The ABC Of Power: Asians, Be Confident! China Orders Civilization To Man-Up

DECEMBER 02, 2022

Xi‘s China To Be The First Civilization In The Galaxy To Dispense Confidence By Decree

By Thorsten J. Pattberg

Why The Renewed Urgency?

Before we explain Mr. Xi Jinping’s much underreported but now revived ‘Confidence Doctrine’, a word about this week’s anti-lockdown demonstrations in China:

IMAGE 1 White Paper Revolution in China But Probably Not

East Asians declared Corona a state religion. They have a genetic streak for submission and agreeableness. Much like females in the West. They are also lighter than Western females. Then, there is an environmental factor, for East-Asians are trained to be less aggressive, confrontational, and meek in character. There is no threat to the West coming from China. If you check your sources, you will see that all the alleged threats coming from China were in fact written by Western agitators.

IMAGE 2 Western China Experts swarm to Twitter and LinkedIn

We Western people speak for the Asians. It is our duty. Read about the first missions to China. Read George Hegel or Edward Said. Read Immanuel Kant on the End of History, or Bertrand Russell on the Problem of China. It is just a fact that Asians cannot create. God said: Not you, sorry! God then chose the Iews, then said Christians… also good. There are no Chinese in the Bible. Read the American Constitution. It says America, not China.

In Japan, everyone is walking around with their C-membership retard badges. In Taiwan… well… these people have an authoritarian streak and are the descendants of traitors, war criminals, and the triads, so they love cult and fascist masquerading. All this is not reported in the West, because Taiwan and Japan are useful anal toys.

IMAGE 3 Double-Standard Taiwan and Japan are as insane but are not demonized at all

China central of course gets all the hate. Did you see the German President praising the brave demonstrators? Well, he called demonstrators in Germany Nazi-scum and terrorists and destroyed their livelihood. Or did you see the Canadian Premier warning the Chinese government against taking actions against peaceful demonstrators? Well, he prosecuted EVERYONE in Canada for peacefully protesting his tyranny. British unelected Prime Minister, a brown person from India or Pakistan, I forgot, said China was doing genocide. This, while London is genociding white Englishmen and killing their culture.

IMAGE 4 Unbelievable Double Standards Of Our Unelected Leaders

China, like Russia, has no agency in the world any more. It became… autistic? It wants to be left alone from the Western bullies. Had Beijing not declared its Zero-Covid policy and now had 6 million Covid-deaths to mourn (the USA has 1.2 million deaths), the Western hate press would have called Mr. Xi the bloodiest despot since Mr. Mao.

While ugly anti-Western nations cocoon themselves in, hoping enslavement will pass, hoping to transform into new creatures of beauty, Western powers are making all the decisions for them about air, space, water, food, energy, rights, education… that will affect all beings on this planet. So, while the West starts wars in Ukraine and Taiwan, Western planners already make decisions about the cutting up of Russian and China.

No Conquest, No Confidence?

If the Asians do not unite and reign into the Western psychopaths who currently torture the world with bio-weapons and mind-control, above all the puppet regimes in London, Berlin, and Washington, then your funny cocoons will be trampled on and squashed.

Anyway, now to the main thread. Largely ignored by the Western media because it didn’t involve racism, violence, and boobs, China mandated the Chinese to build a giant cocoon of confidence, crawl inside and reform itself as a strong terracotta pot plant army that no criticism can defeat.

Confidence is just a new old discourse that every five years or so concerns Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC). And just as anticipated, the theme emerged again, in this fall of 2022 in fact, when the 20th National Party Congress revived the discourse about “the ebbs and tides” of what global historians describe as the “Cultural Confidence” of Great nations.

What’s a “Great nation”? Most people don’t care about Great nations because they do not live in one and never belonged to any. They have no idea what it means or what advantages it can give to their lives. For example, the people in the Philippines, also an ex-US-colony, could all just die and the world would probably be better off [because of over-population, food scarcity, and pollution, etc.]. Or, they could apply for a job at MacDonald’s, buy an iPhone with the Google app, watch Elon Musk videos on Youtube, learn American English, get an US college degree, and work for a Western multinational. That is their only way to become useful and participate in World History.

