They Got the Red Book, They Got the New Look
Remember back in the day when everyone hated on the Soviet Union and got upset when they used their superior gymnastic technology to beat us in the Olympics? Then they self-destructed and it was America 's turn to be top-dog obnoxious bully. Well ladies and gentlemen, I'm calling it right now and you heard it here first: the 21st century's super-power super-villain is the People's Republic of China .
They snuck up on us with their cheap running shoe factories and delicious hoisin sauce and now they're well on their way to overtaking our rowdy southern neighbours for the title of "The Superpower You Love to Hate" — at least America has an elected government to keep up the checks and balances.
Let's review the evidence of China 's newfound jerkyness: Let's start with Taiwan. Taiwan is its own country, end of story. Why does China even care so much — Taiwan has no resources and little historical significance to the mainland. Could it perhaps be their bloated ego and over-inflated sense of self importance? Taiwan has been trying to resolve this ridiculous aberration of diplomacy for the past twenty years, but is scared youknowwhatless by China's huge army and threats of immediate attack.
Tibet — hmmn, how to put it nicely? China's invasion of Tibet in 1950 blows, and their continued efforts to destroy Tibetan culture and suppress self-determination blows even harder! Hey PRC: Get the hell out of Tibet! It does not belong to you except in your own delusional mind. Your thinly-veiled attempt to erase Tibetan identity by promoting mass Han Chinese migration and wrapping it in a pale veneer of 'economic development' is disgusting and smacks of cultural genocide. — Hoo-wee, Tintin, getting a bit hot under the collar there. Moving right along...
Human rights; at the moment, China only has terrible human rights for its own citizens, but how long before it tries to push its brand of commie management on everyone else (à la present global-capitalist American hegemony)? From Tian'anmen to Falun Gong and prison labour, China 's human rights record is boo-urns.
The whole problem is that no one wants to take China to task for its meanie-badness because they don't want to piss off the world's biggest market. So pretty much everyone just turns a blind eye and looks the other way, pretending everything is fine, when really China is executing and torturing people left, right and centre. Any place that, for example, harvests organs from political prisoners deserves a whole heap of sanctions and international condemnation instead of a tsk-tsk-tsk and ineffectual finger-wagging. The PRC's authoritarian, un-elected government certainly makes all these problems worse.
Clearly the People's Republic of China should go in the 'Dead to Me' section, but it has a special place in my heart and I just can't bring myself to do it — there are simply far too many things I love; chopsticks, propaganda art, the Temple of Heaven, dragons, pirated DVDs, spicy crispy ginger pork. I'll have to content myself with 'On Notice,' but be warned China; you better stop resting on your Moo-shu laurels and get your act together before I'm forced to drop you down to 'Dead to Me' with Pope Eggs Benedict.
All that being said however, Americans are still a bunch of bat-crazy mo-fos ↓↓↓.
They snuck up on us with their cheap running shoe factories and delicious hoisin sauce and now they're well on their way to overtaking our rowdy southern neighbours for the title of "The Superpower You Love to Hate" — at least America has an elected government to keep up the checks and balances.
Let's review the evidence of China 's newfound jerkyness: Let's start with Taiwan. Taiwan is its own country, end of story. Why does China even care so much — Taiwan has no resources and little historical significance to the mainland. Could it perhaps be their bloated ego and over-inflated sense of self importance? Taiwan has been trying to resolve this ridiculous aberration of diplomacy for the past twenty years, but is scared youknowwhatless by China's huge army and threats of immediate attack.
Tibet — hmmn, how to put it nicely? China's invasion of Tibet in 1950 blows, and their continued efforts to destroy Tibetan culture and suppress self-determination blows even harder! Hey PRC: Get the hell out of Tibet! It does not belong to you except in your own delusional mind. Your thinly-veiled attempt to erase Tibetan identity by promoting mass Han Chinese migration and wrapping it in a pale veneer of 'economic development' is disgusting and smacks of cultural genocide. — Hoo-wee, Tintin, getting a bit hot under the collar there. Moving right along...
Human rights; at the moment, China only has terrible human rights for its own citizens, but how long before it tries to push its brand of commie management on everyone else (à la present global-capitalist American hegemony)? From Tian'anmen to Falun Gong and prison labour, China 's human rights record is boo-urns.
The whole problem is that no one wants to take China to task for its meanie-badness because they don't want to piss off the world's biggest market. So pretty much everyone just turns a blind eye and looks the other way, pretending everything is fine, when really China is executing and torturing people left, right and centre. Any place that, for example, harvests organs from political prisoners deserves a whole heap of sanctions and international condemnation instead of a tsk-tsk-tsk and ineffectual finger-wagging. The PRC's authoritarian, un-elected government certainly makes all these problems worse.
Clearly the People's Republic of China should go in the 'Dead to Me' section, but it has a special place in my heart and I just can't bring myself to do it — there are simply far too many things I love; chopsticks, propaganda art, the Temple of Heaven, dragons, pirated DVDs, spicy crispy ginger pork. I'll have to content myself with 'On Notice,' but be warned China; you better stop resting on your Moo-shu laurels and get your act together before I'm forced to drop you down to 'Dead to Me' with Pope Eggs Benedict.
All that being said however, Americans are still a bunch of bat-crazy mo-fos ↓↓↓.
13 comments:
Thanks to Katie BTW for providing the link for this video (instead of trying to keep her national shame hidden and secrect).
Hilarious and frightening at the same time.
I mean, WTF — "How many sides does a triangle have?" How can someone not know?
not to mention China's suppression of Falun Gong, if critics are to be believed.
i've often thought it strange that the US (and other countries - Canada included in some cases I suppose) is willing to push economic, commercial and financial embargos on certain countries and not others. when really, china is right up there in many ways.
