Tocqueville on China

[Anonymous No.19255676]

>China seems to me the most perfect symbol of the kind of social well-being that a highly centralized administration can offer to peoples who submit to it. Travelers tell us that the Chinese have tranquillity without prosperity, industry without progress, stability without force, and material order without public morality. Their society always gets on fairly well but never very well. I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find the finest model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.

[Anonymous No.19255782]

>>19255676
How did he do it bros

[Anonymous No.19255903]

>>19255676
>China forced to open to Europeans
>opium and other drugs sold everywhere
>Chinese civilization falls apart
>commies destroy what's left
Nothing personel kid

[Anonymous No.19255922]

What was the keystone bros? Legalist infrastructure? Taoist wu-wei monarchy? Confucian code of ethics? Buddhist... something?

[Anonymous No.19256009]

>>19255903
That is not quite how it went, they were just looking for something to sell to the Chinese so the ships going to pickup tea would show up with something more profitable than an empty hold, Chinese wanted opium. The Chinese were doing the same thing, just giving the west what they wanted, the English felt weight was a sign of quality in tea so the Chinese made the tea heavier by mixing in iron and lead dust to make the tea heavier and the English loved it until they found out the downside and that the tea itself was not actually heavier. Not that this really mattered since they were also shipping the tea in lead lined boxes and all tea during that time was lead laced. But the Chinese did not actually understand the British obsession with heavy tea and knew that weight had nothing to do with quality so adding something to make it heavier seemed exactly the same to them.

China was also not forced to open, they remained closed for the most part and travel was heavily restricted if even allowed, westerners were allowed into the ports but not much else. It was illegal to teach a westerner Chinese or for the Chinese to learn western languages and a pigeon language was developed for the tea trade, this is also the source of the "funny" way in which the Chinese spoke up to the 20th century, it is how they spoke to westerners and how westerns spoke to them, the pigeon language was the only language in common.

[Anonymous No.19256022]

>>19255676
>I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find the finest model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.
and he was right!

[Anonymous No.19256087]

>>19255676
it's worse than you know

[Anonymous No.19256224]

Tocqueville never set his foot in China. Some French priests wrote their travelogues after traveling extensively in the Chinese Empire. Most didn't have positive views on Chinese society though.

[Anonymous No.19256251]

>>19256224
And yet he knew more about China than anyone today.

[Anonymous No.19256260]

>When Europeans first landed in China three hundred years ago, they found that nearly all the arts had achieved a certain degree of perfection and were surprised that people who had come so far had not gone further. Later they discovered vestiges of certain advanced bodies of knowledge that had been lost. The nation was industrial; it had preserved most scientific methods, but science itself no longer existed. Europeans took this as the explanation for what they found to be the singularly static character of the Chinese mind. The Chinese, following in the footsteps of their forebears, had forgotten the reasons that had guided them. They continued to use formulas without seeking to fathom their meaning. They held on to instruments though they had lost the art of modifying or reproducing them. Hence the Chinese could not change anything. They had to give up making improvements. They were forced always to imitate their forebears in every respect lest the slightest deviation from the path laid out for them in advance plunge them into impenetrable darkness. The source of human knowledge had almost dried up, and though the river still flowed, its waters could no longer increase in volume or change direction.
>China had nevertheless lived in peace for centuries. Its conquerors had adopted its mores. Order prevailed. Material prosperity of a sort was everywhere apparent. Revolutions were rare, and war was all but unknown.

[Anonymous No.19256391]

Their property bubble is about to burst, and take their economy with it.

[Anonymous No.19256471]

>>19255676
He was right, but it's not praiseworthy. Their "social well-being" comes at the price of not being innovative or having any artistic talent whatsoever, hence why their products are cheap knock-offs that they poorly lifted from other countries.

[Anonymous No.19256502]

>>19255676
Im halfway through Ways That Are Dark by Ralph Townsend. Best reading I have done since I started reading polemics calling bullshit on decievers. Not only does it reflect on China but the Western European Christian world too. China is the least religious country in the world. India is the most. All nurses in China and teachers have gotten great benefit from Churches but never did any of it sink in. However Townsend goes further and says Confucius barely registers on the plebs. If they had half the zeal for Confucius that the missionaries have for Christ China would be great but the Chinese soul is apathetic and cold.

