders think and instead think they have something better. There's too much "White Man's Burden" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden ) thinking going on here.

kristofferR• 9 years ago

This idea - that democracy and freedom of thought/speech are Western values - is incredibly dangerous and needs to die.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc aren't Western countries.

seanmcdirmid6• 9 years ago

If you asked me this in 1989, we were all sure china will get democracy in 20 or 30 years, it was just a matter of time. The 30th anniversary of Tiananmen is in a couple of years, and things haven't gotten much better.

I was told in 2006 by a prominent Chinese researcher when visiting that there were just a bunch of old fogeys in government and that's why some internet sites were blocked. They would die off/retire soon and the internet would be completely open. Of course, that isn't what happened: after the 2008 Olympics things got much worse and today we fondly look back on 2006 as s time when we could actually use Facebook in china without fiddling through a VPN.

We were told in 2010 that Beijing's air pollution problem would definitely be solved by 2020.

When I first lived in china 2002, I found longer term expats to be so salty and cynical, wow they are so close minded! Before I left just last year I of course had become that expat.

In another 30 or 40 year what china will be honestly can't be predicted.

throwa34943way• 9 years ago

To some in the west, China is a land of opportunities, a booming economy with tech giants and a supply chain for the industrial world. To others it's a bloody dictatorship that assassinated thousands of people for the sole crime of speaking their mind in 1989.

To me it's the embodiment of the hypocrisy of the west when it comes to the defense human rights. Let's be frank, we didn't abolish slavery, we just outsourced it to make it more acceptable. It's also a proof that capitalism doesn't need democracy or free-speech to function.

philippnagel• 9 years ago

Capitalism needs government guaranteed private property. Was there ever the need for anything else?

sametmax3• 9 years ago

Exactly. Too many people in our countries are very pushy about their value system but see no problem communicating about it through orwelian services using hardawre built by children.

I mean, I'm veggie but I wouldn't dare considering eat lovers bad persons given what else I consume.

That doesn't mean we should feel guilty. It's a hard problem. But that's certainly means we should not feel entitled. And boy do we love to be.

peteretep• 9 years ago

Equation of work conditions in China with slavery is flatly idiotic.

InclinedPlane• 9 years ago

He's equating slave labor in China with slavery, which is ... not? idiotic, I imagine. At the outbreak of the US Civil War there were about 4 million slaves living in America. Today there are, according to international estimates, about 3.4 million slaves living and working in China[1].

To claim that it is a non-existent problem or that it isn't severe or that it doesn't merit outrage or to imagine that it is somehow on a different level to the chattel slavery of 19th century America is to turn a blind eye to the truth or to try to finely grade suffering in a way that is dehumanizing.

[1] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/country/china/

pizza• 9 years ago

People nowadays often don't know that the abolitionist movement in the states saw chattel slavery and wage slavery as not particularly different and wanted to abolish both.

js83• 9 years ago

I am not sure what your point is. Are you telling me, if I have no interest in Chinese industry, that empathizing (which I do, as a human being) with Liu Xiaobo is a hypocrisy?

I think you're doing an aggregation error of sorts. The fact that different people in the West have different opinions about China (and some of them are perhaps even hypocritical) doesn't make every westerner's opinion a hypocritical one.

blazespin• 9 years ago

Capitalism is changing China and the world for the better. Wealth is leading to more educated Chinese people who through enlightenment will support better government. If Russia could create the same culture of wealth generation rather than relying on military and natural resources, they’d be improving as well.

Is it the best system? Hardly, but I don’t think withdrawing from globalism is going to help matters. The more we find ways to work together the better.

factsaresacred2• 9 years ago

Let's be frank, we didn't abolish slavery, we just outsourced it to make it more acceptable.

As Joan Robinson said, "the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."

Being paid for work you do not have to do is not slavery. You see we built this thing called civilization whereby instead of starving when crops fail, dying at age 30 with dysentery and living in fear of being bludgeoned to death by a rival clan, we can exchange our labour for security, health and resources.

