To Build a State, Dig
China's modernization reforms followed the exact same pattern first used 2,300 years ago: Build a state, hang on to it, and dig a canal meanwhile.
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Why has the Chinese State remain strong 5,000 years on but the US and other western states are failing and falling apart even though, according to Whiteys and Anglophiles like Francis Fukuyama, they were built on solid democratic foundations? Answers in this article.
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CHINESE VERSUS WHITEY STATEHOOD: Lessons to take home.
Sovereign statehood is not an end state of a nation. This end state presumes a nation is a free and sovereign entity once independent from the White Man. But few nations, if any, are confident enough to admit it, producing in its turn their idea of neo-colonialism.
That most if not all African nations (and Latin America, too) see that they are still shackled to Europe is a predictable response: they had inherited statehood from Europe after the continent was cut up into some 55 parts in Berlin 1885.
Or, to follow the same idea above and also to return to the opening line: It is simply not in White people to ever treat statehood, and with it sovereignty, as a permanent characteristic of a land belonging to its native inhabitants.
This lie that the White Man values States as a sovereign and as a supreme political good (or value) is found in Europe itself. One best starting point is the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia that was supposed to sanctify statehood so there might be peace once nations don’t encroach on each other’s turf. But from 1648 to 1945 there had been some 250 wars, all inside Europe, all between states. This is four wars every five years on average.
There was one big, big problem with Westphalia: What’s a State? It doesn’t say, other than to conduct relations among nations, actually kingdoms which, however White people try whitewashing it, is still personal property.
There is nothing between ruler and people, which is the sort of statehood that is found only in China through operating principles contained foremost in the duration of the Mandate of Heaven or 天命 tianming. In literal terms, it means the lifespan of a nation’s rule. That is, Chinese mandates are renewable, secular political instruments between ruler-and-people unlike the European “divine right to rule” concept supposed to have been granted by some voodoo God, transferable and valid for eternity.
Reinforcing the White lie about independent sovereignty, Westphalia conflated clergy or king rule to statehood. The latter is a composition of national, political institutional structures that belong to no individual or elite group but rather to all under tianxia (天下 or ‘All Under Heaven’, again, a Chinese-only concept).
It is this total contempt and disregard for the inhabitants that’s the defining feature in the White Man’s “State” (whatever that is). Each State might be wrapped up in a single flag, represented by a single insignia or crest, operating a single currency, and patrolled by a single army uniform.
But all that become meaningless if the boundaries and borders could change at will. Just count the number of European states that have come and gone and borders changed in, say, the last 100 years. Or consider the break up of the Soviet Union. Or the dissolution of Czecholosvakia and Yugoslavia. One almost never sees this phenomenon in Asia (unless of course some Whitey American turns up in Vietnam, Korea, China, Philippines). There geographical territories are synonymous with states, even sacrosanct.
This shifting and shifty European kind of statehood is no different from nomadic tribal nations that once roamed north of China’s Great Wall. Tribal chiefs claim whatever and wherever they end up pitching a tent while waiting for winter to pass which can last up to five months in a year.
In the colonial era, the same cultural attitude prevailed each time Whitey wades ashore from the Atlantic or Pacific. It persists to this day: Some Whitey English school teacher or Anglophile reporter turns up in China, like what he or she sees, drums up some entitlements and in no time demands for an identity card as of right. (See, for example, German parliamentary speaker Hage Geingob telling his African counterpart about racist German entitlement in Namibia.)
That the German Adolf Hitler and British Winston Churchill were no different but the same in ethical and cultural values didn’t surprise Tariq Ali and wouldn’t surprise Jeffrey Sachs as well. Anglo-Americans are exemplars of fascist White bigotry. They come from the “world’s most violent country, created by killing natives and designed to establish a White only culture and preserve White privilege,” said Sachs.
And we still let these Whitey motherfuckers into our land. Like the tribal chiefs in China’s northern plains, no Whitey arriving in China ever sees himself as a guest and so must must leave, better sooner than later. Examples: this and this. And most of them live by fraud and thievery as is common to White culture. (The fault is with our people for they are Anglophile Chinese who upon seeing a White Man begin to hallucinate they are seeing God.)