[Anonymous No.19256527]

...

....you have to stop.....

[Anonymous No.19256556]

>>19255676
>the most intractable form of authoritarianism that exists in the universe.
Translating from the French mode of irony this is about the best I can come up with on short notice.

[Anonymous No.19256577]

>>19256224
>Some French priests wrote their travelogues after traveling extensively in the Chinese Empire.
How accurate are they?

[Anonymous No.19256587]

>>19256577
Abbe Huc is on point.
Ralph Townsend quotes it and says it alligns with his US Govt work over there. Ralph notes the abject filth they live in and that the rural lands are humongous grave yards where foreigners are guaranteed death and banditry.

[Anonymous No.19257175]

>>19256527
Lol

[Anonymous No.19257716]

>>19256009
>pigeon language
That's not the word.
>The term pidgin has nothing to do with birds. The word, first attested in print in 1850, is thought to be the Chinese mispronunciation of the English word business

And creoles are complete languages derived from pidgins when they are spoken natively (the children basically naturally develop a complete language from it).

[Anonymous No.19258214]

>>19257716
It is obviously a brain fart, autistic pedant.

[Anonymous No.19258374]

>>19255676
How the fuck is he always right?

[Anonymous No.19258578]

>>19255676
>China was already bankrupt at the time
>After only eking out minor victories against Nepal, Burma and primitive Tibetan hill peoples of all adversaries
What a brilliant administration

[Anonymous No.19258612]

>>19255922
Unironically, Chinese Folk Religion's metaphysics of immanence. Order happens immanently, not transcendentally. That's the secret that all of these faggy frogs like Tocqueville and Voltaire missed: the order comes from the Chinese themselves and is accepted as being intrinsic to the Chinese themselves. Every Chink is actively "doing China", there isn't some centralized bureaucracy dictating down what China "is".

Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism just take this and run with.

[Anonymous No.19258795]

Mqn what is it with the chinese shilling lately. The chink shills have really ramped it up to 11 all across 4chan. Fuck off already

[Anonymous No.19258811]

>>19258795
They are fucking everywhere, but 4chan is too niche for them. You can't imagine how things are on YouTube.

[Anonymous No.19258856]

>Hence we must not reassure ourselves with the thought that the barbarians are still far from our gates, for if there are peoples who allow the torch of enlightenment to be snatched from their grasp, there are others who use their own feet to stamp out its flames.

[Anonymous No.19259629]

We have always been Social Credit™.
>In China, where equality of conditions is very great and very old, a man cannot move from one public office to another without submitting to an examination. He has to face this ordeal at every stage of his career, and the idea has become such an accepted part of Chinese mores that I recall reading one Chinese novel in which the hero, after a series of ups and downs, at last succeeds in moving the heart of his mistress by passing an important examination. Great ambitions breathe uneasily in such an atmosphere.

[Anonymous No.19259684]

>>19258214
Reddit term
Take the L gracefully next time retard

[Anonymous No.19260694]

>>19258795
This may be the opposite.

[Anonymous No.19261788]

>At the same time, no governor or official would ever permit himself to extort money by violence, and highway robbery is almost unknown. (I am not speaking here of some of the mountain tribes of the South, with whom robbery is a warlike action.) Embezzlement is very rare. It is customary to leave rare and precious objects on tables, in open chests and closets in houses with their thirty servants, all of whom cheat in their purchases and in their bills, but who would never touch a diamond left on a table. A dozen times we have left all sorts of valuables in our tents. The tents were guarded at night by poor soldiers, who were often not paid for a year and who were often reduced to eating nothing but melon rinds or cucumber skins. Never did we miss a penny. Dishonesty is, thus, restricted to certain specialties. This distinction is important. The great thing with the Persians is courtesy. Everyone, from peasant to prince, knows the most complicated formulas of address. The great concern of every person and of public opinion is regard for conventions. To be a thief, a drunkard, an infamous liar, is not serious; it is pardonable. But what is inexcusable is not to know the polite forms, and in fact, it is extremely rare to find anyone who does not know them.

