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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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I have never really understood why the right is so anti China. I understand bringing the jobs back but I can't why the right is so eager to defend LGBT on Taiwan.

I'm not sure why "the right" is - I'm not sure I even count as "rightist" - but here's at least a right-leaning explanation.

You don't like cancel culture? Then you don't want the PRC as hegemon. It started there and it's far more entrenched there than it is in the West. The Chinese version of financial institutions has cancellation explicitly built into it; if we cede hegemony to China then this is the mechanism the world will be working with.

You don't like censorship and political indoctrination? You extra super don't want the PRC as hegemon. The West has issues with these creeping in around the margins, but the setup in the PRC is far, far worse because it's pursued openly as policy - for all SJ's excesses, it does not literally round up all the conservatives and throw them in re-education camps. And in a world where the PRC is hegemon, those policies will be rammed down the West's throat - literally item 14 in the list of things the PRC wanted Australia to "fix" was that Australian media said "unfriendly" things about the PRC government, so we have proof positive that in a PRC-hegemon world, our freedom of speech will be demanded of us (Hollywood's also gotten into the habit of self-censoring due to the Chinese market).

You want to preserve your traditional way of life and not have your culture and fertility dismantled? Well, good thing you don't live in China, where there was a one-child policy for 35 years and where they're currently engaged in removing Uyghurs as an ethnicity by literally locking up all the men so the women can only breed with Han Chinese. Admittedly, they haven't shown interest in exporting this one, but holy shit.

If you're a libertarian, then as bad as the West has gotten of late with anti-terror laws and then the SJ movement getting its ten million tentacles around everything and squeezing, the PRC is so much worse. Putin's Russia you can make some argument out of it when comparing it to the non-US West (in much of which there are straight-up hate speech laws), but with the PRC it's a flat no.

...do you really think that the entire US Taiwan policy can be summed up as "defending LGBT on Taiwan"?

It is about ensuring global liberal hegemony. A hegemony that comes with a globalized labour market, global homogeniety and Americanized values.

I think Beinart was right in the Times that it’s a combination of residual Cold War “anti-Communism” (the GOP was fervently pro-Kuomintang rule until Nixon and many in the part were hostile to changing affiliation to Red China even then) and the fact that many 20th century Republicans were involved in the large American missionary movement in China (which Mao obviously put an end to), and that Chiang Kaishek was considered to be a civilized Christian, and residual Yellow Terror racial impulse, China is the first major non-white power since Japan to truly threaten the U.S., and even in WW2 the Japanese were the lesser partner to Germany once US war aims were clarified. (And even in the early 20th century before Pearl Harbor, US nativists were typically much more hostile to the Chinese than the Japanese migrants).