Pictured above: Washington Wizards’ #7 Justin Anderson and Guangzhou Long-Lions’ #12 Mingyang Sun duking it out for the ball in the WDC Arena, two days before Houston’s GM, Daryl Morey sent out his now infamous tweet. This all connects the dots to President Xi Jinping’s hard-nosed, anti-Western language this weekend.
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he mainstream media is not connecting the dots, including Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post. It’s understandable, since they arrogantly refuse to admit that China has a thriving, participatory democracy. It is just different than the West’s, something I have written often about (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=democracy) and a whole lot more in The China Trilogy (see below).
Chinese President Xi Jinping used very un-Confucian, non-Daoist language during a speech this weekend, while on a state visit to southern neighbor Nepal. He warned the West about its ongoing management and financing of overt sabotage in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan. It has everything to do with last week’s national outrage over a subversive tweet sent out by Houston Rocket General Manager Daryl Morey and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver then refusing to apologize for it.
In a recent article (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2019/10/10/adam-silver-and-the-nba-just-dug-their-own-chinese-grave-china-rising-radio-sinoland-191010/) I came down really hard on Messrs. Morey and Silver, because like them, I too used to be a “liberal, do-gooder racist”, who thought I had all the best Western answers for the rest of the world’s inferior peoples. When I came back to China in 2010, I had a series of epiphanies about Eurangloland and its Superiority Racist Paradigm, which is discussed in the above article, so please take a quick look. If you want to really fully grasp the West’s relentless hatred of the “Yellow Peril”, read here (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/06/slavs-and-the-yellow-peril-are-niggers-brutes-and-beasts-in-the-eyes-of-western-empire-china-rising-radio-sinoland/).
Westerners are brainwashed that China is an Orwellian, totalitarian dystopia, where the citizens are zombies who follow everything Baba Beijing commands them to do. It’s horse manure, trust me. Especially with modern social media now, there are platforms for every kind of praise and complaint you can think of. You can join many “I love Mao Zedong” groups and just as many “I hate Mao” ones. Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and all the other leaders, including Xi himself have groups for and against. There are pro-communism sites and pro-capitalism ones. There are Chinese conservatives [in the Chinese communist matrix, they are actually the true progressives and radicals] who want to go back to the Cultural Revolution, like now, and neoliberals who want to privatize all the state-owned enterprises, like yesterday. And there is every hue and shade in between, with countless thousands of forums for you-name-it.
Since liberation, there have always been opposition political parties, collectively called the United Front. In the National People’s Congress (NPC), they represent about 30% of the legislators, as well as throughout all levels of government, a much higher level of opposition than in many Western countries. Like all loyal opposition, they serve as a much-needed reality check on the government and bullshit meter on the Communist Party of China (CPC).
How did the Chinese express themselves before the internet? Mao Zedong’s administration had nonstop mass line meetings, where government officials met with the people to catch the zeitgeist. In The China Trilogy (see below), I wrote many fascinating pages on living in Chinese neighborhoods and seeing public mass line announcements, asking citizens to come to the local government hall or go online to list their complaints, suggestions and what’s working well for them. Xi Jinping reignited Mao’s mass line movement, to make sure that officials at all levels can respond to the concerns of the citizenry.
The mainland Chinese have a much higher level of democratic participation and consensus than in Hong Kong and arguably in Taiwan too, where there are two main political parties and the only significant difference between them is their level of cooperation/hostility towards the Mainland. Being an obedient anti-communist cog in the global capitalist machine comes first.
The Western deep state’s well-paid, black-clad terrorists in Hong Kong and its finger puppet Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan deserve only contempt from the Chinese nation. Thus, when fools like Daryl Morey and Adam Silver support the CIA’s gangsters in Hong Kong, who are trying to embarrass and destabilize Baba Beijing by destroying the city (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2019/07/08/confucius-laozi-and-buddha-are-humbly-winning-against-the-imperial-west-in-troubled-hong-kong-china-rising-radio-sinoland-190708/), the outrage of the Mainland public is understandable.
