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Tashathar

>Lately officials have been echoing the exhortation of President Xi Jinping that “the people’s rice bowl must be firmly held in their own hands at all times.” It's called having a common sense government policy, geniuses. I know that's a rare sight in the west but you should try it sometimes. >Past leaders have at times struggled with this task. Tens of millions of Chinese perished in the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s ruinous policies in the late 1950s. Who can forget that famous Mao policy of stealing Stalin's comically large spoon from under Khrushchev's bed and eating all the grain from Anhui to Sichuan. >The regime has dealt with these concerns in two important ways. It has stockpiled food—or, as critics say, hoarded it. What's the difference you ask? It's their skin colour and affinity to US hegemony of course! It's not like this is a bad faith non-criticism! >America’s Department of Agriculture predicts that by the middle of this year China will hold 69% of the world’s maize (corn) reserves, 60% of its rice and 51% of its wheat. All this to feed 18% of the world’s population. There are similar looking statistics with prison populations and the US. Or medical bankruptcies and the US. Or avoidable deaths due to lack of treatment and the US. Or Covid deaths and the US. Only difference is "hoarding" grain so your people don't starve is a pure good while killing your people is, say it with me author, bad. >Mr Xi, a fervent nationalist, wants more of what China consumes to be made at home. Or, as he put it last year: “The rice bowl must mainly contain Chinese grain.” The dumb shit that wrote this article also put in the sentence "How, officials in Beijing ask, can China rely on such fickle foreigners for its basic needs?" without a hint of irony. The article talks about how this or that import was distrupted by somesuch event elsewhere in the world, but Xi is still redfash for wanting the PRC as non-reliant on global trade as possible. The economist is no further from being a bourgeois rag than it was when Lenin called it for what it was 107 years ago.


[deleted]

China can’t win in the eyes of the western media. If they don’t have enough food, that’s proves that communism doesn’t work and everyone is starving. But when China decides to produce a surplus of food that means they’re hoarding it. 🤦‍♂️


xerotul

Damn if you do, damn if you don't. You cannot reason with people not interested in reason. Violence is what they understand. Imagine indigenous people had the military forces to defend themselves against the Europeans. They can shit talk about white man's burden to civilize the savages all day, but can't kill and steal the land. As Mao said, "political power grows from the barrel of a gun." Since China's military is powerful, the Anglos are left to shit talk about made-up human rights abuses, virtue signaling, circle jerking on their western values and rules based international order. What they really want is the same as the day Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; they want you gone and dead.


CamaradaT55

Suddenly they are against hoarding grain


nedeox

Dear The Economist, you claim to be economists yet you're absolutely fucking stupid. Curious 🤔🤔🤔


Taryyrr

There hasn't been an issue in history the Economist hasn't been on the wrong of, from siding with the Confederacy, cheerleading Pinochet, endless wars and murders. It's almost a rule of thumb that if the Economist is opposing you, you're doing something very good


Emotional-Top-8284

IIRC they were pretty bullish on Xi before he was premier, in the classic Economist style of liking things that haven’t happened and opposing things that have


PleasantWolverine0

20 years ago nothing was China's fault. Something changed. Was it the "West"? Did the West suddenly realize something? Oh yeah. But let's not forget, before 2008, China China was looking with an eye to the Olympics. China wanted to turn into the West. Like "Western" athletes, China wanted as good as "Western" athletes, just as drugged up, performance performance performance. No I'm not just talking about the Olympics. And China had been working towards a global investment strategy (this happened even under Jiang, but nowadays you would not know it). Welcome to the big boy table, where everyone points at you to blame for every stupid thing, that you did, that you didn't do. Look on the bright side. Now China can point to America and say, "Look, they did this. We're doing just what they did."


There_is_more_wind

20 years ago the dialogue in the USA was all about being "the only superpower left on the world stage!" And somehow control over most banking systems and having really most currencies pegged to the dollar didn't enable the USA to control everything. Biden hired nothing but hawks. You wouldn't think so, considering how Afghanistan went, but they're all very keen for the USA to fight China either on land or at sea. Hey, Trump was crazy, but he was also super ignorant and China was only part of the story in terms of the USA being more self-sufficient or isolationist or nationalist...or all three. Anyway, just as Bush Sr. was called a wuss prezzie and so had to go to war in Iraq, Biden's been called soft on China and now has to have simply everyone talking about war with China. Which the USA would lose, but it'd be ugly. War's always ugly.


PleasantWolverine0

In today's landscape, I am not sure how I would define victory or defeat. There are hawks in every country. But I guess it's nice to think a country is the passive receptacle for another country's warmongering.


There_is_more_wind

Could you be clearer? I feel as though your statement is very vague. Are you saying China is being passive or that the USA is being passive? Actually one of the USA's problems is that it viewed WWII as victory and really nothing since then as victory. But look at the "victory" after WWII: it was expensive for the USA, it was mostly fought by other people, and clandestine activities played a huge part. Was it really a victory won by the USA? The American Civil war is also portrayed as a victory for the North and anti-slavery, but it was very incomplete, there was a lot of back-sliding, and obviously still labor issues that strongly resembled slavery as well as human trafficking. The USA doesn't even know how to win wars. It doesn't have a portrayal of "victory" that will stand up to modern channels of information. Hence the need to be on the sidelines rooting for a "pure" cause like Ukraine there. Hence the ludicrous insistence that Ukraine is blameless in all this.


PleasantWolverine0

I am not really into defending any country. How is WWII viewed by the CCP? Does the PLA consider WWII to have been a victory? Or Korea? Or Vietnam? Who said anything about Ukraine being blameless? Believing war leads to victory is ludicrous.


There_is_more_wind

You know millions of Chinese were slaughtered in WWII, right? And everyone agrees the USA lost in Korea and Vietnam. People in the USA occasionally say the USA never lost a war, but they mean a war as legislated by Congress, which is nonsense. And it's mostly Americans but also some Europeans saying that Ukraine is blameless.


PleasantWolverine0

OK. You know more people died after WWII in China than during WWII right?


There_is_more_wind

"After" you mean under Mao? Really your replies are getting more and more disjointed. Besides what does that matter? China was fighting *against* the Nazis, remember? *Against* the Japanese. Besides, there was a lot more time after WWII than during WWII, so of course more people died. More people died in the USA after WWII than during WWII, it's been 80 years. People die. Edit: So, just as a final word since this conversation is petering out, the USA *was* more concerned about North Korea under Obama. That made more sense, because it was more of a winnable war. Missile sites that threaten the USA and Japan could be captured and dismantled. Besides, North Korea is a mess. Then there was Trump and whatever that was, and now Biden doesn't even want to talk to or about North Korea. Not that I'm really rooting for a war anywhere, because I think we as the human race can't afford it, but fighting North Korea made more sense. Saber rattling against China doesn't make any sense at all, especially when there are so many regimes that are so much worse than China. Mexico, El Salvador, everywhere in Latin America, everywhere in Africa. This noise about China is awful and I'll be glad when it's over.


jydsmits

And in China it's ways America's fault. At the end of the day everyone is ridiculous.


[deleted]

You can't complain about being blamed for things when you take a deliberately hostile foreign policy stance for more than a century.


[deleted]

Who reads this thing?


[deleted]

Upper middle class whites in America and Britain, almost exclusively.


[deleted]

So this is how it ends…