It's not perfect but if Capitalism ain't pleasing you then ask the person working that outsourced job what their grandparents thought of Communism, an ideology that crushed the very soul of China and brought misery, mass death and madness.

Or just ask them what work they'd be doing if Capitalism wasn't keeping them enslaved in jobs.

sametmax3• 9 years ago

You don't have a generalized cancer, you just have a small tumor. All is good.

vacri• 9 years ago

There are more political ideologies out there than just capitalism and communism. It seems to be a very American thing to argue as if there are only ever two possible alternatives.

codefined• 9 years ago

As a point, what are your thoughts of a Meritocracy as a paradigm to follow? Nationalise everything, pay everyone an equal amount, to begin with, but based on their "merits" boost their pay. Seems to have all the advantages of capitalism, without the perceived negatives of communism equally a dictatorship or "fat cats", which could be managed by the government.

literallycancer3• 9 years ago

If your only options are "work here" and "die of starvation", then I'm not sure you can really call it a decision at all. Frequently the people doing the work can not, in fact, make any decisions. The guy who owns the factory, on the other hand, will make sure his thugs beat up anyone who brings up fire safety or asks for better working conditions. If that's not slavery, then what is?

dTal• 9 years ago

I'm sure the native Americans would disagree with Joan Robinson.

The fact is there is no opt-out, you do have to participate in the capitalist system to survive, and even if you somehow manage to live in the wilderness, capitalism will eventually come and beat down your door to tell you that the land you're camping on now belongs to someone else, and would you kindly move along? Capitalism claims all resources, then sells them back to you in exchange for your soul. It was this realization that eventually motivated the Unabomber.

dilemma• 9 years ago

To me it's the embodiment of the hypocrisy of the west when it comes to the defense human rights.

The Iraq War, The American War on Vietnam, daily drone bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan by a nobel peace prize winner would be more like it.

Elect2• 9 years ago

Now in Chinese weibo.com, if your message includes "javascript", it can not be sent and return "content is illegal!". A guess is that the word "javascript" includes "RIP".

explodingcamera• 9 years ago

That's just a poor implementation of xss prevention

z3t1• 9 years ago

That's not the case. The problem only started to pop up several hours ago.

maaaats2• 9 years ago

As an aside, even though the Norwegian government has nothing to do with the prize, China quickly ended lots of relations with Norway, losing Norwegian companies billions.

Now, the government is too afraid to publicly speak about Liu, to not sour what they have spent years trying to fix. Weak.

hunglee2• 9 years ago

The weakness is democracy. The Norwegian governing party - whoever it is - now knows that China's default position to perceived outside interference is disproportionate economic punishment, leading to pressure on the living standards of the voters they depend on. Autocratic states have discovered a critical weakness in the representative democracy and there's little we can currently do about it

pmontra2• 9 years ago

What if Norway was another autocratic state? Economic punishment could have made them bent anyway. Maybe your point is that autocracies bend less than democracies and you could be right: dictators usually don't care about economic sanctions because what they care about is to stay in charge. A poor or wealthy country doesn't matter much. Actually sanctions help them to build a narrative of world against the country and strengthen their grip.

I'm not aware of what happened in Norway after those Chinese sanctions. They could democratically decided that it was ethically worth losing those businesses. Any Norwegian people here?

withholding• 9 years ago

Democracies can choose not to trade with dictatorship.

escapetech• 9 years ago

Now, the government is too afraid to publicly speak about Liu

As it should be. Speaking up would only draw more attention to Norway's unscrupulous actions in conflicted and autocratic regions, especially considering its public image of neutrality, diplomacy, non-interference, and promoting progressive values. Denmark and Sweden are also in this as well - they say they promote human rights while exporting billions of euros in military technology and services to regions with known human rights abuses.

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

Sources?

HowardMei• 9 years ago

Not weak, but fragile.

