13
votes
The West’s incompetent response to the pandemic will hasten the power-shift to the east
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- By invitation: Kishore Mahbubani
- Published
- Apr 20 2020
- Word count
- 1570 words
I couldn't read past this line:
That was where the writer lost all credibility.
Ha, yeah... I tried not to go overboard in my comment describing the author's opinion, but the word "sycophantic" did come to mind. That said, I still strongly recommend this article because the underlying point about the results of legitimizing government institutions is (I think) a very important one.
Is it inaccurate to describe China as meritocratic? Is it a good thing to be meritocratic?
The author doesn't really support the claim very well in that article, he just alludes to distant Chinese history and culture.
The best thing I could find was the following student essay describing China's "Official Merit Promototion System" and discussing whether or not that existing system can tackle climate change mitigation effectively:
https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/academics/studentscholars/Climate_Change_Mitigation_Policy_China.pdf
Somewhat yes to both.
China is somewhat meritocratic, as long as you fall in line with the overall belief system. Are you really great at [x] but are an Uyghur? You're not going to be rewarded in the Chinese meritocracy. At its core, rampant human rights violations are antithetical to true meritocracy.
By my interpretation, a government can be "meritocratic" and still oppressive towards individuals who do not adhere to the institutional dogma. The existing power structures determine how performance is evaluated. This is why I say it isn't inherently a good characteristic. I have no sense of whether or not the author is correct in saying that China is "the most meritocratic" government. I also get the impression based on his background and resume that he thinks meritocracy is inherently a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Since we're a smaller crowd, I'd like to take a risk to see if I get crucified since I have a lot less firepower than our media in discussing things outside the officially sanctioned overton window and non-orthodoxy on this topic has a Iraqis pulling babies out of incubator level of sacrilege.
But since it's an acceptable discussion in the UN (where voting was split between the rest of the muslim world in support of China in Xinjiang vs NATO), I hope it's acceptable here.
What primary source are you referencing wrt to Uyghurs? The Uyghurs in China's national congress seems to run counter to your suggestion.
In general, we're very heavily involved in funding insurgency and overthrow in Xinjiang
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/05/world-uyghur-congress-us-far-right-regime-change-network-fall-china/
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/
https://www.workers.org/2019/12/44963/
so any primary sources backing editorials that don't trace back to our NED/CIA funded organizations have, in my experience, been not very clear. Including our paramilitary excursions into Hong Kong, Tibet etc
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/22/hong-kong-opposition-unites-washington-hardliners/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program
I wasn't speaking specifically about meritocracy. In my opinion, there is a lot of value to meritocracy. In any event, I'm more interested in the premise that decaying public institutions is a big failure of the U.S. and other "western" countries than about Mahbubani's comments on China. Sorry if I wasn't clear about that.
Can't you just replace "Wuhan" and "China" in that sentence with pretty much every government on earth? Nobody was prepared for a pandemic of that scale, because it hasn't happened in a century. Everyone, including China, hoped it would just go away (as these viruses often did in the past decades). It took the death toll to rise in your own country – or your country's doorstep – for drastic political measures to get accepted. It's pretty clear China is still lying about their real numbers and they obviously tried to hide the virus for several weeks (remember Li Wenliang?). That's not exactly meritocratic.
Also, the devil is in the details:
Yes, but the equipment was fucking broken. China has a word for accepting the "good enough" even if broken, it's "chabuduo" and it's driving anyone crazy who moves to China from the West.
I agree that we have to start getting right-wing doofuses under control before they do lasting damage. But outside the deep cores of the US Republican party, I do not see hostility towards strong, professional government organizations. In Europe, the right is almost exclusively anti-immigrant, maybe anti-press but not anti-government. That's a US thing. A (powerful) minority of US politics. I have hopes for November.
I think there's a lot of dogwhistling around Li Wenliang but if you read the wiki page you linked, it doesn't quite back the assertion you're making.
Specifically Li Wenliang didn't have any first hand, new knowledge of the coronavirus nor did he attempt to whistleblow or share with the public. He received a private group share from Ai Fen, the actual source of the information and the right person to escalate (and did, with effect) in the first place as the director of the hospital's ER. Li Wenliang just re-posted the message from one private group to another private group.
Ai Fen speculated (incorrectly) that there was SARS in her department based on observations of exactly two (2) patients on December 30th. Her escalation was confirmed on January 11th when a nurse was observed to have the same symptoms. The coronavirus genetic genome was sequenced and shared with the world excatly three (3) days later.
You may disagree about whether that's world record breaking speed. But as much as it's thrown around by the media everyday, "It's pretty clear China is still lying about their real numbers and they obviously tried to hide the virus for several weeks" is a strong statement to make.
You think fighting the virus is broken PPE is hard, think again how the Chinese NHS workers had to deal with with no PPE at all.
That been said, the US is no longer the country that repaired the wrecked Yorktown CV-5 in one day and kept the spirit of fighting the war.
That's an interesting article! I posted it as a new topic.
This seems like a naively rosy picture of China's geopolitical intentions, but the piece makes some very good comments about the United States, and particularly about the importance of strong, competent public institutions.