Take your point re: different Chinese groups. Going to have to wait and see how that shakes out.
For the rest, I think it would help to make my perspective more clear. I am British as I said, and we’re in a mess, so the question of which role models we should look at is a salient one. America is clearly more prosperous than China now, but the direction of travel seems to be in a quite negative direction (I am not talking about GDP) whereas China seems broadly positive and improving except for the very serious issue of demographics.
The genocide against the Ugyurs is awful, but looks rather different when in the UK we have mass stabbings by Arabs on a monthly basis and polls find ~25% of the Muslim population is softly supportive of jihad. Just yesterday we welcomed a man to the UK who has called for the slaughter of all Zionists, and policemen, and says explicitly that he despises all whites. I would not like us to go as far as the Chinese but an explicit goal of ‘no Islamic culture in the UK’ pursued with vigour and the invasive surveillance of the CCP would be far better than what we have.
That is, I am not saying that the American republic is clearly worse right now than the CCP. I am saying that I am not sure it is a good role model, and I am not sure how much it was being propped up by historical contingency. It may be that there are no good role models, and that we all take our turn in the great carousel of history, but I am not yet quite so black pilled.
The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better.
I think that this is the wrong time period to look at. Yes, when America still had lots of empty space and a weak central culture, lots of people being restricted chose to go there and make a society for themselves. That time is over. America is settled, it has a central government with wide-ranging powers and a fairly strong culture both formal and informal. Now the question is not, “should we leave to the New World and start afresh?” it’s “should we go to America and become Americans?”. That is why I limited my analysis to Ellis Islanders and later.
Corvos
3d ago
We used to use BIPOC as an imported term until irate English people pointed out that we were indigenous.
All points taken.
FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:
a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.
b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.
This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really?
Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.
EDIT:
150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now
You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.
I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.
This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.
*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.
Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).
Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.
This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.
I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
Corvos
4d ago
I knew of both but was never educated on them. My education was during Blair’s tenure and lopsided towards modern (post 1900) history: heavy emphasis on the welfare state and the suffragette movement, plus the rise of Hitler and Stalin to power.
Corvos
4d ago
Russia and Ukraine are two butch lesbians fighting over a condom
Time for a new flair, methinks.
Corvos
4d ago
The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:
- 1066 and the Norman conquest
- Magna Carta
- The Hundred Years War with France.
- The Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the scouring of the monasteries and the creation of the Anglican Church.
- The creation of the labour movement and the welfare state.
- WW1 and 2.
Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.
Bugger all, but realistically I think that when people say ‘British’ what they mean is ‘English’ or at most 80% English and 20% Scottish. From the sheer proportions of population it really couldn’t be any other way.
There was a conscious attempt to make a British identity during the period of Empire but that died with Empire. The Scots and Irish hate it because it associates them with the Empire (as it ought) and nobody ever asks what the poor Welsh think about anything.
Basically the only people who use British are the English and the English-adjacent people like @2rafa, because talking about an ‘English’ identity or discussing Englishness is consciously exclusionary and raises awkward questions about how the vastly more populous part of the UK should act with the others. This is also why England is the only part of the UK not to have a devolved parliament.
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