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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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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.

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