China 2098: First Time Abroad
December 19, 2020 3:11 AM   Subscribe

Fan Wennan’s digital illustrations have caught fire on Chinese social media, depicting the world of 2098 where China is a high-tech superpower, with a humbled US that’s embraced communism; Wall Street is draped with hammer-and-sickle flags celebrating the “30th anniversary of the People’s Union of America”. The illustrations come amid China’s Communist Party claiming the pandemic has shown the superiority of its authoritarian model (NYT/Archive.is)
posted by adrianhon (54 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
only thing scarier than a two-party system is a one-party system.

some time ago it occurred to me I didn't really understand the (real-world) difference between "Communism" and "Socialism" . . . after some reflection on the 20th century my appraisal was Communism features an authoritarian party cadre organizing and controlling society to its benefit.

Democracy has its issues, mainly due to too many stupid people casting stupid votes, but its general 50% referenda requirement *should* be a low bar on any political system -- a system that can't keep 50% of the people happy is objectively a pretty sucky system!

but . . .
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/12/watch-anti-maskers-invade-target-store

2000 - 2020 has shown me that the USA has a rather toxic rot in society, spread among conservatives, and these people are not going away.

Their many idiocies (love of violence, self-righteous intolerance of differences, insistence on their "Biblical" bs, worship of self-centeredness, rejection of inconvenient facts, belief in their 'specialness') are indeed crippling us, and AFAICT will kill the USA as a going concern this century.

My namesake ancestor removed himself to America from Germany in the 1760s, mebbe my Deutschen Vaterland will take me back . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:08 AM on December 19, 2020 [7 favorites]


I have no love for the authoritarianism of China's government, but I've grown increasingly suspicious of Western media like the NYT who operate from the unquestioned assumption that the role of the US is to act as a check on other countries as if this were simply a disinterested stance that the US was taking as a favor to the planet.

The virtual eradication of poverty in China in the last thirty years is an absolutely staggering achievement: the socioeconomic equivalent of having built a space elevator. But you can't really capture that in an image, so I guess we get art of flying castles instead.

I am in a way envious of Chinese people who see a brighter future ahead.
posted by um at 4:29 AM on December 19, 2020 [17 favorites]


Mod note: A couple deleted. Let's avoid overarching generalizations describing a population of 1.4 billion people, or other broad pronouncements about how "they" are when it's a culture not your own. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 4:55 AM on December 19, 2020 [9 favorites]


only thing scarier than a two-party system is a one-party system.

I have to say that I would expect, for most humans alive on the planet today, this isn't true. Trump with nukes doing his half-assed Nazi shit—plus threatening a redux of the first and only battlefield use of nuclear weapons in human history, “fire and fury” to exterminate all life on the Korean peninsula, explicitly because he felt threatened—and fucking up 100-year-old color-by-numbers public health measures to the tune of what will probably be a half-million dead in the U.S. alone is, I think, actually scarier than the “boot stamping on a human face—forever” if the boot is attached to a competent dictator. Much less the apex of mixed-systems totalitarianism that is China.

The U.S. has faceplanted so hard coming into this century that we aren't even credible bad guys any more. Time was, if we weren't the shining city on a hill of pseudo-freedom and liberty, we could at least be implacable capitalist-imperialist petty-bourgeoisie-everyman freedom-for-the-common-masses-scripture-quoting devious devil-spawn to the Soviet-aligned bloc.

Now we're just the stupid, whiny, violent, rich, fracked-petroleum-guzzling assholes who tell women to shut up and that they're fat and throw candy at Angela Merkel during summits and have our willing enforcers group-choke unarmed Black people to death and shoot them, and still after centuries allow “private security consultants” slash East India Company rule goons to loose dogs on Indigenous protesters.

The virtual eradication of poverty in China in the last thirty years is an absolutely staggering achievement: the socioeconomic equivalent of having built a space elevator. But you can't really capture that in an image, so I guess we get art of flying castles instead.

The anecdote that captures it for me is that Deng Xiaoping, who attained power after Mao in the late 70s, promised “a Flying Pigeon in every household”. As in, a bicycle.

Now... supersonic bullet rail systems which Chinese firms are world-class competitors for the construction of, building artificial islands in a few months once it's determined to be of strategic value, the first lunar sample return mission for any nation in half a century is in the works, and bicycles are discarded like Kleenex.

The same way that, once upon a time, people the world over would compare the American slave empire and eradication of Indigenous people and theft of land and the occasional purge of Mormons to the thriving industry and wealth and say “eh... could be worse”, in the twenty-first century people are looking at China and panopticon surveillance and Uyghur genocide and revanchism over Taiwan and kind of shrugging, on the whole. Though fortunately, after global experiences of the twentieth century and some hindsight, with a more sophisticated eye.
posted by XMLicious at 5:08 AM on December 19, 2020 [22 favorites]


The virtual eradication of poverty in China in the last thirty years is an absolutely staggering achievement

This is true, but it's also true that it's come at a staggering cost in terms of environmental degradation and mass genocide of dozens of unique ethnic groups and loss of linguistic diversity. Which is another thing the PRC has in common with the USA. It's probably why the two countries find it so difficult to even talk to one another. They're too alike.

I guess i also find it odd that anyone in the PRC would celebrate a future USA adopting communism, a system that China itself has abandoned in exchange for its present one-party authoritarian state. Whatever the PRC is now it isn't communist or even particularly socialist.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:10 AM on December 19, 2020 [17 favorites]


only thing scarier than a two-party system is a one-party system.

Where does a one-party system that masquerades as a two-party system fit into this analysis?
posted by pompomtom at 5:13 AM on December 19, 2020 [18 favorites]


Those illustrations are good, but at least the ones I could see didn't really offer a future I want. (Although if the US is going to go socialist I hope it happens before 2068.) The one with the pink sky that I assume is some kind of space redoubt was the most cheering, maybe because I could imagine a lot of life and vividness going on inside.

I hope US-China relations are stable enough that I can go back to work in China again some day - when I was in my twenties I spent a couple of years there. I've always sort of wished I'd stayed, but it was so difficult and expensive to come home that I ended up feeling like I needed to be able to see my family more easily. Now, when there has been so much development, I assume that the kinds of jobs I was getting fairly easily on the coast aren't so easy to find, but I always wanted to live in a smaller city further inland and never got to. I'd really like to see all the new stuff and visit neighborhoods I used to know to see how they've changed.

In one of the Dorothy Sayers novels, Lord Peter remarks of some fancy shoemaker that it's not the brand that guarantees the quality, it's the quality that guarantees the brand. It's not the brand name on the political system that guarantees it, it's what the system does for its citizens. The Chinese government had the wit to understand that using all their power to stop COVID was the best choice available so that's what they did; their government was nimble enough to act, full of people who did not benefit from mass death and sickness and willing to leverage its extensive powers. This is in fact an argument in favor of the Chinese government - faced with the possibility of a hundred million deaths, they acted.

My bet is that as the climate crisis deepens, it's going to be more difficult to take a middling, muddling path - governments with a lot of power are going to be able to respond quickly and strategically to preserve life even if in an authoritarian mode, popular left governments willing to take radical steps are going to be able to respond and sustain popular support, but the cod-democratic ultra individualist ones are just going to be seized by the grifting right, like we are now.

