China's Muslims and Japan's Empire or Liberalism and minority policy; a book review of a sorts. One of the trends in Western China scholarship is what I would call Qing revisionism. New Qing studies is the origin of the term, but the purpose is actual widescale historical
revisionism away from Party historical orthodoxy and towards a "truer" version of history. The reasons for this are partly Western academic trends towards deconstruction, partly younger academics overturning their elders, and a small part quasi geopolitical attack to undermine
in their own small fashion state history and foster historical nihilism. The problem is of course is that the academics fail to comprehend the great utility of little white lies. Speaking of the book, it lays out the opportunistic collaboration of Chinese Muslims under Japanese
wartime occupation. The party line is that the Muslims were patriotic comrades united in efforts to defeat the Japanese imperialists, the more blase reality was that the Muslims were a potential nay active fifth column willing to collaborate for either petty pay offs or religious
chauvinism. Yet this reality served absolutely no purpose for anyone after the war. The Communists wanted the collaboration of the Muslims in the civil war and Soviet minority policy and the Muslims had less than zero interest to remind anyone of their opportunistic treason when
communists with guns showed up at their village demanding cooperation. Liberalisms intellectual blind spot views only wholesale accomadation of minority interests as the only legitimate policy, the more intransigent the demands, the better. It completely ignores the historic norm
of consolidating states of either assimilationism/annihilation. The Chinese Communist Party state has recognized that the Soviet era minorities policy is no longer adequate in today's social technological environment or global situation where Western hegemons primary method of
subversion is via social dissection and dissonance through religious, ethno, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Thus the new minorities policy in favour of assimilation. Liberals seem determined to make this process difficult in favor of the alternative scenario. It's a situation
where a commissar with a gun is inquiring as to your loyalty and a Western intellectual has to pedantically stand up and say "well akshually..." No one benefits unless your goal is actually not constructive but destructive.
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Some people were interested in a more thorough exegesis of my thoughts India, so here it is. The utility and limitations of caste. One of the biggest mental roadblocks that limits the Chinese understanding of India
or indeed pretty much any Marxist/Materialist conceptualization of Indian society is it's misunderstanding of the caste system. In the orthodox interpretation, it is a feudal relic
a reactionary social institution that limits the national consciousness of the Indian proletariat and bourgeoisie that stunts the potential of the Indian people by enshrining unearned and unwarranted privileges and advantages in social custom as strong as any state law.
Unrepresentative sampling and how Westerners get Chinese so wrong. One of my biggest pet peeves is when Westerners think the Chinese are similar to the Jews. It's a surprisingly common boomer trope that is as usual the inverse of reality. The Chinese are more like the anti-Jew,
with nearly the almost exact opposite social traits. The Jew is an endogamous extrovert used to living in multicultural societies with himself as the minority with strong taboos. The Chinese is exogamous introvert formed in a nearly homogeneous society with zero taboos. The only
reason anyone could possibly conflate the two is because most early interaction between Chinese and Westerners was through Southeast Asian diaspora Chinese who were not only unrepresentative by virtue of being a diaspora but more critically they originated mostly from coastal
Trump's actions are not so much norm disrupting, but rather pretense stripping. Liberals like to speak of the "West" as a unified entity just as Athenians and their Delian lackeys spoke of the "Greeks". It wasn't a Greek Empire at heart but an Athenian one just as the Western
Empire is at its root an American one. The ideology of Liberal imperialism and its purported universality is ultimately a palliative for former nations, including some former imperialists, that their subjugation by America is some kind of natural course of history and the end
state of all mankind. That their slavery is a historic inevitability that they are now equal co-authors of by virtue of their acquiescence. Trump doesn't so much as betray Liberalism as open up the curtains as to the nakedness of Western viceroys. That their sovereignty that they
Patronage, kin, and risk mitigation. This is a very interesting tweet in that it applauds a phenomenon for all the wrong reasons and likewise it's critics also quite clearly don't understand the precise mechanism at play. The Indian takeover of the US motel industry isn't just a
a lesson in hard working Indian business acumen or ethnic nepotism but rather how communities dilineate their own boundaries in order to control risk and foster trust. The cause of Indian success in this field aren't easily replicable by Americans because few American domestic
groups have the genetic closeness of an Indian jati due to not practicing endogamous mating for the past two millennia. At this point the primary remaining groups that can be approximate substitutes are the Amish and the neo stetle Jews in New York. The genetic closeness is in
Canada is an objective lesson in being careful what you wish for. In pre-Covid Canada, the usual complaint about immigration was that Chinese were buying up Canadian real estate and leaving it empty and Chinese kids were zipping around in expensive cars with N stickers. Canada's
most illustrious government in its infinite wisdom decided as in all things to do as America says actually believed that India was the future and a great "counter-weight" to China and opened the flood gates wide open to Indian immigrants instead. This surge, along with a decline
in Chinese migration and students has resulted in a huge shift in the modal immigrant on a now much larger base than ever before. Instead of an empty house growing weeds, Canadian homeowners now enjoy the company of 12 Indians living in a single family home next door and instead
Globalization as it was meant to happen was supposed to be Western firms exporting production to less developed countries but keeping ownership and knowledge so that it retained 95% of the profits while cutting costs in half, while simultaneously importing their best workers.
Fair enough trade for the very poor locations where production was relocated where even 5% was a very good deal and losing their brightest wasn't so much of a loss as their economies couldn't make productive use of them. Ridiculously good deal for the West though on paper. What
ended up happening in practice was something else entirely. Western firms did retain the lion's share of the profits in virtually every country they set up shop and didn't face any real competition except in one gigantic exception. Production in China resulted in the creation of