Chinese "Democracy" in 2022: Joe Biden vs. the Dragon.

um there's something to be said for getting to grips with the primary sources of things in politics in religion in the reading and writing history it's impossible for a secondary source to communicate the stupidity and madness of a particular political leader and of the largely silent followers who place their trust in that political leader there is no rational account of the philosophy and religious views of adolf hitler for example that can make on you the same impression as really reading for yourself seeing for yourself hearing for yourself the madness and stupidity of adulthood really really people who think of themselves as the harshest critics of adolf hitler inevitably end up flattering german fascism just by reinterpreting and restating the arguments of the time in a form that's rational and comprehensible to an audience today um what they were saying was irrational and it is now incomprehensible and it's important to take some time to read the original sources and get a feeling for the madness that became mainstream politics for a while [Laughter] uh i could say the same about numerous political movements that have come and gone and numerous political movements that still occupy and dominate a large part of the earth's surface now in the same way i think i need to take a moment to read to you to share with you the madness of the original primary source documents of what it is that the communist party of china is saying today china in just the last few days december 4th and december 5th of 2021 published three reports in close succession all three very much have the imprimatur of the communist party on them they're all being actively promoted by the communist party's state-controlled media and organs um the first which is the closest to being a formal publication of the communist party itself is a defense of and a redefinition of democracy in china so that's a pro-china statement about democracy the second and the third make explicit what is implicit in the first of the three documents they are an attack on american democracy they're an attempt to demolish or keep scorn on the american ocean democracy this is a coordinated media campaign when the first of these publications came out and i didn't eat set aside time to read the whole thing immediately i cleared my schedule to deal with this uh it was perceived by the press as being a response to joe biden's ongoing campaign to gather together world leaders under the umbrella of democracy to organize them in a fight for democracy china is interpreting this pro-democracy movement that can genuinely be said to be an original initiative of joe biden it does not go back to bill clinton it does not go back to obama it certainly doesn't have any continuity with the former policy of uh donald trump this has been interpreted as anti-chinese more than it is pro-democracy and of course you know the chinese cannot be wrong about everything there's plenty of things to write about i'm a harsh critic of chinese communism i'm obviously going to be a critic of what china has said here in defining and redefining the meaning of the word democracy but no the chinese are not wrong about everything what joe biden is doing and saying right now about democracy he has curiously little interest in the future of democracy on the island of cyprus he has very little interest in the future of democracy in cuba he has very little interest in the future of democracy in north korea he has very little interest in the future of democracy in syria he is very interested in the future democracy in libya or north africa generally there are many many places in the world where joe biden has not taken interest in democracy and the most cynical of commentators might well point out that joe biden perhaps does not have enough interest in the future of democracy within the united states of america the future of democracy in florida the future democracy in uh i don't know the california system of primaries in alaska you name it there are a lot of problems a lot of problems with uh uh you know democracy united states that he could be using uh his position of power and fame as the president states to to draw attention to and he's not all right so there is no doubt that joe biden's current global conference junket schedule is an anti-china offensive you guys might not have noticed this it may not have been mentioned in the news at all where you are wherever you live but the vice president of the united states was sent to vietnam to propose a strategic alliance between the united states and vietnam now if you don't know strategic means military i mean the word strategic in this kind of diplomatic uh context it means guns and bullets and missiles and tanks and airplanes okay i know i admit that is so hard to believe i'm just googling it august 24th 2021 vice president kamala harris was in hanoi as part of a high-stakes visit to southeast asia et cetera et cetera now was that front page news where you were oh okay okay so is this about is this about democracy um is joe biden interested in democracy in vietnam is joe biden interested in democracy in the philippines is joe biden interested in democracy in thailand in myanmar in laos in cambodia no all right so the biggest concession i can give to the chinese side here it's good that we're doing it up front in this video in this live stream the most pro-china thing i can say is that yes indeed joe biden's arguments for summits for military alliance for the advancement of democracy is transparently and cynically an anti-china alliance and i have to say as cynical as i am i was shocked that biden sent the vice president to vietnam to offer that that alliance there is no reason for that i mean there's no justification for that and the principal position would be to say no what's good for the goose is good for the gander what's good for china is good for north korea what's good for china is good for vietnam if you're anti-communist and pro-democracy in china you have to be anti-communist and pro-democracy in vietnam you can't just play favorites and have a strategic alliance with vietnam because they happen to be anti-chinese that's deeply morally incoherent sorry i said morally and coherent how about we just say evil [Laughter] right now again the main topic of this video is chinese democracy the redefinition of democracy by the government of china in 2000 and the last few days of 2021 at the open of of 2022. it's most we're going to talk about here but i would point out joe biden can do much more with the allies he already has for the sake of democracy and also just for the sake of expanding his anti-chinese alliance whether sincerely or cynically all right joe biden already has the only ally he needs in india okay india is the strategic partner america needs vietnam is of no significance and no consequence whatsoever compared to india and on the country strategically we're using this in the diplomatic sense of term strategically it is only a weakness to be in an alliance with with vietnam it opens you up to more costs it opens up another flank you got to defend yourself on frankly you would be much better off doubling down on or quadrupling down on an alliance with india and adjacent powers you know how far can you go in an alliance with sri lanka how far can you go in alliance with nepal and build india into your aircraft carrier against china that's power that strength and the people of india not just the government the people of india are willing to fight and die for you against china they really are they're mobilized uh the people of texas maybe not so much how popular is chopin's anti-china agenda with the people the united states of america i would guess you know it's lukewarm at best the support of that policy now you know you can go into other examples how much uh political capital does joe biden have in japan how much does he have in australia what's the depth of support for his policy in japan and australia well there's a lot of work to be done and yes it is from my perspective it was a really regrettable decision to extend this to to include vietnam and you know uh maybe it wasn't front page news where you were but there's a little country with more than 90 million people called myanmar getting on i think myanmar 70 million i always overestimate the population of myanmar what is the population of myanmar whoa 54 million look at that good thing i did a factor thailand must be above 79. okay thailand is right at 70 million vietnam 97 million myanmar weighed on it at 50 million in change okay okay coziest little place on earth myanmar in case you hadn't heard there were a whole lot of people there who are willing to stand up and fight and die for the future of democracy in their country joe biden was not interested now i wish i could tell you that the american people's opinion matter i wish i could tell you even that the members of congress or the senate mattered really one man's opinion matters that's joe biden that's the way foreign policy works in the united states america the 21st century so the fact that joe biden personally doesn't care about cuba and doesn't care about myanmar is definitive and that's it and there is not going to be any debate in the house of congress or senate nobody among the general population united states there's no particular yearning to bring democracy to myanmar okay but if you are in a strategic alliance with india against china india basically regards myanmar as um a province of india that has broken away through accidents of history he tell you this guys however and sincerely it's something actually the muslims and the hindus have in common in india you might be surprised but both the muslims and the hindus in both india and in pakistan they seem to regard the separate existence of myanmar as some kind of accident of history that should be reversed that this has no right to exist this separate entity okay well you know what i think india would be quite interested in expanding its sphere of power and influence to include myanmar the greatest impossible there was a there was an opportunity there so why are you selling out to vietnam why are you trying to include vietnam in a pro-democracy alliance when vietnam isn't just undemocratic and anti-democratic but it's also a communist party state joe biden has made some of the wrong choices here already and that may foretell you know really grim a chapter of american history to come and of world history to come and there's no doubt in case you hadn't heard china is more than one billion people the future the next few chapters of the political history of china are going to be tremendously important for the whole world for europe for africa for south america there is no part of the world that is untouched by uh chinese politics and over the next 20 years there is no part of the world that's going to be untouched by the long-term consequences of the decisions being made right now by one man and interestingly i mean many of us presume that the next president united states will be kemal harris it is significant that she is directly seeing and touching and smelling this alliance as it folds that she she is personally going to vietnam she is personally in contact certainly with political leaders from india too that she is getting a sense of it now of course she could change direction 180 degrees she could be elected and have a totally different approach to foreign policy we don't know but it's certainly a case where i mean in this specific aspect of foreign policy uh joe biden is actively training and preparing kamala harris to to carry the torch take over uh leadership of american foreign policy and what could be at this point called world democratic strategy the world strategy for democratization now i've i've made videos in the past talking about the history of this but very briefly in case you didn't know china became the most powerful country in the world today through its alliance with the united states of america an alliance that lasted roughly from 1971 to 2021 and that alliance i mean again all this stuff is kind of hard to believe why america was in an alliance with communist china yes and the unique historical figure of richard nixon was a crucial part of that and um that alliance was partly an alliance against the soviet union against russia but it was also partly an alliance against india so that couldn't have happened at any other time that was the product of the unique stupidity of richard nixon and then that carried on and on and on so if you