It's a mistake to set up nations as sort of giant people who we envision as heroes or villains. I remember the cold war perfectly well and it was intensely stupid.
posted by Frowner at 5:15 AM on December 19, 2020 [21 favorites]


yeah I feel like maybe the US isn’t a great counterexample w/r/t political choice

in the 2020 election I voted for the old right-wing white guy I disliked less
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:16 AM on December 19, 2020 [5 favorites]


I am in a way envious of Chinese people who see a brighter future ahead.

I remember having optimism in the future. Back in the 70s, when we were flying to the moon and it felt like there was nothing unachievable...

I haven't felt that since maybe the mid-80s.
posted by hippybear at 5:22 AM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


This is cool art. If 17 year old me, browsing the sci fi section of the local bookstore, would see these on a book cover, I'd probably spend my hard earned paper route money on such a book, without knowing anything about it.
posted by carter at 5:40 AM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I have often felt pessimistic about the future as well, but then I was reminded of and remembered many of the seemingly impossible things the world has done, including people/entities in the US, have done since I was a kid. Diseases that used to be a death sentence that no longer are, cutting the cost of access to space fivefold or more, and partly through our government's addiction to free trade, helped cut global poverty by more than half in a couple of decades.

There remains much to be done, and things look especially bleak right now thanks to the seemingly crazy people, but it is not the first time or the last that major change brings out the worst in our fellow humans.
posted by wierdo at 5:44 AM on December 19, 2020


Also, quite honestly, if you were to task a government agency with developing a ubiquitous surveillance system that could also spread disinformation and propaganda, and also manipulate its users seamlessly, and also make it irresistible to use, you could do a lot worse than come up with Silicon Valley. Maybe this is also about our current wave of tech/disruption having affordances that increasingly jibe well with how China sees itself culturally, and where it wants to go.
posted by carter at 6:06 AM on December 19, 2020


The Chinese government had the wit to understand that using all their power to stop COVID was the best choice available so that's what they did; their government was nimble enough to act, full of people who did not benefit from mass death and sickness and willing to leverage its extensive powers. This is in fact an argument in favor of the Chinese government - faced with the possibility of a hundred million deaths, they acted.

It's kind of weird to me that so many of the discussions I've seen on this topic have framed the situation as a choice between two options: China-style heavy authoritarianism and American-style heavily-individualistic liberalism. That framing omits all the countries who have (a) successfully handled the pandemic and (b) don't totally fit into either category, like Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, and more. It also conveniently ignores the various authoritarian governments who have massively failed the test, as in Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and more.

Clearly a society that treats government as a legitimate source of effective action is necessary. Clearly a society that expects and is able to demand effective action from its government is necessary. But there have been countless cases throughout history where authoritarian governments have been either unable to protect their citizens or uninterested in doing so. And we're seeing how democracy in and of itself is also not enough to guarantee ability and inclination.

So when it comes to thinking about how societies and governments should be structured, I don't think that treating authoritarian-vs-liberal as the two choices we have is a good framing, and I'm not convinced that restricting the debate to that single axis is even useful. There are multiple dimensions in play, and a lot of different measures of what makes for "good" government that I don't think it's legitimate to cherry-pick from. (TBH it's a little weird seeing such a one-dimensional defense specifically of the Chinese approach from you, Frowner - you've always seemed so involved in human rights issues and LGBTQ issues and so deeply aware of all the ways people can be harmed in a hegemonic society. Why argue in favor of either the US or the China model? There are other models available.)
posted by trig at 6:16 AM on December 19, 2020 [42 favorites]


The thing is, I think it's a lie when people say the Chinese government doesn't care about Chinese people. It clearly does. It expends vast amounts of money and resources on their behalf. You can argue that they only care about Han Chinese to the detriment of other ethnicities, or that the forms of care it provides are heavy-handed and rooted in an authoritarian and patriarchal sensibility, but in a way these things are at least understandable when contrasted against Western democracies where we see ideology trumping human need over and over and over again and it just seems like a system designed by and for inhuman sociopaths.
posted by um at 6:25 AM on December 19, 2020 [5 favorites]


Communism is the name of the tin, sure. Much like every other communist nation that’s ever existed it’s hard to take the name seriously when the party elite ride around in luxury cars and technically not-impoverished-of-basic-needs workers live in barred dormitories before walking over to make phones or whatever.

I get the feeling that China is currently in our 60s/70s mode? The mode where the majority of (men, majority ethnic group) working can keep their heads down, do modestly well, and thrive while “dangerous” elements highlighting all the failure modes for citizens run a fairly vibrant (and state repressed) counter culture.

I also don’t find it surprising that there would be views of the US as a nation in serious decline. It’s been forty years+ of waffling between competent people afraid to do things that help people consistently and a gang of alt-reality morons who think tax cuts are good, torture makes us safe and works, security theater without functional followup is proper, etc etc etc.

As noted above: it’s a pretty good scam to be part of for both sides! Successful countries in the nordic, Canadian, New Zealand mold are pretty well just better all around are ignored and made to not be a part of the conversation of what’s possible. These countries might not have the capability alone to be the World Police but they also don’t fuck up large swaths of the planet following in the doomed footsteps of Soviet troops we laughed at not 30 years prior.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:32 AM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


"Embraced communism" does not compute, and I have a lot of trouble parsing this strange doublespeak about China being a communist or even socialist state. It is pretty clearly and obviously a corporatist / capitalist one party police state, about as far from "socialism" as I can imagine a place being...

This says nothing about the Chinese people - there is a healthy democracy in Taiwan.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:35 AM on December 19, 2020 [5 favorites]


(TBH it's a little weird seeing such a one-dimensional defense specifically of the Chinese approach from you, Frowner - you've always seemed so involved in human rights issues and LGBTQ issues and so deeply aware of all the ways people can be harmed in a hegemonic society. Why argue in favor of either the US or the China model? There are other models available.

But that's just what I'm arguing against - the idea that if you say "the Chinese government responded well to X" you're saying "hooray for the Chinese government, this has nothing to do with the choices available in China to the actually existing Chinese government, it just means that the Chinese government is unambiguously good and so is authoritarianism, a system of government enacted identically around the world".

See, this was what struck me as so stupid about the cold war - if you said, "given the material constraints, the Soviet medical system was pretty good, actually, and also the vacation resorts for workers were good" then you were a red-hot commie useful idiot.

I'd also challenge the idea that we're just sort of...picking amongst governments, like we can just select a operating system and totally overhaul everything - so the point would be to decide if "we" want to be more like New Zealand or more like Vietnam or more like Canada or more like China, etc etc etc and then we just...become. Even if everyone in the United States voted to install a Chinese style authoritarian government we wouldn't "be like China" because the historical forces that shaped us are so different. And of course, we don't have the option - the recent election shows exactly how limited action within the current system is.

I feel like this kind of conversation become a stan conversation - Vietnam good! Russia bad! China arguable! - and we're supposed to talk about China or Vietnam or Russia strictly in terms of whether we individually think that they are moral societies. And then the sophisticated angle becomes also recognizing that the United States is bad.

