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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

G.K. Chesterton, "What I Saw In America":

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. ...They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember, wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

...But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

Do note that this would still force them to put work into making an agent before sending him over, rather than being able to only put work into flipping an expat after he's successfully got a relevant position.

Which means the answer to this:

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

...is basically "anyone deterred by this is someone who can be extorted into working for the CPC and thus is de facto a sleeper agent; this isn't a bug, it's a feature".

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

I was thinking more about people who had already decided to do something which pisses off the CCP, like joining Falun Gong or campaigning for human rights.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

From my understanding, the problem with Chinese students spying is not that they get their hands on highly classified projects. The problem is that they get their hands on a lot of much less sensitive projects which then give China a competitive edge.

It is likely that the CCP is already sponsoring the odd fake dissident, but more for reasons of infiltrating the international dissident community than in the expectation that the US will put them on a highly sensitive project.

But the average Chinese student is not some deep cover super spy, but just some average person who is required to do a bit of snooping on the side. "We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.

"We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.

Neither is "we will just ask any potential students to give up their Chinese citizenship and then ten years later when they go back to the Old Country and stay there for good after drip-feeding the information they gathered while here, we'll be completely surprised they did not, in fact, mean it".

I think the CCP is more confident it can deal with "If Li Yu comes back contaminated with running-dog ideology, we can re-educate him to be a model citizen". They had no problem getting Jack Ma to fall in line.

I thought I had read all of Chesterton's work, but I either missed this one or totally forgot about it. Thanks for posting it!

For anyone interested, the full book (~300 folio pages) is available on project guttenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm. It starts with the very in-character line:

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind.

The ... in @HereAndGone's quote misses some of the best lines:

Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex.

Some more gems from the first pages:

Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book.

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.

I doubt the following still holds true:

The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.

This line might make a handful of white-nationalists upset:

I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists.

Once you start quoting Chesterton, it's hard to stop 😁 I love his description of newspaper interviews; first, what the headlines put him down as saying:

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American. Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as I have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This is almost avowed translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign — whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.' Here again I hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking.

Second, the difference between the experience of being interviewed (where the reporter is courteous) and the way interviews are written up:

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of highway-robber in print.

Mr. Chesterton is a man without guile so he doesn’t realize the form is actually a trap. Lying on the form is a crime and can get your visa or citizenship revoked. So when the anarchist gets busted by the cops at an anarchist demonstration in New York six months later with his anarchist party card in his pocket, it proves he was lying on the form and out he goes. Even if just “being an anarchist” is not a crime and protected by the first amendment.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

What would these "agents" do?

Chinamen make good immigrants and don’t have ginormous extended families, it doesn’t seem difficult to just bring over the families of high value immigrants- there is, after all, plenty of extra space in flyover. That’s what will eventually happen anyways due to chain migration.

Chinese government could deny exit visas to family members of academics in the US. They have to apply for permission to leave

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