[Anonymous No.19261793]

>>19261788
>I wonder whether I am wrong when I say that this tendency, existing equally in China, India, and here, a tendency which seems to be ascendant even with us (though to a much lesser degree, being still in its infancy), seems characteristic of enervated peoples, where virile sentiment has vanished. To substitute beautiful manners for private and public morality, to permit cruelty as long as it is not accompanied by marks of passion, to tolerate everything as long as all that is ignoble and even odious is cloaked by smiling and pleasant appearances—I confess that I see in this, on one hand, the last word in what is called civilization, but on the other the broad abandonment of those customs which make people repulsive in the true sense of that adjective—that is, physically repulsive as well as making them safe from conquests and subjugations.

[Anonymous No.19261891]

>>19255676
“Asian despotism” is a colonialist term to denigrate a competing non-Western model of civilization, it has little bearing on reality.

[Anonymous No.19261954]

>>19255676
Which book of his is this from?

[Anonymous No.19262043]

>>19256577
>How accurate are they?

Some of their observations and predictions were right on the money. One was written in the 1850s, and the author predicted collapse of the Qing rule. He believe what would replace it would be a totalitarian regime because the Chinese he had observed were totally clueless without any desire for freedom and self-determination.

[Anonymous No.19262054]

>>19256009
Denser leaves have more flavor you dipshit

[Anonymous No.19262193]

>>19261891
Good thing Tocqueville never used that term then, isn't it?

[Anonymous No.19262326]

>>19255903
China is a better society than the United States, you should be preparing to move there my friend

[Anonymous No.19263748]

Boomp

[Anonymous No.19263896]

>>19262054
No, they may but it is far from a rule, which is why adding iron or lead filings to the leaves was enough to make the Brits happy. Strength has more to with growing, harvesting time, processing techniques and brewing techniques. If you measure your tea out by volume, yes the denser tea will be stronger but that is because you will be using more tea than and equal volume of a light and fluffy tea which takes up more physical space. If you measure your tea out by weight you will quickly find that there is little correlation between weight and strength. Put away the teaspoon and use a scale, see what happens.

[Anonymous No.19263949]

>>19258795
keep believing your msm, tard. china is not the enemy.

[Anonymous No.19264887]

>>19263949
Talk about Tocqueville.

[Anonymous No.19265644]

>>19255903
why isn't L-Mao on the left what the fuck

[Anonymous No.19266754]

>>19262326
No, China's real estate bubble is about to implode, and take the rest of the economy with it.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/evergrande-shares-tumble-sale-failure-97-plunge-sales-markets-brace-chinese-default

[Anonymous No.19266872]

>>19266754
2 more weeks, right, faggot?

[Anonymous No.19267156]

>walk down the street in downtown guangzhou
>children stare at you because they have never seen a real human before
>the smell of feces and industrial pollution is overpowering
>you have already been targeted by pickpockets and sex scams five times on the same block
>retard nearly ends your fucking life in a massive truck because traffic laws in asia are a mere suggestion, also horns will not stop honking
>then cops arrest you for an innocuous shitpost you made three months ago on wechat, straps you down to a chair and rips your fingernails off, you now have to pay a month's salary fine
>upon release from the police station you make your way back to your apartment but your landlord has decided to kick you out and keep all of your things because you are not chinese
>go to the public park
>sit on a bench which collapses and impales you through the heart, your last vision a wisp of trash that blows through the gutter on this cool smoggy evening. an old woman walks by a lets a wet shopping back go in the breeze, which sticks to your face
>a shopping mall built out of sand falls over on top of your desecrated corpse

there was roughly a two year period that ended maybe last year where a lot of western poltards or just malcontents became russophiles on the hugely mistaken assumption that russia was based and tradpilled, or that it had any fucking future at all lmao, but people gradually came to their senses once the absolute state of russia became public knowledge even to them. the same misconception is happening with china, which is a diseased, bloated beast on the brink of collapse, full of shit government and shit-er people just like USA etc. once the cringe pro-china larp phase is over on 4chan, I wonder which country will takes its place.

or better yet, perhaps we only have one or two more iterations of this phenomena left and then will enter a new phase where people realize you won't find salvation in an exotic country because they're literally all shit even compared to dying western hegemonies. at that point, and with even normies becoming blackpilled about their own countries, perhaps the real strife IRL will begin.

[Anonymous No.19267191]

>>19267156
>once the cringe pro-china larp phase is over on 4chan
I assumed those were CCP sockpuppets. No?