But there are no moral nations, there just aren't. I mean, just how good is, eg, Australia? Fantastic on the pandemic, shitty on lots of other stuff. New Zealand has some pretty serious problems, too. Vietnam isn't that great for LGBTQ people.

The point in all of this ought to be to try to understand the....I guess the operating range of any system and try to figure out what can actually be done and what is likely to happen.

~~
I'd argue that there are a number of governments that can deal with pandemics a lot better than the US, that this is for different reasons but that governments like ours are uniquely unfitted for the problems coming down the road. I freely admit, I worry that there may well be a forced trade-off coming where many of the governments that can respond to the climate crisis are the richest and most functional of the authoritarian ones.

It seems like being able to wield substantial power from the center is essential - whether that's authoritarian power or truly popular power.
posted by Frowner at 7:08 AM on December 19, 2020 [30 favorites]


(a) successfully handled the pandemic and (b) don't totally fit into either category, like Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia

The thing is, those aren't all great comparisons because countries like New Zealand and Australia handled things early by preventing community spread of covid taking hold through strict immigration control and early hard lockdowns, an option that China absolutely did not have. Are there any countries where covid ran rampant through a city that have successfully suppressed it? I'm not saying it IS an A or B situation, but you really can't compare China's response to New Zealand's in a meaningful way.
posted by stillnocturnal at 7:17 AM on December 19, 2020


There is no such thing as "China". The nation you think of as China is an empire, consisting of many different ethnic groups, languages and cultures. The No. 1 priority of the government in Beijing is to make you forget this fact.

Also: something is clearly wrong with the world when a cartoon in Europe causes more international outrage than a million Muslims in slave labour and re-education camps in China.
posted by Termite at 8:02 AM on December 19, 2020 [8 favorites]


Where does a one-party system that masquerades as a two-party system fit into this analysis?

It’s fits in back during the Clinton Administration, the last time the phrase “BuT DEmOCraTs aND REpUbliCaNs aRe eXActLY thE SaME!” could be said by someone who wasn’t pants on head insane.
posted by sideshow at 8:39 AM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


Amen to that, and the other trick the BJ gov't wants you to believe is "the CCP and the Chinese people are the same".
posted by Meatbomb at 8:40 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


It’s a bit off topic I suppose but - when I think of China I mostly feel sad. For a lot of reasons, the Muslim genocide definitely among them.

But there’s another more abstract reason that’s hard to put my finger on. I guess in my head I think of China as being....ancient? Ancient. An ancient empire with an incredibly long and rich history. A region of the world that has been active and important for thousands of years, far longer than my nation of birth. A place that is absolutely 100% essential for understanding world history and technological evolution and social organization and art and literature and so much more.

The sadness comes because I don’t have a lot of confidence that I will ever get to visit and spend time learning and absorbing Chinese culture and history in person. As an American my nation has instilled in me a sense of otherness and danger while also downplaying or avoiding teaching the culture and history. The idea of traveling to and living in a place like China feels impossible in a way that doesn’t apply to many other places.

My school cohort are about 75% Chinese students and I have made some friends and they have shared some of their nation with me ( though we mostly just play league of legends together) and i have enjoyed some literature and art that makes it’s way over here but it’s not enough! And the overall feeling of inaccessibility to such a vital place and people makes me feel very sad.

I also feel this way about Russia and much of the Middle East. I am lucky to go to a school where I get to make friends from Moscow and the UAE but I just...yeah.

I hope I get to visit and stay a while, some day.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:52 AM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


Deng Xiaoping, who attained power after Mao in the late 70s, promised “a Flying Pigeon in every household”. As in, a bicycle. Now … bicycles are discarded like Kleenex.

For many people in China at the time, a Flying Pigeon would have improved their quality of life immensely. These discarded crappy bike-share bikes — even though the thought of any bike being discarded makes me sad — added very little to anyone's quality of life. Each one might've added a sixth decimal place to the IPO price of one of their now-defunct companies. And while the Flying Pigeon was made of materials we'd now consider obsolete and heavy, they were built to withstand rough usage and minimal maintenance. The same absolutely can't be said of some of these disposable bike-share bikes: I saw ones that looked like they had sleeve bearings in the headset; good for one trip, pretty much.

There would have been no supersonic bullet trains without the humble Flying Pigeon to start dreams moving.
posted by scruss at 9:16 AM on December 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


I also find it odd that anyone in the PRC would celebrate a future USA adopting communism, a system that China itself has abandoned in exchange for its present one-party authoritarian state

Yeah, Communism = Authoritarianism to a lot of people outside China, but calling the mainland "communist" today is as absurd as calling North Korea Democratic (which they do anyway).
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


That Communist US flag is fascinating. Is the central motif 1/2 a notched gear?
posted by doctornemo at 9:48 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


Why is no one talking about the Leek Museum?
posted by betweenthebars at 9:56 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


There's no Leek Museum and I didn't see a Leek Museum. How could there be a Leek Museum? The 14th Transnational People's Congress declared that leeks were counterrevolutionary and had never actually existed. How can there be a museum to a nonexistent vegetable, comrade?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:25 AM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


(though I have to admit I wouldn't mind seeing a reboot of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated where Fred is obsessed with leeks)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:27 AM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I remember having optimism in the future. Back in the 70s

Just a reminder that the 1970s, like every other decade since the Industrial Revolution, was living on borrowed time; the lack of optimism we have now, looking out on a veritable jackpot of environmental and social catastrophes, is a direct result of decisions made during those "optimistic" decades.

The Greatest Generation and the Boomers partied pretty fucking hard, and while I'm sure it must have been fun, now we have to clean up the mess—and at least from where I sit, it takes the shine off their "optimism" about the future.

They were so optimistic about the future, they stole it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:07 AM on December 19, 2020 [13 favorites]


I definitely think we’ve found the limits of democracy. In fact, are there any democracies that have survived any appreciable amount of time?

I’m jealous of China’s ability to take the long view of things. When your history dates back 4,000 years, and you are planning 1,000 years into the future you have an intrinsic advantage over a democracy that thinks 2-4 years into the future.

America’s crimes are far worse than China’s, and I’d much sooner trust China to steward the world into the future.
posted by karst at 12:37 PM on December 19, 2020


The sadness comes because I don’t have a lot of confidence that I will ever get to visit and spend time learning and absorbing Chinese culture and history in person.

If you want to do that mainland China is NOT the place. Sorry, spoiler alert / trigger warning, I am pretty jaded about the place after the last 4+ years here.

1. Mao and the Red Guards burnt out all the culture and history in the 70s, the "Cultural Revolution". That was alongside the drive towards industrialisation / modernisation, such that today Chinese people (at least big city "modern" Chinese people ) have very little contact with all of that art and history and culture you imagine yourself absorbing.

2. This place is new new NEW in all respects. The cities are huge and bustling and are all made to cookie cutter patterns over the last 30 years, most of it in the last 20, and much of it brand spanking new. Not specific to China, really more a part of modern urban malaise, but in Chinese cities there is no "there" there... it is all the fucking same, no soul, too much concrete. Culture is surface, restored and Disneyfied temples and ancient structures that Chinese tourists flock to for a photo op.