look up the photographs why do we have photographs of bill clinton you know visiting the great wall of china why do we have all these friendship gestures why do we have all these attempts to reconcile enough peace with china at a time when instead i mean under bill clinton you could have had closer friendship and economic cooperation with russia now you could have had closer economic cooperation and friendship with brazil or colombia i mean there were other places that you could manufacture china you could manufacture the type of cheap plastic commodities that we now associate with the yangtze river delta in china the pearl river delta these kinds of places you know you know there's there was nothing inevitable back in the 1990s about this uh you know economic and political cooperation between the united states and china it was a choice and it was a choice that was first made by richard nixon and that's successive presidents including uh you know really i feel the most the most memorable twist in the tale is is bill clinton that they embraced the industrialization of china as if this were in america's long-term economic political and foreign policy interests you tell me today though what we're discussing is really the beginning of a new phase in china's political history okay the narrative during the bill clinton era was that china was not democratic but that it wasn't anti-democratic that china was merely a country that was not democratic yet but as it went through a process of economic development they would become more sophisticated more affluent more powerful and they would inexorably and inevitably catch up with europe catch up with the western world however you want to put it in becoming a real democracy now this is stupid but it's not insane look at south korea south korea had been a military dictatorship that barely had a few scraps of democracy to justify its claim to the name and over time south korea over decades it wasn't wasn't that quick a transition south korea went from being a kind of phony democracy or paper uh democracy to being a real democracy in every sense the word okay south korea was anti-communist i do not think that's a minor footnote in the history of south korea right they were a dictatorship but they were an anti-communist distinction that made that transition successfully taiwan similar story i have a blog post i could give you guys where i actually charted out i should give you a chronological chart of when these countries made their transition to democracy and it normally was step by step it wasn't kind of just one single wave of legal reforms taiwan at one time taiwan was ruled by a military dictatorship it was an anti-communist military dictatorship that kind of barely had any claim to being a democracy there was some you know some trappings of democracy and they made the transition step by step to being a country with a robust free press elections real in every sense both south korea and taiwan they really are today democracies now japan it's a little bit different it's a little bit but still you know it's fair to say that china was surrounded by positive examples of the transition from fake democracy to real democracy so it wasn't completely insane for bill clinton personally or for politically engaged people of bill clinton's generation to optimistically imagine that what had happened in south korea what had happened in taiwan would happen in china next and by the way when i say china was surrounded by democracies never forget they have a land border with india they also have a land border with mongolia all right and mongolia made the transition from communism to democracy and they did it they set the record it was the most rapid most successful transition basically of any post-communist country in their world mongolia has a lot of problems it's not paradise it's not but they have elections they have newspapers that can complain about corrupt politicians they have all the basic fundamentals of a functioning democracy now depending on how naive you are at that time if you were alive while bill clinton was president some of you were very small children some of you weren't born yet well you know the other the other domino to fall here of course is the soviet union that to some extent people wanted to believe that what had already happened in south korea was now going to happen in russia on a massive scale and you can debate to what extent russia has successfully made a transition to democracy most people would give it at least a maybe a five out of ten maybe russia is no longer a communist dictatorship it is also not what we would call a legitimate democracy nevertheless so you can say there was some sincere optimism uh on the american side as we made the transition from one period of the sort of starkly evil alliance between nixon and mao zedong and if you don't think it's evil take a look at the history of cambodia take a look at what the americans were supporting in cambodia america supported the khmer rouge they supported pol pot they actively armed paul pott and trained his soldiers provided them with bombs and machetes and guns and everything else um you know the united states did a lot of really evil things as part of this alliance with china but they transitioned to this period of misplaced optimism what i would basically call the clinton years oh well if we help china become wealthy we can just leave them to become democratic now there were some very palpable uh political and legal instruments involved in this transition this wasn't purely a matter of editorials in the new york times or what have you there was the question of the united states of america granting most favored nation status to china it was so odious to refer to this as most favoritation status that they started using the term permanent normal trade relations there was the matter of admitting china to international trade groups and and lobbies like a world trade organization of integrating it into the trade system of world capitalism the import and export system and there were questions raised in the paperwork for those things about exactly what china's political system was and what it would be and at that time what you'll find when you read what the chinese side says for themselves and basically the american side repeats it is well you know china has a long history of thousands of years these last few centuries china has struggled against enormous odds they were conquered by the japanese uh they were destroyed by war and famine and you know um as material conditions improve democracy and political rights are only going to get better and better what's this very vaguely stated belief in transition without ever stating what it is a transition from and what is the transition to you could call this transitionism i said before if you could put yourself in the frame of mind of someone who was only thinking about the positive examples south korea taiwan then you might you know and also perhaps if you personally stood to make millions of dollars by manufacturing disney toys in the pearl river harbor you know like people got incredibly rich off of the uh economic cooperation with the united states and china including companies like apple corporation i mean practically everything in your apartment right now is made in china we're partly made in china there's all this unique you know corporate cooperation with the united states and china that emerge that emerged out of a strategic alliance between nixon and mao zedong that's you know political conditions form the basis for changes in economic conditions and again there was nothing inevitable with that apple could have been manufacturing electronics in brazil they didn't have to do it in china you could have had economic development in brazil instead you could have had american and european companies working with throw a dart at the map of africa there are all kinds of places that could have taken on this role that china took on and a lot of them had advantages over china because among other things they weren't run by an insane communist dictatorship that has nuclear arms and is in constant a constant state of conflict with your real allies people like japan next door and so on there would be advantages brazil is not going to cause those kinds of problems for you so you know there were alternatives there was nothing inevitable uh about that it was a series of political decisions that had economic consequences tremendous tremendous for far-reaching long-term uh confluences um where was i take a moment here to look at the comments so yes uh desu kafal says um this is related this discussion is related to the text that isil was showing on instagram indeed so if you guys do not follow me on instagram uh what is my name there is it about sale or as amazon yeah i can give you guys the link to my instagram i do generally share the links to these live streams before they've started and uh i do also share screenshots of the books i'm reading short passages just thing uh quotations that have circled things that are especially uh worth thinking about or worth talking about okay so sorry i am actually seeing these other some intelligent questions and comments but to return to where i where i left off turning my throat although it would be possible for someone who was a contemporary of bill clinton to be optimistic about this supposed transition in china given what had already happened south korea taiwan and other carefully selected positive examples there were also negative examples right saudi arabia saudi arabia went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest countries in the world right tremendous expansion i mean there's no way to quantify the transformation you're talking about in saudi arabia all right it is a quantitative and qualitative transformation of the whole country all right do you think that the increasing wealth of saudi arabia has brought about increasing democratization why would these things be related that way more wealth can mean more power in the hands of the government and the government having a greater ability to repress and control its people there's no reason to presume that as china became wealthier the communist party became more powerful and its ability to reach people you know they were all kind of saudi arabia is not the only example there was fundamentally no reason to believe the mythos of the the bill clinton era that china sort of like a snowball rolling down a hill that china was going to just move away from communism and nothing the chinese communist party itself said you know indicated that now i have lived in china and i have to say before xi jinping there were people who assumed china would go through some similar kind of uh opening up process i mean it had to be stated very vaguely the china was going to go through should we say a glasnost process on some kind of um shedding of of uh communist ideology was what's going to go on discarding of obviously all of you was going on i was in china in 2007 2008 when the olympics happened and i can tell you i mean you know there are no surveys there are no polls but i can tell you the people of china were shocked at how repressive their own government was they were shocked and that shows the kind of limited optimism from say 2001 to 2008 that a lot of people in china encouraged by what they saw on tv frankly you know the communist party controls the tv they were often being told that they were in a new and more liberal era you know they were being told vaguely that china was living through a through through a new more permissive era and obviously in some ways it was just the transition to capitalism capitalism under communist party dominion you know um and the overall increase in wealth and so on but you know i can really say the people of china were aghast at what happened politically within china in those years 2007 2008 it was an unwanted reminder that china is not a normal country that china is this unbelievably of oppressive dictatorship that it's a place where no freedom of speech no freedom to protest exists whatsoever um this is a distant memory and i've never i've never found the news footage again uh somewhere on youtube you can probably find this guys if you want if you want to you can you can email it to me there was some kind of complaint put to the government of china and i think the complaint had some weight behind it because of the the ioc the international olympic committee so you guys may not know this but quite a lot of political pressure is exerted on countries by sports organizations but somebody