China is obviously more ambitious. It still has…well… City Wok fast food… I guess, Xiaomi phones, Youku, a powerful Mandarin script with 40,000 letters, and excellent schools. It also has plenty of global companies. So, in a way, China hopes to keep its state economy and not be privatized by Western powers like it was in the 17th Century, and then again in the 19th Century, and again in the 20th Century, and is now threatened with regime change again… and it isn’t even a quarter into the 21st Century.

Prove It That You Met Your Maker!

Earlier this year, in May 2022, during the 39th group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the government allocated scholarly efforts to the tracing of the origins of the Chinese civilization. The underlying idea is to desperately show the world and prove to the Chinese that they are in fact a pre-Biblical super civilization that was just forgotten to be mentioned in the Bible and during Science.

IMAGE 5 More or Less 5000 Years Trust the Science Or dig for It

Catalysts for the Cultural movement were, among other research findings: the discovery of hundreds of archaeological excavation sites, the human genome project on the origins of the Chinese civilization, and the catalogization of Ancient relics, for example pottery and stone tools from the Zhou Dynasty (770 BC) unearthed in China‘s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

There were no mummies or that kind of reminiscences, just pots and stones. But mass hypnosis shall suffice if you throw in fancy DNA terminology, also a Western invention, that the Chinese, against all negative Western stereotyping, did indeed create and were creators.

The Cultural Confidence discourse [Wenhua Zixin] is a continuation of the ‘Confidence Doctrine’ [Zixin Lun] formulated during the 18th Party Congress in November 2012. President Xi Jinping marked the doctrine of “Confidence in Chinese Culture” as the natural continuation of the doctrines of “Chinese Dream” and the “Rejuvenation of China.”

Now you could argue, what’s left of the “Chinese Dream” when the world is told to hate China, but that is beside the point. What’s there to rejuvenate? Feudalism? The Manchu queue? Pillow girls?

Another tide of Cultural Confidence came in in 2017, during the 19th Party Congress. The doctrine was to expand into “globally recognizable cultural images of China,” “Chinese language teaching through the Confucius Institutes,” the “Key Concepts of Chinese Thought and Culture” program, and “rapid economic and technological development” as the Four Characteristics of Confidence to build, quote: “a multidimensional China for the world.”

Again, not much enthusiasm left from that period either. The West has rejected the Confucius Institutes. Chinese names and concepts are still banned in Europe. Telecom giant Huawei, Social media TikTok, e-commerce Alibaba, super-application WeChat, shipping firm Cosco, drone supplier DJI,… Chinese banks, electric cars, airplanes, newspapers… all blocked.

The Ebbs and Flows of Confidence

China during the last two centuries has experienced both extreme humiliations and extreme successes. Humiliations at the hands of Western Imperialist powers and Japan, which led to chauvinism—a sense of moral superiority even after physical defeat. And Successes under the Leadership of the CPC when China overtook all those Western Imperialist powers and Japan, and became the biggest trading nation in the world, which led to an inferiority complex—a sense of doubt and feeling like an impostor.

The range of Chinese emotions between callousness and grandstanding, between inferiority and hubris, has been matter of Western ‘China Studies’ since its conception as an academic discipline in the 18th Century. Generally speaking, Western missionaries were Western spies who reported back to Rome, Paris, and London that China was backward and needed Christianity and a strong Western Leadership. Did you know that the most famous book that was ever written on China is Mr. Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics? Well, it is pretty much like the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, just from the dip shit end of world conspiracy.

What followed was the coordinated invasion of China and the semi-colonization of several parts and ports, notably Shanghai by the French, Macau by the Portuguese, Formosa by the Japanese, Tsingtau by the Germans, the Canton by the British and so on and so forth. I spare you the details of “a hundred years of humiliation,” as every Asian learns about it. However, few people in the West are taught this history.

Naturally, a strong introspection of the Chinese psyche took place since the fall of the last Chinese Dynasty, the Qing, in 1911. Even in defeat, Chinese sages imagined a spiritual victory. Wrote the poet Gu Hongming: “It is a well-known fact that the liking – you may call it the taste for the Chinese – grows upon the foreigner the longer he lives in this country.” That was in 1922.

In other words, even when their armies were clearly defeated and their nation conquered, their poets turned “a disastrous beating” into some form of spiritual victory and moral triumph. Almost like the biblical “Turning the other cheek…”

An East-West dichotomy reemerged. The ebb must follow the tide, the unjust brings forth the just, and so on. Said the chairman Mao Zedong: “I believe that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two Winds in the world, the East Wind and the West Wind.” That was in 1957.

