Comparisons to the Pope might be the wrong metaphor.
From all outward appearances, Xi Jinping regards himself as a latter day Mao Zedong--right down to the promotion and distribution of "Xi Jinping Thought".
Mao himself idolized Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who also established Legalism as the governing philosophy. Legalism essentially establishes the State as the supreme moral arbiter.
Xi is going down a very Legalist path, from what I can tell. That makes Zero COVID "right" because the State says it's right.
...Canada will not be far behind..... "'B.C. to stay the course as U.S. CDC relaxes COVID guidelines: Health minister'; are you BC corrupted narcissistic idiots that out of touch? It is time to set the good people of BC free, it is time!" https://palexander.substack.com/p/earth-to-british-columbia-bc-earth
SARS-CoV-2 variants are spreading in China despite extraordinary, destructive, attempts at brute-force suppression and their best efforts at vaccination. This is in the summer 25-hydroxyvitamin D peak. Transmission will surely rise as as levels fall in the months to come. The next peak is nearly a year away.
This is not a good position from which to actually invade Taiwan, especially since the whole of China cannot do without the semiconductors made there. The Taiwanese semiconductor factories would not produce anything under occupation, since the equipment depends very much on support from companies in Western countries. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company employing 1.2 million mainland Chinese. In a war, countries such as Australia would stop selling iron ore and other minerals to the Chinese, along with equipment and electronic parts their entire economy depends upon. Likewise imported food.
Rational leadership would surely recognise this and so do no more than rattle their sabres regarding Taiwan. However, relying on rational judgment from the leaders of countries is not a good bet - especially from a dictatorship.
Thanks! Here is an optimistic view of how this might work, followed by a critique in the form of exceptions to the principle.
Broadly speaking, as the array of intricate, genuinely sophisticated products and services grows, and as more and more people aspire to making use of these and so expect them to be available on reasonable terms for themselves and everyone they care about:
The production of manufactured items - especially equipment - is generally dependent on a large number of component products which are also very difficult to design and produce, or at least to produce in large quantities, with the required very high reliability, for low prices. Designing and manufacturing these end-user products and their components naturally and correctly gravitates to a situation where one or a few companies and factories in the whole world do the best job. This is assuming relatively low transport costs and a high degree of standardisation, as is the case in electronics. Heavier materials and components need to be made more locally - such as steel and other high-mass components of vehicles.
With electronic devices now at the heart of many or most products needed at home and in business, the supply of these products and so the exceedingly complex components (integrated circuits, but even the capacitors, resistors, inductors and connectors are fancy pieces of work, often coming from one or a few factories worldwide) on a reliable basis becomes critical. If you want to be able to walk into an office-supplies store and buy a PC, Android/Apple cellphone/tablet, laser printer (they are all done by arrays of LEDs now), FLASH memory device (a terabyte in a Micro-SD card, now with 128 layers of transistors made of polycrystaliine silicon deposited on the basic crystal silicon wafer) then every stage of the production and supply of these components and sub-assemblies needs to be working really well. Every factory needs automation - and so the best equipment available - in order to remain competitive.
The electronics industry does a truly stellar job of this, compared to any other industry I know. Medicine is the absolute worst, despite its numerous, astounding, achievements.
We all depend on electronics for happiness and security, including for transport and health.
No country can produce all the electronic components it needs. A country as big as China or the USA might be able to in principle, but in a global market, the best job will frequently be done by some other country. This is especially true considering the extraordinary capacity of the best and brightest managers, investors, designers and their production workers in East Asia: Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China especially. No-one mass produces difficult-to-manufacture electronics like these people. My 40" curved 4k LCD monitor is made by AOC = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPV_Technology which is the world's largest manufacturer of computer monitors. The screen has 24,833,200 separate transistors made from polysilicon deposited onto the glass. Every one of them works, year after year.
Very few people outside the industry have an inkling of what it takes to design and manufacture leading edge 7 nanometre design rules integrated circuits, which are needed for the best CPUs in servers, PCs and hand-held devices. The electronics industry is bogglingly sophisticated - a triumph of human inventiveness, hard work and *cooperation*.
Therefore . . . . The ability of the citizens of a given country X to have the life they expect depends on that country being able to import, in general (only a few will produce them), the end-user home (I hate the word "consumer") and business products they need. Likewise the country's military - for its actual weapons and communications systems and for any local production of these or ammunition.
Only a functionally insignificant quantity of complex end-user products can be smuggled past trade barriers, so if country's people are to prosper, that country has to be on peaceable trading terms with all the large end-user product manufacturing countries in the world.