somewhere whether it was attached to the united nations or the ioc or both or many of the governments they said well look it's not really acceptable to us that there's nowhere that people are allowed to protest politically during the holding of the the olympics so someone found some justification that you know like some brazilians might have flown all the way to beijing to see the olympics and they might want to protest while they're here or they might want to see a protest over here that this was somehow part of the olympic spirit now again i i admit it's not just that i don't know it may be impossible to know exactly who was leaning on the chinese government saying there should be some some permission this way and the chinese government there's this was not a parody this was not satire this was not self-parody they set up a tiny fenced area i would say it was a fenced area the size of a basketball court so in beijing there was one area of open concrete with soldiers with guns standing around it and you know a cyclone fence and some kind of padding set up too and i was like okay you want to protest you want a fruit of speech you can stand inside this prison you can stay inside and you know i remember the journalists standing there you just can't you can't believe it it's surreal it's so ridiculous you know but you are is the chinese government doing this in order to make themselves look bad like you know like how you know it seems like a sketch comedy from saturday live or something you know it's it's so ridiculous anyway yeah in case you guys have forgotten or didn't know in the first place um just in the months leading up to the beijing olympics there were protests in tibet protests for tibetan independence protests for the future of the language protests for democracy in tibet to some extent i wouldn't say they were narrowly or exclusively pro-democracy for us but they were tibetan indigenous protests and the government of china stamped down on that with uh you know the biggest boot they could find in the military locker it was outright old-fashioned communist dictatorship tactics give no give no quarter now i don't support tibetan independence just mentioned i actually don't sympathize with that i have very little sympathy for tibetan buddhists or tibetan nationalism you might be surprised i'm against communism and i'm pro-democracy but i actually don't really favor going back to the political traditions of the dark ages and i also don't think it really makes sense to organize national units uh you know governments whatever you want to say around uh traditions religious traditions from the dark ages uh this is very difficult to talk about in some parts of the world and easy and others people in the united states of america and australia countries like this where genocide wiped the you know ancient borders from the map you know what are the borders of arkansas i mean this is obviously completely modern artificial borders drawn on a map well in many parts of the world the distinctions relate to for example sectarian differences between sunni and shiite people and that's where they've been for hundreds of years you know the the persistence of borders the connection between borders and nationality and modern governments and ancient religious nations this is something i have a rather nihilistic view of you may or may not be surprised to know nevertheless um at that time the people of china got a reminder that the tiananmen square massacre was not so long ago that most of the people in charge are literally the same people who are in charge trying to attend square massacre they don't have any they don't have any democracy and they don't have any right even to to complain now i just mentioned um in these documents that have inspired me to make this video a new timeline is actually proposed by the government of china that i have never once seen in print before and i've read a lot of academic peer-reviewed articles about politics and democracy in china that we've just been published in the last few years so i was at university victoria 2015 some of that but i mean in 2015 i was really reading the stuff in the library both things published by the government of china and by the sort of people with phds who are in their living doing commentary and analysis about uh what's going on in economics china so i never once saw the year 2012 referred to as a turning point in the history of chinese never once the new propaganda line that came out december 4th and december 5th 2021 the brand new you know telling of history by the comments part of china it states that a new era of chinese democracy began almost 10 years ago in the year 2012. that's when china really made this transition to be a democratic country so this is part of how the propaganda gets into just outright fiction obviously one way to respond to china is just ask questions well when are you going to make this transition when are you going to make the transition to democracy the transition that people were hopeful for back in the bill clinton era and one possible answer is that they already made it that they already have democracy they already have all the democracy they're ever going to get and this is a new myth this is a new lie this is a new form of propaganda where now they're saying back in 2012 that's when we made the decision and nobody noticed you know now i just point out um you know i think there is an argument that if you compare the year 2008 when i was mentioning this kind of frightening wake-up call chinese people had in 2008 how little democracy if you compare 2008 to 2022 they they there may be some truth to this it may be that there is a little bit more of freedom of speech and democracy in china when i was in china in that era 2007-2008 uh sorry i'd have to go check exactly exactly what the dates were doesn't let's just say 2008 you know um you couldn't access wikipedia on the internet in china now if someone else disagrees with me maybe they were in a different province you know that is different like sometimes there's more censorship in some parts of china and then in the most liberal places like shanghai some of those cities high-tech cities maybe the internet was less censored but i have to tell you where i was in china the censorship of the internet was absolute so guys i'm i apologize for you you've heard this story before it's possible i've never told this story before um most chinese people are unaware of how tightly the internet is censored there because they never push their luck i had one professor so i was myself a professor at university in china that time and another professor he was he was a real professor with a phd but i got paid more than him my status in this university was professor and i was the most highly paid professor there and so i know it's ridiculous but rank has its privileges anyway i was talking to this other professor he said hey do you know anything about this issue from political history and i said oh yeah i've done all kinds of research on that in fact i've written published articles about it you know it's a particular issue in political history so this year and he was he was genuinely saying okay great great you know can you send me your article as a pdf you know obviously by email us yeah sure and i think i said the time i said i can send it but i'm not sure you'll receive it i was like what do you mean i said you know don't you know every email you send here every single email you send in china is censored you know and if you send an email that just has certain keywords in it that email was not going to arrive at the other end and he didn't believe me so away sometime goes by and i met up with him again and he said again he was genuinely interested in reading this article had written about history of politics what do you want to say it had to do with i think the relationship between china and cambodia one of those topics i've done honestly i forget but it's something i had done a lot of research on written about and he said hey look you know you never sent me that that pdf you never sent me the article you wrote it's like oh no i sent it [Laughter] you didn't receive it you know the extent of censorship and state control it's not just public protest it's not just articles published in the newspaper private communication one person would have received this email nobody else that's unacceptable that's control so when you have no freedom of speech it is zero in china and of course you can be punished they didn't bother in this case to punish me uh and i have a longer story about an email that i sent from my email in china to one of my professors in canada and it did have a whole bunch of political keywords because it was actually i was proposing theses i could write my phd about i could do a phd thesis about this that phd level research and those were all those were about you know communist politics in china from an anti-communist perspective and um i was in effect punished for that uh i actually don't know if the professor in canada received the email or not i never asked it's quite it's quite possible the email also didn't ever materialize at the other end we had that guy had a lot to talk to him about so never never told that story either so um yeah my point is this there may be a little bit of truth to this new myth that they've now decided since the year 2012 what isn't isn't acceptable what is and isn't democratic enough to suit china but the frightening thing is this new version of the propaganda has a sense of finality to it the transition is over there will be no transition well now from my perspective there never was a transition but they are telling you loud and clear the mythology of the bill clinton era is the thing of the past here's the new mythology and that is that china already is a democracy by its own definition it already has become a democracy and in fact they are claiming that china's definition of democracy is more legitimate than the united states of america they're claiming that america is a fake democracy and that china is a true democracy great i can take i can take uh i can endure flattery uh someone called ben in the comment section said quote this is the most honest and important channel on the platform thanks ben you know uh you flatter me but i i sadly i feel i have very little competition i wish i could respond to this flattering comment from the audience by telling you oh no no i can name five other great youtube channels that talk about the politics of china i can't i wish i could respond by saying oh no no i know five other great youtube channels that talk about hollywood mainstream movies and i can't five other channels that talk about the politics of the vegan movement five of the channels talk about game of thrones like any of the subjects on this channel sadly i feel i have very few contemporaries and really no um really no competition so yeah i'm just reading your comments okay interesting provocative comment from jacob jacob says quote excluding the biden white house and the harris presidency which may follow is another u.s china economic alliance possible as america continues to look inward and has a less principled foreign policy so jacob i think you know that the answer is yes it's possible it's totally possible i would say further very cynically i think that the political elite in germany is banking on it i think probably the political elite in a lot of other countries in europe i know switzerland uh spain of greece um you know that probably if you go through europe government by government a lot of them are taking the attitude like okay joe biden's gonna play this game maybe it's going to last four years maybe it's going to last eight years but the high-tech companies of germany want to keep making money manufacturing mobile phones in china they want to continue importing solar panels from china they want to continue for example the strategic cooperation between universities uh research institutes but manufacturing most of all uh between europe and china and they're making a lot of money and they have no reason to change now again all those things you could do them in india and there were a lot of ways in which economic development and cooperation would be easier with india than china i have if you guys don't know i've studied the chinese language i have studied the languages of india i'm getting to hear exactly what my involvement was it is much much easier for someone who grew up speaking any language indigenous to the indian subcontinent anyone who was born and raised in india speaking any of