Resistance is futile…Īnd if you accommodate us, we'll make it worth your while. The fundamental message and I'm quoting a smart friend of mine in Beijing here is China's rise is inevitable. And so they're going to keep delivering educational doses of pain until we get it… And it is to shock us because we are too mule headed and thick to understand that China is winning and we are losing. I think that what they believe they are doing is delivering an educational dose of pain and I'm quoting a Chinese official with the word pain. To simplify and exaggerate a bit, I think that China, and this is not just a guess, this is based on off the record conversations with some pretty senior Chinese figures, they believe that the Western world, but in particular, the United States is too ignorant and unimaginative and Western centric, and probably too racist to understand that China is going to succeed, that China is winning and that the West is in really decadent decline… I don't think that's how a big part of the machine here sees it. One of the things I think is a value of being here is you have these conversations where the fact that we in the West think that China is inevitably making a mistake by being much more aggressive. Because we went after you calling us a dictatorship, you're now slower to use that term because we went after you about human rights and how it has different meanings in different countries. And because we went after you again and again, you see news organizations no longer as quick to use that. You in the Western media, used to routinely say that the national people's Congress was a rubber stamp parliament. And they say, how aggressive China is now and how upset all this Wolf warrior stuff is and how China is doing itself damage. I had a very interesting conversation with a CGTN commentator…He said, I can't tell you how many Western diplomats, or Western journalists they whine. But I felt, I'm one of the few English language media still in China, if I'm going to add value, I need to speak to these people. Clearly he is an extremely aggressive nationalist, some would call him a troll and there are risks involved in talking to someone like him. So then I had to make a decision, was I going to try and speak to someone like Sai Lei. I spoke to some very serious NGO people who've been in China a long time, Chinese and foreigners who said that this was the worst time for NGOs since 1989, and the kind of mentions of espionage and national security was a very serious thing. Our topic is online discourse, nationalism, the intensifying contest for global discourse power and US-China relations. This episode's guest is David Rennie, the Beijing bureau chief for The Economist and author of the weekly Chaguan column.
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