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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Though to be fair a good chunk of those fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, immigrated to the US, etc. Anecdotally I have a friend of Chinese descent whose grandfather was a banker (and a personal friend of Chiang Kai-shek). He supposedly escaped on a fishing boat to Hong Kong under a pile of dead fish.

Fair, but most of them did not escape and those that did are not even in the zipcode of political power in China right now.

Unfortunately China has failed to stop a new elite technocratic class from fermenting in the trash heap. A new crop of economic elites has supplanted the old legacy that indeed fled to San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver via Hong Kong, and this new crop is dabbing their toes in both the China and Western economic elite. The new moneyed Chinese are not climbing the ranks of coroporate america, but indtead forming medium sized enterprises cornering all manner of small import export goods no one thinks about. Your costco crab chunks may come from Alaskan fishermen, but they are processed by some Chinese-owned slave factories in Thailand.

Wasn't Xi Jingping's father purged by Mao? Somehow he weaseled back.

According to Wikipedia, yeah his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Not that I'm a fan of Pooh-bear, but it makes me kind of happy in the schadenfreude sense to learn that. Mao was an utter shit-bag, and I am amused by imagining how mad he would be if he found out that the son of the guy he purged is now running the country.

Mao would either be ashamed by history proving him a monstrous fool or in denial about that. Whether his cognitive dissonance would take the form of anger or unearned pride/boastfulness is an open question.

A highly substantial part of the urban elite in China did escape, actually, to Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore (or in some cases to the West). It took about 8-10 years for capitalism to be abolished fully in all of China, there was actually plenty of time for much of the elite in Shanghai and elsewhere to leave after the war ended. If you were 99.9th percentile wealth in China in 1947 (and therefore likely in the intellectual elite), you probably did leave.

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