吾国与吾民 | my country and my people
© 2013
  • 01 blog 博客
  • 02 about 关于
  • 03 Resources 资源
    • online sources
    • books
    • movies
  • 04 Podcast 播客
  • 05 proverbs 成语
  • 06 quotes 引语
  • 10 语言 Sprache
  • 11 饮食 Ernährung
  • 12 教育 Bildung
  • 13 生活的空间 Lebensraum
  • 14 环境 Environment
  • 15 创新 Innovation
  • 16 银行业务 Banking
  • 17 大同 World Order
  • 18 腐败 Corruption
  • 19 移民 Leaving China
  • 20 价值宣传 Value Propaganda
  • 21 Fish, Energy and XJP
  • 22 Fintech, Freud and CCP
  • 30 Absurd Products
  • 31 Lost in Translation
  • 32 Sound Slumber
  • 33 Propaganda Posters
  • 34 Mordor's Light 魔都的时光
    • Mordor Manual
    • 00 Essentials
    • 01 Grounding Neighborhood
    • 02 The Big Picture
    • 03 Past, Present and Future
    • 04 Balancing Body and Mind
    • ME01 Hangzhou
    • ME02 Beijing
    • ME03 Hong Kong
    • ME04 Taiwan
    • ME05 Japan
  • 40 contact 联系

巨人的花园 The Giant's Garden

11/17/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Gideon Rachman writes these days in the FT about the implications of China's self-isolation and calls it a global concern. I wrote about this tendency to seclude China from ROW already in 2017 when dissecting the Japanese term SAKOKU.

There is also reason for concern that a cosmopolitan FT correspondent like Mr. Rachman does not dig deeper and tries to understand the roots of this self-isolation and by unearthing the roots, giving the reader more insights about the consequences of such regime behavior. 

Since FT is restricted in access I copy Mr. Rachman's article here and ad a short video from my son's Chinese school. The Giant's Garden is a widely known primary school text. It is a fable about a Giant who denies children access to his garden and builds a wall around his estate to keep them out. Its a story which like no other explains the problem with China's self-understanding of cultural superiority and uniqueness.
Further reading:
  • On Nippon Sakoku: A Blueprint for China?
  • Hong Kong: Polis between two Empires
  • An Extended Review of Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos
China’s self-isolation is a global concern

Beijing’s zero-Covid policy is damaging international business and global governance

November 8, 2021 1:00 pm by Gideon Rachman
The most important invited guest at COP26 did not show up. As president of China, Xi Jinping leads a country that emits more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. But, unlike other world leaders, Xi did not give a speech to the climate summit. Instead he submitted a written statement of less than 500 words for the conference website.

Xi’s dismissive attitude to the climate talks was not so much Middle Kingdom as middle finger. But the Chinese leader’s refusal to travel to Glasgow for COP26 — or to the G20 summit in Rome, before it — is part of a broader pattern of national self-isolation.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, China has installed one of the world’s strictest systems of border controls and quarantines. Foreigners or Chinese citizens entering the country must go into strict quarantine for a minimum of two weeks. Extra controls apply if they enter Beijing, where the leadership resides.

This system has in effect made it impossible for foreigners to visit China without staying for several months, or for most Chinese people to travel abroad. Xi himself has not left China for almost two years. The last time he saw a foreign leader in person was at a meeting with the president of Pakistan in Beijing in March 2020. Xi’s forthcoming summit with President Joe Biden will be held by video.

When much of the globe was in lockdown, the extreme nature of China’s measures seemed less remarkable. But as most of the world returns to something close to normality, China’s self-isolation is increasingly anomalous.

The effects on international business are already apparent. China continues to trade and invest with the outside world. But business ties are fraying. Foreign chambers of commerce in China report that international executives are leaving the country and not being replaced. Hong Kong’s role as a global business centre has taken a battering.

China’s leadership may actually welcome some of these developments. Yu Jie, a fellow at Chatham House in London, argues that the pandemic has allowed Xi to accelerate down a path where he was already heading — towards national self-reliance. That policy began well before the pandemic, with the “Made in China 2025” campaign, which promoted domestic technology and production.

But with Covid-19, an emphasis on economic self-sufficiency has become a much broader inward turn — with dangerous implications for China and the world. China’s extraordinary rise over the past 40 years was triggered by Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of “reform and opening” in the 1980s. Deng saw that the isolation of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution had led to poverty and backwardness. He was humble enough to realise that China could learn from the outside world.

The current mood in China is very different. Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford, points to a danger that “closed borders will lead to closed minds”. After 40 years of rapid growth, China is self-confident.

The Chinese media portray the west, and the US in particular, as in inexorable decline. The Chinese government believes that the country is well ahead in some key technologies of the future, such as green tech and artificial intelligence. Beijing may believe that the world now needs China more than China needs the world.

Pandemic control has also become closely entangled with the political legitimacy of Xi and the Communist party. The official death toll in China is under 5,000, compared with 750,000 deaths in the US. The Xi government argues that while the US prates about human rights, the Chinese Communist party has actually protected its people.

But China’s zero-Covid policies now risk becoming a trap. As the outside world transitions towards living with low levels of the disease, contact with foreigners may look even more dangerous to China — leading to a renewed emphasis on restricting interaction with the outside world.

Even relaxing internal controls in China is difficult, since the Delta variant has led to small outbreaks of the disease in two-thirds of China’s provinces. Suppressing these outbreaks encourages the worst control-freak tendencies of the Communist party, which uses technology to monitor citizens ever more closely. In one episode, more than 30,000 people were locked inside Disneyland Shanghai and tested, after the discovery of a single case of Covid.

These kind of draconian policies are now causing some public debate in China. But controls are unlikely to be relaxed any time soon. This week the Communist party is holding a meeting that is preparing the ground for Xi to extend his period in power at a vital party congress in November 2022. The Chinese will not want to take any political risks before then. After the congress, China will be heading into winter when the disease can spike. As a result, many experts think that China’s zero-Covid policy — and the sealed borders that go with it — will extend well into 2023.

By that stage, China will have been in self-imposed isolation for more than three years. The Chinese and world economies are likely to suffer as a result, and so will global co-operation.

Yet the biggest and most intangible effect may be on the Chinese people. It is much easier to believe that foreigners are dangerous and decadent if you never meet them. When China eventually opens up, the world may encounter a much changed country.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    July 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    November 2018
    August 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    January 2012
    August 2003
    May 2001
    April 2001
    March 2001
    November 2000
    October 2000

    Categories

    All
    Banking
    Bildungssystem
    China
    Chinglish
    Coffee
    Consumer
    Consumption
    Corruption
    Economics
    Education
    Energy
    Environment
    Evolution
    Face
    Fashion
    Feiertage
    Fernsehen
    Gesellschaft
    Government
    Identity
    Imperialism
    Industrie
    Innovation
    Internet
    Japan
    Kommunisten
    Landesverteidigung
    Language
    Law
    Medien
    Nationalismus
    Nutrition
    One Belt One Road
    Pax Americana
    Policy
    Power
    Prostitution
    Purpose
    Reisen
    Religion
    Russia
    Silk Road
    Soe
    Technology
    Teleology
    Tourism
    Transportation
    Ukraine
    Umweltverschmutzung
    Urbanisation
    US
    Waste
    Wirtschaft
    Xi Jinping
    Xinjiang

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly