THE CHINESE DILEMMA

Sometimes you wonder whether journalists are capable of understanding history, or even considering the long view of events. After all, their business is 'news', which as soon as it's published starts becoming 'not news'. At which point it becomes decreasingly interesting to them.
Of course many of their audience are equally afflicted with attention deficit disorder, Fox news being a leader in that field, with MSNBC and CNN struggling to catch up, but some of us do have a somewhat wider range of attention than most journalists are capable of grasping.

Often necessary background goes missing.


Consider this doozy of a quote from a BBC article: "Relations between Vietnam and China are strained over territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Tensions rose in 2014 after China moved an oil rig into waters claimed by Vietnam, leading to violent protests."

Actually, folks, relations between Vietnam and China have been more than miserable since the late seventies, when those Vietnamese reptiles drove a large number of their Chinese fellow-citizens out. You remember the boat people? Most of them were Viet-Chinese, who fled under duress, and made a perilous journey in rickety vessels through waters infested with Thai fishermen... who often captured vessels, raped the females, and slit the throats of everyone, or simply raped and robbed. Then the boats would make it to the Philippines or Malaysia, where the authorities weren't happy to see Chinese people (due to longstanding institutionalized racism and officially encouraged ethnic hate). "Unwelcoming" barely describes it.
Brutality towards the refugees was shockingly common.

Yeah, you could say that "territorial disputes" are a cause of strain.

What's surprising is that China is being so very gentle with all of those South East Asian Countries. That's very civilized of them.
Forbearing, too.


東南亞華僑

After what Vietnamese, Malays, Filipinos, and Indonesians did to their Chinese minorities, a rational person would be enthusiastically supportive of a complete takeover. Too many violent riots with racialist overtones, plus apartheid-style laws and discrimination, politicians demanding protection money and "facilitation fees", crime targeted specifically at the Chinese...
The Thais deserve a little credit, as many of them are part-Chinese, and they make absolutely fabulous curry-pastes; that counts for something.
But please refer back to what their coastal people did starting nearly four decades ago, and continuing into the nineties.
Disgusting.


"Relations between Vietnam and China are strained over territorial disputes in the South China Sea."


There's an easy solution to disagreements in that stretch water.
Keep the Vietnamese out entirely.

本網誌不接待越南人，菲律宾人，和狗。

Relations with the tributaries beyond the frontier are better now than has historically been the norm. The South East Asian states seem to have forgotten this, perhaps they should be made re-aware of it.
Politely, of course. Diplomatically.
But firmly.




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