“PCC prohibits flying motorcycles on the outskirts of SP and beats those who disobey.” I caught my eye on the title and for a moment I thought the matter it spoke of the Chinese Communist Party. I suspect that my momentary confusion may be a symptom of a fixation on following the unstoppable advance of the PCC’s will – to make clear, the Chinese – over the West, particularly in Brazil. I assume that the overdose of the dictatorship left me boring, monothematic and pessimistic. The Chinese regime has taken up so much of my time and attention that it’s gotten to the point of pissing me off. This week, I heard that I piss off the Chinese too.
It was the third phone call in less than two months with the same advice: forget the Chinese. The last one this week went like this: “Macho, the Chinese ambassador (Yang Wanming) hates you”. For me, a surprise. How can someone who doesn’t know me hate me? Soon me? A guy who doesn’t hate anyone. Well then. I tried to understand better and heard an explanation followed by a pretty gruesome comparison. “The Chinese are unforgiving and there is no safe place in the world if they decide to get even. Don’t want what happened to that journalist in Turkey to happen to you (in reference to Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in exile by agents of the Saudi monarchy in 2018).” This, by the way, was the second time that this friend made the very same comparison.
In September, I wrote a column about how China is shaping the world in its image and likeness. Xi Jinping’s project is to normalize the regime. To trivialize evil in the face of a West less and less haunted and tolerant of regime actions. The title was Deplorable New World. After that, another one about the disappearance of tennis player Peng Shuai and later another one telling how the PCC supported itself in the Forum of São Paulo to use its capillarity to spread the message that China has a different democracy. Something so grand that the West not only needs to tolerate, it has to learn and replicate.
Xi looks at the world as if in a mirror. Nothing can be different from the image he has of himself.
It seems that there are those who still do not understand or do not want to understand this. The CCP will not change. The message that comes from Beijing every day is that the world has to change its perception of the regime. Changing, in this case, means imploding founding concepts of Western civilizations. Freedom, Human Rights, Democracy, to focus on a universal tripod, are being redefined. And that means that, for the regime’s actions to become trivial, the world must change. The deplorable new world is becoming more and more admirable every day.
In the last two weeks, the Chinese regime has flooded Brazil with its propaganda. The biggest Brazilian media, which have been nourished by the Chinese advertising budget for a long time, embraced the cause with fervor. the carioca The globe he gave its pages to Ambassador Wanming, the greatest of the war wolves of Chinese diplomacy in the Americas, to stir up his pack. On the trail, the Folha de São Paulo published an “interview” which curiously has (almost) the same title as the article from three days earlier. The quotes in the word interview have a reason. The answers that hang below each of the questions were sent by email. When this happens, the respondent owns the ball. Write what you want with the support of consultants and technicians. It produces an official text that earns the signature of a journalist who had his role as mediator between the reader and the interviewee annulled, so it is essentially a statement.
Wanming does not speak to the Brazilian press. Send texts and everyone publishes. With a little exaggeration on my part, I usually say that in some ways Beijing is already editing newspapers and magazines.
I mentioned Folha and Globo for being the most recent and related cases. But the two newspapers are not the only ones. Folha also has a special ingredient. One article at the top which is a must see.
This week, while digitally “leaking” the Globe and watching a webinar by one of the most important Brazilian think tanks, the Brazilian Center for International Relations (Cebri), I realized that, in addition to being a pain in the ass, I’m also a demodé.
The newspaper rented one of its pages to the Chinese dictatorship to talk about how beautiful the regime is and the human rights violations attributed to the CCP are an American fiction and that the massive violations of the rights of Uighurs, imprisoned in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang, they are a sham to defame China and its people. Always that. This is what is now naughty conventionally called the “anti-China feeling”, as if the criticisms of the dictatorship were against the people, who are the direct victims of the regime.
It’s perfectly understandable that the newspaper needs to make cash to pay the bills, the thirteenth of the staff and whatever. But isn’t there another line that delimits the limit of what is reasonable in the financial and pseudo-editorial relationship with a dictatorship? Looks like not anymore. Only someone old-fashioned can expect that. It took me a while to notice, but it’s getting clearer. China is increasingly managing to leave the world in its image and likeness.
And the Cebri event, which I mentioned above, was even more educational. Everything was new. New way of doing international politics, new concepts, new multilateral system built with Chinese bricks and, of course, a new language with its fluidity of meanings. Remember the Democracy, Freedom and Human Rights tripod? Nothing else is what it appeared to be. Like defined former ambassador Marcos Caramuru: “China began its great participation in global issues with a very pragmatic vision of international relations. Now, China brings us a conceptual vision”.
While the diplomat said this in an appreciative and appreciative context, he defined well what’s next: Chinese concepts.
So I’ll stop pestering others and mine. My New Year’s resolution: I will forget about the Chinese regime.
Then I’m going to call that same friend to say that my decision has nothing to do with his advice. What amazed me was realizing that, if it continues like this, in a little while, the PCC will give a salute by banning things in Brazil – and it will certainly be the Chinese.
I need a detox.
#Deplorable #World #Column #Leonardo #Coutinho
source https://pledgetimes.com/deplorable-new-world-2-column-leonardo-coutinho/
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