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The ‘Rules Based Order’ Knows No Distance
Remarks by President Biden Providing an Update on Russia and Ukraine, Feb 15 2022
Nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. They have the freedom to set their own course and choose with whom they will associate.
The distance between the U.S. (New York) and the Ukraine (Lviv) is 7,194 kilometer (4,470 miles). The distance between Russia and Ukraine is zero kilometer (zero miles). They are neighboring countries.
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Readout of Senior Administration Travel to Hawaii, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands, Apr 22, 2022
The two sides engaged in substantial discussion around the recently signed security agreement between Solomon Islands and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Solomon Islands representatives indicated that the agreement had solely domestic applications, but the U.S. delegation noted there are potential regional security implications of the accord, including for the United States and its allies and partners. The U.S. delegation outlined clear areas of concern with respect to the purpose, scope, and transparency of the agreement.
If steps are taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation, the delegation noted that the United States would then have significant concerns and respond accordingly.
The distance between the continental U.S. (Los Angeles) and the Solomon Islands is 9,845 kilometer (6,118 miles). The distance between the continental China (Shanghai) and the Solomon Islands is 5,901 kilometer (3,667 miles).
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Jen | Apr 24 2022 4:07 utc | 179
You cited ‘Manage without me | Apr 24 2022 3:01 utc | 170′
“That Attila is one of the most popular boys’ names in Hungary is not in itself proof that modern Hungarians are direct genetic or cultural descendants of the Huns.”
You are right, of course. Even that, I say, will be insufficient to change the minds of people like ‘Manage without me’. Westerners — and you see them everywhere online, from the academic papers to the Internet — are so fond of this kind false logic, or syllogism:
“All English people have English names
George is an English name
Therefore, George must be English.”
To say Hungary is not Hun, there have been three explanations, factual, historical, and logical given to ‘Manage without me’ (what an idiotic name), such as one from ‘Peter AU1’. Yet he comes back with this stupidity about Attila.
This then brings to the point, did morons like ‘Manage without me’ even go to school? Or, is that person simply born stupid? On my part, I don’t even bother refuting it since, one suspects, that their claims are born out of their individual, personal bigotry — an attitude you see that’s no different from reading the NYT or the Guardian. Bigotry wasn’t reasoned in and can’t be reasoned out.
This is why I find such platforms to be a waste of time. Below is another example which is from K (@ K | Apr 24 2022 4:29 utc | 180) who still doesn’t seem to comprehend what’s the matter at stake no matter how hard and simply you try writing in English to explain. I repeat:
“The world is all that is the case… The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
In it one tries to explain the essence of the Chinese language (borrowing explanations from not the Chinese but Europeans, to wit Wittgenstein and Heidegger). It is to say that language, in this case, the Chinese language, goes beyond its historical and cultural context. Yet he comes back with this totally unrelated and spurious claim:
“Don’t be too presumptuous that westerners cannot understand or empathise with the Chinese culture…”
You would think that Wittgenstein had make it clear: your world is a unique world in which only you yourself and your language thrives. Conversely, it makes difficult, if not impossible, for anyone else that doesn’t possess your language to penetrate your world. I again borrow from Wittgenstein: “The world is all that is the case… The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
What then has this to do with K’s (or western) understanding and empathy? Nothing, other than for the fact K is employing western standards, frameworks and ideas he had soaked up in a western environment then applying that to the Chinese, in this case, me. This — Chinese versus the West — is racist at root.
In another phrasing, K is a prisoner of his own Anglophile world. But he can’t accept that. Therefore K attempts to project onto others such trite western values as ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ whatever those are: “I understand and empathize with the Chinese.” Who asked K for his understanding and empathy? Can’t he see: We are not his colonial subjects anymore requiring his approval. We Chinese don’t care for the West, not one bit, not even the Anglophiles of Hong Kong.
People like A.L., K and ‘Manage without me’ can’t tolerate differences. These are pathetic people over the Internet and talking with them is so frustrating and wasteful.
(I’m promising myself to never again to respond to moronic comments, not even, as in this case, when writing to MoA in person that were remarks intended solely for the author and nobody else. Jen, I must now go and fetch the firewood before nightfall and before somebody throws the bamboo chair at me. Would you believe if I tell you, my girlfriend’s family owns four mountains, all useless, except for the firewood they provide, and at one time a honey nest! On occasions mushrooms at this time of the year. Byebye, Jen. You are a rarity, if westerner.)
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james | Apr 24 2022 5:10 utc | 184
I rarely come and when I do, I avoid lingering in the Comments section. Most comments are revolting. It is not because opinions differ from mine – Chinese people can take that and we don’t ban books like Lady Chaterley’s Lover or Ulysses or cancel Copernicus. We don’t accept those statements because they are simply false, on point of empirical fact, history and logic.