If you want "real" Chinese culture, or culture that connects more deeply to ancient China, you will be better served in Taiwan or anywhere there is an old historical established diaspora - San Fransisco, Vancouver, Malaysia, etc. These are the places you will see temples and shrines being used as intended, with some knowledge by the practitioners.

Caveat: white man who understands very little Chinese but is interested and attentive to the environment around me.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:41 PM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


When your history dates back 4,000 years, and you are planning 1,000 years into the future you have an intrinsic advantage over a democracy that thinks 2-4 years into the future.

America’s crimes are far worse than China’s, and I’d much sooner trust China to steward the world into the future.


Trust who you want I guess, but tortured comparisons of "crimes" and simplistic conception of the history of the modern Chinese state aren't lending this position a ton of credibility for me.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:41 PM on December 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


Leeks (韭菜) are a Chinese netizen slang: “Leek.” Also borrowed from stock markets: It’s a metaphor for newbie investors who get “harvested”—that is, they follow the lead of seasoned investors but often end up losing their money. Fortunately, they can grow back when other naive newcomers spring up to replace them.

It seems it's meant to be a museum to exploiter workers/investors at the old NYSE.

Anyways, this looks like one of those sci-fi alternate history book covers that's meant to grab your attention. But when you go home and read the book you find that either the event on the cover never happens OR mmmaybe some version of it happens, but it's in the third book of the series and not the one you're holding in your hands.

It looks like they are trying to show this is the US losing a major conflict or war (either cold or hot) with China, because that's usually the time when a country's flag changes pretty drastically. And I find that unrealistic. Not in the sense that the US could never lose a war, but that a US embroiled in such a conflict would look this stable in 2098. China itself went through 100 years of slow collapse, civil AND global conflict before the Party drove the Nationalist Party out and emerged victorious. And even then it was ruling a country that took the brunt of war, famine, and destruction and took another 50 years to recover.

When I look at this, I'm thinking this is basically NYC turned into a Potemkin-model city by a puppet-US government trying to impress the CPC. The People's Union of America, or PUA (oof, not a good acronym), has official maps published still showing the old borders from the 2030s. In truth, they really only fully control NYC, DC, Hawaii, American Samoa, Alcatraz Island, and one of the Channel Islands in SoCal. The rest of the United States is broken up and in a mostly peaceful but uneasy truce among former states turned national governments, Corporate/Silicon Valley owned city-states, and QDominionist warlords.

(And, no, this is not a scenario I want to happen or think it's super plausible. It's just less of a China-wankfest and I will add if there is a US-China conflict, it would be a stupid mistake for China to do what the US did and try to mold the US into it's own image.)
posted by FJT at 3:04 PM on December 19, 2020


I agree that China and the USA have many similarities. There's a sort of... mania both here and there, that, say, Europe or Russia don't share. A willingness and ability to get things done, to dream big dreams, that can turn into delusions of grandeur, hyper-religiosity, and then into paranoia and persecution.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:08 PM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


today Chinese people (at least big city "modern" Chinese people ) have very little contact with all of that art and history and culture you imagine yourself absorbing.

This probably has to do with the fact that you don't understand Chinese... most modern Chinese people are pretty conversant with old literature, poetry, painting, and calligraphy. Like, schoolchildren recite Li Bai. Granted, religion has changed a lot, but though I'm from one of the old diasporas (both sides of my family left the mainland before the CCP was even founded), I was raised Catholic, so I can't really say.
posted by airmail at 4:35 PM on December 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


For me, more interesting than questions about any accuracy of prediction is simply the seeming increase of work coming from China that carries more of an internationally aspirational theme to it around Chinese influence on the world, which seems to match their continued growth in relative standing and power as well as carrying something of that old US notion of ideological importance in/through cultural hegemony.

It's something that seems to either be more able to be seen by those of us outside China now and/or coming from a more confident position in regards to the image China projects, at least through some of its cultural output, as there are of course other perspectives too, just as there were when the US was asserting its growing cultural dominance. It's a bit different, in other words, than, say Soviet era mass culture or that of earlier 20th century Chinese works that found outside audience.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:45 PM on December 19, 2020


Well, responding to the last link, I certainly wouldn't tar democracy or representative government in general with the present example of the US. For one, it's very much "Democracy 1.0", and its constitution is as much designed to prevent government action to protect entrenched interests as it is to enable the government to enact legislation to "promote the general welfare". Right now the US congress can't even agree to pass funding to support its citizens through this crisis, and its unlikely much will change to enable better responses to future pandemics. For the past four years the salient political divide between factions capable of controlling both major political parties was over whether Trump was the savior of America or an anti-christ that needed to be destroyed at all costs.
posted by eagles123 at 4:56 PM on December 19, 2020


That Communist US flag is fascinating. Is the central motif 1/2 a notched gear?
It's the current symbol of the CPUSA.
posted by heteronym at 7:00 PM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


America’s crimes are far worse than China’s

I don't think this is true, nor do I think there's a really direct comparison at the extremities. (←despite my best efforts, all links in that FPP are now broken; here are a couple of other ones at the Internet Archive, if you can stand watching an infinite series of short clips.)

But note that, during the same time as the US has been around, China as a nation has also had planned military genocides and mass seizure of land from minoritiesChuang Guandong (simplified Chinese: 闯关东; traditional Chinese: 闖關東; pinyin: Chuǎng Guāndōng, literally "Crashing into Guandong" with Guandong being an older name for Manchuria)—see also Tibet and Uyghur regions and elsewhere, of course.

A marked difference would be that China itself was a victim of colonialist invasions and depredations in the same period, was subject to having biological and chemical weapons tested on its populace by Imperial Japanese conquerors (the leaders of which were granted immunity from war crimes prosecution so that the US military could benefit from their resulting expertise), and had their civil war directly interfered with. (...again, in probably the most ridiculously and monstrously offensive way possible, by the United States and allies.)
posted by XMLicious at 8:24 PM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


The virtual eradication of poverty in China in the last thirty years

It's all a bit complicated.
posted by the cydonian at 1:46 AM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


> I worry that there may well be a forced trade-off coming where many of the governments that can respond to the climate crisis are the richest and most functional of the authoritarian ones. It seems like being able to wield substantial power from the center is essential - whether that's authoritarian power or truly popular power.

The Super-Scary Theory of the 21st Century - "In an era of internet driven unrest, authoritarian states capable of managing the internet may have a significant advantage."

Ein Volk, Ein Reich: "'I'm extremely pro-Taiwan, but my non-crazy pro-China friends have explained it to me as a means to end the century plus subjugation of China and (ethnic Han) Chinese interests by the West by having a single unified strong Chinese voice and government.'"[1,2]

Is China just too big, technologically advanced, and economically robust to be resisted? - "Answer: No, but we better get our act together fast."[3,4]

otoh...
China's Bungled Overseas Loans Reveal a Key Weakness - "The nation's vaunted Belt and Road Project was meant to build influence around the world. Instead, it's stirred resentment."