Without Confidence, a civilization, a nation, a family and even an individual will succumb to the hostile forces of nature and man, and will fall victim to cruelty and conquest.

It is therefore of essence to our survival, that we must combine forces, serve the people, and be assertive and vigilant against outside invaders.

Evolutionary Sciences seems to support this claim. A recent study in ‘Current Biology’ in July 2022 suggests that the now extinct Native Americans had Chinese DNA traces in their bones.

This was 14,000 years ago in North America. The Europeans wiped out the Native Americans as soon as they “discovered” them in 1492. China lost contact with North America, and could not help. The core Chinese Civilization today traces its origins back “only” 5,000 years. But still, it has survived the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, lived in peaceful coexistence with the Indians and Japanese, and, for the longest time, regarded itself—erroneously—as Zhong Guo, the Center of Nations.

As a Nation Thinks

 Today, China’s Cultural Confidence is again caught in between two extremes. The pro-Western forces say China cannot achieve a multipolar world and must accept total Westernization [or suffer US embargo, containment, and military intervention like Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and Russia]. The pro-China forces say China must revive Confucianism, groom its own economic champions, and become a center of the world again.

IMAGE 6 Confidence and The Xin-Civilization

Governments do well by carefully weighing in and listening to the traditionalists as well as the progressives, but ideally, they should never again become push-overs to foreign dictate.

Did you read how the American President’s favorite propaganda media like New York Times or Wall Street Journal reported on China’s “censorship on information about the Covid demonstrations”? Well, America owns or dictates all global media, owns global big tech, and controls the world wide web commonly known as the Internet. It is Americans who control and censor all of us. And if China objects to the American world dictatorship, it will be called a terrorist, a rogue state, and a censorship regime.

Some commentators have argued that Xi Jinping and the CPC still should not subsidize “writers and artists.” They say things like “Art should be for art’s sake” or “Don’t draw a moon, build a spaceship.” In other words, the government in Beijing is believed to focus too much on technology and infrastructure, hard power, not on arts and culture and the mighty word, soft power. To which we reply that all nations in the world want to improve their material circumstances, yet it is only those who seem to stride effortlessly and possess a magnificent Culture who succeed.

As a Nation thinks, so it becomes.

Dr. Pattberg is a German writer and cultural critic. He is the author of The Human Hierarchy and Finis Sinarum. BUY HIS BOOKS! @TJPattberg

Will Confucius marry Marx?

October 10, 2020

By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times

Chinese scholar Lanxin Xiang has written a book, The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, that is arguably the most extraordinary effort in decades trying to bridge the East-West politico-historical divide.

It’s impossible in a brief column to do justice to the relevance of the discussions this book inspires. Here we will highlight some of the key issues – hoping they will appeal to an informed readership especially across the Beltway, now convulsed by varying degrees of Sinophobia.

Xiang delves right into the fundamental contradiction: China is widely accused by the West of lack of democratic legitimacy exactly as it enjoys a four-decade, sustainable, history-making economic boom.

He identifies two key sources for the Chinese problem: “On the one hand, there is the project of cultural restoration through which Chinese leader Xi Jinping attempts to restore ‘Confucian legitimacy’ or the traditional ‘Mandate of Heaven’; on the other hand, Xi refuses to start any political reforms, because it is his top priority to preserve the existing political system, i.e., a ruling system derived mainly from an alien source, Bolshevik Russia.”

Ay, there’s the rub: “The two objectives are totally incompatible”.

Xiang contends that for the majority of Chinese – the apparatus and the population at large – this “alien system” cannot be preserved forever, especially now that a cultural revival focuses on the Chinese Dream.

Needless to add, scholarship in the West is missing the plot completely – because of the insistence on interpreting China under Western political science and “Eurocentric historiography”. What Xiang attempts in his book is to “navigate carefully the conceptual and logical traps created by post-Enlightenment terminologies”.

Thus his emphasis on deconstructing “master keywords” – a wonderful concept straight out of ideography. The four master keywords are legitimacy, republic, economy and foreign policy. This volume concentrates on legitimacy (hefa, in Chinese).