Take for example @A.L. | Apr 24 2022 6:48 utc | 193 . A.L.says yangren means ‘ocean people’. If that is true, then what is hai 海 which, in all dictionaries, translates as ocean. But, you don’t have to know Chinese to see A.L is lying. Empirically, (a) there is no ocean west of Xinjiang and Chang’an (the old Han capital) and across the entire central Asia until you reach the Caucasus. (b) If there is no ocean why did the ancient text use the term yangren 洋人 to describe tribes from the west? (c) What has the term, sheep 羊 , got to do with an ocean 海 other than the fact the tribes are nomadic herds people? Do you raise sheep in an ocean? (d) Why did Yang Jiechi in Alaska (following Sima Qian 2000 years earlier) use the term yangren 洋人 to refer to westerners and not use today’s common term which is xifan ren西方人 (in literal translation, ‘west/direction to and from/people’).
So, can you see why this Comments section is so full of poison, with people like A.L. and ‘Manage without me’. Instead of providing rational and intelligent support to their claims, they throw insults, calling me ‘garbage’ for instance. You can also see why, therefore, China banned most western platforms and social media. I have proposed going further: expelling any such person in China and declaring them persona non grata. They are a poison because we are dealing with Anglophone bigots, and stupid ones to boot. Today was my mistake coming here. But, it’s Sunday now in China.
PS: I just spotted another bigot named ‘Organic’.
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Rasta | Apr 24 2022 5:37 utc | 188
Why was the involvement of the Chinese in Korean war so important? What was the threat for China that is so high that the were ready to sacrifice 3 Mio young Chinese? What would have happen to China if South Korea (that means US) won the war?
I’m amazed anyone outside China even bother to ask because, in the English, there is no single book to begin to answer all your questions and others. (I have never seen any such.) That war, I have read in some English articles, is known as the forgotten war (Not in China though where it is remembered every year at around this time. Again, see the western egotistical bigotry: everything is about them!) It is forgotten to Americans because they had inflicted so much of barbarity, and Douglas MacArthur had proposed nuking China. Bombs with plague and other disease-infected insects and bugs were dropped on Korea, just as many also landing in north China. (See https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4334133/ISC-Full-Report-Pub-Copy.pdf Also: http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/27/c_1310153213.htm. The Japanese WWII Unit 731 whom Americans shipped off in its entirely to America and never put them on trial, were the first to try such methods on Chinese, dropping three cannisters full of rats from an airplane over a mountain top village where my family has a farm and home. Within a week, dead were my grandmother, my aunt (father’s elder brother’s wife) and her daughter, i.e. my cousin. They were the first to touch those cannisters that landed on the farm land where they were tilling. The plague spread quickly in the village which until then had never experienced such a thing in 1500 years of its recorded history, and they didn’t know what was happening. The buboes, said my father, was as big pingpong balls and horridly painful.) Elsewhere in the English, there is much rewriting of history, as in Wiki. It is outrageous but see, for example, Stephen Endicott, Germ Warfare and “Plausible Denial”: The Korean War, 1952-1953, in journal of Modern China, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), Sage (https://www.jstor.org/journal/modernchina). Specifically, to your questions:
Q. “Why was the involvement of the Chinese in Korean war so important?” Important for China because the Americans had, at the eleventh hour, amassed some 80,000 troops along the Yalu river – literally waiting to cross – while they bombed bridges in Liaoning, the province next to Korea. Important for America…? What else?
Q. “What was the threat for China that is so high that the were ready to sacrifice 3 Mio young Chinese?” Same answer that Putin would have given on Ukraine. As for 3 million send, 1 million died. Officially, and until around 2010, the number was 197,653. These are soldiers who can be identified through their army badges, letters, personal belongings or human remains. The Chinese army doesn’t have a category for MIA. Either one is dead or alive, never in between. http://world.people.com.cn/n/2014/1030/c1002-25939560.html . The soldiers knew what they were going into because of letters (written in Chinese, of course) to families back home. They were not sacrificed by the state. They volunteered and Chinese history is replete with tens of thousands of such personal accounts of commitments, including building the Great Wall, fighting off the Xiongnu, Mongols, Jurchen, Japanese, etc…. Most important factor, in answering to your question is, China had to made up in human numbers what it lacked in technology, war materials, and firepower. We had no choice but to ask for that many volunteers. My neighbor’s grandfather was one of them. He never came back, and till today nobody knows what happened to him, and the family didn’t install a memorial plaque and tablet (a place where you honour the man’s memory with joss sticks and three kow-tows) for him until some years ago. Another missing and unaccounted for.
Q. “What would have happen to China if South Korea (that means US) won the war?” Dead Chinese, or made slaves! You think this is exaggeration, don’t you? We were proven right when Vietnam was invaded a dozen years later. Pity them. They still suffer from its effects today: farms poisoned by Agent Orange and depleted uranium bombs, missing legs and hands from millions of mines and unexploded ordinances. America does what it does best: barbarism.
Posted by: C Forest | Apr 24 2022 8:35 utc | 210
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