There are sufficient large, highly productive, countries which can do this - the USA, larger European countries and the East Asian countries (plus India, in principle - but they seem to excel in pharmaceuticals rather than electronics or machinery) - for no one country to be able to monopolise the production of any one type of item. (An exception is that due to the stupendous difficulties in design and manufacture, only one company, headquartered in Holland - ASML - can produce the 13.5 nm wavelength "extreme UV", actually, nearly X-ray - wafer exposure systems needed for the most advanced integrated circuits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8 .)
Therefore . . . unless a government is to hang onto power as a pernicious, exploitative, destructive, parasitic dictatorship - North Korea, and so far China, Russia, Iran and others - governments can only survive and prosper if their people can get all the products they need, which means the country has to be on reasonable trading terms with all other major countries. If one of those countries goes rogue - as China is contemplating doing by invading Taiwan - than the world will cope. (It does not seem to matter so much what the CCP is doing to the Uygurs in Xinjaing, since they are culturally and geographically remote from the West and do not appear to be crucial to the production of sophisticated products, with the possible exception of solar panels.) Trade barriers will move production elsewhere. This is happening already as companies seek long-term reliable alternative countries for mass production of their products - and China with its warpath promises and maniacal zero-COVID policies is making other East Asian countries more competitive.
Outright aggression such as Russia invading Ukraine (even though Ukraine is not all sweetness and light) means that most countries, for their own self-interests - to protect themselves and their allies from further such aggression - will do their best to deny trade with the aggressor. Russia cannot survive the trade embargo on pretty much everything, especially electronic end-user products and the components which are required to make them. This is not just about home products. Offices, factories and the military need these products as well. Russia has only decades-old semiconductor fabs.
No one country can produce the electronic components needed for the end-user products it requires, even if it could, in principle, design and produce the end-user products.
This is true even of China, the greatest manufacturing and design powerhouse the world has ever known. Even if they could access ASML's EUV machines (or devise their own) they cannot in fact produce all the best components they need to produce truly competitive (with the outside world) end-user products.
On this basis, Russian cannot win by invading Ukraine and China cannot win by invading Taiwan. If a country is small and/or has a cranky Western-civilisation-averse language and culture/religion, and lacks the extraordinary smarts, stability and work-ethic which makes Taiwan and other East Asian countries leading manufacturers, then it is not likely to be immune from invasion. For instance the US/West invading Iraq, or probably Venezuela. If they could get away with invading Iran, hardly anyone would mind, since the Iranian people are a lot brighter and friendlier than their Islamist government, which openly threatens productive countries (Israel at least, and prior generations of Intel CPU were designed in Israel).
Resources in the ground are totally different from the factories, design people and socio-economic-legal stability which are needed for competitive manufacturing of complex products. It is possible to invade a country and so control the extraction of its resources and/or its agricultural production even if the country is a mess. As far as I know, invading Taiwan and expecting its (world-wide shareholder owned) TSMC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC) factories to carry on working their miracles day-after-day would be like invading and largely destroying the country with the world's finest opera company, and expecting its singers to ascend the heights of their art every night as if nothing had happened. I read an article recently quoting someone from TSMC that their fabs would be useless after an invasion, since numerous crucial production machines depend on real-time support and links to the companies which made them - most in Western countries.
The critique is that corruption, stupidity and malfeasance can be really intense. Look at Western medicine. Of all places where we can't tolerate an industry being riddled with corrupt groupthunk ineptitude, this is it. Likewise universities, mass- and social-media being swept up in a woke social contagion which denies reality and denigrates the values which properly hold a society together.
There's no outer limit to how bad things can get through the madness of crowds and more conventional corrupt and mistaken government, corporate and institutional action. There's no parent figure ready to put a stop to this rot when it gets out of hand. So while the above principles argue for the impossibility of any country wisely invading any other peaceful, productive, country, what will happen may be another matter entirely.
Just random. I had a job offer for a position that involved extensive travel to China. I only found that out in the final interview and I turned it down right away. Decent job but no way I was taking the chance of sneezing in China and being welded in a hotel room (hyperbole but still).
My question is: Does Xi consider himself more "infallible" than the Pope?
I'm thinking "yes." (It's the "disease" of dictators.)
Comparisons to the Pope might be the wrong metaphor.
From all outward appearances, Xi Jinping regards himself as a latter day Mao Zedong--right down to the promotion and distribution of "Xi Jinping Thought".
Mao himself idolized Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who also established Legalism as the governing philosophy. Legalism essentially establishes the State as the supreme moral arbiter.
Xi is going down a very Legalist path, from what I can tell. That makes Zero COVID "right" because the State says it's right.
