If anyone hasn’t heard of the rape of nanjing where the memorial in the image of the rally of remembrance was set, they should. Its dark. That image is FAR more potent than a passing onlooker can begin to imagine. As such, it is an infinitely powerful tool for collective emotional manipulation. That cannot be understated. Context is everything. Japan should be getting nervous.
Regarding Rape of Nanking, I suggest people read this book: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.
The magnitude of Nanking atrocities is already mind-boggling for today’s standard. The rest of China, especially northern China, were subjected to multiple Nanking-style atrocities in terms of magnitude and horror.
So, in short, how bad were the Japanese atrocities in China? Imagine ISIS multiplied by 10,000. It is no exaggeration that the Japanese slaughtered many millions of Chinese in the 8 years of war.
Even in far away Singapore, I heard stories of Japanese atrocities from my grandparents. My old neighbour told me how he witnessed Japanese soldiers beheaded someone when he was 10 years old. My teacher told me her father was killed by the Japanese. As a kid, I heard from my old relatives stories of how Japanese tortured people.
This types of extreme national trauma cannot be easily forgotten. It gets passed down from generation to generation. Unlike ancient atrocities, these are modern atrocities that are preserved in numerous films and photos, many of them were even recorded by the Japanese themselves. The spoken testimonies of eye-witnesses are also recorded on video and some of them are even alive today.
I would argue that it requires far more effort to forget a national trauma than to sustain it. A government with an agenda can just ride along with it.
They did write the art of war, and they will wait until we are weakened. Then they will strike. The green new deal was mainly propagated by the CCP, if I dare to opine. Makes sense, cause look at the mess were in from stopping domestic oil production. I guess it’s cheaper from Venezuela?
Excellent metaphor.
China has been waging war on us for decades. Seriously, how does anyone think their infiltration and building of networks could be so pervasive and effective if they just started recently??
Like Hitler, Xi would prefer to keep us friendly until his preparations are complete. He can gain much more in his preparations if we are not actively fighting him. Possible is that infiltrating and undermining us he won’t have to fight a full scale war to accomplish his exerting control.
I worked for a port in British Columbia, Canada and since about 2015 I was always quite surprised by the amount of coal we were shipping to China. The assumption by our senior staff at our organization was that China was using it for manufacturing and heating. However, my question was always what type of manufacturing are we talking about here? Isn’t coal used for steel production? And we are not talking about a slight increase in coal shipments either…it was a large amount of coal. So how do we know this coal wasn’t being used to manufacture steel to build up their military? If it was, then rest assured that for the past 7 years at least China has been building up that military and preparing for a large conflict. Western China, to where some pretty impressive highways were built decades ago all lead, is not that far from the oil fields in Iran.
I just listened to an exceptional analysis by the Duran, predicting that U.S. neocons will eventually feel forced to call for American boots on the ground in Ukraine. See 28:20 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=021JkYHJy1Y
Given how crazy and insatiable these neocons are, it is unsurprising to me that China–a culture really good at planning–would be preparing to defend its interests. That means that Chris’ exposition could be interpreted exactly in the opposite manner: China sees the provocations the U.S. has created around Taiwan, and seen how the U.S. was able to provoke Russia to defend its sphere of interest from U.S. (NATO) missile installations in Ukraine. It has drawn the sober conclusion that it needs to defend itself.
One more thing: For several years now, PP has been warning of food shortages. Prior to this video, I’ve understood those Chinese stockpiles to be the rational effort to protect against famines and shortages. I don’t feel compelled to change that analysis.
There is such a long history of hysteria in the U.S. about communist aggression. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize this is all projection. It is the U.S. that is the aggressor–it’s just more obvious now. I fear this PP presentation was tainted by that hysteria.
Oh wow, it was quite the surprise to see my comment featured in this video. I figured it’d be lost among all the posts as I was rather late to respond. Thank you, Chris, for demonstrating (for the n-th time, I must assume) that you do read the comments, even old ones.
As for my thoughts on this video…
China has a strong reputation for playing the long game. They caught my attention over a decade ago when I first started taking interest in the financial space on sites like The Daily Bell. They Chinese government, and the Chinese people, have a solid understanding of material wealth and have gone to great lengths to improve their circumstances via acquisition of resources, precious metals, production capacity, technology, and similar items. They have their faults in other areas, but they place a great deal of importance upon having leverage (and self protection) via the ownership or control over material goods.
They absolutely do see trouble on the horizon, internal and external, and they’re trying to ‘get their ducks in a row’. This may mean war, but from where I am sitting they would absolutely prefer it if the US and adjacent western nations simply self destructed into irrelevancy. They, of course, employ pressures to promote such.
One of the best institutions the US (and soviet Russia) possessed during the nuclear scare, but appears to no longer appreciate, was ‘civil defense’. These were the regular citizens in every town and community being taught how to organize and plan for disasters. Communities would have designated shelters, food stockpiles, equipment for handling medical and contamination issues. The entire community would run drills and even children could be employed as runners or to help the adults. At the time this brought a community together and helped with skill transfer across the different generations.
Though nuclear war was thankfully averted, this was among the top expressions of national resiliency that have since been lost. Both the US and Russia are now asked to rely on faceless bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of kilometers away for their security during times of disaster and unrest. I really think this institution should be brought back, and I highly recommend for Peak Prosperity members to look into the books and manuals from the era when civil defense was a higher priority and identify what ideas may be adapted to today’s circumstances.
Lastly, I must strongly recommend the YouTube channels owned by Laowhy86, SerpentZA, and their collaboration channels ADVChina and ADVPodcasts. They have lived in and explored China and Southeast Asia and have a lot of informative insights about the culture and government, while remaining realistic yet respectful.
They, too, have observed greater state-promoted ‘othering’ within China, increased hostility towards foreigners, and a general shift in tone coming from the top.
I will give part 2 a watch. Thank you for your diligent and ongoing work, Chris!
Reminds me of a conversation I had when I visited China before the pandemic.
I was told that in China’s history whenever there’s natural disaster (e.g. droughts, famines, locust plague, war, etc), millions died.
This is in sharp contrast to the wonders of modern life. In Australia, we have our fair share of natural disaster e.g. drought (that recently broke a couple of years ago), flood, fires. As bad as it gets, no one expect mass starvation because of these natural disasters.
So, China, being conscious of its own history of what can possibly happen in times of trouble, is wise to stock up on food. I’ve seen on Wikipedia photos of the remains of fortified granary in ancient China, built during the Han Dynasty (207 BC to 220 AD). So, they have a track record of stockpiling food.
Even during the ancient times, corrupt officials attempted to cheat the system. The emperor would send in inspectors to ensure that a prefecture stock up on grains, but corrupt officials would ‘borrow’ grain from another prefecture to fool the Imperial inspectors.