It’s astonishing, bigoted Whitey liberals (the racism of the anti-racists) should be tolerated today squatting in both China and Africa. (In China, this immigration policy was the result of the influence of White-loving Anglophiles on the Communist Party of China between circa 1990 and 2018. Patient; we are dealing with these Bananas, people like Victor Gao and Henry Wang.)
That (the above) is also how the White Man has come to regard African land, gold and copper mines.
If a White regime, which has no regard for the people within its own borders, what more can be expected of its Whitey subjects seeing black or brown and living outside the West to boot? This Whitey contempt for others is repeated in Palestine, the last formal European colony in Asia where Whitey Jews simply take the native land and homes. Result: they have no qualms slaughtering people like pigs in a Gaza abattoir.
Contrast this Whitey to the Chinese state.
Unlike tribal Whitey presidents always looking out of their tents to the next door grassland, the Chinese ruler, past and present, has only one mandated preoccupation. It is to look inwards, always, on how best to rule.
Han-era rule 2,000 years ago held the same attitude. That is, under their watch, how do you perfect Chinese statehood, using what methods and building on the efforts of previous generations and taking advice on well laid out philosophical and ethical principles (Legalism, Confucianism, Daoism are the three major ones). The measure of a successful statehood is the contentment of all under tianxia, namely their prosperity and peace. On those criteria only is the Mandate fulfilled.
To restate the above, statehood is not an end state but a never-ending work in progress in which sovereignty is a requisite condition, the top among others.
The rest of this essay will unpack this work, naturally from how it began and its progress so far.
This is the lesson Africans must take home with them from Beijing and not just the money because that’s easily frittered away. Once back home, also remember to kick out the White Man (kill him if he doesn’t go; you don’t need them) and keep a tally of the Black Skin, White Masks (Franz Fanon, 1952), just like we keep a tally on Bananas. And no dual passports, symbol of a Whitey regime’s expressed disdain for the sanctity of statehood, borders and other people’s land.
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TO GET RICH, BUILD A CANAL
Even in their modern embellished narratives the Chinese elite largely stayed close to the original outline laid out in the shiji 史記 and the hanshu 漢書. Which is this:
To expand the State of Qin and influence, emperor 嬴政 Ying Zheng (aka Qin Shihuang) agreed with a ministerial proposal to build ancient China’s hitherto largest irrigation canal, 150 li 里 long (li is the Chinese unit of distance-measure, simply half it for km; hence, 150 li equals around 75 km).
That was Qin Novelty No. 1: Statehood beginning.
Qin had no engineer at home competent enough to design and supervise the construction of this magnitude. So Ying Zheng hired a minor official who was responsible for construction works at the rival state of Han and gave him a ministerial position. Completed 13 years later, circa 230 BCE, three years behind schedule, the canal quickly drew in farming populations from the next door states of Han, Wei and Zhao.
Granaries full, population expanded, and a grateful people, Ying Zheng embarked on a national reunification campaign that was completed in 221 BCE.
Chinese statehood existed in other varied forms some 3,000 years before Qin, beginning with Xia, Shang and then Zhou, each lasting for a thousand years, give and take two to three hundred years.
But 221 BCE was a milestone. It was markedly revolutionary in that statehood became a unified, centralized China as a single national political unit, one currency, one language, one government and one bureaucracy wrapped inside clear physical boundaries and operating as a single political, economic and social system. This system continues to this day, totally intact and recognizable even in the United Nations (UN) today.
That was Qin Novelty No. 2: Statehood
There has been nothing like this anywhere — Statehood as a legal unity — which people today would have heard but know nothing about how it works.
Or, to rephrase the above, the Chinese invented modern statehood that in theory at least put everyone equal before a given set of rules and laws.
This was a novelty for reasons that have nothing with being new or unknown or rare in its application. Today this way of application called “equality before the law” was then known as Legalism or 法家 fajia, which had been under development for some 300 years before Ying Zheng.
The person singularly responsible for the Qin development was Li Si 李斯 (280-208 BCE), a fajia student from the next door Han state who became Ying Zheng’s top minister. His novelty was expanding what he had learned into the following:
(a) to dress up and put forward Statehood as standing for or even synonymous with a set of laws;
(b) that set of laws institutionalized Statehood and so gave it concrete expression;
(c) a State was not to be ruled personally by an individual or group, unlike other States before it like Zhou, or even Rome and Europe.
