How Does China Work?
Truncated traditions form a common forum for all.
This is an updated version of my article from June 2, 2022. It is meant to provide an introduction to the mechanisms that have kept China alive and are now turning it into a giant module in the globalist machine. Even Schwab admits that he would like to keep some of the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans alive after the big culling, because these folks are “used to being obedient.”
The legal, economic, and cultural segregation of the haves and the have-nots has always been a pillar of human civilizations. All of them used an ideology that convinced both the elite and the subjects that they deserved their fate. In most cases, the ideology took the form of some religion, but “the Chinese” were, and still are, different.
It is easier to understand “the Chinese,” if one manages to understand their heritage, at least to a certain extent.
If you take a look at East/Southeast Asia, you can find a number of prominent ethnic groups that somehow managed to weather out all the storms in the violent history of the region. Any way I look at it, they share only one feature: they all have their own system of writing modules and calligraphy. Writing in China, however, is not linked to a specific language.
Literacy alone in China took care of the separation of the privileged and the underclass. Social mobility, however, emerged in China about 2.500 years ago with the emergence of Confucius, whose influence on the powerful initiated a crude form of meritocracy outside belligerent causes (in militant tribal cultures, soldiers of old usually enjoyed quite a bit of upward mobility). When Confucianism was embraced by the rulers (it is an “etiquette” of “ruling properly”; Machiavelli comes to mind as an analogy from the West, but that happened nearly two thousand years later in the West and it never became officially canonized) suddenly, small landowners and some artisans who were able to pay a tutor to teach their sons how to read and write and a wondering scholar whose stock of Confucius’ works made it possible for the sons to learn all of them by heart and go for the Imperial Exam that could elevate their position. That is why the Chinese respect money even today; social mobility was possible only for those with assets, and the destitute had to succumb to the fact that they were undeserving.
Only about 40% of “the Chinese” speak Mandarin. There are about 300 languages in China, and their stone-age-level writing is the only way they can communicate with each other, which makes their writing indispensable for maintaining cultural “unity,” but they also enjoy the fact that “western devils” have a hard time understanding a writing system (the Russians also pride themselves of the same, although Russian is incomparably easier to read and write than Chinese ideograms) that requires familiarity with about 15 thousand symbols (that denote morphemes, that is, the smallest meaningful elements in a language) with a just about infinite number of combinations with the 52 diachronics (little markers within ideograms indicating some sort of inflection in meaning, but ideograms can also be created for novel ideas, mostly by combining two or more existing elements), so one of the final tests at the Imperial Exam, when multiple contestants achieved a perfect score by reciting Confucius perfectly (assuming the mandatory bribes before the test hadn’t taken care of it, because when all things went equal, the largest donor’s son was declared winner), was the task to create a new “ideogram,” and the candidate with the most elegant solution was granted the title of the lowest-ranking imperial official.
So, “the Chinese” are not so mysterious, after all, but bearing in mind that they represent a completely different stance in civilization might assist westerners to realize why they are looked down upon even by the lowliest subject of China.
Still, not everyone from there is completely detached. I remember having a discussion with a Chinese doctoral student in my time as a doctoral student about 30 years ago in Massachusetts. While packing books for shipments for the University Press as student workers, we were exploring the possibilities of some kind of solution to a computer programming problem (it may have been hardware, I forget) and, as I kept coming up with options (as a student in Linguistics), after a few minutes, he couldn’t hide his astonishment, to which, to my amazement, he immediately gave voice as well, as if talking to himself, which resulted in something like, “It looks like not all white people are stupid.” In the same warehouse, after the conversation, I was even befriended by a Vietnamese engineering student, whose idea of westerners also radically changed (but the Vietnamese tend to be Roman Catholics as a result of their French colonial heritage, so they are light-years closer to the West than most people from China).
Obviously, it would be easier to get along with people from China, if they didn’t consider themselves superior, but I cannot blame them, because such a sense of superiority seems to be just about universal in all cultures.