[Anonymous No.19267197]

>>19267191
no, take your meds.

[Anonymous No.19267198]

>>19266754
People have been saying this for years.

[Anonymous No.19267236]

>>19267198
Really? Wow...Zoomers really ARE the worst, aren't they.

[Anonymous No.19267259]

>>19267197
Anyone shilling for China needs meds, not me.

[Anonymous No.19267303]

>>19267259
you need meds for assigning these posts to CCP shills when occam's razor says it's just a bunch of fools getting carried away by runaway memes on the hyper-evolving internet. like i said, the same thing already happened with russia, it's a pattern. people are searching for an alternative to the liberal hellscape, and this leads them to be foolishly optimistic about foreign powers that seem immune to certain problems in western countries.

of course this falls apart when they learn what those countries are like, i.e. poor and therefore violent and retarded, just as alienated as westerners, etc. i think this optimism comes from the fact that these cultures aren't full blown materialist cucks, and the prognosis for the west seems to be bad due to rampant lib materialism. marxoids are also material bug people so they don't offer a solution, and conservatism ranges from dead memes to outright scams. but the fact remains that china is equally bad and in many respects worse to western paradigms, they just don't know enough about their meme countries to complain about it yet.

[Anonymous No.19267354]

>>19267303
I didn't think anyone could be "foolish" enough to shill for China.
I feel neurons dying as I contemplate such people.

[Anonymous No.19267356]

>>19267191
>I assumed those were CCP sockpuppets. No?
I thought it was only one seeing them. Talking about china makes me so paranoid on 4chan.
The other day on this board I got into a "Xi jing jing Thought" thread and I made some stupid shitpost about forced labor, organ harvesting or some other none sense. The thread was shit and very slow. Non the less I got 5 replies within two minutes. I got on with my shit tirade speaking about Hongkong and the censorship of the press. Got another bunch of replies in a hurry like a gust of fast bullets. It felt very strange to have so many replies on a slow board so I pointed that out, at which point the replies were more spaced out even as I continued to shitpost.
The replies I got were all very alike, short, not getting to the point and dismissive, and at the same time they all seemed to want to look like different posters were behind them. It really gave me the creeps.

[Anonymous No.19267401]

>>19267303
>it's just a bunch of fools getting carried away by runaway memes
Maybe it is and maybe I need meds too.
But as I said >>19267356, getting a lot of fast replies on this slow pace board seems odd.

[Anonymous No.19267404]

>>19267303
>when occam's razor says
Fuck off. There are legitimately tons of Chinese lying scum shills swarming the internet these days. You can see it on Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, Steam, app stores, etc.

[Anonymous No.19267415]

>>19267401
>>19267404
das rite white boi. uncle xi is dropping fat yuans in my account as we speak and there's nothing you can do about it.

[Anonymous No.19267467]

>>19267415
Got me laughing.

>>19267404
I don't know about a ton but there are definitely some out there.

[Anonymous No.19267478]

>>19267356
Their out-of-date lingo gives them away, though.
>>19266872
Faggot? Really?

[Anonymous No.19267503]

>>19267467
Enough to be noticeable on most major sites. I wouldn't mind, but they're also flooding Amazon and making it an awful place to shop on.

[Anonymous No.19267585]

>>19258795
I think people are just very despondent over the situation in the West currently. Everything seems bad and getting worse while there is no hope in sight. On every front from decaying basic infrastructure to ever more insane social policies to governments somewhere between incompetent and malicious towards its own citizens.
It's no wonder that people would start looking for hope somewhere, and the one place that actually seems to be doing fine and seems to be heading towards a brighter future, is China. At the very least, I believe that the Chinese government is genuinely trying to do what is best for their country and their people, which I don't think you can say about the Biden administration for example.

[Anonymous No.19267929]

>>19267585
The Chinese government is doing what's best for the Chinese government, their people be damned.

