How much do you really know about China?

Probably not as much as you think you do.

Some truths about China that you probably weren't aware of that I'd like to share with my SS followers. In the coming days and weeks (maybe months), I will be posting articles and stories about what life is like for an American man who chose to move to China in 2006 from his comfortable lifestyle in sunny Southern California. My purpose in doing this is to shed some light on the culture and dispense some truths about the real China and it's inhabitants, not the propagandist version you know of coming from America and the UK MSM.

The following Tweet was published today by my friend living in China, Arnaud Bertrand. His Twitter @rnaudbertrand

“This is so profoundly true and everyone needs to understand that. This is a 2011 video of James Peck, Professor of History at NYU, author of "Ideal Illusions, How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights" and one of the keenest observers of China in the U.S.

He explains that actually, when it comes to "human rights" in China, Western backing of the various individuals and movements is "a serious mistake".

For instance he makes the stunning claim that before the 1989 Tiananmen events he went to "a soirée" at the American embassy and "it was filled with the people who later became very prominent in Tiananmen." He remarks that the way to understand this is to "imagine a comparable contrast in this country where Americans were busily associating with people in a foreign embassy" and then attempting a revolution...

I have zero doubt in my mind that if China or Russia made interference efforts in the US similar to those the US makes in their countries, the US would undoubtedly become an incredibly more dystopian surveillance and security state than it is today, and much more "authoritarian" than China or Russia have ever been.

In way, this is what the PRC has always been telling the world: "no foreign interference". But we've always doubled down in this profound mistake, which in the end helps absolutely no-one.

We always comes back to the all-important golden rule: "Do not do unto others what you wouldn't like done unto you".

Lastly, and I couldn't agree with this more, he explains it is a "profound misunderstanding" to believe China's market reforms "were possible without the revolution" (i.e. the Mao era).

He also explains that the Western version of recent Chinese totally miss the context in 1949 when "the US [was] on Taiwan, blockading all the major cities on China that were the treaty ports and you have a 100 million people in those ports whose trade had once been with the external world and no longer can China develop in that road. It's gonna have to figure out how to develop, because of that hostility, I think significantly, a kind of revolution that turns deeply inward."

This video includes the entire discussion that is definitely worth the watch.