(d) applied to and enforced on everyone under Qin rule (天下 tianxia), the laws gave no distinction for social, political or religious standing. For the first time hitherto in Chinese history, the Mandate of Heaven had ground rules with which to work on.
Applied and enforced on all peoples under Qin rule, the laws gave no distinction for social, political or religious standing.
Now comes the Canal with which laws were applied. In other words, the Canal gave concrete specificity to legal concepts like equality and rights. Upon its completion, laws were introduced into its use. Its waters was accessible and available to all, without exception, no questions asked, at no costs, whether for private use or to farm on plots of land the Qin government divvied up based on households.
To flip around the same jurisprudence, the canal or its waters was owned by no private institution, company or individual — the exact opposite case in barbarian Europe then or today. That is, the Chinese invented a social good or infrastructure development before these moronic Whitey professors began selling these as classroom courses. Was this communism? Ya, if you say so but who cares.
Qin Novelty No. 3: Citizenry
Rather, the point is that Novelty No. 2 led to Qin Novelty No. 3: Because statehood conferred rights it created citizenry (albeit without then an identity card or passport). Hence came the typical official answer to questions seeking access to the Canal: “You want water? Are you a Qin person?”
In other words, the notion of a “Qin person” married an individual to Statehood. This converted an individual person into a formal, national identity that carried onwards well after Qin: the Han person, Tang person, Ming person and so on to the present, that is, Chinese.
All this mean Statehood was a process of internal construction, beginning with people, and not governed externally by some peace theory of Westphalia relations between States that nobody observes.
The twin concepts — citizenship and equality — were totally absent in Rome and Greece and for the next thousand years after that in medieval Europe. Chinese democracy belonged to all and was written into and governed by laws informed by Confucianism. This is still true today, whereas power in White Man’s democracy belonged solely to the elite rich who ruled as individuals and in groups.
As a test into the farcical nature of western democracy: Name one US law which proclaims that the waters of the Mississippi river belong solely to the people and therefore available free to all? Any use of it for profit would be punishable with one bullet in the head.
No wonder poor Caitlin Johnstone should feel trapped and helpless under the weight of the White Man’s tyrannical governments. Yet she continues to perpetuate the illusion and especially the contradiction that power still belonged to the people. Revolution is now, she says. Wrong! They don’t have it any more. They are free to talk all night, day in, day out about revolution but yada, yada is still not power.
The moment Americans elect Joe Biden or the Democrats or the Republicans or anybody, they surrendered all power which, so far, has been dressed in an electoral illusion of being renewed every four or five years. Maintaining this illusion is what make the 2024 US presidential race costly. Behind this facade of electioneering, nothing changes fundamentally because the loss in the people’s power has been permanent.
This loss is consequentially and has to be logically true, that is, the moment the ballot paper is marked on Day One. The root of Johnstone’s frustration is the election, in its turn enabled by the Constitution. That is, western Constitutional rule permanently drained off and emptied people of all individual agency. Now, Johnstone can’t even make a case to legitimately tear down and burn the western citadels of power resident in Canberra or Washington DC. (It’s easy to talk revolution, Caitlin, let’s see you act on it!)
The same happens in Europe where people exist not for their own sake as humans radiating from families with a history (do White people have anything worthwhile?). Rather people exists purely as objects of the State — to vote, that is giving their nod to the State.
In the past there were classes of nobles, aristocrats, lords, clergy, slaves, serfs, colonialists and the like. They may be bundled into one, new class called “voters” or “electorate” but how has relations between State and citizenship changed? Answer, nothing. People remain subjects, with life and death ultimately in the possession by the State. They may on the Internet talked about how much individualism and individual agency they each possess but so what. Yada, yada is, again, not power. This point is well documented in the body of European literature from Dickens and the Brontes, to Gogol, Dostoevsky and Weber. Today the White Man’s Master is called the State, sometimes Deep State.