That video is ridiculous!!
this post made me laugh out loud at work. i don't even dare play the video.
Boo China, if your food wasn't so tasty you'd be dead to me too!
I read this post in the staff room of the high school I'm currently working at and your judicious use of 'boo-urns' made me laugh out loud! Only to get shushed (sp?) from the old bat sitting next to me!! How very dare she?!? bloody PRC sympathiser I bet...actually, she DID choose Chinese fried rice at lunch...anyway, I digress. living in Nippon I get bashed around the head with anti-China tirades daily (bless you 'Daily Yomuiri' and your ultra-right wing readership) so I'm jumping on the bandwagon. twas it not for the delicious mysteries of fried ice-cream (how do they do it?!?) i'd be getting in the black vans and starting a fatwa of my own.
btw chopsticks ARE Attila the Fun, but the disposable chopstick industry should not be encouraged!! an area the size of Africa is cleared everyday just so that Office Ladies and Salari-men don't have to endure the strain of carrying their own little o-hashi from home and back again. who cares about trees, eh? what have they ever done for us??
in other news...Mc Donald's here is releasing a new burger on Friday...the Mega Mac!! same old Big Mac, but with two EXTRA patties slipped in! sweetie, you should've seen my face when I saw the sign! (yeah, you know the one) I think I may've even done a little dance. I'll send you a picture of me inhaling one. double standards are the new black.
Dave—
Well, of course the US has sanctions against Cuba — they don't have any resources execpt cigars. Sanctions are really only for poor countries with nothing we need. For example, Iraq; sanctions galore, but then when Bush decided we needed that oil he started an illegal war to overcome the previous sanction-related no-trading problem.
I don't doubt that if Bush decides that the US needs cigars to keep the American economy inflated, he'll invade Cuba faster than you can say "Che Guevera."
America depends on China for all it's cheap junk, so they'll never have sanctions no matter how bad a country they are. (I bet they won't give sanctions even if I put China in my "Dead to Me" section).
jase-
Disposable chopsticks were the bane of my existance when I was in Tokyo. I mean, how wasteful can you be? Oh, wait — we can wrap the disposable chopsticks in paper packaging, that'll ruin the earth some more. Who cares, they're not Japanese forests, so it doesn't really matter anyway.
Bah! Japan must have one of the *worst* environmental track records anywhere!
tt you forgot Xinjiang, which is really East Turkestan and its 9 million Uyghirs, who are already outnumbered by the Han chinese in most of Xinjiang........except the southern prefectures....also inner Mongolia was subdued in the same way. Tibetan areas outside Tinetan Autonomous Region like Kham and Amdo are already Han majority......now the railway built with the help of our very own Bombardier will accelrate Han migration into Tibet. This is not the first time a Canadian company has helped an opressive regime......Talisman and others have done it before.
Ugh! Don't even get me started on Xinjiang!
When I lived in China, there was actually a fairly large-scale terrorist campaign by the Uyghirs against the central government (supported with ex-Soviet arms from their Central Asian brothers across the border). Blowing up buses, government buildings, whatnot, but the whole thing went completely unreported by the Western media.
It may even still be going on now, who knows? When I tried to talk to my dad about it over the phone, the line went all staticky and then cut. Good to know the government has nothing better to do with its money and time than to listen in on every phone call made by foreign residents.
Boo China. The whole country is steamrollering ahead without realising they are teetering on the edge of a knife. Countdown to some major shit going down in China: T minus 15 years and counting...
You lived in China too...wow, you're so lucky to have travelled to all these places. As for China, i think there are a lot of problems in the regions.....its almost like the former Soviet republics...a lot worse than the soviets in many ways. Don't know where all these minorities will end up, i hope they don't end up being crushed with an iron hand....Han imperialism is much worse and dangerous than the Russian domination of the soviet republics, whereas the Russians were mostly concerned about communist ideology, the Han Chinese regime wants total cultural and dempgraphic domination over these regions that have never been a part of China. The irony is that the so called 'Free world' is not the least bit concerned, as they are being bought over with lure of Chinese market. The Chinese seem to get away with an awful lot.
They even bullied Kazakhstan And Kyrgyzstan to cede terrritory to China...as they did with Nepal and Pakistan previously...and are now trying to do the same with Bhutan, they even built a road through Bhutanese territory without their permission, the only countries that have resisted Chinese expansionsm are India and Russia, India and Tibet signed a Border agreement when China was not even in the picutre, but after taking over Tibet, China wanted a large chunk of Ladakh called Aksai Chin to build a road from Tibet to Xinjiang which it later Occuied during a war in the 60's, on the eastern front they claim a whole Indian state Arunachal Pradesh(as the Chinese ambassador to India said last month causing a diplomatic furore), and haven't recognised Sikkim as part of India, though this former Indian protectorate joined India after a refrendum. The Border with Russia in Manchuria is also not to Chinese satisfaction...but they know Russia can't be bullied. Seems like the only language they understand is that of fierce resistance. Its one thing to have border disputes with your neighbors, but disputing already delineated borders of countries that China occupied(i.e Xinjiang, Tibet) is bullying at its worst. Not to mention the Han cultural and ethnic imperialism over the occupied regions.
note - china didn't invade tibet in 1959. thats the year of the tibetan uprising and the dalai lama's exile.
they invaded in 1950 (although there is controversy about whether they actually invaded in 1949)
Kad-
Yes of course. All my years as an East Asian Studies major, wasted!!
I'm changing it right now.
Someguy-
Your second post somehow completely escaped me when you wrote it. I agree, China's diplomatic track record is absolutely abysmal. It's hard to imagine a country having border disputes with so many of it's neighbours. Boo China!
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