In fact, the government structure designed by Lisi in Qin dynasty 2000 years ago, and still being used today, is a fragile structure in peaceful times. It's a structure designed for war and the law enforcement tends to vanish if no direct threats are present to ordinary people. The central government will lose authority if the officials cannot contain dissenters, especially those who may be backed up by the provincial government officials.

Liu tried to restructure the aforementioned political structure through 08 Charter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08

We still don't know the details about what he actually had done besides drafting the manifesto.If he tried to create a political group to materialize the 08 Charter, then it's definitely a substantial threat to the central government and even to most of the Chinese people, though it would be a trivial issue in any western countries.

The Norwegian government officials apparently had no idea about the severity of backing a dissenter challenging the central government in China due to cultural gap. In fact, many NGOs failed the same way in China. Those few who helps the central government are successful though.

Liu spotted many flaws in the current political structure that many Chinese people know for years. Even scholars in northern Song dynasty and late Ming dynasty also tried to fix the same drawbacks Liu mentioned, but they failed miserably and gave up the entire civilization to Mongolians and Manchurians.

In my opinion, Liu's importance is exaggerated by western media. His solution to our centuries-old problem is completely non-realistic and very dangerous. Ordinary Chinese people will laugh at his naiveness instead of respecting his idealism.

To do a successful political system reform to attain the same achievements that western civilization has obtained through hundreds of years of improvement, China needs to meet Chinese people's most urgent demands step by step and reason from First Principles instead of mimic any model countries.

It's kind of similar to the way for a startup to succeed.

Edit: Added the Norwegian government paragraph and fixed some grammar issues.

varjag• 9 years ago

China also quickly reestablished relations with Norway when it needed a foothold in Europe against incumbent Trump.

utbabya2• 9 years ago

FYI, there's an interesting commentator machine operating in China for public manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

I'm not ruling out genuine believer of their opinions but there's also this possibility.

They're getting pretty sophisticated and sometimes instead of supporting the government, their goal would be disinformation, induce hatred (i.e. troll) to divide and conquer.

If you're interested in the perspective of some HongKongness (myself included) I'd recommend this film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_(2015_film)

It's so touching to me because it's dystopian but really just exaggeration what I perceive in real life that how the changes are creeping in during recent years, continual development of public swaying psyops is just one of them.

Not that I like Britain nor UN either as they both dropped the ball of enforcing the Sino-British Joint Declaration or giving HongKong a chance to decide its own fate as other post-colony.

dis-sys15• 9 years ago

This thread has nothing relate to Hong Kong. Could you please stop introducing such completely off-topic stuff? Thank you.

utbabya2• 9 years ago

Well there's comparison of cultural and citizen quality between HongKong an China in some heated debates here.

Or do you think my comment should be censored?

LiweiZ• 9 years ago

Until those so-called activists don't have to looking for funding from sides with their own agendas, or more clearly, having stable and large cashflow, they are fighting for their own fames and interests instead of the people living on that land.

For outsiders, they are icons/symbols. For most of insiders, they are someone unrelated to their life. In events like this, both sides can consume the news and get what they want without anything really meaningful happens.

This is a kind of hopeless in the real world.

Icons get selected and pushed to their directions and have no means to actually do anything useful.

As an average Joe, the best thing to do is reducing this kind of consumption, taking care of yourself and, hopefully, not getting involved in/caught. This can somewhat explain, from one dimension, why there is no truly strong and cohesive Chinese community in the western world.

More money only spoils unrestricted kids even more. They don't settle down for the progress they gain, just want even more. That's a DNA in the core of the whole system and affects people within.

There is nothing to look for, just strong dark currents.

petraeus• 9 years ago

Culture-lock is the very reason China is having such a hard time become a modern technology leading state.

Its the same as in martial arts, the fixed form practices got absolutely decimated by MMA, diversity is a strength and modern cultures are very bad at accepting outsiders.

I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)

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