those languages whether it is tamil a dravidian language or a north indian language whether it is uh marathi or you know punjabi anyone who grew up speaking a language native to india it is so much easier for them to learn english than it is for a chinese person to learn english and it is so much easier for someone to grow up speaking english to learn one of the languages of india now this is not the only difference in case you hadn't heard india is a democracy rightly or wrongly india has fundamentally embraced the british empire tradition of you know parliamentary indirect democracy now i can launch into a critique of what's wrong with the british model of democracy but if you're comparing it to communist china you know there's every reason for india to be your strategic ally and your your economic allies so on and so forth now there's a whole other separate uh question here by the way if you're asking what i think and you're not which is good what i think what i think matters to only to a limited extent you know i'm opposed to this whole model of development that's based on seeking out a partnership with the countries of the lowest wages where it's based on high-wage countries cooperating with factory workers who are paid a tenth of what the minimum wage would be in their own country i think that's the wrong approach to economic development for everyone i think it's immoral and i think it's unethical and there are better ways to organize uh economic development economic development globally continentally on every kind of intermediate scale of planet but uh setting that aside you know yeah there are alternatives to a continued economic alliance with china however the question which is a good question is is it possible after joe biden everything will go back to normal with between america and china between western europe the answer is yes and billions of dollars are being gambled on that billions of dollars if you manufacture stereo systems you're a german corporation that makes high-end electronic speaker components but in germany you just make the core the most important electronic component you have german engineers doing that stuff in germany at high price and then you send that maybe you just send the schematics you do quality cool you work with a factory in china that does everything else you have a factory in china that makes the box that makes the enclosure that does it's not the only industry that works that way the extent to which uh economic cooperation defines the economies of these countries and has done for 20 years it's impos of course it's more than 20 years now but in the last 20 years especially the the dominance of chinese manufacturing that is something a lot of people are gambling billions of dollars on uh continuing there are alternatives while i was in taiwan this is what two years ago now um anyway just before anyway virological conditions inspired me to move back to canada when i was in taiwan very much the news from week to week was questioning which companies were shutting down which factories in china so companies were making strategic decisions soon as they close the factory in china and expand their factory in taiwan close a factory in china move some of the manufacturing to vietnam move some of it to malaysia move some of it to taiwan that stuff was going on and people were really watching it and really happening pardon me they were they were really analyzing it step by step because their own lives in taiwan were interconnected so yeah uh now i would imagine in japan also and you know again the the depth of cooperation was such that if you had a factory in japan or taiwan many of them even if you finished making the product in that country they would send the product to china just to have it put into a cardboard box and a bag and have a sticker put on it and then send it back in like that level of supply chain integration so disentangling those supply chains is a tremendous thing so sorry guys this is a digression but i hope i hope you uh hope you enjoy it it's not it's not what i wanted to make the video about especially but you know yes there's there's a trump i mean all right now sir let's just let's just close out that that topic suppose you own one of those corporations whether it's a company that makes bicycles in taiwan or company that makes stereo speakers in germany and now i tell you look shut down everything in china put it all in mothballs start operating out of africa instead we want you to set up the factory in ethiopia now there are advantages to being an ethiopian there are and i mentioned this in youtube video a million years ago there are examples of shoe factories that did that that closed down in china and opened up in ethiopia nothing ethiopian people can manufacture shoes ethiopian people can manufacture computers and again they may not even be manufacturing them ethiopian people may be just taking the speakers and putting them in a box you know doing some of that manual labor at the final stage uh as was being done in china you can do it okay but those guys they don't want to do it they don't want to get off their asses it's you know it's a huge change in people's lives they've gotten comfortable working with china and that's why right now check the tags on the clothes you're wearing china has no advantage in manufacturing clothes none every item of clothing you're wearing could be made in egypt egypt is where they produce the cotton there's no reason for it not to be but it's not it's made in china and if you're wearing a shirt that's egyptian cotton it'll be cotton grown in egypt exported to china made into clothes in china export this is the world we currently live in and joe biden is the first president to admit that this is a problem it's not just a problem for america it's a problem for the future of democracy it's a problem for the future of planet earth in case you just joined me hit the thumbs up button some more people will see this video but in case you just joined me at the beginning of the video i did criticize joe biden's position now moved past that i am not saying that joe biden is taking a purely principled uh position here on the side of the angels for the advancement of democracy sadly it is a somewhat cynical and self-contradictory position he's taken but um he's not all wrong in broad brushstrokes he is correct and how old is joe biden 74 or something i think part of the magic of joe biden is just that he is old enough to remember how this whole farce unfolded where are we at 74 79 that plastic surgery is paying off from 79. so if you're 79 years old he can remember a time before china had this economic power he can remember the whole process especially under the clinton presidency of how china was built up into being this manufacturing superpower by the united states by definite specific decisions the united states made he may or may not be able to remember that era around 1971 1972 when the strategic military alliance iron triangle situation was being established and unfolding you know i don't know exactly how much of a perspective has on it he has mentioned repeatedly xi jinping is somebody he knows face to face he met with and eat lunch or dinner with xi jinping several times he has a sense of the man not just of the the communist political system he knows what he's up against and he sees it in the perspective of almost a century of you know historical and political retrospect okay and joe biden fundamentally made the right choice on china and it's a choice for whatever reason bill clinton couldn't make it or didn't make it barack obama couldn't make it or didn't make it right so joe biden is right about that and probably his advanced age helps him may be wrong but everything else and again we'll see we'll see what the cause are so okay i'm going to move on to the main the main point of this video but let me say something else you know in in china's favor and guys especially on the left there's a lot of demonization of businessmen okay international businessmen are the tiny minority of the population who really have experience with these cultures and with these political systems now i think especially in the era of the internet the stereotype is of a certain kind of hippie tourist on permanent vacation a good-looking woman in a bikini who flies around the different countries in the world and takes photos of herself or takes videos those people do not know china those people do not know saudi arabia those people do not know yemen i realize that the left wants to demonize someone like an oil executive who does business in these countries there are oil executives who know china all right and like i'm being real with you no false humility no ego trip they know china in a way that i don't and you won't and that these hippies on instagram who just go on vacation and take photos themselves at the beach they don't they know what it's like to deal with the authorities to deal with the system you know what they may also i mean oil is not the best example whether it's oil or mining or manufacturing these types of international businessmen they may also know about dealing with the local uh laborers with the poorest people in the company the low-wage labor who are there at the factory at the mine at the oil rig or what have you and the issues and problems that arise out of their their situation their status i've spoken to some of those people these are obviously just casual conversations i've never been in in business with them whatever but i mean to give you an example remember a long conversation i have with a guy who was an executive in the mining industry in china he specifically was a health and safety expert for mining so it's dealing with things like explosions and cave-ins and it's a very special field and he really knew the face-to-face reality of the the people earning minimum wage in those mines and he didn't just go to he didn't just meet them on the mine site he went to their houses and he went to their funerals and he met the widows and the kid he really had that experience and also by the way sorry money is a part of this he was wealthy enough to pay a translator to come with him you're like yeah he didn't speak chinese generally he didn't speak the specific dialect in this part of china which is of course they say dialect it's a totally different language you know he was able to really have some kind of meaningful content with that there's a lot of demonization of businessmen and international businessmen and businessmen do influence government all right but i'm just saying uh there are businessmen who know how hard it is to get anything done in saudi arabia they're a businessman who know how hard it is get anything done in brazil you know hard it is to get anything done to make something happen in various parts of africa right and there are businessmen who have been willing to reconcile themselves to the brutality of the chinese political system because they say these people know how to get business done these people know how to organize launch all right if you look at a map of the world and you divide it into democracy and not democracy right china is on the non-democratic side of the equation if you just color in the world democracy pro-democracy anti-democracy very simple color coding black and white you can fill in all kinds okay then china is in one and the same anti-democratic morass along with countries like saudi arabia okay but what if instead you color code the world in terms of people that fundamentally have religious attitudes and people that fundamentally have modern secular scientific attitudes ah now all of a sudden china is the same color as the united states of america china is a country full of people with modern secular scientific attitudes that can get work done you know and they are very business-like there are a lot of things i complain about with chinese culture but they are they are very business-like they are industrious etc you know oh okay so yeah there are deep reasons why frankly the power elite frankly the millionaire elite frankly the international business elite around the world have done so much business with china in the last 20 years and why they want to keep on doing business china notwithstanding the total lack of democracy in china and a lot of those people will say to you oh well if you think china has no no democracy let me tell you stories about my experience in indonesia let me tell you stories about my experience in myanmar some of these are guys i did used to run a factory in myanmar i met and spoke to one of those