The CPC listens to its citizens and they are pissed off about the NBA fiasco. Business will eventually return back to normal, however in all likelihood, uncountable thousands of basketball fans will have burned their bridges with the US league and start focusing their roundball passion on the China Basketball Association (CBA), whose teams have a fair number of former NBA players, like Jeremy Lin, who just arrived (https://www.ranker.com/list/nba-players-in-china/ranker-nba). CBA’s commissioner is former Houston Rocket superstar Yao Ming, who is venerated here for marrying his local “high school” sweetheart (Olympic and pro b-ball star, Ye Li), never renouncing his Chinese citizenship and year after year faithfully paying half his multimillion-dollar salary as taxes in his home country. Talk about Sino-street cred. But in the meantime, Baba Beijing must address the concerns and anger of the people. It is for this reason that President Xi bluntly warned in his speech this weekend,
Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones. And any external forces backing such attempts at dividing China will be deemed by the Chinese people as pipe-dreaming.
The subtle reference to opium addiction was no accident. Xi, like every other leader in China knows that their citizens are fiercely patriotic, infused with history and yes, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms and opening up have their many fans, but more importantly – and this is a fact that Euranglolanders ignore at their peril – 95% of them adhere to Mao Zedong’s worldview on the evils of Western imperialism, thoroughly distrusting neoliberalism and keeping global capitalism at arm’s length. Mao died in 1976, but his geopolitical vision is the heart and soul of the Chinese people, always will be, and since Baba Beijing listens to their voices, it is the CPC’s too.
Thus, in answer to a number of comments I got on my above “NBA” article, that Westerners do not need to kowtow to Chinese sentiments about nationhood, territorial integrity, sovereignty, and their deep memories of the West occupying their country, while plundering, raping and addicting their ancestors to hard drugs, from 1839-1949, they are absolutely right, they are totally free to express themselves.
However, if you see a black man who has had a very bad day, he is holding a loaded gun and you call him a “stupid fucking tar baby”, you might get shot. If you walk up to a woman who is trained in self-defense and tell her she is a “stinking cunt of a whore”, you’ll likely get your genitals kicked in and your eyes poked shut. You might even get your neck broken.
In other words, freedom of expression is fine, but it can have consequences, sometimes very serious ones. The US Supreme Court ruled a long time ago that you can’t yell “FIRE!” in a crowded movie theater.
So, good on Houston’s Morey and NBA’s Silver. They mouthed off like good, chest beating Americans and insulted 1.4 billion Chinese people. The downside is the NBA has blown a commercial hole in its collective head and has had its PR gonads smashed to smithereens. As the business of international professional basketball slowly heals itself here, millions of fans will always remember what happened, and it will negatively influence how they spend their money for years to come.
This, in the biggest NBA market outside the United States. Freedom of expression can be very expensive and this time it is costing one of sport’s wealthiest, elite clubs a boatload of cash. Six-hundred-forty million Chinese watched the NBA last season. In 2017, China’s sports industry was worth US$310 billion and it is skyrocketing, with over 20% growth per year. Let those mindboggling stats sink in for a second. That’s a whole lot of coins to leave on the table for speaking one’s mind. But hey, what the heck! It’s all good…
Come to think of it, I’m going to watch Jeremy Lin play in the CBA for the Beijing Ducks this year.
LeBron who?
JEFF J. BROWN, Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China - The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.
• For Jeff J Brown’s Books, Radio Sinoland & social media outlets be sure to check this page on his special blog CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND
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It has been informative to watch a member of NBA royalty like Lebron James get savaged for apparently suggesting there is more to the story than Western media would have us believe. Since he made his comments every sports writer on every platform imaginable has morphed into a international policy expert and is attacking James and repeating the typical CIA talking points of “democratic” protests, (with of course no mention of input from the West and our “color-revolution” apparatus). In this way the propaganda line is repeated not only by the completely obvious propagandists of MSM, but also by unwitting… Read more »
Good comments, Gary. Even LeBron James is not above the Big Lie Propaganda Machine!