32 private links
will there be "considerable debate" this time around?
from Wikipedia:
"...there was a considerable debate over whether the United States should participate in the 1936 Games. Mahoney, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, led newspaper editors and anti-Nazi groups to protest against American participation in the Berlin Olympics. He contested that racial discrimination was a violation of Olympic rules and that participation in the Games was tantamount to support for the Third Reich."
"China has also taken steps to gain greater control over its technology sector, which flourished largely free from government influence.
Approvals of new video game titles have been frozen since a shift in regulation that has given the Communist Party’s propaganda department a direct role, an unusual degree of power over what had been a government process. Tencent, China’s video game giant and one of the world’s largest technology companies, has lost nearly one-third of its market value. Tencent declined to comment.
Private entrepreneurs are loath to speak out for fear of attracting official condemnation. But signs of distress aren’t hard to find.
Last month, Chen Shouhong, the founder of an investment research firm, asked a group of executive M.B.A. students — many of whom already owned publicly listed companies — to choose between panic and anxiety to describe how they feel about the economy. An overwhelming majority chose panic, according to a transcript. Mr. Chen declined to be interviewed."
"The growing use of immunity, however, has raised worries that private companies have been given the green light to win business contracts illegally.
A local prosecutor said they dropped the charge because Mr Yang had made good use of the state subsidy. “It is true that he has made up some facts,” said the prosecutor. “But the project is completed and is having a positive impact.”
cultural genocide through dystopian digital surveillance and Orwellian re-education
"One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is “to prevent problems before they happen” -- in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance."
"Sauytbay called the detention center a “concentration camp...much more horrifying than prison,” with rape, brainwashing and torture in a “black room” were people screamed. She and another former prisoner, Zaomure Duwati, also told the ICIJ detainees were given medication that made them listless and obedient, and every move was surveilled."
"The documents make clear that many of those detained have not actually done anything. One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is “to prevent problems before they happen” -- in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance."
we've all accepted profit over morality for too long. clearly keeping silent and looking the other way to China's abuses is not a policy that's worked for anyone in the western world. we're all complicit.
"It means that the N.B.A. has weighed China’s human rights abuses against China’s potential as a source of revenue, and it has decided that it can live with state policies like the detention of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang."
"American executives and policymakers initially reconciled themselves to following China’s rules by arguing that China’s turn toward capitalism, and its exposure to the United States, would gradually lead toward democracy and a greater respect for human rights. They argued, in effect, that silence was the most productive form of criticism.
It should now be clear that silence is merely complicity, no more or less.
It is the moral price the N.B.A. and other businesses are paying for making money in China."
wild world we live in where companies gladly destroy free speech and fairness to make a buck.
"Under the game's rules, players can be removed for behaviour that results in public disrepute, offends the public or damages its image, Blizzard said, adding that the two hosts were also fired."
No social security net, no family security and a pensions crisis will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. In the future, the economic gap between elderly China and middle-aged US will again widen. From this, we can say that the US economy will not be overtaken by China but, rather, by India. China’s economic vitality will continue to decline, which will have a disastrous impact on the global economy.
In our games, when we fight Russia and China,” “blue [the color traditionally representing the US in the games] gets its ass handed to it.” This is because the massive increase in military spending has transformed China’s military. China’s military power in the region is such that within the next 5-10 years Beijing may feel confident it could win in a regional conflict with the US. While its military buildup makes a tactical victory possible, in the larger strategic sense China faces an unprecedented demographic cliff, the country is dependent on trade with the rest of the world, and geography has left the country boxed in.
“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. “That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of Xinjiang. “This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. “That’s a genocidal policy.”
Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? The Chinese refer to the 19th century, during which the British oppressed them with two opium wars, as the Century of Humiliation. Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.
"trade wars are good, and easy to win" 2018 March 2
"Never said China was going to be easy" 2019 August 15
startling perspectives, given the West's hope for China opening up to liberalism, and China's history of squashing dissent
“Beating them to a pulp is not enough,” one person said about protesters on Tuesday, echoing an increasingly common sentiment on Weibo. “They must be beaten to death. Just send a few tanks over to clean them up.”
“The five-star flag has 1.4 billion guardians,” CCTV wrote indignantly to its 87 million followers on Weibo. “Repost! ‘I am a guardian of the flag!’ ”
It was reposted by more than 10 million people, including Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong martial arts film star.
In the boom years of globalisation, Hong Kong was always said to be the epitome of a commercial city whose citizens cared little for politics, as long as they could buy, sell and shop. But, across the world, the period when economic concerns always seemed to override politics is over. Once again, Hong Kong is at the forefront of a new era.
Today Hong Kong rests upon a delicate balance — one in which western liberal capitalism and Chinese authoritarianism find themselves juxtaposed, not always without conflict, but never without mutual benefit. Far from the parallel tracks that we had once placed our obdurate faith in, my fear is that “one country, two systems” will end its days as a violent clash between east and west. The death of an independent Hong Kong will mean the death of the peaceful coexistence we have all come to take for granted.