For sure, the Qin (and follow-up rulers) offered no individualism in citizenry. But what they offered was something far, far, far better. That is, a united, collective national consciousness played out, expressed and acted through diverse and varied institutions, first and foremost the family, the Canal, and even the People’s Liberation Army today.
China’s high speed rail (HSR) today functions for the same purpose as the Qin Canal, transporting not just goods but re-connecting families broken up and the nation. Stupid Whiteys (on YouTube especially) see, talk about and treat the HSR as some tourist wonder. That was never the intent when built. The Chinese see it different from being transport; rather it brings back together lovers (Xiao Ying), brothers and sisters, parents and uncles, cousins, friends and clan separated by the force of circumstances and the business of living. (See video at bottom of page, and this and this. The horse is treasured for the same reasons as the railroad and the Canal.)
That is yet another lesson Africa must take home from Beijing: don’t be such a fucking Whitey!
On the one hand Statehood turned and bundled collective consciousness into a single, physical reality. On the other hand, reality radiates outward, like consciousness rippling over a lake, emanating from central authority to bureaucratic departments and institutions to clans, villages and settling finally in the family that’s the core, political unit. The same national consciousness is also valid in the reverse direction, flowing from family to the State.
This collective is infinitely more satisfying and meaningful than individualism. So, when western governments lecture China on individual human rights, we very proudly tell Whiteys to fuck off: The Chinese invented (legal) rights and equality, 2,000 years before them, so what is this whitey fart?
Qin to Present: How Statehood birthed Rights, Equality & Meritocracy
The novelty in the Qin Canal wasn’t in just its physical size, function and sense of common or shared ownership. It also gave concrete expression, hitherto for the first time, to Legalism’s notions of rights and equality. That is, equality before law is not a legal construction that Whiteys put down on paper. It is instead a natural, pre-existing condition attached to Chinese citizenry and statehood.
By “natural and pre-existing” it means that rights are given not by anybody, like some fat, bearded Santa Claus who can then turn around to take them away once you fall into disfavor. This democratic tyranny is widely practised in the UK (against for example, most famously, Julian Assange and Richard Medhurst) and in the US (Chinese students and scholars under the 2018 “China Initiative” which caused the deaths of Jane Wu and others, against the Uhuru Movement and Scott Ritter).
Through citizenry, a united Chinese statehood birthed individual identity — “我是秦人 / I’m a Qin person” was an oft-quoted expression. (Today, the substitute expression is, “I’m Chinese” unless, of course, you’re a piece of fucking Banana like Victor Gao, Henry Wang or Ronnie Chan.)
Individual identity was once available only through Daoism and not in Confucian governance. By the Qin-era, however, this identity emerged in actual legal form that remains to this day. Transmitted into the next Confucian Han government, individuality was formally recognized in one respect found nowhere else in the world: meritocracy.
That is, a person is officially recognized for competency in a test used on all.
Consequently, public service became the reward for that competency instead of being hired on the basis of family or personal connections. Reward because the public sector official lives off the labor taxed on others, the peasant, the farmer, the artisan, corvee labor, the Great Wall construction worker, and so on.
There is so far no discovered written, evidential account of this Great Qin awakening. But, certainly, the new ways of constructing statehood were infectious in the reach of Qin novelties, their minute consequences recorded in detail by subsequent Han generations in the shiji 史記 and the hanshu 漢書, and felt even today by non-Chinese strangers as Jeffrey Sachs. He understood what he saw and heard and he felt the lineage when dealing with Chinese officials. Excerpt:
“China looks today not completely different from the Han Dynasty, a centralized administrative state with Confucian culture and a tradition of excellence of the mandarins. When I speak with Chinese senior officials, which I do often, they are the best informed professionals I know in the world, who know their brief, sophisticated and well-trained.”
Strange, why is Sachs the only Whitey to see and especially recognize China’s present, direct connection to its Han past and its “tradition of excellence”? Or, is it because, to satisfy their individual racist bigotry and western ideological agenda, the Whitey chattering class has been talking to the wrong persons, the Whitey motherfuckers who know nothing and Anglophiles in Chinese universities, corporations and Hong Kong bureaucracies.