guys guy who literally was an executive running a factory in in myanmar for several years uh white i think freddie you think it was french you know you're white european guy who ran a factory in myanmar oh you know oh well if you think it's bad here in china let me tell you about my experience in other developing countries around the world it does get worse right and that contextualizes china in a very different way and it's not the quality of education in china it's not the quantity of education in china it's not just saying chinese people are better educated all right the attitudes of chinese people that are in large part cultivating created by their government education system all right they are incomparably more modern more secular more scientific than the attitudes in countries adjacent on all sides including indonesia saudi arabia et cetera sorry i realized indonesia and saudi arabia are not literally adjacent i'm sorry i apologize by the way uh countries you can find throughout asia that are very much still mired in the attitudes and assumptions of the of the dark ages okay just glancing at your at your comments here guys since i opened this video saying there is really no way to give a sense of the insanity of china's new propaganda position on democracy without looking at the primary source text i said start the video three texts came out december 4th and december 5th i'm reading the first of these now quote the constitution describes china as a socialist country governed by a people's democratic dictatorship that is led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants period now close quote i just want to point out already it would not be difficult to organize a democratic system a system of democracy that actually was based on leadership by the working class if you wanted to do that communists have never been interested in doing that right very simple in ancient athens you weren't allowed to participate in democracy unless you had about two years of participation in the military you can get into all the details in different periods it wasn't quite that simple but you were expected to pitch in and do your part with the army one way or the other in athens before you have the status of a full citizen i'm aware we could add some footnotes about exactly what we know and what aristotle says about it but any case there was an expectation that you would do military service and or pay money to support the army for several years and then you could participate you could have a system of democracy in which people are required to work in a factory for five years before they can vote before they can be elected if you really think there's something magical about the experience of working in a factory for five years or for two years and you want to have democracy but democracy that reflects the experience of the working class you can do it you can do it and the nature of factory work is such there's a lot of turnover it wouldn't be as closed as an aristocratic system of the dark ages anyone could people might be motivated to go and work in the factory for two years and five years say okay well i finished college now i'm going to work in a factory for a couple of years and so that i can become a full citizen and produce university all right it's worthwhile to point out the attainability of that model of social organization precisely because china has never attempted anything like that and they're what what they are referring to as a democratic dictatorship led by the working class it has never it has never been that it is not that now you know right now who has power in china who rules china and who votes in china not the working class not the factory workers not the peasant farmers uh already as simple as this first sentence sounds sorry it's not the first sentence in the whole document it's near the start of the document it's just the first sentence but this we're already taking a step from uh nonfiction into fiction that's quite uh dangerous alright i continue the quote the fundamental nature of the state is defined by the people's democratic dictatorship china upholds the unity of democracy and dictatorship to ensure the people's status as masters of the country on the one hand all power of the state belongs to the people to ensure that they administer state affairs and manage economic and cultural undertakings through various channels i'm going to skip a few words here i'm sorry guys on the other hand china takes resolute action against any attempt to subvert the country's political power or endanger public or state security to uphold the dignity and order of law and safeguard the interests of people on the state period democracy and dictatorship appear to be a contradiction in terms but together they ensure the people's status as masters of the country period a tiny minority is sanctioned in the interests of the great majority and dictatorship serves democracy end of sentence end of paragraph end of the chapter or the section in the essay right so we are being told that china is a socialist dictatorship we are told that china upholds the unity of democracy and dictatorship i skipped over some of the words were given a completely irrelevant statement here about how wonderful the political system is in china and then it is confessed that democracy and dictatorship appear to be a contradiction in terms but in fact this is the claim made by the the government of china the use of the so i just mentioned this document was not translated from chinese and english it was written and published in english it's its first language is english the use of the word sanctioned is also very strange there you can look it up in the dictionary sanction has several completely different meanings in english but they claim a tiny minority is sanctioned in the interests of the great majority comma and dictatorship serves democracy so as i say there's no way i can summarize this or give you a rational account of it like a rational analysis of it that isn't going to be extremely flattering to it the the depths of irrationality the the the insanity of what you're being told here it has to be it has to be seen in the primary source text now again i don't have to editorialize this too much so here i'm just quoting from different sections of text this isn't a continuous reading uh quote in china there are no opposition parties period but china's political party system is not a system of one party rule nor is it one in which multiple parties vie for power and govern in turn period all of these documents are dancing around the fact that in china there are no elections that nobody gets to vote and making the i don't know with with zero irony making the completely surreal claim that nevertheless china is a democracy and as i said in all three documents as a whole the claim is that china is more of a democracy in the united states america that china's definition of democracy is superior to the definition of democracy offered by the united states um [Music] very little mention of ancient greece very little mention of ancient rome very little mention of england india france france the home of the french revolution switzerland denmark right so it's it's being set up as if there are two options being presented to the world the american definition of democracy and the chinese definition democracy and they make an argument largely incoherent surreal and fictive but i'll talk about the part of the argument that does make sense they are making an argument that china china is not going to make a transition democracy china already is a democracy and their definition of democracy is the correct one not the american one okay another question from from ben ben asks what does your channel name mean in english do shirts ship to vancouver in a good time so ben you may not know we're walking distance from vancouver where uh we're on vancouver island you know yeah of course if you walked you would drown don't don't walk but we're we're right across the street from you we have ordered those shirts yeah you know the problem isn't time it's money i have not gone back and made a review video talking about those hey melissa's wearing one you might come on camera babe melissa is wearing one of the complete coincidences she's wearing one of the shirts right now yes there you go uh oh sir you might getting the hair out yeah he's not gonna buy the hair so yeah um my my complaint is the shirts are maybe about five dollars more expensive now than when i first put them on the website and that's not my choice so i do i do not like uh long story short i feel that that it's too expensive what it is uh but things like this are a really good deal so this is a steel mug that could last 100 years that's the same logo but you know i'm not saying the t-shirts are bad obviously i mean i can promote my own merchandise here but when i first signed up they gave me one price that i felt was just barely okay i was like okay i'm not embarrassed to offer this to my to my fans you know um and now i think the price has gone up by about five dollars canadian and i feel it is embarrassing so the plain black and white t-shirt is now 22 canadian it's probably significantly less than us dollars because shipping is also cheaper there and it'll be cheaper in europe too but i've gotta say there's to me there's a big difference between fifteen dollars and twenty dollars if you're talking about a t-shirt um the hoodie anyway you guys can see the website for yourself and draw your own conclusions but yeah that is it i was uh i was yeah so yeah you'll see how it goes bad um anyway i've dodged your question of what does the what does the channel name mean we must have a couple youtube videos but don't worry nobody's gonna start a fist fight with you over the t-shirt unless unless you wear it in quebec [Music] [Laughter] so uh do you want to give me a little kiss asks i'm going to ask to answer several of these questions in succession uh we know a lot about threats to american democracy do you have an opinion on threats to india's democracy uh well look long story short china is not a threat to india's democracy it's not right india can be completely confident that way they're not really afraid of chinese infiltration or chinese-led communist revolutions or china supporting communist rebels within india which by the way there are armed insurrection groups within india you can google the naxalites there's ongoing armed communist revolution within india even today even now but they they do not have a problem with china you know expanding those into being a really significant armed front india is quite secure in that respect the way in which they're not secure is exactly looking out over the ocean um india has a naval base off the southern tip of myanmar it's hard to describe the geography frankly india and australia both are very concerned about the control of the seas about trade um it's put it this way it's really the indian empire it's the in india's position in the world including over the broader horizon of that ocean that they're concerned about they're not concerned about their own democracy now when i say the indian empire okay what about sri lanka china put a foot down in sri lanka china started setting up shop in sri lanka they basically bought a harbor we're trying to invest it in a harbor that would control harbor in sri lanka the same way they control the harbor and greece but somewhat more so somewhat more political economic power there was the beginning of china kind of taking over sri lanka economically india was terrified of that now can india offer sri lanka a better deal than china no but india felt that was a threat they're like whoa whoa we can't have china taking a step into china take a look at nepal today good luck figuring out what's going on in nepalese politics which includes nepalese communism okay so yeah india does have some some concerns that way and i mean the big story here i'm just not talking about because i already made youtube videos the big story is pakistan what happens next with pakistan and china is in a military alliance with pakistan against india so that for india is a big deal so you know it's a good question what are threats to indian democracy i do not think anyone in india is concerned about china subverting uh democracy within india or those kinds of internal threats but these these external uh problems for india they are so close and so immediate so dear into self-interest you know nepal is a foreign country but it's adjacent sri lanka is a foreign country and pakistan is an overlapping