04/10/2020
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
Much earlier, by John Derbyshire: Importing Sino-Fascism? September 13, 2000
The hope has been expressed — for example by Counter-Currents’s Greg Johnson, as I mentioned last week — that our current travails will open the eyes of Western electorates to what a really bad idea unrestrained, unquestioning globalization has been.
The last thirty years, following the end of the Cold War, has been an era of globalization: lowered tariffs, world-wide supply chains, and First World countries outsourcing their manufacturing to cheaper workers in the Third World. Also, in the Western part of the First World — the white part — of Open Borders and lax enforcement of immigration laws.
We all live on the same planet, to be sure, and we have common concerns in areas like, oh, public health. But making your country dependent on a geopolitical rival for some high proportion of your medications, or key manufacturing processes, is seriously stupid.
But concerning that hope — that our people will awaken from their opium dream of globalized plenty with no downsides and become sturdy nationalists — I remain skeptical.
I do, though, see signs of a spreading awareness about one particular aspect of globalization: the fact that by far the biggest winner from globalization has been communist China.
This is easiest to see in the most thoroughly globalized organization of all, the United Nations. The most prominent UN agency in this current crisis has been the WHO, the World Health Organization. The Director-General of the WHO is an Ethiop named Tedros Something, or Something Tedros. [Tweet him] Anyone who pays any attention at all to the news now knows that this Tedros bloke is a bought-and-paid-for shill for the Chinese Communist Party.
Since the WHO is just the currently most prominent UN agency, it’s reasonable to suspect that the rest of the UN is similarly compromised.
To be perfectly fair to the U.N., there are some contrary indicators. Last year saw some to-ing and fro-ing in the General Assembly over China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs in ChiCom-occupied East Turkestan. Twenty-three countries issued a joint statement of concern.
Who were the 23 countries? The U.S.A., Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand…and the other 18 were all European countries.
The ChiComs easily countered with a much bigger list of countries saying they were just fine with whatever was being done to the Uighurs. That pro-China list included majority-Muslim countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, along with Russia, Cuba, North Korea, the Philippines, and a bunch of rat-hole countries in Africa and Central Asia.
If you look at the lists of countries protesting China and countries supporting China, the fundamental difference isn’t hard to figure. An outfit named Transparency International publishes an annual list of the world’s countries ranked by how corrupt they are. The countries critical of China come from the bottom part of that list, the least corrupt; the countries supporting China are just the ones most easily bought.
Any globalized enterprise will display a similar pattern. Since most of the world’s countries are Third World — which here I am using as a synonym for "poor and corrupt" — globalization means Third World-ification. And since China leads the Third World thus defined, with the most money to splash around and the least reluctance to just buy other countries' leaders with bags full of cash, globalization means Sinification.
The First World isn’t altogether immune to this globalization-equals-Sinification phenomenon. Our own capitalist boss class is not at all keen to offend ChiCom sensibilities.
Imagine, if you can, a major Hollywood studio making an honest movie about the Land Reform terror in China around 1950, or the mass famines that followed the Great Leap Forward ten years later, or the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, or the 1989 uprisings.
You can’t imagine it; no such movies will be made. The studios like their China market.
That’s not corruption, at least I don’t think it is. That’s just economic pressure. In this context, the context of economic pressure, an interesting case study is Australia.
As I mentioned above, Australia was on that list of countries criticizing China at the U.N. last year.
Well, stick around. Five years from now, Australia may be on the other list, supporting China. Australia is well on her way to being a Chinese satellite.
That’s not straightforward corruption, either. Australia’s a high-trust Anglo-Saxon nation with low levels of corruption. The case study here is one of economic pressure. I’m going to quote here from a 12-minute YouTube clip [Australia’s China Problem, November 19, 2019] from Wendover Productions, which so far as I can tell is unbiased.
Australia is big, the same size as our 48 continental states. While those states have over 300 million people, though, Australia has fewer than 26 million. By comparison with the U.S.A., Australia is quite dramatically under-populated. All the more so when compared with China: there are 56 Chinese people for every one Australian.
Australia makes a big part of her national living by digging stuff out of the ground and selling it to other countries. She’s the world’s largest exporter of minerals: iron, lead, diamonds, gold, uranium. Coal, too, and liquified natural gas. She makes another big part selling agricultural products. Thirty percent of her exports go to China.
Australian colleges and universities, like ours, are also exceptionally hospitable to Chinese students, who pay full tuition. The number of Chinese students in Australia is variously reported as in the range from 150,000 to 250,000, so I'll say 200,000 for convenience. That’s one per every 130 Australians, paying in about twelve billion Australian dollars a year to the Australian treasury — that’s around US $7.5 billion.
Before I went to live in China in 1982, I had read somewhere that it takes four Chinese peasants to support one non-peasant. Strolling around in the countryside with Chinese friends, any time we saw a peasant I'd exclaim, in English: "Hey, I know that guy — he’s one of my four!"
I’m not quite sure why that came to mind…
The consequences of all this are not hard to figure. As the Wendover Productions video clip says:
There is a very clear but unspoken threat by China to Australia: If you make things difficult for us politically, we'll make things difficult for you economically.
Hence the recurrent news stories about China meddling in Australian politics. [China meddling claims hit Australian government before vote, Straits Times, April 9, 2019,]
The ChiComs also of course carefully monitor their students in Australian universities. If a student expresses open support for the Hong Kong demonstrators, for example, he will soon hear that his family back in China have been pulled in for interrogation by the secret police [A student attended a protest at an Australian uni. Days later Chinese officials visited his family, by Fergus Hunter, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2019].
So, as I said, stick around: By 2025 or 2030, public criticism of China will be taboo in Australia. The Aussies will love Big Brother — unless, ironically, the China virus saves them, and us.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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