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If the Chinese acquired the representation across institutions of cultural influence that Jews currently have in media, politics, and academia, and made the Century of Humiliation equivalent to what is now the Holocaust in public consciousness, then wouldn't the "Chinese Question (CQ)" be justified as well?
The JQ doesn't claim that the behavior of Jews, or the Chinese in this counterfactual, is hard to understand. But that it's a hostile foreign influence. That same criticism would apply if the Chinese forced the elevation of their identity so prominently in the cultural consciousness.
And wouldn't it be weird to call someone a "Chinese-hater" for correctly pointing out that influence and identifying it as hostile, in this counterfactual?
Especially if many of those lobbing the accusation of "Chinese-hater" in this counterfactual were Chinese themselves, you would be correct to view that epithet, and its cultural weight, as being yet another validation of the initial critique.
I guess this hinges on whether the Chinese got to those positions through merit by being legitimately better at them, or through corruption (there is a lot of gray area in between of course, but my point should be obvious).
If it turns out that the world’s greatest physicists, philosophers, writers, comedians, investors, and entrepreneurs were languishing in poverty for a century as a result of imperial subjugation, that would in fact be one of the pivotal events in world history!
It would be especially weird if the people most upset about this had some weird historical hangup like, “the Opium Wars were actually about tea, no one was trying to smuggle drugs into China.”
This is completely wrong. If the Chinese acquired and used that level of influence in academia, Hollywood, and news media to perpetuate systematic hostility towards White American identity, and used that same influence to elevate Chinese identity above all others, it would not matter whether they acquired those positions by merit or by crook.
If I were to say, "hey the Chinese are being very ethnocentric and hostile" then the merit of that accusation has no bearing whatsoever on how the Chinese acquired that influence which is the subject of my accusation.
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