Immigration and urbanism as a way of building national power? - "Should we bulk up our country with 670 million more people, in order to balance China? What would an America of one billion people look like? What would it be like to live there?"

@GeorgeTakei: When I was a boy, politicians who were sworn to uphold the Constitution failed us, choosing instead to imprison my entire community of 120,000, most of us citizens. When we came out of the camps, we could have given up on America entirely. But despite all we had been through those four years, we still believed in the promise of America..."

also btw...
-Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
-China's Rebel City - The Hong Kong Protests
-Agnes Chow, revered in Japan as the 'goddess of democracy', faces prison in Hong Kong
-Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait speaks about the detention of Haze Fan, who works for the Bloomberg News bureau in Beijing, on suspicion of endangering national security

> The sadness comes because I don't have a lot of confidence that I will ever get to visit and spend time learning and absorbing Chinese culture and history in person.

I will never get to go to Hong Kong
So it’s the end of Hong Kong as we know it. But in fact that Hong Kong had already begun to end many years ago, and these protests were in some way a last gasp. Under steady Chinese pressure, Hong Kong’s status as a free-wheeling financial entrepot has long given way to an oligarch-dominated sclerotic economy based on real estate. This has led to a loss of economic opportunity and sky-high rents, which helped fuel the anger of the protesters.

The freewheeling Hong Kong that I had seen hinted at in movies like Chungking Express, that had given rise to Stephen Chow’s mo lei tau comedies and Jackie Chan’s zany kung fu and Chow-Yun Fat’s thrilling action movies, is a place you just can’t go anymore. Hence the title of this post. Sure, every city in every era is a place that will never quite exist again; you can’t visit San Francisco in the Summer of Love, or attend a salon in 1700s Paris. But Hong Kong is something else — a nation that never really had a chance to become a nation, a unique and special little civilization being swallowed up by the Manifest Destiny of a vast and implacable empire.
> This place is new new NEW in all respects.

The Celestial Empire - "When I blogged from Beijing in the summer of 2019, some readers were surprised that I found parts of the city as aesthetically interesting as places in Tokyo or other iconic cities. Everything is advancing very rapidly in China, as you can tell from the videos."
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM on December 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


I travel to Hong Kong and China a few times a year, occasionally to Taiwan too (or did before Covid) .... and hope to again (but I'm just a western bystander).

Remember Hong Kong has never had much real democracy, the lawyers get a seat in their Legislative council, so do the accountants and the Insurance biz .... the English were never very big on democracy in Hong Kong, the locals were not going to vote for them. Democracy where real people got to vote and get a seat at the table was an afterthought once England realised they were going to have to give it back, they still didn't get an equal vote.

There's a long history of people demonstrating against the powers that be for the right to control their own country.

I don't really expect things to have changed much next time I go back (from my Western point of view), I'm sure it's different for the locals. Really though what I see is a fight for the minds of the next generation, I think that the mainland government has erred by not giving the current crop of HKG kids a vision of the future that they can buy into, can aspire to - it's why they're in the streets.

On the other hand I think that we're all being screwed over by Trump's closing of trade with China, the best thing we can be doing right now is to have our economies intertwingled so that elites on all sides have too much to lose - that means not freezing out Huawei (or Apple or Google) - I hope Biden makes moves to reduce tensions
posted by mbo at 3:23 AM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


China is definitely gaining influence, but they aren't yet playing the soft power game as well as the US even in its currently diminished state. They've been making huge investments in countries around the world but have not been receiving the political influence they expected/hoped to gain for the most part. It has gotten them a significant economic boost from exports of high value industrial goods, though. Perhaps temporary, if they never actually get paid.

Ideally, this will end up stopping the game entirely if the US' soft power continues to atrophy since it has almost always ended up being antidemocratic.
posted by wierdo at 7:05 AM on December 20, 2020


> The virtual eradication of poverty in China in the last thirty years

It's all a bit complicated.

It does not seem so complicated to me. Unfairness, grave injustice, social inequality, and even horrifying crimes against humanity haven't been eliminated—it's the poverty that's been eliminated. All of those other things are very important but don't erase the accomplishment of eradicating poverty, which I think just about anyone would be proud of, had a nation they considered their own pulled off the same feat.

The only actual criticisms of the Chinese program of poverty eradication itself in that article are “everyone wasn't elevated to be of independent means”, which, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't something which has been accomplished anywhere, and the hypothetical that “maybe it's temporary”:
Many of those lifted out of poverty in recent years are dependent on government help and in danger of falling back below the line after the campaign is declared a success.
It's like the Soviet Union's eradication of illiteracy: innumerable people were starved to death in the Golodomor, tortured by secret police and thrown in gulags, tens of millions ground to dust as cannon fodder against the Nazi war machine at the behest of Stalin and the WWII Allies, and of course, ironically, kept from reading even quite a bit of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union's own literary works by government censorship, but Soviet citizens really actually could read at much higher rates than their predecessors:
In 1897, the overall literacy rate of the Russian Empire was an estimated 24%, with the rural literacy rate at 19.7%.⁽¹⁾ [...] By 1939, however, male literacy was at 90.8 and female literacy had increased to 72.5%.⁽³⁷⁾ According to the 1939 Soviet Census, literate people were 89.7% (RSFSR, ages 9–49). During the 1950s, the Soviet Union had become a country of nearly 100% literacy.⁽³⁸⁾
My favorite Soviet propaganda poster. These are hardly unalloyed goods, but they're achievements nonetheless.
posted by XMLicious at 7:24 AM on December 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


Well I think sociologists and economists would agree (once in a blue moon) on the necessity of a key analytic step: They eliminated poverty at what cost? If the price is the obeisance of the populace and a national narrative that strengthens a fundamentally autocratic government... Pick an episode of Star Trek and see how such a society plays out in 100, 1000 years.

It is always the price paid. There is no free lunch.
posted by polymodus at 3:02 AM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


Do you think it was that transactional, though? It kinda seems like the costs were pre-paid a long time ago in China, or at least a substantial downpayment was already made. The end of Deng's rule, preceding the southern tour “it's okay to just make money and consumer products and skyscrapers now” bit, was also the (most notorious) running-people-over-with-tanks bit.

In the case of literacy in the Soviet Union, for what-ifs I'd think it would've been far better had the February Revolution government fended off takeover by the Bolsheviks. But as a nation the Russian Empire they were leaving behind was not exactly a blissful haven of liberty—Emancipation Reform of 1861, some of the peasants participating in the revolutions had been born the property of Russian noblemen; constant pogroms and mass murder of Jews; the Emperor's Cossack Guard mass slaughter of unarmed protesters led by a priest in Red Square on Bloody Sunday 1905. In the Russian language there's the Greek-derived word “autocracy” but there's also tsarskoye samoderzhaviye, “царское самодержавие”, which is translated as “Tsarist autocracy” but is a different word, sort of a “platinum edition autocracy” reserved for the Tsar which meant something like “no, really, the Tsar or Tsarina can just set up an oprichnina and torture to death or chop off the beards of the boyars whenever she or he wants, none of that Magna Carta stuff here.”