When law is about morality

It’s a joy to follow how Xiang debunks Max Weber – “the original thinker of the question of political legitimacy”. Weber is blasted for his “rather perfunctory study of the Confucian system”. He insisted that Confucianism – emphasizing only equality, harmony, decency, virtue and pacifism – could not possibly develop a competitive capitalist spirit.

Xiang shows how since the beginning of the Greco-Roman tradition, politics was always about a spatial conception – as reflected in polis (a city or city-state). The Confucian concept of politics, on the other hand, is “entirely temporal, based on the dynamic idea that legitimacy is determined by a ruler’s daily moral behavior.”

Xiang shows how hefa contains in fact two concepts: “fit” and “law” – with “law” giving priority to morality.

In China, the legitimacy of a ruler is derived from a Mandate of Heaven (Tian Ming). Unjust rulers inevitably lose the mandate – and the right to rule. This, argues Xiang, is “a dynamic ‘deeds-based’ rather than ‘procedure-based’ argument.”

Essentially, the Mandate of Heaven is “an ancient Chinese belief that tian [ heaven, but not the Christian heaven, complete with an omniscient God] grants the emperor the right to rule based on their moral quality and ability to govern well and fairly.”

The beauty of it is that the mandate does not require a divine connection or noble bloodline, and has no time limit. Chinese scholars have always interpreted the mandate as a way to fight abuse of power.

The overall crucial point is that, unlike in the West, the Chinese view of history is cyclical, not linear: “Legitimacy is in fact a never-ending process of moral self-adjustment.”

Xiang then compares it with the Western understanding of legitimacy. He refers to Locke, for whom political legitimacy derives from explicit and implicit popular consent of the governed. The difference is that without institutionalized religion, as in Christianity, the Chinese created “a dynamic conception of legitimacy through the secular authority of general will of the populace, arriving at this idea without the help of any fictional political theory such as divine rights of humanity and ‘social contract’’.

Xiang cannot but remind us that Leibniz described it as “Chinese natal theology”, which happened not to clash with the basic tenets of Christianity.

Xiang also explains how the Mandate of Heaven has nothing to do with Empire: “Acquiring overseas territories for population resettlement never occurred in Chinese history, and it does little to enhance legitimacy of the ruler.”

In the end it was the Enlightenment, mostly because of Montesquieu, that started to dismiss the Mandate of Heaven as “nothing but apology for ‘Oriental Despotism’”. Xiang notes how “pre-modern Europe’s rich interactions with the non-Western world” were “deliberately ignored by post-Enlightenment historians.”

Which brings us to a bitter irony: “While modern ‘democratic legitimacy’ as a concept can only work with the act of delegitimizing other types of political system, the Mandate of Heaven never contains an element of disparaging other models of governance.” So much for “the end of history.”

Why no Industrial Revolution?

Xiang asks a fundamental question: “Is China’s success indebted more to the West-led world economic system or to its own cultural resources?”

And then he proceeds to meticulously debunk the myth that economic growth is only possible under Western liberal democracy – a heritage, once again, of the Enlightenment, which ruled that Confucianism was not up to the task.

We already had an inkling that was not the case with the ascension of the East Asian tigers – Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea – in the 1980s and 1990s. That even moved a bunch of social scientists and historians to admit that Confucianism could be a stimulus to economic growth.

Yet they only focused on the surface, the alleged “core” Confucian values of hard work and thrift, argues Xiang: “The real ‘core’ value, the Confucian vision of state and its relations to economy, is often neglected.”

Virtually everyone in the West, apart from a few non-Eurocentric scholars, completely ignores that China was the world’s dominant economic superpower from the 12^th century to the second decade of the 19^th century.

Xiang reminds us that a market economy – including private ownership, free land transactions, and highly specialized mobile labor – was established in China as early as in 300 B.C. Moreover, “as early as in the Ming dynasty, China had acquired all the major elements that were essential for the British Industrial Revolution in the 18^th century.”

Which brings us to a persistent historical enigma: why the Industrial Revolution did not start in China?

Xiang turns the question upside down: “Why traditional China needed an industrial revolution at all?”

Once again, Xiang reminds us that the “Chinese economic model was very influential during the early period of the Enlightenment. Confucian economic thinking was introduced by the Jesuits to Europe, and some Chinese ideas such as the laisser-faire principle led to free-trade philosophy.”

