China isn’t winning any popularity contests these days
Finally! Something on which we can agree.
Americans in both parties blame China:
Republicans and Democrats now largely agree that the Chinese government bears responsibility for the spread of the pandemic, that it can’t be trusted on this or any other issue, and that the U.S. government should maintain a tough position on China on trade and overall, especially if Beijing again falters in its commitments.
“It’s as much of a consensus issue as you can get in today’s divided world,” said Mark Penn, chairman of the Harris Poll…
Of the nationally representative sample of 1,993 American adults Harris surveyed online between April 3 and April 5, a net total of 23 percent said Xi, the Chinese president, was a trustworthy source of information related to the covid-19 outbreak, with Republicans and Democrats closely aligned.
That’s where the unity ends. We also have this:
The White House and the U.S. media rated 53 and 60 percent in trustworthiness, respectively, with Republicans tending to support the former and Democrats the latter.
Is it because they’re Democrats that they trust the media? Or is it because they trust the media that they’re Democrats?
The larger issue of not trusting China shows Trump’s prescience – or some would say his intuition. One of the pillars of his campaign and administration has been that China has – not to be too delicate about it – screwed us. He wasn’t talking about the virus, he was talking about money and trade and things connected with money and trade. But the current health crisis has only highlighted how right he was.
I believe that it has also made it clear to more people that many politicians and pundits of the liberal/left persuasion were and still are wrong about China. It may even be becoming clear to more people that the error is not just a cognitive one, but a stance motivated by self-interest – in other words, money.
There’s the Bidens, for example. And then there’s this sort of thing (from 2018):
Meanwhile, in the US, lobbyists paid by Chinese-backed institutions are cultivating vocal supporters known as “third-party spokespeople” to deliver Beijing’s message, and working to sway popular perceptions of Chinese rule in Tibet. China is also wooing journalists from around the world with all-expenses-paid tours and, perhaps most ambitiously of all, free graduate degrees in communication, training scores of foreign reporters each year to “tell China’s story well”…
The state-run English-language newspaper China Daily has struck deals with at least 30 foreign newspapers – including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the UK Telegraph – to carry four- or eight-page inserts called China Watch, which can appear as often as monthly. The supplements take a didactic, old-school approach to propaganda; recent headlines include “Tibet has seen 40 years of shining success”, “Xi unveils opening-up measures” and – least surprisingly of all – “Xi praises Communist party of China members.”…
In September (2018), Donald Trump criticised this practice, claiming China was pushing “false messages” intended to damage his prospects in the midterm elections…
As Beijing and its proxies extend their reach, they are harnessing market forces to silence the competition. Discourse power is, it seems, a zero-sum game for China, and voices that are critical of Beijing are co-opted or silenced, left without a platform or drowned out in the sea of positive messaging created by Beijing’s own “borrowed” and “bought” boats.
It’s a long article, but I recommend that you read the whole thing.
Trump’s emphasis on COVID-19 as “Chinese” was widely criticized as xenophobic and racist. In addition to being a reference to the virus’ origin as well as the initial Chinese coverup that facilitated its spread, he was (I believe) trying to underline China’s role in order to increase distrust of that country. I think, despite all the criticism he received, that he succeeded.
Americans seem to not be buying the Chinese line these days. COVID-19 has had very few benefits, but that may be one of them.
Neo: One of the pillars of his campaign and administration has been that China has – not to be too delicate about it – screwed us. He wasn’t talking about the virus, he was talking about money and trade and things connected with money and trade. But the current health crisis has only highlighted how right he was.
you only had to read this and believe rather than not to get it.
As i asked the question before, that no one had nerve enough to answer. What would war look like if you didn’t wage it with bombs and bullets? would we even realize we were in a war? would we even try to defend ourselves? how far would we stretch our necks out before we discover there is a guillotine?
This is a valid unexplored question! We as a public only see war in one dimension, and even that, we dont see if the opposition is not big enough to fight one on one, but has to be attritioned out of existence to avoid war crimes for using too much force.
Unrestricted Warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare
a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang (??) and Wang Xiangsui (???). Its primary concern is how a nation such as China can defeat a technologically superior opponent (such as the United States) through a variety of means. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, this book instead examines a variety of other means. Such means include using International Law (see Lawfare) and a variety of economic means to place one’s opponent in a bad position and circumvent the need for direct military action
I covered this years ago… and said, we were in this..
Will people believe now that the game is to slowly kill your opposition in a way in which their people are hamstrung from response? The response being independence, over dependence with the left wishing the latter as some way to join in happy harmony with a force that has never ever claimed not to be an enemy.
The book argues that the United States does not consider the wider picture of military strategy, which includes legal and economic factors. The book proceeds to argue that the United States is vulnerable to attacks along these lines. Reducing one’s opponent, the book notes, can be accomplished in a number of ways other than direct military confrontation. The book notes that these alternative methods “have the same and even greater destructive force than military warfare, and they have already produced serious threats different from the past and in many directions for…national security.”
Their strategy was much akin to the heroin dealers in my neighborhood as a kid, get em hooked, then what?
Now lets see how many believe in this “Long Game”
Reading the actual document would do it justice over the wiki points… wiki does not do it justice nor convey the seriousness of such an open plan, that is not believed, and yet, will cause the end of the other.