I'm actually sitting here wracking my brain and having no success coming up with any large-population advancement in human welfare that wasn't basically built on top of a pyramid of human skulls (or, if you go far enough back, specifically Neanderthal or Denisovan skulls.) I'm feeling like you probably have to go back to the point in history when whatever you want to define as the first humans got their turn at the Sahara pump and spread into regions with no humans whatsoever and suddenly had access to vastly more hunting and gathering resources per capita, though that would have been a tiny population by modern standards.

Not that it's an end-justifying-the-means thing or that we shouldn't constantly be like, “oh, hey, I'm sitting on a throne of skulls”, we just shouldn't be nationally or ethnically biased in recognizing the resulting accomplishments in improving human welfare, or scoff too snarkily at things which aren't easy to pull off, y'know?
posted by XMLicious at 7:56 AM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


BBC:
China’s ‘tainted’ cotton: New Uighur cotton evidence 'game-changer' for fashion brands

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang, according to new research seen by the BBC. [...]

Alongside a large network of detention camps, in which more than a million are thought to have been detained, allegations that minority groups are being coerced into working in textile factories have already been well documented.

The Chinese government denies the claims, insisting that the camps are “vocational training schools” and the factories are part of a massive, and voluntary, “poverty alleviation” scheme.

But the new evidence suggests that upwards of half a million minority workers a year are also being marshalled into seasonal cotton picking under conditions that again appear to raise a high risk of coercion. [...]

The documents, a mixture of online government policy papers and state news reports, show that in 2018 the prefectures of Aksu and Hotan sent 210,000 workers “via labour transfer” to pick cotton for a Chinese paramilitary organisation, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. [...]

References to “guiding” the pickers to “consciously resist illegal religious activities” indicate that the policies are designed predominantly for Xinjiang’s Uighurs and other traditionally Muslim groups.
The Wikipedia article of Adrian Zenz, the German researcher whom the BBC credits with uncovering this latest evidence related to the Uyghur genocide and who has also done much of the other seminal research exposing and documenting treatment of Uyghurs in China and bringing the issue to the attention of the international community, has been subject to malicious editing by the 50 Cent Army and other interests aligned with the government of the People's Republic of China.

So, for anyone with time on their hands and steel in their backs, it'd be appreciated if you could keep an eye on that page or even dig through the history and restore any valid content that has been removed. (And Zenz himself may be personally dealing with harassment, I haven't looked into that.)

In recent years the PRC has harassed Taiwanese and Hongkonger Wikipedians and in September the Chinese government blocked the observer-status membership of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the NGO parent organization of Wikipedia, in the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, which has input into international copyright laws.
posted by Charles Bronson Pinchot at 8:33 AM on December 22, 2020


I'm hesitant to put much stock in what Zenz says. He runs an anti-communist website, but more importantly he doesn't seem to read or speak any form of Chinese, which is the minimum requirement IMO for anyone the media calls a 'China expert'. His primary method of research was apparently using Baidu and Google Translate (before the Chinese censors took most of the primary source material offline).

I don't know what is happening in Xianjing and even going by the Chinese government's own policy documents it sounds heavy-handed: at least 18 months in detention centres for 'de-radicalization' of young Muslim men, ostensibly to teach them a trade and indoctrinate them in the value of Chinese society so they don't go fight in Syria. But they don't seem to be prisons or gulags or death camps or any of the things Sinophobes insist they are: they're being built in the same communities these men are part of and (according to the government policy documents again) they are eligible for day release to attend various family matters.

Once again, I don't like this stuff, and I think you can have a reality-based dislike of the Chinese government's approach to dealing with the radicalization of young men without going off the deep end the way Zenz has. It's not that what he says is unbelievable, but the thing with extraordinary claims is that they require extraordinary evidence.
posted by um at 2:06 AM on December 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


There have been numerous eye-witness accounts from escapees. I recall one Kazakh woman that managed to get out to the West, and she recounted some brutal stuff.

Every bit of the very limited and restricted media that manages to get out of Xinjiang points to very ugly very brutal business there, I see no reason to give the CCP the benefit of the doubt. Even the good news stage managed stuff they have released themselves looks like hostages claiming everything is fine for fear of their lives after the cameras are turned off.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:59 AM on December 23, 2020


...they don't seem to be prisons or gulags or death camps or any of the things Sinophobes insist they are...

Er, can you point to an example of anyone insisting that?

All I have seen in US and European media is depiction of these camps as ethnic concentration camps—in the original sense which the US, for example, initially applied to what were later euphemised as “internment” of American citizens of Asian descent—and parallels to the láojiào “re-education through labor” and láogǎi “reform through labor” systems, except that whereas those systems were designed to reinforce the Chinese Communist Party's versions of Han and Chinese culture, the Uyghur re-education camps are designed to eliminate any self-determined ethnic distinctions or autonomy on the part of the Uyghurs.

Obviously at least as much, if not more is going on than, like, happened on North American reservations during the past couple of centuries, right? The rez doesn't have guard towers visible from satellites in space.

Are you seriously suggesting that the “reality-based” perspective on this is that the Chinese government asked nicely for everyone of the same ethnicity to submit themselves to re-education, and out of self-doubt and an ardor for civic duty Uyghurs did so by the hundreds of thousands or millions? If that were actually true it seems like the re-education wouldn't be needed in the first place. And I don't know how re-locating cemeteries away from public transportation termini would fit in, or the other obvious measures disrupting cultural institutions and infrastructure.

I'm not really sure what hasn't been proved in regards to cultural genocide by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs. Like... western nations are specialists at doing this, both at home and in colonies, though hardly the only ones—that's why we have pretty good criteria for analyzing it and its effects. These aren't “extraordinary claims” by any means. We're still in the business, in the US: more and more Indigenous North American languages go extinct every year.
posted by XMLicious at 8:27 AM on December 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


The conversation upthread about New Zealand was, as a New Zealander, a bit weird.

"I'd also challenge the idea that we're just sort of...picking amongst governments, like we can just select a operating system and totally overhaul everything - so the point would be to decide if "we" want to be more like New Zealand or more like Vietnam or more like Canada or more like China, etc etc etc and then we just...become."

Uhhhh... as much as I think the American political system is bizarre, and you're clinging to a constitution and system that only made sense when you were trying to deal with the population and technology of the 1700s (e.g. sending riders on horseback as your electoral college because this is pre-freaking electricity or modern communication).
In this case, uh, that kind of is what we did though? NZ's Covid response is directly related to the prior election where we picked our Government?

Rolling back, there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding here that New Zealand was just going to 'naturally' get through this Covid thing through our system of Government:
HahahaahHAAAAAhahahaha. Oh god. Oh hell no. You don't understand. We would have been doomed.

If we'd had our National party (center right) in power, rather than Labour (center left) we WOULD have a much worse situation with Covid.
We'd be as screwed as Europe, and I highly doubt we'd have got it under control.
And any Australians, do feel free to speak up if you think too much credit is being taken here - But given the Australian Government frequently announced the same border & health measures etc a day or two after NZ announced them, I'm pretty sure Australia's Covid success was directly influenced by a certain amount of trans-Tasman political rivalry/shaming, or the sense that Jacinda Ardern/Labour/NZ was being more 'decisive' etc. Do you really think Scott Morrison would have taken those steps right after New Zealand if NZ, well, *hadn't* been going first?