country that they're perpetually in a state of war with a low-level cold war what have you so yeah those are big deals and look you know i'm guessing nothing is really going to happen on the indian side until the next elections until someone replaces modi it seems that modi uh is a real status quo player and i could say the same about japan when is japan going to really take an anti-china position maybe never but maybe maybe some number of years from now it seems that you know joe biden is leading a very reluctant generation of politicians in most of these other countries including look at the philippines you know how anti-china is the philippines today in 2021 2022. um the exception is australia australia has become they swung they used to be very pro-china and they figured out that that would that would basically be the end of their country and they they've swung to the opposite extreme now where where certainly the political elite in australia is incredibly anti-chinese they're incredibly worried about china um so they went from reckless optimism to a kind of reckless pessimism and i do wonder to what extent the rest of the world will catch up with uh australia's somewhat hysterical anti-chinese position you know that i'm not making uh any bold predictions there uh it's possible it'll just be australia in the united states that really remain in this this way committed to opposing china okay j.j mccullough says this is a great question jj's watching the show and he writes in and says quote does the chinese definition of democracy have any adherence in the west so jj looking back at the last 100 years part of china's problem is that they keep changing their propaganda line in a way that alienates their supporters so within this video i've given a lot of emphasis to the bill clinton era supporters of china i'm now going to talk about sort of the communists before after and during um but to start you know with that example you can think of three categories here is china a democracy yes no is china anti-democracy yes no is china entitled to define or redefine democracy to suit itself to use its own sweet generous autogenous definition of democracy well okay so these are the questions we're we're now dealing with a bill clinton-era supporter of china they were clinging to the belief that china was not democratic but it wasn't anti-democratic that it was merely a backward country gradually making progress toward democracy that was the illusion right now again to be fair the most flattering thing i can say is there was a time when someone might have said that about south korea and some might have said that about taiwan and it was true so well south korea today it may not be a perfect democracy but they're making progress and they have problems with war and poverty give them a chance south korea paid off you know south africa did make the transition right by the way that doesn't mean it would have been morally correct to sorry that doesn't mean that in the context of the particular moment in south korea you shouldn't be actively advocating for a transition to democracy it doesn't mean you just sit back and pass or let it happen but there were some there were some success stories so someone who had bought into that mythology and perhaps made millions of dollars from it perhaps it was rewarding for them personally to be on the pro-china team starting in the bill clinton now today what position are they left in china has alienated all the people who supported that compromise view of china's political stats the same way that they've now alienated all the people who supported um uh the barack obama era of china opening confucius institutes around the world there was a very different kind of compromise there was like well you know china supports the understanding of appreciation of chinese culture you know there was a certain set of um self-contradictory and stupid you know compromise at the time in case you didn't know people forget very quickly during the barack obama era china supported america's war in afghanistan they were actively there supporting the american side now they pretend that they opposed america from alpha to omega in afghanistan okay now there would have been some people not many but there were people in the barack obama period who made their piece with china and said well china is our strategic partner against the taliban against isis against these other threats and problems they would have seen a kind of you know grand alliance grand strategy along those lines and resigned themselves to it or or accept it now of course it gets much crazier if you try to think of somebody who supported mao zedong in the 1960s and 1970s who made those compromises who accepted those excuses who bought into that mythology and how they tried to continue supporting china in the 1960s 70s 80s 90s 2000s it's impossible all right any of the friends and supporters of china outside of china again you can easily imagine someone in australia someone in california someone who tried to be pro china from one era finds it impossible to continue being pro china in in the next era um so the question is does the chinese definition of democracy have any adherence in the west zero absolutely none and anyone who supported what china used to say about democracy just a few decades ago they'll find themselves alienated from this new definition that's been set down today on december 4th just a few days ago december 4th 2021 this is the new propaganda line and everyone either has to line up with or get out this is a feature of chinese politics this is one of one of the distinctive features of chinese politics since mao zedong new campaign new propaganda line new party line everyone has to agree with it or go to jail or die you know they've done this again and as i mentioned uh about an hour ago they are pretending that this new party line has existed since the year 2012. so in mythology in the make-believe land of chinese propaganda this has already been going on for nine years and immediately there will be a little bit of truth to that something happened you know some of these initiatives probably started some of the transition probably started in 2012 but really it is now in 2021 after the experience of the presidency of donald trump and now the even colder relations with the united states even more hostile relations than it states uh under the presidency of joe biden now this is the this is the problem so i would say though uh we live in an era of insincere allusions to thucydides if you guys don't know thucydides don't spell it um relations between china united states are insincerely um you know linked to this notion of the the thucydides trap this historian the cities there is one very interesting connection to the philosophy of thucydides i suppose you could say thucydides says that athens supported democracy so the allies of the athenians had to support democracy both in athens and in their own city in their own democratization of of grace the advantage that sparta had was that instead sparta supported autonomy right now this is autonomy partly in our modern sense the word but partly in a more ancient and etymological sense what sparta supported was that each city having its own laws having its own system sparta their position allegedly or ostensibly was to say oh okay you can be an ally of sparta and be a democracy but you can be an ally sparta and be a dictatorship or a kingdom that they're willing to make peace and make alliances with all kinds of different political systems now if you read the whole of thucydides it is clear that actually the spartan empire was terrible for its allies that this really wasn't true but this this was the ostensible or propaganda line that they took so what china is arguing for today can be compared to the 1970s philosophy of indigenismo you know um a return to indigenism i'm saying indigenism because it is associated with latin america and so on this idea that what really matters is having your own indigenously developed culturally continuous form of democracy or dictatorship or whatever it's going to be that political systems should organically emerge from conditions that are unique to cuba unique to north korea unique to china you have to be an idiot to believe i cannot imagine who is stupid enough to believe that but it is it is broadly similar to that argument made in favor of the spartans and thucydides again not an argument that thucydides actually believes to read the text as well it's very clear he's he's telling you that the opposite is true that sparta was an incredibly uh violent repressive tyrannical ally to have uh and that they you know they did terrible things to their allies not to mention their enemies but nevertheless that is that is the most appealing or most legitimate part of china's argument so um today in 2022 what does china's strategy mean for myanmar well obviously it means that china is going to get into bed with a horrible repressive military dictatorship and they're not going to ask the burmese people to do to take even the smallest step imaginable toward democracy let alone human rights or any other vague you know vaunted notion of 21st century western liberalism sorry you may have noticed this the first time i used the term human rights in this whole video i avoid i studiously avoid these term human rights i think it's a really counterproductive abstraction you know we should be honest and precise with what it is we mean in politics uh including what china means by democracy for example okay so obviously china is letting it be known loud and clear that they will not put any pressure whatsoever on myanmar to become a democracy they will not put any pressure on indonesia or the philippines or nepal or [Music] afghanistan they are in a position with this indigenous argument to say oh well the government of the taliban is a unique product of the cultural conditions and history of afghanistan going back for a thousand years so who are we who are we in beijing who is the chinese government to question or challenge or change or demand modernization for afghanistan so yes it is um [Music] convenient to the political situation right now in the year 2022 uh it is so convenient that it is impossible to believe that it's not cynical and in case you didn't know if you have a long enough memory there was a time when this was not china's attitude um china's attitude towards what the government in vietnam should be china's attitude toward what the government in cambodia should be towards what the government allows should be they used to have quite a long robust history of intervening in other countries affairs and letting them know that they absolutely ought to imitate and catch up with the type of political order that china had created for itself whether or not they bothered to describe that so and sincerely as a as a democracy yeah quote that's just a ham-fisted attempt by the chinese to make it seem like they're following len into the letter it's a leninist so it's democratic um several phrases are verbatim from standard london translations um there were some passages of this text that i felt i i wrote down on the page this hasn't changed since stalin said stalin redmond some of it um rings in my ears that brings back the memory of of those excuses um but some of it is new some of it is different and is incredibly stupid i mean it's not some kind of positive innovation um you know but yes i have to admit there is a long history of totally surreal claims that russia already had democracy and therefore didn't need it even though nobody is allowed to vote there are no elections there isn't more than one there's only one political party i already read you the passage where they they have to offer this concession and so forth yeah so i've got a question about a book i've held up on camera before it's still read uh oliver shields is asking about china's crony capitalism which is still on the still on the shelf [Laughter] well i've been busy writing my own book and admittedly you know i uh i have quite a few books to read before i would even theoretically get to that one we'll see maybe it'll be on the great list of books i books i purchased but never read all right uh another so i'm just reading you a couple more short past year if you guys have questions now's the time to send them in because i am gonna this this live stream will not be infinitely long quote oh so i should have introduced this term the new propaganda claim is that what china has now since the year 2012 again this is a little bit different from leninist or