[Anonymous No.19267938]

>>19267585
A few more videos like this, and Joe Biden will be put into a nursing home, where he belongs:
https://twitter.com/TheFirstonTV/status/1450197542214438924

[Anonymous No.19268390]

>>19267929
>The Chinese government is doing what's best for the Chinese government, their people be damned
And what is this government made of, if I do so ask? I do not know of any country where the government is not made of people, and especially when you consider the CCP, a nation of more than 1 billion that would be very inefficient if it througly is directly top down in governance as people in the west believe, even if it "just" has 95 million members that mainly consists of those with much personal connections (people like village elders, community leaders etc).
Only the most middle of nowhere of a mountain village shithole can a individuals connection to the government be seen as weak. For while there is no democratic elections to appoint parties or leaders to run the government in a way that's "different" from the previous administration, like all countries except maybe the US, it's the "deep" state, the civil service, or in the case of China, simply "The State", that actually does governing. And while the administration does sadly just governs in a way so that it could hope to govern tomorrow, it does so in a complex dynamic not so different from most democracies (especially France), yet still distinctly Chinese, the usual Confucian-Legalist bureaucracy with a modern twist to it, where villages actually have democracy to vote their leaders, mayor's and provincial governments have polls for the people to vote on issues concerning their local area's livelihood, and the state collects data from these village elections, local government polls, social media, news reports etc to shape their policies. (1/2)

[Anonymous No.19268397]

>>19268390
Cont.
Consider the recent events like the crack down in "flower boys", an issue that is definitely against the interests of the young urban class, but was basically pushed enforced by a mass of conservative rural immigrants who found the cities to be degenerate and unmasculine compared to the lives the had in their hometowns, hence it's weird nature in that the kind of masculinity that their trying to push contain much of the stereotypes of a country bumpkin to appease the interests of the conservative rural and rural-immigrant community. Or how about the new laws on gaming or shit like the insane regulations on Vtuber which was basically the usual shenanigans where an Asian kid's boomer parents are frustrated at their son or daughter for not studying and will through any means, in this case complain loudly to the government, to get them back on the right track?
If you want positive examples, the best one would be the new labour laws, where the Chinese government has actually listened to it's workers and have banned shit like the 996 work ethic and have punished those that advocated for it.
While China is not a democracy by the people, it is like most states, a government of the people and for the nation. Anyone comparing it to failed states like a dictatorship in the middle east, or even semi-failed kleptocratic states like Russia, where the oligarchs truly have no checks on their power, are failing to truly understand the nature of the Chinese government and why I find anyone who consider the Chinese people weak or even oppressed when much of it's success and most of it not all of the bad press that China gets, from it's nationalistic dick waving, everything Uyghur, all it's policies that "restrict" freedom etc, are done by consensus of the people, from Xi Jinping himself, to a rich tech giant ceo, to a humble teacher and the poorest wage worker. (2/2)

[Anonymous No.19268431]

>>19268397
What wonderful myopia.
What about harvesting organs from executed prisoners?
What about literally welding people into their apartments to "stop the spread of COVID"?
What about wholesale theft of foreign technology?
I could go on. But I don't care.
Your property bubble is about to crater your entire economy; your government can't stop it.
And then you'll go back to being irrelevant, like you have been during most of your 3000 year existence.

[Anonymous No.19268434]

>>19267156
Russia has potential, or at least the right conditions to be a laboratory for something new

[Anonymous No.19268585]

>>19256260
Underrated. Shame the classics aren't taught these days.

[Anonymous No.19268714]

>>19268397
No reply yet, huh?

Your party bosses will be most displeased with your sloth and lack of commitment.
Say goodbye to your apartment.
A bureaucrat will soon take your wife as his own.
Your children won't get to attend the most prestigious schools.
You'll be banned from air travel, train travel, and driving more than a few blocks from your new hovel.
You'll have to check in every 15 minutes from your phone.
You'll be banned from all the good restaurants, and have to eat Uighur food.

And YOU thought this job would be a good way to rise through Party ranks. You simp.