Right, so we would NOT HAVE HAD the Covid response we had, if Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Government were not in power.

And how close were we to that happening? Well, Labour only got 36.89% of the vote to Nationals 44.45% at the previous election. See that much smaller number?
Yep. Labour only juuuuust managed to scrape into power because they formed a minority coalition with two smaller parties.
Do you understand how close we came to being as or more screwed as everyone else?


People blab on about being an island? Yeah, well we were a country economically dependent on *high tourism*, where visitors from the People's Republic of China were our SECOND HIGHEST source of visitors. We have nearly as many international tourists visit our country each year, as we have in total population. Ok, I exaggerate slightly, it's *80%*.
And we only had the capacity to do 100-200 Covid tests per day... For our whole country.
And dramatically insufficient ventilators or ICU beds.
We didn't have enough masks for our essential health workers, let alone our population.
Look at our pandemic preparedness rating - we were SHIT. Actually, look at the pandemic preparedness ratings just to see how hard many countries, like the US, have *dropped the ball*.


We went hard BECAUSE we were *not prepared*.
We couldn't go high-tech, we had to go old school, and basically shut down the whole country and isolation, WHILE we quickly upgraded our testing capacity, our masks, and our pandemic response. And internationally, quarantine and isolation is what has worked. We had to have a political party in government that was willing to do so, for the sake of people over the perceived economic cost.
Has this worked out better economically? Of course. Would National have done these 'bad for the economy' things? No!

I can guarantee you that National would not have shut down the border with China so early.
They would not have shut down our international border so early.
They would not have shut down the entire country for nearly 6 weeks (and I don't mean half-assed lockdown, I mean there was no takeaways or food other than supermarkets with strict distancing, and almost no 'essential' services - dentists were not essential).
They would not have provided a wage subsidy to most of the country so we could shut down for nearly 6 weeks.
They would not have communicated the public health requirements so clearly.
They would not have kept the border closed with everyone else, including Australia, til now.
They would not have provided 4-5 star hotels for all returning citizens for 2 weeks quarantine, for free, so that returnees did not reintroduce Covid to our country.
National has kept arguing we need to open up again, and bleated 'what about the economy?'.
I could go on, but this was not about our system of Government, it was about the specific government, ie political party we just HAPPENED to have in at the time.

Our, NZ's, entire Covid response hinged on one election, one picking amongst governments.
We scraped by, by the skin of our minority coalition, with a party that wasn't the most popular.

The UK response also hinged on one election. The UK & Ireland are also islands. Massive populations, but also massive testing capacity in comparison.
If the Conservatives, aka a bunch of sociopathic ratfuckers in power like Boris Johnson, hadn't been in power, would they be in this situation? No.
I LIVED in London only 3 years ago. If they had shut down the Tube (subways) sooner, would infection have spread so quickly? No.
Would ANY Labour government have been better? I'm not even talking Jeremy Corbin, but just... anyone? Almost certainly.

The US response ALSO hinged on one election.
We all know this right? Know this already?
But weirdly, I don't really see this said enough, but c'mon - if the US had actually instituted it's FULL pandemic plan, would you be in this situation?
No.

Would Hilary Clinton have instituted the US's existing full pandemic plans?
Yeah, I don't really think that's in question. She was a massive health policy wonk.
Would she have shut down international borders sooner? I think so.
Would she have closed state borders early on to get the outbreaks isolated? Also probably yeah?
Seriously, ask yourself, what's the chances that a President Hilary Clinton would have gone FULL Covid health-war-hawk, and thrown the FULL testing capacity of the US against the initial Covid hotspots and isolated the outbreaks back in February/March, before it spread to almost all of your states...?
C'mon, you know that kind of sounds *exactly* like what she'd have done.
Think of the criticisms of her foreign policy, I genuinely do think she was a compassionate person, but she'd go hard and fast and hawk if she thought she needed to in international policy/war (e.g. I'm way more anti-force, but if you've looked at the actions around Kosovo, she's pretty convinced that going in with the Nato bombing stopped/prevented more civilian deaths, and I can't say that she's wrong on that, so I can see emotionally how a person who takes peoples lives and wellbeing to heart could still end up on the hawk-ish side).
If you're more left-leaning, suddenly her flaws there turn into a total asset when it comes to a pandemic
Health was one of her defining issues. Covid would have been the campaign she actually felt comfortable fighting, Covid would have been Hilary Clinton's War.
This is the kind of issue you *can* and *need* to go overkill on, it's not like the 'War on Drugs', or 'Terrorism', and yet after years of hyping up the American population on issues that tactic doesn't work on, seriously, it's so frustrating that the US couldn't have gone jingoistic and had a full-on War on Covid?
Bamboozled the right wing with military-sounding patriotism, and tell all the preppers that this is what they planned for, and they just need to stay home for 6 weeks. Suppression doesn't work, eliminating community transmission does, and then... you don't have a problem anymore.

I'm not from the US, but is there just some kind of 'both sides are both as bad'-bullshit or emotional resignation or some kind of not wanting to be 'I told you so', that means people haven't really pushed home, that yo, America, it really didn't have to be like this?
Yes, choosing a different Government, and having a President Hilary Clinton, would have probably given you an entirely different outcome.
Before that election, I thought having Trump would probably be more likely to provoke a swing to Democrats for this election (the one in which 2021 redistricting is so important) than the chances of having Democrats in for 4 terms.
But, a successful response against Covid would probably have bolstered the Democrats support even better than Trump entirely screwing up.

Anyway, point being, always be pushing, always be voting, for the least harm. We needed our center-left Government to get in, even supported by NZ First (which yes, was the slightly xenophobic anti-immigration party, but NZ has progressed to the point the tiny xenophobic party was bicultural Maori & European not wanting anyone else, rather than the usual thinly veiled white supremacy, so that's both bizarre and a step up). That's what made the difference.
posted by Elysum at 6:44 PM on December 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


The United States isn't going to be like New Zealand because the United States is not a functional democracy, unlike New Zealand. With great, great effort we just barely managed to elect Joe Biden, a corporate tool with a dubious personal history. If we are extremely lucky and everyone works very hard, we'll be able to reelect him in 2024.

The United States is about as different from New Zealand as it's possible for one English-speaking settler-state to be from another. New Zealand is a small, remote island nation which is more or less allowed to mind its own affairs. The United States is an imperial power intimately enmeshed with many of the world's richest and most evil people. New Zealand passed nuclear free legislation in 1987; the United States has the second largest collection of nuclear weapons in the world. Your material interests - vis a vis climate, security, maritime stuff, etc etc etc - are so radically different from those of the United States that it boggles belief. There is just literally no way that any amount of political choosing here in the United States will get us to New Zealand-like outcomes.

For instance, no matter how badly your government might have handled things, you have a national health service. We don't, we're exceedingly unlikely to get one and the reasons that we don't have one are just some of the many things that make us Not Like New Zealand.