Government and religion have always been two sides of the same coin.
Whichever side, don't we suspect Chinese people see Xi as the "emperor with no clothes"?
...Canada will not be far behind..... "'B.C. to stay the course as U.S. CDC relaxes COVID guidelines: Health minister'; are you BC corrupted narcissistic idiots that out of touch? It is time to set the good people of BC free, it is time!" https://palexander.substack.com/p/earth-to-british-columbia-bc-earth
Canada is going to Canada. Although, mercifully, I don't believe they've attempted anything like the Shanghai experience. And hopefully won't.
I am expecting the worse but hoping for the best..... they can't do it to the extent of Shanghai but they are subversively trying.....
https://thecountersignal.com/canadian-airport-authority-rejects-ban-arrivecan-billboard/?utm_source=The+Counter+Signal&utm_campaign=f7dfe6ae1b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_08_15_03_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3b53636f01-f7dfe6ae1b-562706639
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8fpT9qTgk
https://rumble.com/v1fovzv-former-csis-honcho-says-canadian-politicians-are-on-foreign-agents-payroll.html?mref=6zof&mc=dgip3&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nonvaxer420&ep=2
SARS-CoV-2 variants are spreading in China despite extraordinary, destructive, attempts at brute-force suppression and their best efforts at vaccination. This is in the summer 25-hydroxyvitamin D peak. Transmission will surely rise as as levels fall in the months to come. The next peak is nearly a year away.
This is not a good position from which to actually invade Taiwan, especially since the whole of China cannot do without the semiconductors made there. The Taiwanese semiconductor factories would not produce anything under occupation, since the equipment depends very much on support from companies in Western countries. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company employing 1.2 million mainland Chinese. In a war, countries such as Australia would stop selling iron ore and other minerals to the Chinese, along with equipment and electronic parts their entire economy depends upon. Likewise imported food.
Rational leadership would surely recognise this and so do no more than rattle their sabres regarding Taiwan. However, relying on rational judgment from the leaders of countries is not a good bet - especially from a dictatorship.
Thanks! Here is an optimistic view of how this might work, followed by a critique in the form of exceptions to the principle.
Broadly speaking, as the array of intricate, genuinely sophisticated products and services grows, and as more and more people aspire to making use of these and so expect them to be available on reasonable terms for themselves and everyone they care about:
The production of manufactured items - especially equipment - is generally dependent on a large number of component products which are also very difficult to design and produce, or at least to produce in large quantities, with the required very high reliability, for low prices. Designing and manufacturing these end-user products and their components naturally and correctly gravitates to a situation where one or a few companies and factories in the whole world do the best job. This is assuming relatively low transport costs and a high degree of standardisation, as is the case in electronics. Heavier materials and components need to be made more locally - such as steel and other high-mass components of vehicles.
With electronic devices now at the heart of many or most products needed at home and in business, the supply of these products and so the exceedingly complex components (integrated circuits, but even the capacitors, resistors, inductors and connectors are fancy pieces of work, often coming from one or a few factories worldwide) on a reliable basis becomes critical. If you want to be able to walk into an office-supplies store and buy a PC, Android/Apple cellphone/tablet, laser printer (they are all done by arrays of LEDs now), FLASH memory device (a terabyte in a Micro-SD card, now with 128 layers of transistors made of polycrystaliine silicon deposited on the basic crystal silicon wafer) then every stage of the production and supply of these components and sub-assemblies needs to be working really well. Every factory needs automation - and so the best equipment available - in order to remain competitive.
The electronics industry does a truly stellar job of this, compared to any other industry I know. Medicine is the absolute worst, despite its numerous, astounding, achievements.
We all depend on electronics for happiness and security, including for transport and health.
No country can produce all the electronic components it needs. A country as big as China or the USA might be able to in principle, but in a global market, the best job will frequently be done by some other country. This is especially true considering the extraordinary capacity of the best and brightest managers, investors, designers and their production workers in East Asia: Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China especially. No-one mass produces difficult-to-manufacture electronics like these people. My 40" curved 4k LCD monitor is made by AOC = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPV_Technology which is the world's largest manufacturer of computer monitors. The screen has 24,833,200 separate transistors made from polysilicon deposited onto the glass. Every one of them works, year after year.
Very few people outside the industry have an inkling of what it takes to design and manufacture leading edge 7 nanometre design rules integrated circuits, which are needed for the best CPUs in servers, PCs and hand-held devices. The electronics industry is bogglingly sophisticated - a triumph of human inventiveness, hard work and *cooperation*.
