China's Marxist vision of state control and redistribution never went away

 

What is a communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

- Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849)

 

… it’s back, says Rudd, and Xi’s Marxist vision means greater control over the private sector, an expanding role for state-owned enterprises and industrial policy, and the quest for “common prosperity” through redistribution — all of which is likely to shrink economic growth, he concludes. Rudd is the current Australian ambassador to the United States. …

Stevenson-Yang is … one of the few who isn’t puzzled by what’s happening in China, after living there for more than 20 years. The CCP “was always going to decouple. Once the party had acquired enough power, enough resources, enough money, it was always going to decouple,” she told CNBC.

The reforms that began in 1979, she says, “were always meant to be temporary, in order to bring in more resources.”

More.

I hope Nancy Pelosi wears something more appropriate in Taiwan than she did in Italy, you know, maybe more like what she wore in Tiananmen Square in 1991

 

Trump kicks off speaking tour vying for the Sean Penn vote, saying he got on best with communist dictators of China, North Korea, also with Russia's Putin

 Reported here.

Tone deaf, much?

My guess is Sean Penn still isn't impressed, try as Trump may.

32 years ago we could have supported the right side but instead our elites chose labor arbitrage to make-ah the moolah, ruining our own country and making China great again

 

"Believe in something, even if it means losing everything" (except your Nike shoe profits, right Steve Cur?)

Type 59 main battle tank deployed vs. Chinese civilians 1989

Type 56 assault rifle used vs. Chinese civilians 1989

Goddess of Democracy

Tiananmen Square protest for freedom 1989

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Greedy and craven U.S. tech companies have helped China control the internet and police its citizens"

Defying China: The world must fight the Tiananmen legacy:

The world must stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery. ... [Tank man's] defiance is a lesson for the rest of the world, which must resolutely stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery and nurture democracy there whenever, however, it can.

Robin Munro: The Tiananmen massacre was not primarily of the students, rather the workers, not in the Square but citywide in Beijing

Remembering Tiananmen Square:

Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. ... By May 17, the sight of as many as 2,000 idealistic young students collapsing from heat and starvation brought more than a million ordinary Beijing citizens into the square in a moving display of human solidarity. “The students speak on behalf of all of us,” they would tell any foreigner who cared to listen. 

Having been passive spectators, the laobaixing now began to act as a bastion of active support for the students, bringing food and other supplies to the square on a round-the-clock basis. This specter of emerging cross-class solidarity led directly to the authorities’ decision to impose martial law in Beijing on May 20. ...

Action groups formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. ... The laobaixing were now in a posture of peaceful, nonviolent but direct confrontation with the government and army, and similar “turmoil”—to use the party’s term—rapidly emerged in dozens of other cities. Moreover, the laobaixing were beginning to articulate their own grievances. ...

However, the birth of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation a few days after the abortive imposition of martial law posed a much greater threat. That is because this group, headquartered in a couple of scruffy tents in the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square, raised an issue that had been taboo in China since 1949: the right of workers to engage in independent labor organization and self-representation. Such a demand struck at the very core of the Chinese Communist state, for the party’s main claim to legitimacy is that it rules in the name and interests of the “laboring masses.” Although its active membership remained relatively small, its formal membership soared during the first few days of June, reaching a peak of more than 10,000 enrollments after three of its leaders were secretly arrested on May 29.

Autonomous workers’ groups quickly sprang up in most of China’s major cities. This was the “cancer cell” that the authorities had feared from the outset would appear if legal recognition were ever to be conferred on the student organizations. In the government’s eyes, if the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, erected in the square at the end of May, represented the arrogant defiance of the students and the symbolic intrusion of “bourgeois liberalism” and “Western subversion” into the sacred heart of Communist rule, the crude red-and-black banner of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, not a hundred yards away from the goddess, represented the terrifying power of the workers awakened.

Both had to be crushed, and the rapidly defecting party apparatus had to be frightened and shocked back into line.

Cable from UK Ambassador to China declassified in 2017 indicates 10K brutally killed by China's military during Tiananmen Square protest in 1989

Tiananmen Square protest death toll 'was 10,000'

UK cable on Tiananmen Square Massacre

 

Why were the Tiananmen Square protests so Asian?

Campaigning for Cruz: Limbaugh compares Donald Trump to Sean Penn. Isn't such a comparison a tactic of the left?

He just said Trump admires the strength of the Chicoms putting down the Tiananmen Square freedom movement the way Sean Penn admires the likes of communist strongmen Chavez and Castro.

See?

Update:

Here's the money quote:

[Trump] was simply admiring the strength or pointing out what a powerfully strong government can do.  Hey, this is why what's-his-face, Sean Penn, loves Castro.  It's why Sean Penn loved what's-his-face down in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.  They envied the power.  No question about. 

Rush is willing to jettison conservative principles and cross this line because his loyalty to Ted Cruz is more important than those things are.

Total hypocrite. 

Charles Cook embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump

Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:

"As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?"

He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.

Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.

By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.

It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."

To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.