If anything gets better here within, say, the next twenty to thirty years, it won't be because we use our functional democracy to make better choices; it will be because some shattering events from the outside disrupt the system enough that the old powers can't keep a lid on things. Or possibly it will be because the US government itself weakens and withdraws so much that some parts of the US will have a shot at making their own improvements while other parts get substantially worse.

What I'm saying is that the whole range of outcomes possible for New Zealand, good and bad are radically different from the outcomes possible for the United States. Like, do not underestimate how much we've been eating the seed corn in this country for the past forty years.
posted by Frowner at 8:32 PM on December 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


Hey, I'm as willing to acknowledge the absolute dysfunction of America as the next person... considerably more so to be fair?

But in this case, I call bullshit.

NZ did not magically have the capacity to deal with this. This is not some inverse American exceptionalism.
We had a 'national health system' that had been evaluated as being entirely unprepared for a pandemic, and had been deeply underfunded for over a decade of National being in power, and over the longer term, our ICU beds per population has fallen steadily over the past 20 years.

Sure, let's look back to the 80s, back when we were one of the most economically equal countries in the world, but our trajectory of economic inequality in the last 30 years has been appalling, we've been higher than OECD average since the 90s. We don't just have a 'housing bubble', we just literally haven't built enough housing for over 30 years, and our affordability ratio of housing price to median income is 6.5 to the US's 3.5.
Some of the richest and most evil people?
Ok, yeah sure, roll your mind back to the financial crisis, and the involvement of companies like Merrill Lynch. Yep, NZ elected Merrill Lynch's former Global Head of Foreign Exchange, a man known internally as the "smiling assassin", and who was reportedly in line to be Merill Lynch's chief executive (got out while the going was good), as our Prime Minister for not one, not two, but three terms.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/07/john-key-was-known-as-the-smiling-assassin-and-people-still-liked-him
National was about to get in *again*, for a FOURTH TERM.

Our success against Covid, was wildly unlikely on a healthcare capacity basis which I'll get to, but also on a political basis. Labour was polling REALLY BADLY in July 2017. Our political response is basically down to Andrew Little having resigned as leader of the Labour party 8 weeks before the 2017 election, and being replaced by Jacinda Adern, a wildly unlikely turnaround in the polls, and cobbling together a minority coalition.
Ironically Covid might have saved us politically, as Labour's successful response to Covid and subsequent popularity is the biggest political swing we've ever seen, as a country.


But back to how we were unprepared on a healthcare level -
In November of 2019? New Zealand got 54/100 and came 35th in the list of preparedness for pandemics:
https://www.nzdoctor.co.nz/article/undoctored/new-zealands-poor-preparedness-according-global-health-security-index

Sure, that index turned out to have almost no relation to how anyone *dealt* with Covid, but that's because it doesn't matter how prepared you are for a pandemic or what your health care capacity is, if you don't have the political will to use any of your plans or capacity.
If you think your health care capacity can cope with it, if anything, you get blase about actually eliminating transmission. Only Thailand has managed to actually *use* their high preparation score.


Our national health system? Has had almost nothing to do with NZ's success at dealing with Covid, unless you count realising our health care system would be utterly unable to cope, meant we HAD to use other measures. If you look at our case rate vs death rate? Yeah, so we've been a teeny bit shit at actually treating the few people who actually *got* Covid. That was about to get exponentially worse at higher numbers.


The US had the capacity to deal with this, but it didn't actually *do it*.


Of course we are entirely different countries, but in terms of range of outcomes?
Let's get away from whatever "radically different" outcomes means, and how about just picking a really basic outcome, like per capita death rate?

If we had had National in power again, but you'd had Hilary Clinton...?


You know what? Yes, we should have EASILY have had a higher per capita death rate than the USA under Hilary Clinton.
Clinton would have been *all over it*, freaking war room briefings, everyone in masks, getting states that weren't affected yet to do testing for the hotspots that were, you'd still have had a ' Global Health Security and Biodefense unit' (rather than it being disbanded in 2018), she'd have hired people who could *actually do their job*.

There's honestly a bit of a right wing spin in international news, to make it sound like NZ was an exceptional case, in order to make the failures to institute pandemic plans in bigger countries not look like the shitshow that it was.
I mean, love it here, and wouldn't live anywhere else, our historical economic equality etc has had spillover effects that mean that we still have a lot of social equality on things like class/money, gender (I'm just not expected to perform 'woman' in the same ways I was in UK or America), and race (oh, we're still racist, but we're at the enlightened level where a brown person can say that the country is racist without being vilified to *quite* the same extent, and the xenophobic grey-power political party was lead by a Maori politician).
But we're a small country in the middle of the pacific with large shipping costs, and without the capacity for economies of scale, or backup infrastructure.

Our testing capacity per capita was an embarrassingly small percentage of the USAs (and again, no economies of scale, or ability to test in areas not yet affected because we were too small), we wouldn't and couldn't use masks either as it's not like we had them, we're small but most people live in cities meaning population density where people actually LIVE isn't that different to the US, utter dependence on tourism and migrant agricultural workers meant 'but the economy' has been a huge factor, and once Covid was fully established here, even if we'd 'flattened the curve' our health care system would have been quickly overrun because even after trying to ramp up all year, we stiiilll don't have the healthcare/ICU bed capacity to be able to deal with the overload that a *flattened* curve would bring.

Look, it really sucks, but pretending that single elections don't STILL have a huge influence even in a broken system, just perpetuates the political apathy of 'what's the freaking point?'

God, I was 18 and on the internet back during the Bush election, and Trump being elected was such a depressing retread of history, it's 20 years on, and the Bush/Gore/Nader triangle of online arguments was just repeated as Trump/Clinton/Sanders, blah blah Gore was a corporate shill and 'just as bad', and particularly the arguments with supposedly left-wing types on message boards who were sure that Bush would be better because if it got bad enough in the US, surely THAT would trigger the revolution (I have no doubt those posters mostly become either Libertarians or Conservatives in the 20 years since, given that seems to be the pattern of the usual teen/early 20s types that turned out to like being contrarian, and apocalypse fantasies, more than actually valuing human wellbeing).
From the outside, I really don't have the confidence that things getting progressively worse, or the system being disrupted in the USA *will* suddenly start things any better, since that hasn't been the case for the last 20 years.

Government is just the way that cultures make large infrastructure happen, and at some point, you have to imagine that that is even possible, or it won't happen.
posted by Elysum at 4:11 PM on December 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Re-reading everything, I'm inclined to agree with Elysum here. Yes, the US and NZ are markedly different at just about every level except being Anglo settler-controlled societies, but the alternate-timeline analysis does seem pretty feasible that a Clinton-45 administration would have dealt with COVID in an above-average way.

And she's also right that I haven't heard anyone say this in my casual perusing of US media this year, despite copious denunciation of the Trump administration's every action. I'd hypothesize that, since Trump can't stop talking about Clinton or his inauguration crowd sizes and those sorts of things, there might be a little bit of an overcompensating reflex attempting to not follow his example. Plus, or probably more importantly, sexism.
posted by XMLicious at 5:12 PM on December 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


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