[Anonymous No.19268791]

>What is singular is that the Chinese, whose lives are entirely regulated by the rites, are nevertheless the most duplicitous people on earth. This appears especially in commerce, which has never been able to inspire in them the good faith that is natural to it. The buyer must bring his own scale, each merchant having three: a heavy one for buying, a light one for selling, and an accurate one for those who are on their guard. I think I can explain this contradiction.
>China’s legislators had two objectives: they wanted the people to be submissive and tranquil, and to be hard-working and industrious. By the nature of the climate and the terrain they have a precarious life; they can assure their living only by dint of industry and labor.
>When everyone obeys and everyone works, the state is in a happy situation. It is necessity, and perhaps the nature of the climate, which have given every Chinese an unimaginable avidity for gain, and the laws have made no attempt to check it. Everything has been forbidden where acquisition by violence was concerned ; everything has been allowed when it was a matter of obtaining through artifice or industry. Let us therefore not compare the morality of the Chinese with that of Europe. Everyone in China has had to focus on what was useful to him: if the thief has looked after his interests, the dupe has needed to think of his own. In Lacedæmon it was permissible to steal; in China it is permissible to deceive.

[Anonymous No.19268816]

>The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.

[Anonymous No.19268978]

>>19256556
you did terribly and clearly haven't read the ancien regime and the revolution. administrative centralization is what is discussed in the book, it is not a synonym for authoritarianism

[Anonymous No.19269003]

>>19267303
>hyper-evolving internet
the internet has not culturally evolved in half a decade, the rate of advance is very slow. i agree with paragraph 2

[Anonymous No.19269019]

>>19268390
>not so different from most democracies (especially France), yet still distinctly Chinese, the usual Confucian-Legalist bureaucracy with a modern twist to it, where villages actually have democracy to vote their leaders, mayor's and provincial governments have polls for the people to vote on issues concerning their local area's livelihood, and the state collects data from these village elections, local government polls, social media, news reports etc to shape their policies.
that's ironic because de toqueville said exactly that about france in the late bourbon monarchy

[Anonymous No.19269047]

ITT why bugmen

[Anonymous No.19270011]

China is literally the page 10 boomp complainer.

[Anonymous No.19270135]

>>19270011
can you respond to my posts if this thread is to survive:
>>19269019
>>19269003
>>19268978

[Anonymous No.19270240]

What do the Chinese themselves have to say about these accusations?

[Anonymous No.19270469]

>>19270240
I'm pretty sure that was >>19268390 .
And it appears they ran out of self-serving BS.

[Anonymous No.19270546]

>>19267303
>when occam's razor says it's just a bunch of fools getting carried away by runaway memes on the hyper-evolving internet
Or, people read the various works of Communism and know the actual fact that propaganda is an intrinsic component of the system, and know the actual facts that China has one of the most robust online propaganda machines of any nation on Earth, rivaled only by U.S. corporations.
Who gave all these poor yuppies the idea that China might be salvation? Obviously they apparated it from nothing. If someone came up to me and told me that a particular brand of paper towels was better than another, I would understand that - at some point - either they or someone they knew saw a commercial. Asking me to pretend otherwise is what needs meds.

Yes, it would be ridiculous to assume every Chinaboo is a CCP bot. It would be equally ridiculous and outright denialism to claim there are no CCP psyops going on when we literally know there are, and that the push to pro-China views hasn't been motivated by state-sanctioned actors.

[Anonymous No.19270735]

>>19268978
>it is not a synonym for authoritarianism
It is absolutely necessary to it, and sufficient when kinds of it are assessed according to degree: That the countless formal differences between centralized authority in constitutional democracies and their immediate European precursors, with their elaborate and strenuously emphatic checks on it, and what's typical in Asian states lacking them, is a subject about which discourse is forbidden in the latter, demonstrates this principle. The high comedy of Tocqueville's quote, which observes the stultifying mediocrity of the result at that measure of centralized authority, doesn't take a scholar to grasp. At least in the West it doesn't.

[Anonymous No.19270935]

>>19270546
It seems much less likely compared to the other option, that is government agents who try to influence public opinion do exist, but most "shilling" stem not from the government's conscious effort it trying to sway it's or another nations people, but inertial cultural forces from nations, narratives like history, that create subgroups within a people that "shill" for an idea for free. Governments may help spread propaganda, but ultimately they originate from a narrative that was created from events, the history book's documentation of it, media's portrayal of it, and the individual's own preferencial aesthetics in regards to it. And ultimately I think the last one, and I'm bringing up the miracle of the house of Brandenburg as an example as though propaganda during that time was no way as sophisticated as it is now, is really the one that matters the most, and if it weren't for the existence of a idea to pin their interests on they would just move on to another one. (i.e non-ethnic Chinese China fans in the west exist because China simply is the only counterpart or option that can be chosen besides the US, as they're literally the 2nd most powerful country in the world. If the USSR still existed, or better yet, if it was still the 70s, the one's who were against America would just align themselves with the Soviet union simply because that was the only option there, except maybe the rare french communist hipster who liked Maoist China.)