Christianity could have served as a decent common denominator to abridge various cultures, but it didn’t work out in China in the long run. Christianity was not banned right away. After about 200 years of proselytizing, in 1692, it even received imperial protection:
https://thechinaproject.com/2021/03/24/when-christianity-was-tolerated-in-early-qing-china/
The Jesuits managed to convert up to 400 thousand Chinese (the poor were out of range for Confucianism that was the elite’s ideology, and and many people liked the idea of a personal relationship with God as a personal redeemer, which was missing from the spiritualism in Taoism that recognized only the “inner voice” as “the voice of the Tao”), but the pope disallowed to have the Sacrament made of rice, and the in the absence of wheat, conversions slowed down. Jesuits were adept at making deals with those in power (which is the reason why Counter-Reformation was successful in Europe), convincing them it was in their best interest to allow Roman Catholicism to flourish. Later, Franciscan and Dominican preachers showed up, ignored the rich and powerful, while publicly declared that Confucianism was from the Devil, which ticked off the ones in power and in 1724, Catholicism earned a 136-year-long banishment from China:
https://thechinaproject.com/2021/02/10/the-yongzheng-emperor-and-christianity-in-china/
Christian missionaries were welcome in China only after the Second Opium War that ended in 1860.
Today, only about 44 million Chinese declare themselves to be Christians:
The idea of equality before God and before the law doesn’t exist in most cultures, and China is not an exception. In fact, even in the West, in Calvinism and in orthodox Judaism, the proof of God loving you is your opulence. There is a pecking order among Muslims, too1. The “West” pretends to give people equal opportunities, but upward social mobility has been non-existent for decades, taking the illusion of the American Dream with itself after an ephemeral existence to an early grave.
What is the common denominator among all cultures is that they structure themselves in the same manner, and they respect wealth and power, based on which, they usually develop their own ideologies in order to keep the destitute at bay:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/apocalypse-now
The people of China share an understanding of how their country works and their literacy ensures that the subjects are always informed from high up regarding their next tasks. Their version of the “Ubermensch” ensures at least a certain level of unity against outsiders, which provides a little human dignity to all. The mechanism is easy to observe in Chinese movies; much like their American counterparts, they are nearly exclusively vehicles on conveyors of propaganda for mass manipulation:
China is now often presented as the paragon of all commendable political establishments in the future.
The people of western Saudi Arabia still speak the language of the Q’ran, and they expect their version of the Messiah, “the Mahdi,” coming from their ranks. This is somewhat similar to orthodox Judaism, where any newborn boy can turn out to be the Messiah, but for good measure, Muhammad is the most common name for newborns in many European countries.
I lived in china for 12 years, what I saw was the great majority are dirt poor peasants, well aware of their position, well aware of exactly what the ruling class is.
They have a major issue there, being the tenure and ownership of land. All those massive buildings, that are 'worth' billions, are on land owned by, and leased from, those peasants, displaced for that purpose, and given peanuts in exchange.
They can see just what the value is now and those 'leases' are all 70 year duration, which is coming due for re-negotiation right about now.
The ruling class - the military - have a dilemma. Claim ownership and spark an uprising of the great majority of the people, or make a huge payout to the actual owners?
What I saw, was that the peasants are very angry, and very ready, to reclaim their country.
I saw this in village uprisings against the local representatives of the 'govt', occurring each week.
Even among the 'middle' classes, minor disagreements with local 'govt' crooks quickly escalated into violence, regardless of the well known consequences.
In my opinion, it won't take much of a spark to set that place alight.
Interesting Ray. In the 50's mainland simplified the characters but Taiwan retained the complex original. Japan is closer to Taiwan's usage. Mandarin is hard because of the pronunciation and gobs of words that sound similar but the grammar isn't so hard. Japanese is easier to pronounce, grammar has some twists but after getting a dozen rules down its not so bad, but they also have gobs of words used in specific situations, 2-3 levels of politeness that can get a bit dazzling, and use 2 auxiliary written syllabaries that take some time to get used to. Proton Magic & Co has recently sent China a Christine Massey FOI on the proof of a virus there, their reply probably wont be hard to read because it will be just as blank as the package inserts for the shots.