2017-05-14

Grand Supercycle Peak: White Left Becomes Insult on Chinese Internet

I was surprised on my last visit to China by acquaintances who discussed the migrants into Europe. He was perplexed as to why it was happening, and I made a comment about how pepole say some areas of the major cities are devoid of natives. He had recently been to London and confirmed it. He was also clearly a bit dejected to have traveled to the geographic location London, but not found himself in cultural London. At dinner, he asked me how anyone could possibly vote for Clinton? I told him Trump would win, but he didn't believe it.

As this article from Open Democracy explains, there are a lot more people like him in China.

Open Democracy: The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult (Chinese source: 为什么西方受过高等教育的精英分子会成为部分中国人眼中幼稚的「白左」?)
The term first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a baizuo for her open-door refugee policy. Hungary, on the other hand, was praised by Chinese netizens for its hard line on refugees, if not for its authoritarian leader. Around the same time another derogatory name that was often used alongside baizuo was shengmu – literally the ‘holy mother’ – which according to its users refers to those who are ‘overemotional’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘have too much empathy’.

... A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
What is really interesting is these netizens aren't buying a government line because their thinking is more in line with Neoreaction:
Global Times conducted their own online survey in response to Amnesty’s claim, and the results were quite the opposite: 90.3% said ‘no’ to the question ‘would you accept refugees in your own household?’ and 79.6% said ‘no’ to the question ‘would you accept refugees in your city, or would you like to be neighbours with refugees?’. Ironically, Amnesty’s portrayal of China as a welcoming country for displaced people was even read by some netizens as part of a foreign conspiracy, intended to pressure the Chinese government to accept more refugees. A senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences commented that this survey was “weird” and seemed to “incite citizens against the government”.
It's possible there is some influence from Russia, as it was the first to target foreign NGOs. China has also tightened control over NGOs in recent years. However, the government is not stoking right-wing ideology online.

Back in 2013 I wrote: Rise of the New American Right Leaking Into Mainstream; What is Neoreaction?. Around that time, the term "Dark Enlightenment" also started appearing as a description of ideas that reject some of the base foundations of the Enlightenment such as the Blank Slate. If the West has or is crossing through a Grand Supercycle peak, the start of it traces back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. If a major reversal in social mood is in store, it is possible the core concepts of the Enlightenment will also be tested.
The more interesting question is what's behind the emergence of these ideas in China? Is it totally organic, a reaction to the failure of modern Western ideology? Or did China wake up and realize it can't fight cultural Marxism with Marxism?

Or is it China's determined focus on development?
From a domestic perspective, the proliferation of anti-baizuo sentiment is clearly in line with the dominance of a kind of brutal, demoralized pragmatism in post-socialist China. Many of the attacks on the welfare state and the idea that states have obligations towards international refugees appeal to the same social Darwinist logic of ‘survival of the fittest’. It is assumed that individuals should take responsibility for their own misery, whether it is war or poverty, and should not be helped by others. The rationale goes hand in hand with the view that inequality is inevitable in a market-economy-cum-Hobbesian-society. Although economic disparity in China has been worsening in recent years, sociologist Yu Xie found that most Chinese people regard it as an inevitable consequence of economic growth, and that inequality is unlikely to give rise to political or social unrest.
However, the Chinese also see the "White Left" as destructive:
Seen from the perspective of international relations, the anti-baizuo discourse can be understood as part of what William A. Callahan calls ‘negative soft power’, that is, constructing the Chinese self through ‘the deliberate creation and then exclusion’ of Others as ‘barbarians’ or otherwise inferior. Criticisms of the ‘white left’ against the background of the European refugee crisis fit especially well with the ‘rising China’ versus ‘Europe in decline’ narrative. According to Baidu Trends, one of the most related keywords to baizuo was huimie: “to destroy”. Articles with titles such as ‘the white left are destroying Europe’ were widely circulated.
From what I've experienced, Chinese see China surpassing the West positively, as China becoming greater. They do not see the destruction of the West as good. It is more akin to how Americans viewed the rise of communism during the Cold War.

Globally, major political changes are coming worldwide as negative social mood unfolds. If this is a small-scale decline in mood similar to the 1960s and 1970s, the changes will be brief and eventually reverse in the coming decades. I believe the current changes are at least on the scale of the 1920s, or the 1850s in the United States (see Turchin's Ages of Discord). The risk of war and social upheaval is great. If instead this change in mood is occurring at the greatest scale, basic thinking about concepts such as equality will completely change in the coming decades and centuries.

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