>>19268714
>>19268431
Is this some kind of bait? I geniunely don't know what this has to do with my posts. You could have just posted cope if tldr. Sorry for my late reply though I was outside and for some reason my mobile IP is banned. Anyway, while one may think these guys are glowniggers, I actually believe they are China stans falseflagging as glowniggers because of how ESL it is. also cause I've done that before too.

>>19269019
That's interesting. May I have a quoted passage?

[Anonymous No.19271789]

>>19261793
>...
The day when the Persian North becomes Russian and the South perhaps British will not be an ordinary day in the history of the world. Its effects, its terrible effects, will not be late in coming. Here the conquerors will find hardy soldiers, easy to lead into battle; they will find dormant and really virgin earth; I saw people hardly scratching it with a bad rake and things soon shooting up. The mountains offer coal of fine quality, superb iron ore, native-made leather with beautiful patterns, sulphur and other minerals. Once these people receive permission together with enforceable protective laws they will develop their material interests as well as do Europeans. I do believe that they will never possess safe judgment, a healthy judiciary, and a reasonable consistency of ideas. I never met an Oriental, however distinguished, who does not have the most curiously incoherent mental processes. It is mainly to this that I attribute their incapacity to govern themselves. In one sentence, they are an intelligent people, they are able to comprehend their own interests in the restricted sense of the word, but they are a people incurably decadent.

[Anonymous No.19271822]

Another thinly veiled CCP shilled thread. Can't shills just go back to their normal targets like YouTube comment section or twitter alike?

[Anonymous No.19271839]

>>19271822
How is it a CCP shill thread when it's all anti-China?

[Anonymous No.19272581]

>>19270935
>quoted passage
Do it. We need more quotes.

[Anonymous No.19273678]

>>19271789
>Undoubtedly we Europeans shall dominate them, and they will let themselves be ruled. We shall rule them because we have more constancy in our imagination, more energy in our thoughts and, even though we ourselves have fallen far from the level of the white races from whom we descended, we have nevertheless conserved our will power better than have the Orientals. But to rule them will be all that we can do; we shall not be able to assimilate them. They will take from us what they find convenient and let the rest go, and if one of the two conforms to the other I do not doubt that it will be ourselves. We shall descend to their level on every point of contact. Did the Russians perhaps rise to the level of the Germans? Never, but wherever they could they slid down to the level of the Greeks. Once they become the masters of Persia they will do the same, and the result will be a compromise which, for Europeans, will be mere decadence. But will we profit materially at least? Will we be able to live, commercially and financially speaking, at the expense of Asia? Will we nourish ourselves from her substance? No; she will exploit us in the long run as all our ruling qualities fade away and, letting us indulge at our pleasure, she will naturally and thoughtlessly draw profit from those incontestable and unmatchable advantages which her own corruption will gradually acquire for her. The Asiatics’ rapacious desire for gain, the economic practices of their families, their low level of salaries, their extraordinary sobriety are advantages which we will never be able to equal. Once we have built their roads and taught them how to invest their capital in those manufactures in which they excel, they will give us cotton and silk, agricultural products and everything that we want at such low prices that we will have to abandon the competition. Look at what is already happening to India."

[Anonymous No.19273734]

>>19256009
books to read about this?

[Anonymous No.19274157]

>>19258612
>Unironically, Chinese Folk Religion's metaphysics of immanence ... Order happens immanently, not transcendentally.
Yup

https://youtu.be/0hIMfJs5s8E

[Anonymous No.19274214]

>>19258612
More stuff. This is boosterism but this is how the civic religion operates. It's all immanence and animism (natural forces) and ancestor stuff.

https://youtu.be/2pJzU9lvRw0

[Anonymous No.19274473]

>>19255676
This guy comes off a major pseud.
Would not be surprised to see him posting here if he was born in our times

[Anonymous No.19274709]

>>19267191
>everyone who disagrees with me is a sockpuppet
Americans should be shot.