Xiang shows not only how external economic relations were not important for Chinese politics and economy but also that “the traditional Chinese view of state is against the basic rationale of the industrial revolution, for its mass production method is aimed at conquering not just the domestic market but outside territories.”

Xiang also shows how the ideological foundation for Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations began to veer towards individualist liberalism while “Confucius never wavered from a position against individualism, for the role of the economy is to ‘enrich people’ as a whole, not specific individuals.”

All that leads to the fact that “in modern economics, the genuine conversation between the West and China hardly exists from the outset, since the post-Enlightenment West has been absolutely confident about its sole possession of the ‘universal truth’ and secret in economic development, which allegedly has been denied to the rest of the world.”

An extra clue can be found when we see what ‘economy” (jingji) means in China: Jingji is “an abbreviate term of two characters describing neither pure economic nor even commercial activities. It simply means ‘managing everyday life of the society and providing sufficient resources for the state”. In this conception, politics and economy can never be separated into two mechanical spheres. The body politic and the body economic are organically connected.”

And that’s why external trade, even when China was very active in the Ancient Silk Road, “was never considered capable of playing a key role for the health of the overall economy and the well-being of the people.”

Wu Wei and the invisible hand

Xiang needs to go back to the basics: the West did not invent the free market. The laisser-faire principle was first conceptualized by Francois Quesnay, the forerunner of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Quesnay, curiously, was known at the time as the “European Confucius”.

In Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767), written 9 years before The Wealth of Nations, Quesnay was frankly in favor of the meritocratic concept of giving political power to scholars and praised the “enlightened” Chinese imperial system.

An extra delicious historical irony is that laisser-faire, as Xiang reminds us, was directly inspired by the Taoist concept of wu wei – which we may loosely translate as “non-action”.

Xiang notes how “Adam Smith, deeply influenced by Quesnay whom he had met in Paris for learning this laisser-faire philosophy, may have got right the meaning of wu wei with his invention of “invisible hand”, suggesting a proactive rather than passive economic system, and keeping the Christian theological dimension aside.”

Xiang reviews everyone from Locke and Montesquieu to Stuart Mill, Hegel and Wallerstein’s “world system” theory to arrive at a startling conclusion: “The conception of China as a typical ‘backward’ economic model was a 20^th century invention built upon the imagination of Western cultural and racial superiority, rather than historical reality.”

Moreover, the idea of ‘backward-looking’ was actually not established in Europe until the French revolution: “Before that, the concept of ‘revolution’ had always retained a dimension of cyclical, rather than ‘progressive’ – i.e., linear, historical perspective. The original meaning of revolution (from the Latin word revolutio, a “turn-around”) contains no element of social progress, for it refers to a fundamental change in political power or organizational structures that takes place when the population rises up in revolt against the current authorities.”

Will Confucius marry Marx?

And that brings us to post-modern China. Xiang stress how a popular consensus in China is that the Communist Party is “neither Marxist nor capitalist, and its moral standard has little to do with the Confucian value system”. Consequently, the Mandate of Heaven is “seriously damaged”.

The problem is that “marrying Marxism and Confucianism is too dangerous”.

Xiang identifies the fundamental flaw of the Chinese wealth distribution “in a system that guarantees a structural process of unfair (and illegal) wealth transfer, from the people who contribute labor to the production of wealth to the people who do not.”

He argues that, “deviation from Confucian traditional values explains the roots of the income distribution problem in China better than the Weberian theories which tried to establish a clear linkage between democracy and fair income distribution”.

So what is to be done?

Xiang is extremely critical of how the West approached China in the 19^th century, “through the path of Westphalian power politics and the show of violence and Western military superiority.”

Well, we all know how it backfired. It led to a genuine modern revolution – and Maoism. The problem, as Xiang interprets it, is that the revolution “transformed the traditional Confucian society of peace and harmony into a virulent Westphalian state.”

So only through a social revolution inspired by October 1917 the Chinese state “begun the real process of approaching the West” and what we all define as “modernization”. What would Deng say?

Xiang argues that the current Chinese hybrid system, “dominated by a cancerous alien organ of Russian Bolshevism, is not sustainable without drastic reforms to create a pluralist republican system. Yet these reforms should not be conditioned upon eliminating traditional political values.”

So is the CCP capable of successfully merging Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism? Forging a unique, Chinese, Third Way? That’s not only the major theme for Xiang’s subsequent books: that’s a question for the ages.