Therefore . . . . The ability of the citizens of a given country X to have the life they expect depends on that country being able to import, in general (only a few will produce them), the end-user home (I hate the word "consumer") and business products they need. Likewise the country's military - for its actual weapons and communications systems and for any local production of these or ammunition.
Only a functionally insignificant quantity of complex end-user products can be smuggled past trade barriers, so if country's people are to prosper, that country has to be on peaceable trading terms with all the large end-user product manufacturing countries in the world.
There are sufficient large, highly productive, countries which can do this - the USA, larger European countries and the East Asian countries (plus India, in principle - but they seem to excel in pharmaceuticals rather than electronics or machinery) - for no one country to be able to monopolise the production of any one type of item. (An exception is that due to the stupendous difficulties in design and manufacture, only one company, headquartered in Holland - ASML - can produce the 13.5 nm wavelength "extreme UV", actually, nearly X-ray - wafer exposure systems needed for the most advanced integrated circuits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8 .)
Therefore . . . unless a government is to hang onto power as a pernicious, exploitative, destructive, parasitic dictatorship - North Korea, and so far China, Russia, Iran and others - governments can only survive and prosper if their people can get all the products they need, which means the country has to be on reasonable trading terms with all other major countries. If one of those countries goes rogue - as China is contemplating doing by invading Taiwan - than the world will cope. (It does not seem to matter so much what the CCP is doing to the Uygurs in Xinjaing, since they are culturally and geographically remote from the West and do not appear to be crucial to the production of sophisticated products, with the possible exception of solar panels.) Trade barriers will move production elsewhere. This is happening already as companies seek long-term reliable alternative countries for mass production of their products - and China with its warpath promises and maniacal zero-COVID policies is making other East Asian countries more competitive.
Outright aggression such as Russia invading Ukraine (even though Ukraine is not all sweetness and light) means that most countries, for their own self-interests - to protect themselves and their allies from further such aggression - will do their best to deny trade with the aggressor. Russia cannot survive the trade embargo on pretty much everything, especially electronic end-user products and the components which are required to make them. This is not just about home products. Offices, factories and the military need these products as well. Russia has only decades-old semiconductor fabs.
No one country can produce the electronic components needed for the end-user products it requires, even if it could, in principle, design and produce the end-user products.
This is true even of China, the greatest manufacturing and design powerhouse the world has ever known. Even if they could access ASML's EUV machines (or devise their own) they cannot in fact produce all the best components they need to produce truly competitive (with the outside world) end-user products.
On this basis, Russian cannot win by invading Ukraine and China cannot win by invading Taiwan. If a country is small and/or has a cranky Western-civilisation-averse language and culture/religion, and lacks the extraordinary smarts, stability and work-ethic which makes Taiwan and other East Asian countries leading manufacturers, then it is not likely to be immune from invasion. For instance the US/West invading Iraq, or probably Venezuela. If they could get away with invading Iran, hardly anyone would mind, since the Iranian people are a lot brighter and friendlier than their Islamist government, which openly threatens productive countries (Israel at least, and prior generations of Intel CPU were designed in Israel).
Resources in the ground are totally different from the factories, design people and socio-economic-legal stability which are needed for competitive manufacturing of complex products. It is possible to invade a country and so control the extraction of its resources and/or its agricultural production even if the country is a mess. As far as I know, invading Taiwan and expecting its (world-wide shareholder owned) TSMC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC) factories to carry on working their miracles day-after-day would be like invading and largely destroying the country with the world's finest opera company, and expecting its singers to ascend the heights of their art every night as if nothing had happened. I read an article recently quoting someone from TSMC that their fabs would be useless after an invasion, since numerous crucial production machines depend on real-time support and links to the companies which made them - most in Western countries.
The critique is that corruption, stupidity and malfeasance can be really intense. Look at Western medicine. Of all places where we can't tolerate an industry being riddled with corrupt groupthunk ineptitude, this is it. Likewise universities, mass- and social-media being swept up in a woke social contagion which denies reality and denigrates the values which properly hold a society together.
There's no outer limit to how bad things can get through the madness of crowds and more conventional corrupt and mistaken government, corporate and institutional action. There's no parent figure ready to put a stop to this rot when it gets out of hand. So while the above principles argue for the impossibility of any country wisely invading any other peaceful, productive, country, what will happen may be another matter entirely.
Just random. I had a job offer for a position that involved extensive travel to China. I only found that out in the final interview and I turned it down right away. Decent job but no way I was taking the chance of sneezing in China and being welded in a hotel room (hyperbole but still).
Not entirely random, since we've seen video footage of more or less that very thing.