stalinist era propaganda but that starting in 2012 they transitioned to this a system of so-called whole process people's democracy so i should look up the chinese terms of that this is not a propaganda term i've seen before um so it looks like we're starting a new a new campaign a new era of claiming they have whole process people's democracy but they admit they did not have this system during the era of mao zedong right this is very much a xi jinping era innovation now what it says in these texts about the arab mao zedong hilariously is positive they give the maoist period of communism credit for producing the firm foundation of the democracy that communism day but this is a paraphrase but this is quite close to the text i read it recently they claim that uh chinese democracy is a tower that stands tall because it was built on this demo this foundation created in the the maoist the more extreme communist era however as much as they might praise the past they are indicating that there was a decisive break from the past in their 2012 and now they have quote unquote whole process people's democracy so what is whole process people's democracy quote whole process people's democracy is a comprehensive and coordinated system involving pieces i'm sorry there are some errors in english ensuring that the people's voices are heard and their wishes are represented in every aspect of china's political and social life whole process people's democracy prevents individuals from manipulating the political process to win elections comma and leaves no room for politicians to shower promises while campaigning and then break them all once elected yes there is certainly no possibility for politicians to make promises while campaigning and then manipulate the political process to win elections because there are no campaigns there are no elections there are no promises there is no voting so all of this literature just produced in december 4th and december 5th or published in the last few days it's written in this very strange style of pretending that china already has democracy and how can anyone question that they have democracy talking about china as if there are elections and voting indeed as if they have multi-party competitive parliamentary democracy when nothing of the kind is the case by the way um to give an interesting example that is a human face on it most of you will know the actor jackie chan the martial arts actor jackie chan jackie chan is a sitting member of china's equivalent to the senate he's his formal title is not senator but jackie chan is the equivalent of a senator in communist china nobody elected him he probably could win an election if they had democracy obviously he's one of the most famous and popular people in in china so it is somewhat hilarious that when they try to include uh popular and populist figures in their political process they nevertheless are nothing but faceless voiceless cogs in the system i mean is you know he's not able to influence or decide anything in china and nobody who sits in that council can but you get these crowd shots you know they all vote unanimously they all raise their hands and support xi jinping unquestioning and so on but every so often the camera zooms in you know to show you oh there's there's jackie chan they do that for a few celebrities here's someone you might recognize you know who's a member of your supposedly democratic body um that that represents you you know in the public all right um so this was the this is the short quotation that i i wrote down in my own margin on paper here that the excuses haven't haven't changed since stalin the communist party of china upholds democracy within the party and practices democratic elections decision making and management and oversight they always want to add management how many times do the word management appear in this document they practice democratic elections decision-making management and oversight to better serve the development of people's democracy the communist party of china has improved its mechanism for selecting and appointing officials enabling outstanding individuals in all sectors enter party leadership terms and the government comma ensuring that the leadership of the party and the state rests in the hands of those loyal to marxism comma the party and the people so again i don't know what to say except that this is a sort of self-contradicting fiction so you claim that the communist party has internal democracy so again completely or explicitly admitting there aren't elections there isn't democracy if the country's all nobody elected xi jinping for example there's not going to be an election or a referendum or a vote or what have you but the claim is that there is never the less democracy than the communist party and then we're told that there's some kind of freedom of speech or democracy as long as all of the people selected by the party and i say selected not elected as long as they of course remain loyal to marxism and the party so you know again i'm sorry there's no way i can summarize or analyze this to make it seem more or less stupid than it is it is profoundly utterly incoherent i mean you know this is the same contradiction we had before they bluntly stated that democracy and dictatorship may seem to be a contradiction but they're not because they've unified them in one system this is really saying you have as much uh democracy as you want as long as you don't have any elections you don't have any vote you don't have any choice you have as much freedom of speech as you want as long as you remain totally obedient to just repeating the communist party line remain loyal to marxism uh so on and so forth now just you just want to post one second sorry i could do a whole separate video on this i could have opened the video with this of course it's important to talk about what democracy really is in contrast to this phony definition again it's hard to call it phony this self-contradictory nonsensical definition advanced by china it's also important to recognize non-democratic systems that exist within western societies okay when a famous movie director has a heart attack and dies this happens all the time i hear about the news there's someone who was gonna make a movie the movie was gonna cost millions of dollars and some announcements were already made for this movie maybe the the lead actor had already been announced some of them oh there's going to be a new movie starring this person with so many millions of dollars and this person is going to be the director then suddenly the director has a heart attack and dies or even more commonly someone on instagram says that he's guilty of sexual transgressions and he's canceled and he has to be fire i mean we live in an era when people get fired in hollywood before kind of okay there's some kind of scandal some people might say there is the democratic process of appointing a new director like from a chinese perspective it's much more democratic than anything that's ever happened in the history of the commerce party think about what happens you know there is there's a role for public opinion whenever this happens there are people who send in emails and make posts on social media and they may even have kind of events the streets oh this is the guy we want to be the new director who should be the new director for batman or who should be the new director for star wars or star trek you know there is a kind of public discourse and i think genuinely the corporations actually listen to that pay attention they say oh all these fans want this person to make the movie all these fans want this person to take over the movie and you have a series of meetings a series of consultations that are closed door but that are reported on to the public and the the public kind of participates a little bit all right now i think everyone in this audience just because you speak english you will all agree with me when i say that is not democratic okay there is no democracy whatsoever when a large corporation decides who is going to be the main actor in a movie or who is going to be the director when they when they decide to commit millions of dollars to making a film it's not democratic but it resembles democracy more than the system of government the chinese are claiming as democratic here you know so i think i think that's really very important i mean if you're a high school teacher thing if you explain this to teenagers or explain to someone who's a fully groomed over some if you're explaining this to someone who hasn't really spent years thinking about and researching politics it's worthwhile to reflect seriously on non-democratic institutions and systems within the western world how we organize hospitals is not democratic how we organize universities is not democratic but how the walt disney corporation manages selecting a director for a motion a major motion picture it's not democratic but there is there is consultation there is debate sometimes the companies change their mind at first they appoint one director and then everyone in the public says no they don't want that guy and then they change it it happens there's some response to public interest right but it's still really important to recognize that that's that's not democracy and the argument the chinese government is making here is that any public involvement whatsoever no matter how fleeting minor or shallow renders the whole system democratic like because you can't claim that uh you know the opinion of the masses the opinion of the people doesn't doesn't matter in china what at all whatsoever that somehow therefore the whole system should be recognized as democracy and as i say they're making the claim no matter how absurd they're making the claim that uh their definition of democracy is correct and the american definition of democracy is incorrect and is even an institutional failure all right so just giving you another uh short quote of how surreal uh these documents get quote advancing democratic elections consultations decision making management and oversight it's the exact same phrase again management and oversight as if that's what democracy's about right comma progressing electoral democracy and consultative democracy side by side and expanding the people's orderly political participation and the scope of democracy this is they describe going on in china right now you know what does this mean of course obviously we can sit here and just say this means absolutely nothing how can china talk about progressing electoral democracy there are no elections they now it's possible to have a system of government where you don't have multiple political parties but you at least have to have multiple rival candidates you know even in sorry in some countries you they're just they stand as individuals without a without a party but regardless you either have to have rival individuals or rival parties you have nothing like that in china in china you do not even have rival ownership of newspapers all newspapers are controlled by the one and only political party that controls the whole process but so we're taking a step you know into the into the surreal here and again to to give it context they think they're advancing their notion of democracy to defend themselves against um the attack that joe biden is is pressing against them well what's going to be the final outcome here is this going to legitimate or delegitimate uh chinese democracy and chinese foreign policy so this is a this is a relatively coherent uh quote from the paper quote democracy is not a decorative ornament but an instrument for addressing the issues that concern the people whether a country is democratic depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country whether the people have the right to vote and more importantly the right to participate extensively now there's a semicolon there it's not the innocence i'm going to stop close one whether the people have the right to vote is is in there all right but the claim made again and again in these in these documents [Music] is that america has mistakenly come to believe that one person one vote is the whole of the definition of democracy and that in fact it is america that is not a true democracy whereas china is but i i again i'm not putting these words in there they they include here as one of the criteria for the definition of democracy whether the people have the right to vote and there is no promise that china is going to become a democracy the claim is that they already are and that they can't be forced to change by america or or anyone