Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "" video.

I think Mr. Andrews understanding of China is a bit out of date. It's probably been a more than a decade since China had four hundred million people in poverty. And while China certainly is looking to Africa for opportunities of obtaining resources, at least at this point it doesn't seem to be as coercive a relationship as that between the Western colonial powers and Africa. Though to be fair, the same could probably be said of the Portuguese when they first started establishing themselves on the continent. We'll know more in a century or two.
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What a beautiful quote. I always liked Adams, a truly underappreciated American president.
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@danielwebb8402 China didn't copy capitalism, they deployed it. It's one factor of the poverty alleviation program (primarily the funding engine), which is a state-controlled targeted social management program.
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The West has dominated technology and cultural pretension across all the world for two centuries. Any society that progresses forward at this point is going to have to be undeniably influenced by the West. Non-Western societies that want to be relevant in the modern world are going to struggle with how much of today's reality is Western rather than just modern, and how much they can embrace without selling out their own culture. It doesn't mean that a country like China has to consider itself to be Western in order to be advanced. It can chart its own course, but it would be foolish to try to do so without taking advantage of the advances developed during the time of Western global dominance.
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@MsBloodyFox China uses aspects of market capitalism, some of which has western origins. Market economics goes back to the beginnings of civilization though—I'm not sure how truly western it is. It has been codified in the west and liberal market economics has been raised to the level of philosophy in the west, but in practice it's timeless and placeless. What China has done is to harness the revenue that derives from market economics and combine it with state-identified goals and projects and an Orwellian anti-corruption campaign to produce an effective practice of anti-poverty which appears to be the most effective the world has ever seen. We can quibble about how much of this is "western" and how much of this is "Chinese". As connected as the world is at this point, I don't think it really matters. It happened in China and it was administered by Chinese people. The rest of the world can learn from it if they choose to, or they can spend their energy whining about how it's not really a Chinese success after all.
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The major difference between the slavery of the early New World and that of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean basin is the lack of a respected local agricultural society. The Caribbean and the northern coast of South America were industrialized by plantation agriculture. These were industrial sugar farms operated by European outsiders who did not consider those lands to be their homes. Any local agriculture was buried under the plantations so that this lucrative cash crop could be cultivated almost exclusively. The local populace was enslaved to concentrate their labor on cultivation and those that weren't worked to death or killed by their own in an effort to escape such a life were destroyed by Old-World diseases. Slavery in Africa and South Asia was not on such an industrial scale. Slaves were often captured in raids in order to boost the prestige and productivity of relatively small family units or to fill the ranks of royal retainers. It was still slavery; it was still bad, but wasn't such an integral driver of the economy until the trans-Atlantic slave trade made slaves such a lucrative commodity that coastal kingdoms in Africa began focusing on large-scale slave acquisition. What dynamized the Western world was the sugar trade, which led to the slave trade, as well as the gold and silver mines of South America. Later, coffee, cotton and tobacco (all slave-based industries) sustained the Atlantic trade network. The skirmishes fought to obtain the fruits of these developments as well as the wars related to the Reformation, accelerated the military technology of the West. Agriculture in Africa and South Asia was performed by local farmers who, at least in good years, reaped the benefits of their own labor. The farmers may have been tied to the land, but they weren't imported in as labor for large scale plantations, at least not until Western colonialism brought those practices. So while these other civilizations were built with slavery, slavery was a much lesser factor because they never developed slave-dependent industrial agriculture to the degree that they did in the imperial periphery of the West. Eventually a sector of the slave-owner population in the New World began to more resemble that of the old. In North America in the nineteenth century most slave owners owned one or two slaves who were more-or-less considered part of the family. However most slaves were still owned by a small group of plantation owners and considered more like faceless planting and harvesting tools. The former group generally fared better than the latter, but they were still owned and had no recognized rights or control over their future or that of their spouses or children.
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@mogznwaz There is truth in your reaction. Of course technology is blind and unfeeling. The benefits of technology are not bequeathed by technology itself, but by those who control it. The descendants of slaves, as well as the descendants of communities of colonial oppression, have obviously benefitted less from these technologies than others, but they still have benefitted to some extent. The real benefits that these groups have realized compared to others have come from their political allies and from themselves once allowed into political life, though it's been a constant struggle and I would argue that the struggle continues.
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@MsBloodyFox I think your view of modern China is off the mark. I've been there a few a times and I don't think it's nearly as repressive there as you're making it out to be.
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@MsBloodyFox No, the Great Firewall of China is very real. I don't know anyone that claims that it is a myth. But it's also kind of voluntary. From what I understand, it's easy to scale and there is no real consequence for doing so. What the Great Firewall accomplishes is that it keeps information that the government distrusts out of view of Chinese citizens who don't care enough to take their research to the next level. If you're a huge free speech advocate, as I suspect you are, then this will be highly disagreeable to you. I get that. But frankly the unregulated information that has so poisoned the environment here in the west is only tolerable to the extent that it is Constitutionally protected and may be more dangerous to reign in than to allow because of the consequences of disregarding such a foundational piece of our legal and popular identity.
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@gerard dearie They weren't dominant in continental Asia and Japan until the 1800's.
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@MsBloodyFox If an opportunity to work there appeared that was better than what I've already got, I would definitely go. I'd say the same thing about another opportunity within my country as well. China is a beautiful country with an amazing future. It would be great to be part of that. I think I'd be quite comfortable there, aside from the language barrier.
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@MsBloodyFox I'm greatly concerned about what's going on in Xinjiang, even while I don't really trust the World Uighur Congress, ASPI, Adrien Zenz, or the Uighur Human Rights Project, all of which are actively trying to either break up or weaken China, nor do I trust western media and human rights organizations to fairly report on Chinese issues or accurately assess what's happening on the ground. I've seen too many hit pieces by the likes of the Financial Times, the BBC, the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, WAPO and others. Of course, just because these NED funded advocacy groups, their members, and their slanted media junkies regularly defame China doesn't mean there is not some truth to some of their claims. The question being, how much truth, and also, how much of China's method of deradicalization is justifiable considering the very real threat of deadly violence and separatism posed by Uighur nationalists, as well as how much of the opprobrium references the legitimate conviction of individuals who have committed actual crimes, like engaging in violence, promoting violence, or advocating for separatism. Just to be clear, I don't think sexual abuse (which has been alleged) is ever justified. Nor do I think torture is ever justified. I think incidences of this may very well have occurred and I think China needs to investigate those allegations and punish any official who may be in any way responsible for such actions. So I do suspect that some of the allegations made against China have some basis in fact. What I don't think is happening is genocide, or slave labor, or cultural erasure. There is no logical reason for China to engage in these practices, and if there is one thing China is, it's logical. I think that these allegations are made strictly to undermine China's reputation in the world in an effort to either break China up territorially, or to weaken China diplomatically around the world.
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