[Anonymous No.19275229]

>>19274214
You're not wrong either in the general or the particular. Usual as it is in the East, socially retarded men, incapable of friendship, are more than ever famous lately. They're all rather eerie.

[Anonymous No.19275298]

>>19274473
>major pseud
Lmao

[Anonymous No.19276098]

"The immense social power that the Economists imagined was not only greater than any power they could see before them; it was also different in origin and character. It did not flow directly from God. It was not moored in tradition. It was impersonal. It was no longer called “king” but “state.” It was not the legacy of a family. It was the product and representative of all, with the duty to ensure that the rights of each individual were subordinate to the will of all.

This particular form of tyranny, known as democratic despotism, of which the Middle Ages had no idea, was already familiar to the Economists: no more social hierarchy, no more well-demarcated classes, no more fixed ranks; a people composed of almost identical and entirely equal individuals, an indistinct mass recognized as the only legitimate sovereign but carefully deprived of all the faculties that might allow it to rule or even oversee its government by itself; above it, a single designated official charged with acting in its name without consulting it; to control that official, a public reason deprived of organs; to stop him, revolutions and not laws – de jure a subordinate agent but de facto a master.

Not finding anything in their vicinity that lived up to this ideal, they went looking for it in remote corners of Asia. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was not a single Economist who did not somewhere in his writings lavish fulsome praise on China. When you read their books, you are sure to come across this, if nothing else. Moreover, since little is known about China even now, there was no kind of nonsense that they did not dispense about the country. China’s incompetent and barbarous government, which a handful of Europeans were able to manipulate at will, struck them as the perfect model for all nations of the world to copy. For them, China was what first England and then America would later become for all the French. They were moved and apparently delighted by a country whose sovereign, absolute but unprejudiced, plowed the earth once a year with his own hands to honor the useful arts, where all official posts were obtained through literary competitions, and where philosophy was the only religion and men of letters the only aristocracy."

[Anonymous No.19276340]

>>19274709
>Americans should be shot.

Just try it. The population is heavily armed.

[Anonymous No.19276450]

>>19256224
I thought sinophiles was pretty big. Though I assume it went through waves. Voltaire if I remember was also a sinophile

Of course they were probably both semi constructed accounts too with there own projections.

[Anonymous No.19276819]

>>19261891
it´s true, islamic, hinduist and chinese civilization are prone to barbarism and despotism

[Anonymous No.19277190]

>>19255676
Didn't Tocqueville wager that the US would have no great literature on the eve of the American renaissance (Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville et al).?

Inb4 euroshit or coomergenius green texts those names

>American literature
>Good

[Anonymous No.19278267]

>>19277190
I don't that's what he said.

[Anonymous No.19278556]

>>19273734
If you are asking about tea and the tea trade, try The Gunpowder Gardens, mix of travel memoir and history of the tea trade and tea culture. Good place to start and he covers 90% of what I talked about in that post, you will learn a good amount about the tea trade, tea culture, growing, processing and brewing. Don't recall if it has a bibliography or anything, but it will give you enough knowledge to be able to effectively search out the areas of interest. It is not a rigorous study but quite good. If you want the more general history of trade with China, probably loads of books on the subject, don't know any off hand, been 20 years since I read that stuff, The Gunpowder Gardens is the only book on the topic which has stayed with me.

[Anonymous No.19279381]

Any more?

[Anonymous No.19279471]

>>19279381
do (you) have anything else to add?

[Anonymous No.19280429]

>>19279471
Maybe

[Anonymous No.19280468]

Simon Ley was a Belgium diplomat stationed in Beijing and traveled extensively in Mao's China. As a Sinologist, he had written a few highly critical books on modern China.

[Anonymous No.19280526]

"For the West, the problem of China is first the problem of how we know China. No observer approaches her safely; as he thinks he is describing her, he may actually be revealing his own secret fantasies—and in this sense, whoever talks about China talks about himself."

[Anonymous No.19280585]

>>19278267
Well, point is, he's often invoked as this astute observer. But I never understood the Sinophilia of the French from the Enlightenment up to Tocqueville and whoever else. I doubt any would say the Chinese are great today. He was a better observer of democracy desu.

[Anonymous No.19281645]

>>19280526
Yikes and cringe.