Individuality versus Collective
In the Chinese ontological worldview, those two are not distinctly separate, standalone concepts. How the Whitey turned them into separate categories, only they can answer but each concept couldn’t realistically stand alone, one independent from the other. That is, how can a person be an individual, or individualist, if you don’t first live in a group? In interviews one often hears the liberal question, “how do I keep my individual freedom under the present onslaught by the western states, namely the US, Canada, Britain and Germany?”
The only correct answer is, go live the rest of your life in an island like Robinson Crusoe.
Chinese didn’t have to live alone to remain individual. Instead individualism could only be available in the collective consciousness which in subsequently generations expanded under the Qin novelties.
Remarkable as that might sound, one’s existence does not come at expense of the other. Rather they are mutually dependent, that is, without the individual there is no collective and vice-versa. This is exactly as the Dao duality law had predicted: high and low, long and short, day and night, empty and full, Being and non-Being define, depend on, and create each other.
Small wonder that the decline of the western State (or power or collective) is invariably accompanied by the fall of the individual.
Ditto in capitalism: a market is no longer left to be free once the corporation entering it begins constraining the freedom of choice. The solution is straightforward, take out BlackRock and replaced it with the State.
We, the People’s Republic of China killed that cockroach face Jack Ma to return market freedom to the Motherland; he was too big for his boots. It’s a tired cliche by now: being trillionaire Elon Musk is impossible unless he sucked the life out of the remaining 99 percent. These stupid Whiteys….
In this way, thus, Qin statehood dovetailed into and then absorbed Confucian governance ideas. In dovetailing one to the other, it married individual versus State duties, and loyalty to the State as an extension of the family. There is no difference between the individual and the State, they both serve the same goal, namely their nation. Hence is the saying about not begrudging another person’s station in life: “let the emperor be emperor, the minister be minister, the father father, brother brother, friend friend.”
The White Man never knew how to make a State, not even today, because they don’t even know what statehood entails. Their idea of a State, or sovereignty, that was derived from 1648 Westphalia was a nice piece of fraud, more concerned with protecting the turf of some tyrant king rather than growing a national identity and a collective consciousness. The last two, identity and consciousness, are impossible in the West because these were never the western state’s raison d’etre.
Hence, inside the State, nothing changed not especially in the relations between king and his subjects and between president and his citizenry. Everyone is still treated as subjects. People who once belonged to some whitey king or Holy Patriarch or whatever now belongs to the State, whatever that is.
The first step in the western journey of a thousand li went off on the wrong fucking foot. (And, please, don’t ever, ever, ever say this come from Confucius, minus the swearing. The line is taken from Laozi’s daodejing 道德經, not the Analects.) And the Whitey doesn’t even know that, much less turn back.
That the western State is today breaking up, Whiteys attribute it to the fall of an empire is patently false even at an intuitive level because how is an empire to decline if the State were to stay strong? It is the other way around.
Away from outlining the enduring power of the Chinese State — the whys and the hows — the subtext of this article is to detail why the western State is failing and will invariably continue to fail.
For a century or more electoral democracy has been legitimizing a state-fraud that Whiteys believe is valid because there is “constitutional rule”. The Constitution is just a piece of paper, like is the Bible. Anybody with some literacy can write it.
Whiteys don’t realize that they have been mislead (by academia especially) to believe the Constitution is sacrosanct when it is not and so forget that it can be voodoo, also like the Bible. The test of its validity and its truth is simple: enforcement. Who or what does it serve?
Now, after the vote, Whiteys have no excuse to topple or kill their president-kings or prime ministers even when crimes of murder, genocide, kidnap and theft are committed for all to see (think Israel). They can do nothing except bark from the kerb.
For 5,000 years in China we threw out the tyrant and killed him, first and foremost for violation of the Mandate of Heaven to which emperors have sworn to uphold. In the rule of the Communist Party of China, that mandate is titled “Serve the People!” The CPC knows that the people know they are sincere and honest and hardworking. Still, we keep an eye.
Chinese historians have observed that few sane and clever people want to be emperor because the job is so heavy, 24/7, contentious, dangerous, lonely and often short-lived. But not in the US it seems. Forget Trump or Kamala, therefore. Only think of ways to rip the US State into a million pieces.
Let the president be president, the revolutionary be revolutionary, the rebel rebel….
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