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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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I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West. Russia is far better at it, despite having some deep comparative disadvantages (it's much harder to pitch Russia as the model of an advanced society than China, for example). I'm sure there are many disaffected people in the West with declining loyalty to the state who would be very happy to work with China for minimal perks, or even just the joy of sticking it to the man. This was a critical element of Soviet soft power during the Cold War, and if China was smarter they'd be exploiting it now.

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West

Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?

That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.

Declining loyalty to the state is right coded and the right wing hates China. They’re an explicitly anti-Christian communist society which has practiced population control in the recent past. Throw in some stuff about race(it’s just very easy to make them seem like the other- and everyone knows they’re racist too).

What would this even look like?

Plus, why interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake? China doesn't need the US to fall into civil war. It just needs us to let our military slowly lose its edge, our industrial supply chains wither on the vine, and our people lose interest in contesting Taiwan. All of those trend lines except the last are pretty much baked into the cake for the next decade, and probably having domestic issues displace foreign issues in American public opinion is the easiest way to get the last (and much easier than nurturing a domestic fifth column).

YouTube is full of videos of Americans who moved to some Russian village with their families to "escape wokeness", but the only living-in-China videos I see are from young high-openness singles. I imagine that to be a dissident on behalf of some folk, you must want to or at least be okay with taking on its folkways, and in terms of those Russia is seen as much closer and more compatible with Western sensibilities than China.

I think that’s all on the money, but China wouldn’t need to transplant dissident Americans to Shanghai in order to make mutually beneficial trades with Western dissidents (if anything, that would rather defeat the point). I’m thinking instead of actions like, eg, creating or funding thinktanks and NGOs across Europe and the US that champion ideas like civilisational states, the danger of radical Islam, the importance of assertive state-led assimilation of minorities to the dominant culture, etc.. Basically turn Chinese state capitalism into a more general ideological package that can be pitted against the perceived failures and weaknesses of current liberalism, and use Western dissidents to promote it, as the Soviet Union did with Communism. Could be some very substantial geopolitical gains for minimal costs.

creating or funding thinktanks and NGOs across Europe and the US

The Confucius Institutes were an early version of this, but they all closed. They'd have to be more circumspect a second time around.

Right, but I think the reluctance of Westerners (at least those past their rumspringa stage) also hints at a general sense that Chinese people are so alien that what works for them will not work for Westerners. China could of course campaign to dispel this sense, but this might be a two-edged sword. If Chinese and Westerners are sufficiently similar that PRC governance working for the Chinese is evidence that PRC governance would work for Westerners, then the converse inference that Western governance would work for the Chinese is not far away, and conventional wisdom holds that they are very concerned about that notion catching on.

There's the obvious ethnic issue there. There are a lot more white people in the US than Han, and China is far more ethnically homogenous than Russia.

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West. Russia is far better at it, despite having some deep comparative disadvantages (it's much harder to pitch Russia as the model of an advanced society than China, for example)

Russia is way more familiar with Western culture, and I don't know how seriously I should take Yuri Bezmenov, but apparently an argument can be made that the current internal divisions is just what they sowed back in the Soviet days bearing fruit now. In any case they probably have some cultural infrastructure left over from back then.

It would make sense. If the social discord was sownin the 1970s, then the first generation raised with it would be late gen X in the 1979s and 1980s. Those people are parents of high school and college kids now. So that means that only those in the boomer and early gen X era can even vaguely remember a time when racial politics and class/race resentment weren’t prominent parts of the political and social landscape. Most people under 60 or so think those things are normal.

And Russia has an advantage of being fairly culturally similar to the West to be able to talk in their language. They’re Orthodox Christians, which gives them an understanding of the foundation of Western religion. They’re shaped by Greco-Roman cultural norms, including individualism and guilt over shame. China has none of that. China was its own civilization for millennia. It’s influenced by Taoism, Confucius, and Buddhism. They emphasize conformity and respect for the elites instead of individual self expression and individual rights and liberties. As such, even though China has become a sort of city on a hill, it can’t really communicate it’s values because of the lack of commonality,

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