The great game is still going on, its just nuclear warfare has changed the board from OVERT to COVERT, and the less the public can comprehend harm from a FRIENEMY the better for the enemy posing as a friend and taking advantage of everything that friend has to offer, from technology to inventions, to process, to the ability to insinuate operatives into the body politic.
as i pointed out… rather than disarm, they have only used the tech given to make weapons that will and have forced us into another arms race… as they claim the china sea, and world economy through a dependence model based on doing what to their own peoples economy to insure it?
The useful idiots in the MSM who refuse to hold to account China (not to mention the WHO, heavily funded by the U.S. and run by an African Marxist, lacking a proper medical degree, who is subservient to the ChiComs) are not only displaying ignorance of the etiology of the Wuhan-virus, but also doing the bidding of their corporate masters, the large media conglomerates in this country who are afraid of antagonizing the authorities in Beijing for fear of losing current and future profits.
From Army.mil Military Review (they are not unbelievers like the public and the left)
In a separate interview translated by the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), Qiao was quoted as stating that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
As a result, any serious student of modern warfare would be well advised to become acquainted with this influential work. There are various commercial translations available of Unrestricted Warfare. However, Military Review recommends an abridged version derived from a translation by FBIS available at https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf.
For those interested in more detail, the background and significance of Unrestricted Warfare on modern military thought, we invite you to read “A New Generation of Unrestricted Warfare,” by retired Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and Dr. Nora Bensahel, published in War on the Rocks on 19 April 2016. To view the article, please visit https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/a-new-generation-of-unrestricted-warfare/.
from War on the Rocks
Qiao and Wang argued that the battlefield had fundamentally changed. It was no longer a place where militaries met and fought; instead, society itself was now the battlefield. Future wars would inevitably encompass attacks on all elements of society without limits. Military battles resembling those of 1991 might become secondary elements of conflict — if they even occurred at all.
[snip]
Seventeen years ago, Qiao and Wang warned us that these myriad new forms of non-military warfare were coming. Today we all now live on that battlefield — an unlimited zone of conflict that can reach each one of us in every aspect of our lives and work. The unconstrained notions of modern war articulated in Unrestricted Warfare have now arrived. Boundaries between soldiers and civilians, combatants and bystanders have all but disappeared in this dangerous new world.
[snip]
We can’t wait for the first big attack of the next war to throw society into chaos — rethinking what war now means in our interconnected world demands the attention of our civilian and military leaders today.
Last I checked, Hillary Clinton and Pelosi were still sucking up to ’em. As were wide swaths of the MSM.
(No doubt because the Chinese might be awful but Trump is far, far worse…)
And there’s always “Nature Magazine”…
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079293/coronavirus-nature-magazine-apologises-reports-linking-covid-19
While Diane Feinstein, speaking for the Obama administration, clearly has a soft spot for Iranian propaganda (but we already knew that):
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/feinstein-trump-iran-imf-aid
Anyway, here’s another way the Chinese “government” is “lending a helping hand”:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/10/finland-latest-country-receive-faulty-chinese-protective-equipment/
In fact, China’s ruthlessness and that of the Democratic Party no doubt explains what ought to be a very bizarre affinity:
https://www.blazingcatfur.ca/2020/04/11/china-clamping-down-on-coronavirus-research-deleted-pages-suggest/
Well, ought to be….
I posted a similar post on another thread here a couple of days ago.
Not a lot of Westerners are interested in, understand, and are fluent in written and spoken Chinese, and that has given the CCP an extra level of protection.
Here is an interesting, lengthy video, an “investigative report,” examining the origin of what they term the “CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Virus,” a deep dive into Chinese language sources and documents by the Epoch Times Canada—a multi-language news organization headquartered in New York, and founded by Chinese-Americans associated with the Falun Gong–which focuses on China and its human rights record, and which has Chinese language expertise.
Among other things, this video presents evidence of interest in such Caronavirus research by the Chinese government and military.
See https://www.facebook.com/EpochTimesCanada/videos/249873422852228/
You also don’t hear much about the Chinese workers (including slave workers) in northern Italy who traveled to and from the lunar new year celebrations in China. It’s like the media don’t want us to remember why Italy started the problem in Europe.
How about the mayor of Florence, in Italy who, early in the Pandemic, when countries including the U.S. were starting to take precautionary measures, wanted to send a strong “virtue signal,” about the absence of any racism/prejudice against the Chinese there, so he arranged for a blindfolded and masked Chinese man to stand in the center of town, with a sign saying that “he was not a virus,” and had their citizens come up and hug him, and sometimes remove his blindfold and mask, and then hug him?
Current Italian death toll above 14,000, and apparently highest in Northern Italy, where Florence is located.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SeZ5YOKf4E
P.S.–According to this tally by country which I’ve just discovered, which claims to be up to date as of today, the cumulative death toll for Italy, as of today, is 19,468, with 619 new deaths added to that total in the last 24 hours.
See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Here is a take from Bill Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1248957031559692289
from redstate.com
I had read somewhere about the Chinese connection in Italy, but this comment (which I think was actually quoting from another article, but I’m not sure of the original source) was very informative. Long, but worth the read.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/11/saturday-april-11th-open-thread/#comment-8061760
This is long but very informative….
https://youtu.be/Gdd7dtDaYmM
Artfl, Qiao and Wang’s article is not new thinking on the part of the Chinese:
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
Sun Tzu
See this summary of the evidence for the idea that, rather than the wetmarket in Wuhan, it is the two viral research labs in Wuhan–which were researching bat Cornaviruses–which are good candidates as the likely source for the Chinese Coronavirus at–
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/brits_deem_wuhan_virus_lab_origin_credible.html