Big Mao: There are a lot of apologists for China in NZ and there really shouldn’t be
I’m a Socialist Communist lefty post marxist anarchist with radical environmental tendencies.
I’ve never felt any love to towards the Chinese, Putin OR the American Military Industrial Complex.
Putin is a KGB thug who probably bombed his own people in Moscow to start a barbaric war with Chechnya. He is homophobic beyond belief and he started a war in the Ukraine, so yeah – I hate the American Military Industrial Complex, but let’s not pretend Putin is an antidote to their corruption!
Sure, China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and that feat of Government should be celebrated and championed, but let’s not forget that beyond that incredible result you have a paranoid, aggressively authoritarian regime with mass surveillance powers that sells body organs, commits genocides and has devastated Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
The bewildering amount of apologists for China in NZ is extraordinary, and it really shouldn’t be.
China is not our friend and they are not a friend to their own people…
A new report has claimed the Chinese government is now implementing cutting-edge artificial intelligence to monitor the minds of dozens of Communist party officials.
Researchers in China claimed to have developed software that can acutely analyse facial expressions and brain waves to monitor subjects’ attention to “thought and political education”.
China’s stringent police state has been radically upscaled over the past decade, using big data, machine learning, face recognition technology and artificial intelligence to build what many have labelled the world’s most complex digital dictatorship.
According to the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Centre, the high-tech development would be used to “further solidify their confidence and determination to be grateful to the party, listen to the party and follow the party”.
In a short clip, a subject was seen looking at the screen at a kiosk, scrolling through exercises promoting party policy. According to researchers, the technology in the kiosk was able to note the researcher’s expressions and pinpoint their reactions to particular pieces of content.
The institute said it had encouraged 43 party members on the research team to take party lessons while being monitored by the new software.
The video report was published on July 1 but has since vanished.
“On one hand, it can judge how party members have accepted thought and political education,” the article said. “On the other hand, it will provide real data for thought and political education so it can be improved and enriched.”
President Xi, secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the nation of 1.4 billion, has demanded absolute loyalty to the party it and has previously declared that “thought and political education” is an essential part of the government’s doctrine.
Chinese state-backed publication Study Times was reporting about the development of similar artificial intelligence back in 2019, claiming algorithms could be used to “gauge the thought condition of party members” and make sure content can “go into the head and the heart of party members”.
…y-e-a-h. I think when the Party is looking at 1984 as a instruction Manuel, we need to appreciate they don’t share our concerns for human rights and whose technology is out of moral line with our own.
That said is there that much difference between Facebook hate algorithms and the Chinese trying to brainwash their members to love them?
We need to urgently decouple economically from China.
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Our of idle curiosity, just how might New Zealand “urgently decouple economically from China.”?
We need to urgently decouple from Facebook…
We need to decouple from China and facebook.
Well in terms of primary produce exports having more agricultural diversity would help. The Dairy and Beef sector basically wanted us to hold out on a deal with the EU at the expense of the other NZ producers that got something. Holding out for something that will never happen. It’s all very well producing mountains of milk powder and beef but if major markets are essentially closed off what’s the point?Agriculture needs more balance. If we can’t break into these markets with cow power grow alternative crops that can.
More hyperemotional nonsense from Bradbury. He is forgetting that China is aggressive and has been aggressive only within its own boundaries (apart from a spat with Vietnam) – remembering that it considers Taiwan to be part of China. Yes, it is not a wonderful democratic regime, but that is their own business – by all means make protesting noises, but don’t get carried away by ones self-rightsciousness. That is how international relations work, or rather should work: meanwhile the US wants to impose their brand of everything on everyone. As to Xinjiang, the US was meddling in there and training terrorists long ago. We can believe the worst of what is happening there, but how do you disentangle truth from Western propaganda. China suffered massively under the heel of Imperial British gunboat diplomacy, and has made huge improvements against all odds. New Zealand must look to its own interests, and I believe that they do not reside with an over cosy relationship with anyone, least of all the US. We need to be carefully realistic.
China is looking at technology that Amazon developed and that supermarkets in New Zealand have already implemented? How thoroughly dystopian, clearly their functioning society is much worse than our entirely failed state.
I agree there are a “bewildering amount of apologists for China in NZ”. Some of these apologists from the left and right seem to view morals/ethics as optional extras that can be dispensed with for ‘realpolitik’ or financial reasons.
Maybe. Yet what if the unethical behaviour is a ‘tell’ or giveaway that the state/leader is psychopathic? Becoming financially dependent on psychopaths doesn’t end well. Imagine a potential partner – steady job and income; but wants to control your phone, puts GPS trackers on their family’s cars, and some of their ex’s disappeared. I suggest running very far away!
Maybe ethics can be a practical guide to survival. Maybe ignoring genocide and 1984 surveillance isn’t so tough or smart after all.
From our cave-dwelling forebears to today’s electronic entrepreneurs the use of devices to “persuade” is as old as time itself. And if the Chinese have developed a new way of pre-determining a political outcome that seems Orwellian, so too was what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump and for the outcome of the Brexit vote, a short while ago?
The problem is this:
Europe: Protectionist
North America: Protectionist
India: Protectionist
South America: Protectionist
Japan: Protectionist
Because of capital accumulation, every country on the planet wants to be an exporting nation. None want to be a net importing nation.
The UK want to export, The US want to export, China, Russia, Japan all want to be export nations and run a trading surplus in their favour compared to their competitors.
In the old days of the British Empire this trade imbalance between countries was imposed by force.
The economies of the colonies were not allowed to develop manufacturing, their only exports were raw materials taken back to England worked into finished goods and exported back to the colonies. Buying cheap and selling dear, is the capitalist dream, the British Empire did this very successfully at the point of gun.
For a small capitalist country, New Zealand has been extremely lucky. We gain over $20 billion in export earnings from China, while only buying about $10 billion off China. This is because of two things: 1/ NZ is such a small country and economy a trade imbalance in NZ’s favour is small potatoes to the Chinese
2/ We had something the Chinese badly wanted and needed – baby formula. As China industrialised many working mothers were called into the factories and the grandparents were left to raise the babies.
But on the world stage competition between the rival political economic blocs is are starting to come to a head.
In the tussle for control of trade routes raw materials and markets between the large rival capitalist powers, New Zealand is being forced to pick a side. It won’t be pretty.