else that they're already supposedly more democratic than america ever has been reported all right um quote whole process people's democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy procedural democracy with substantive democracy directs democracy with indirect democracy and people's democracy with the will of the state it is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society period it is a true democracy that works period and that is the thesis statement of the uh of the document and the title is chinese democracy china colon democracy that works all right guys okay uh perfectly reasonable comment from oliver quote doesn't any dictatorship or any political system rely on some kind of participation yes and again i think that's that's a sort of misconception that helps to shore up support for china such as it is um a lot of people don't realize that in a country like egypt i mean i do not consider egypt the democracy but yes there are meetings there are consultations there is a role for um public opinion and you could certainly make an argument that there's more freedom of the press there's more of sort of the newspapers criticizing the government the government respond to it in a country like egypt than there is in communist china so there are many non-democratic countries where you can still say you know vox populi box dais you can look at kingdoms you just look at you know monarchies where there is still public consultation and concern about you know uh what people think you know so on and so forth but you know the great democrat pardon me the great advantage democracy has is that it can change okay the united states of america was built on slavery and racism okay and they changed they changed and they changed in large part because they elected new people and they passed new laws you know there were really deep fundamental changes in the united states of america china can't do that china can't change china is a one-party state committed to one ideology now again how different would america be if you would had a tyrannical one-party state government as recently as the 1950s you know we have to go back that that far and you didn't have you know you didn't have this potential this possibility through criticism through debate yes you know freedom of speech freedom of press through democracy at every level um you know to bring about profound sweeping institutional political and legal change so there's a lot wrong with the united states of america i mean the other documents i read there are pages and pages of criticism the united states america melissa heard me laughing as i was reading it it's like yes well you know for example the government of china is complaining that in america twitter and facebook are too tightly censored that you don't have real freedom of speech real freedom of uh you know real freedom of uh political discourse on the internet in america for example the censorship that's seen on on twitter and facebook yes well there is some censorship of the internet in the united states of america but shall we compare that to the level of the internet in china in this same way it was all just laughable um look you know i do not feel that the election of george w bush in the year 2000 was a legitimate election if you weren't alive there was demonstrable corruption and incompetence in the state of florida especially elsewhere too i feel that the first election of george w bush was illegitimate however it was more legitimate than any election that has ever occurred in communist china ever so like when you're putting it in that comparative context even a bad election in america like the first election george w bush seems you know fantastic hilariously the the chinese communist party's publications from just the last few days they attack also the system of primaries that bernie sanders uh contested in so you know they say it was unfair and crooked the primaries that selected hillary clinton over uh bernie sanders so what is that now more than eight years ago 10 years ago or something i don't know yeah yeah because that was when he was against hillary that's not uh was that 2016 oh okay getting old all right um anyway uh the you know the system of primaries within the democrat party the united states of america is indeed deeply flawed it needs improvement and the experience of bernie sanders both in contesting the primary against hillary clinton and against uh joe biden it illustrates some problems guess what oh that is still a more legitimate political process democratic process than anything china has ever attempted implemented design dreamed of it's still better than anything even set out in theory in these documents that are boasting that china already has the best democratic system in the world as the result of the progress of 5 000 years of cultural development now to be fair to china their claim is not that chinese democracy is the best system of democracy for everyone on planet earth it's this is an indigenous movement this is indigenismo you know their claim is that china has developed the best possible system of democracy for the chinese people and that in the same way all of these other countries and all these other cultures should be allowed to develop their own indigenous system democracy ah yes well hmm what if the people of tibet were allowed to develop their own system of democracy their own definition of democracy that resulted from their culture and their language which is also 5000 years old i can't tell you this guys but the clock started at the same time for the whole of planet earth if china has 5 000 years of history tibet has 5000 years of history yes well if you think democracy should uniquely emerge from local cultural conditions and that its legitimacy should not be tested by an objective standard created by the united states of america they definitely don't want it to be judged against the standard created by ancient athens or ancient rome well then we get into some some interesting questions hmm how how about taiwan those people are just as chinese as you they're they're kind of more chinese in some ways in case you didn't know you know the people of taiwan also have 5 000 years of history they also speak the chinese language they read chinese literature they read it more than people do in communist china they're equally as familiar with confucius and laozi and all the classics of the han dynasty and before you know the warring states period they they know all that stuff at least as well as chinese communists do probably more it's a more conservative continuous example of chinese culture what can we say about taiwan's model of democracy then as a product of their own indigenous culture in history why does that why does that work so well what can we say about south korea what can we say about japan what can we say about even mongolia right how about thailand i mean this is so easily controvertible for china's bordering nation states and of course you know even within china yeah yeah have you ever heard of this you've heard of xinjiang you ever heard of this well they have their own language they have their own culture they've been there for five thousand years hmm so yeah this can be applied and the the point is right now i mean it's sickening and it's shocking but china is cutting a deal with the taliban china is just going to try to rub america's face in their defeat in afghanistan and they're probably going to do that in syria they're probably going to get into bed with iran to the greatest extent that they can their current strategy is basically to team up with america's enemies anywhere and everywhere they can and make life difficult for u.s foreign policy okay um so yes cynically this new definition of democracy can be deployed to justify a partnership between the taliban the most hated the most despicable conservative muslim regime in the world and chinese communism which is nominally atheist and actively anti-islamic for example in xinjiang but on the other hand it has some other you know worrying implications regionally globally and even within china itself okay guys uh you know the implicit point of this video you know i haven't had to state until now and i don't really need to state it before i had to hit the end and the stream button but you know um if you're overweight there is no point debating the definition of overweight wow wow i mean you know how do you define right so you got like a spectrum here you got thin and you got fat and that's it's binary it's a spectrum you're thin you're thin you're thin then you gain too much weight in your fat right let's find out well you know um what if we have a few different kind of gray areas all right you're thin what about people who are husky do we have to say fat do we have to over couldn't we have couldn't we have husky you know can't we redefine obesity redefine being overweight can't we you know now look you can keep getting fatter and fatter and you can keep making up new excuses and you can keep putting words in quotation marks and keep challenging the definitions you know at what point is obesity obesity you know well you know over the centuries the meaning of the term obese has changed in different cultures it's changed uh here's the average body weight for an american of my height therefore if i weigh less than the average man of my height i can't possibly be obese i can't possibly you can keep moving the goal post you can keep changing the definitions of terms right and it's utterly counterproductive you're never going to prove anything about obesity you're never going to prove anything about democracy you're never going to prove anything but your own weight or your own fitness or your own health right all you're gonna do is reveal the depth of your own intellectual dishonesty your own immorality frankly all right so china has opened the door to redefining democracy endlessly to suit its own short-term self-interest and the bottom line is a rose by any other name would smell as sweet a communist dictatorship by any other name would smell as foul there were people who believed that china would make the same kind of transition we saw in south korea the same kind of transition we saw in taiwan and other positive examples around the world there were people who thought they would go through a series of gray areas from dictatorship to democracy there were people who wanted to believe that china was neither fat nor thin but somewhere in between and that we could all just set sit back and let it happen all right and the truth is that the situation in taiwan today is worse than japanese fascism huh oh god okay well no edits no edits thanks melissa's manager little slip there the reality is the situation in beijing the situation in communist china is worse than japanese fascism i'm not wanting to compare taiwan to japanese fashion fascism but japan the situation in communist china is worse than japanese fascism in world war ii there is a real question what if america had never gone to war with japan what if japan had never entered into an alliance with nancy germany there's a parallel universe where japan just pursued building its own empire without entering into an alliance with nazi germany do you think japan would have remained a fascist dictatorship forever if you've actually studied the history they'd already had elections they already had democracy they already had a diet as they called it the history of democracy in japan is longer than the history of fascism they moved into this fascist period after already having democracy so there's actually an interpretation of history that without america conquering japan without the american army literally writing a new constitution for japan japan could have made its own transition back to democracy right the situation in china is much more extreme there is no reason to think that china can make a transition from dictatorship to democracy without being conquered or without an unimaginably violent civil war sadly china remains in the category of countries that are not merely non-democratic but are anti-democratic it's in the same category of countries as saudi arabia and thus saudi arabia and china both should be enemies of the united states they should be the target of a worldwide pro-democracy conspiracy and it is only now in 2021 that joe biden is putting together the rudiments of an international alliance to promote democracy against dictatorship something that they could have done back in 1971 and then the creation of china as we now know it this manufacturing behemoth never would have happened