India is going through a tough phase in the Covid epidemic with lots of people dying. I am of Indian origin and have lost several members in my extended family and friends back in India.
I get it that the Communist Party of China was great in vaccinating people and saving lives.
But what’s the sick point in comparing a burning funeral pyre to a space ship ? That funeral pyre is someone’s daughter / mom / father … a HUMAN being.
Is the Chinese communist party really so psychopathic ?
Not psychopaths but assholes. Though knowing China, they probably did it because they were butthurt about something Modi said. And Modi probably said something assholish himself. And so on…
It would be interesting if the Chinese booster that is falling uncontrolably from space would land on one of the military islands they have created so as to claim other country’s ocean space. They are indeed jerks.
I think it’d be funnier if it landed in Beijing. Perhaps on the Great Hall of the People. Which, since the legislature meets there very rarely, will almost certainly be unoccupied at the time. Hence little or no loss of life, but a big symbolic faceplant.
There are way in excess of sufficient truck loads of hypocrisy, humbuggery and nationalistic jingoism to go around here. We all get truly coated and hosed.
If Modi could have spun this in sectarian terms he certainly would have
“If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” Uttar Pradesh in 2017 cited in:
‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity
by Arundhati Roy
You get a frightfully defensive response from Chinese nationals at the merest suggestion as to their culpability regarding the pandemic.
There are billions of dollars in trade sanctions being applied by PRC to Australia for having the temerity to join an enquiry into the origins of COVID-19.
I’d bet dollars to doughnuts there’d be plenty of US party hacks who’d happily use precisely the same joke against India but with US ICBMs, not withstanding the appalling toll of life in the US.
Well put. It’s grade school stuff all round, sadly.
Hell, Republican anti-Indian gibes don’t even rise to the level of making puns on different meanings of the word “ignition”. So far they seem stuck on childishly mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name.
Yes, callous Chinese jingoism making fun of the tragedy of Indian coronavirus deaths is disgusting. But we in the US don’t have a whole lot of room to criticize such things, with our own recent leadership’s public derogation of many other nations as “shithole countries”, and a similar tendency to go for jingoistic juicing up his base at the expense of civilized diplomatic discourse.
China is at diplomatic odds with a fair number of it’s neighbors… Their opinion on such matters gets weighed against those efforts.
I’m not sure why they’re using rocket launches as something to brag about after having launched one of their own rockets into a nearby village killing people.
Same reason they gave a medal to Yossarian…
I don’t think necessarily psychopaths, but more like - very tasteless. Or, only concerned about how something would be received domestically, not abroad.
I think they are very aware of how things will be perceived internationally also - to the point of deliberate trolling. They are being shit-stirrers, to use Australian vernacular.
If they want to troll, their trolling is a bit…early.
Sure, they’re on the rise. But they still have only a fledgling semiconductor industry at home, import a lot of their oil, their military might not necessarily beat America’s in a war, their nuclear arsenal is only around the size of Israel’s, and if the rest of the world started feeling really negative towards them they could cause Beijing a massive headache of trouble.
If they were making these shit-stirring posts in the year 2040, that would be one thing. But the world isn’t under their boot quite yet.
I wasn’t intending to propose that their trolling is to that level. More just to the level of showing that if countries outside piss China off, they are equally adept at pissing those countries off, right back - with potential political implications where their jabs hit home eg whether Modi has done a good job on Covid.
I don’t think they understand that the Sun has still not set on the British Empire. That legacy extends beyond historical ties.
Trying stomp on Australia’s grapes is a lesson to the world on who to trust.
Also note that this was one ad put out by the state news agency, and that it was removed shortly after it aired. So all its really evidence of is severe callousness by some mid-level functionary in that media organization who produced the ad and by their boss who signed off on it.
Yep. It’s absolutely disgusting, but not likely to be something that was signed off by high ranking officials. Whatever their true views may be, they know well enough not to put something like this out where it will inevitably be seen in India and elsewhere. Lower-level fuckup is about the only way things like this happen.
It’s not the same as the kind of things the former US administration said on the record.
Still, I of course hope that the people responsible get fired and China tries to minimize any bad feeling that this will have generated e.g. with free medical assistance (I know China is providing medical equipment and vaccines, but I have seen conflicting info on whether any of it is gratis. I think any nations that can help India, should do, for free).
Troubling erection of colossal statues to bellicosity given that in actual Chinese history the heroes were Confucian civil servants, while generals and admirals were simply jumped-up bandits and pirates, respectively, granted warrants by necessity to suppress the other bandits and pirates but never respectability, much less adoration. That’s a bad sign: distorting your own history while flexing it for clout.
Firstly, from your cite:
So this was not some top-down, government-led project to glorify war.
Secondly, China has a lot of statues; many of the largest statues in the world are in China. Most are of the Buddha. It takes a special kind of cherry picking to ignore the hundreds of statues that have or are in the process of being built that are religious, or artistic or even the many monuments to the horrors of war, and focus on one comparatively small statue of a mythical figure, that doesn’t look like it got approval and claim that as evidence of how the Chinese government feels about war.
I doubt that China was really that ‘great’ at saving lives. I don’t doubt that, overall, they probably responded to COVID better than many countries, including the U.S. But I suspect that they have significantly underreported their COVID outcomes.