I'm very interested in your insights from your experience inside the Chinese system of education and beyond. I'm particularly interested in engaging with you about the field of Bioethics, typically applied to work backwards from a policy decision that rationalizes and justifies it as satisfying bioethical concerns using clever linguistics and pretzel logic, but we can save that for another thread. Because I believe the field may actually be useful in efforts to unravel much of what has happened, the breaches of ethics can't be linguistically waived away with a magic word wand.
Back to this piece of yours I'd appreciate your thoughts on a Chinese research book I discovered going back to some of my early pandemic readings when I was taking in a lot of US foreign policy writings and official Chinese media stories. I read the following Foreign Affairs article in March, 2020. Foreign Affairs is perhaps the most influential foreign policy publication in the world, A Council on Foreign Relations production:
It is a long book, I list some of the chapters and sections that I found most interesting in my stack that I introduce it on for those who don't have the time to read it in it's entirety they can use this as a guide to the essentials in it:
The book introduces me to the concept of the Chinese "Double-Discipline" model of governance. External and Internal discipline. External being the heavy handed applied discipline of police and courts, authorities flexing muscle. Internal being the lighter touch of propaganda, indoctrination, re-education, mind managers.
The double-discipline model the book describes was useful to transform "The Sick Man of Asia" full of individualists and nationalists into a collectivist authoritarian governing system. Break an existing unruly population in hard with heavy external disciplinary actions. While indoctrinating the nation, particularly young, impressionable minds so they desire to place the needs of others, society above themselves, do as they are told because they believe it to be the right thing to do, virtuously, allows the heavy hand of external discipline to retreat into the background, high levels of voluntary compliance.
Disease Politics. Fear of disease proving to be most useful in fundamentally transforming a nation to adopt a collectivist authoritarian form of government, how consent is manufactured for totalitarianism. And the fact that Foreign Affairs, the CFR's mouthpiece referenced this book in March, 2020, as the entire free world shifted from a western liberal democratic response to pandemics, protecting individual civil rights and liberties into a global collectivist authoritarian/totalitarian response is more than a coincidence. With your background in China perhaps you can share more understanding on this than my reading alone has given me?
Congrats on breaking free from academia. It was once a noble institution, but it's been so thoroughly corrupted that I'm not sure any good can come from it anymore. I can see the future going one of two ways -- either a new dark age or a new Renaissance powered by independent scholars on the internet. Substack gives me some hope for the latter vision.
Good article. So much that we hear about China is just propaganda, Nice to see an alternative pespective that shatters some of these fallacies. Linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
I'm very interested in your insights from your experience inside the Chinese system of education and beyond. I'm particularly interested in engaging with you about the field of Bioethics, typically applied to work backwards from a policy decision that rationalizes and justifies it as satisfying bioethical concerns using clever linguistics and pretzel logic, but we can save that for another thread. Because I believe the field may actually be useful in efforts to unravel much of what has happened, the breaches of ethics can't be linguistically waived away with a magic word wand.
Back to this piece of yours I'd appreciate your thoughts on a Chinese research book I discovered going back to some of my early pandemic readings when I was taking in a lot of US foreign policy writings and official Chinese media stories. I read the following Foreign Affairs article in March, 2020. Foreign Affairs is perhaps the most influential foreign policy publication in the world, A Council on Foreign Relations production:
Past Pandemics Exposed China’s Weaknesses
The Current One Highlights Its Strengths
Foreign Affairs, March 27, 2020
https://web.archive.org/web/20200328050913/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-03-27/past-pandemics-exposed-chinas-weaknesses
The book I'm very interested in your thoughts about is:
Rural Health Care Delivery
Modern China from the Perspective of Disease Politics
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2013
('GET' .pdf download)
http://library.lol/main/DB87C08A174B849E1EB0476138787AED
It is a long book, I list some of the chapters and sections that I found most interesting in my stack that I introduce it on for those who don't have the time to read it in it's entirety they can use this as a guide to the essentials in it:
https://freedomfox.substack.com/p/the-devious-use-of-infectious-disease
The book introduces me to the concept of the Chinese "Double-Discipline" model of governance. External and Internal discipline. External being the heavy handed applied discipline of police and courts, authorities flexing muscle. Internal being the lighter touch of propaganda, indoctrination, re-education, mind managers.
The double-discipline model the book describes was useful to transform "The Sick Man of Asia" full of individualists and nationalists into a collectivist authoritarian governing system. Break an existing unruly population in hard with heavy external disciplinary actions. While indoctrinating the nation, particularly young, impressionable minds so they desire to place the needs of others, society above themselves, do as they are told because they believe it to be the right thing to do, virtuously, allows the heavy hand of external discipline to retreat into the background, high levels of voluntary compliance.
Disease Politics. Fear of disease proving to be most useful in fundamentally transforming a nation to adopt a collectivist authoritarian form of government, how consent is manufactured for totalitarianism. And the fact that Foreign Affairs, the CFR's mouthpiece referenced this book in March, 2020, as the entire free world shifted from a western liberal democratic response to pandemics, protecting individual civil rights and liberties into a global collectivist authoritarian/totalitarian response is more than a coincidence. With your background in China perhaps you can share more understanding on this than my reading alone has given me?
Congrats on breaking free from academia. It was once a noble institution, but it's been so thoroughly corrupted that I'm not sure any good can come from it anymore. I can see the future going one of two ways -- either a new dark age or a new Renaissance powered by independent scholars on the internet. Substack gives me some hope for the latter vision.
For now _ need time and space to absorb and reflect _
exceptionally powerful images. Thank you, DH.
Good article. So much that we hear about China is just propaganda, Nice to see an alternative pespective that shatters some of these fallacies. Linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/