«   |   »

A Chinese Right since Ancient Times

It’s frequently been argued that the Senkaku Islands shitstorm – or the Chinese side of it – is a distraction from CCP power transition hiccups. I have my reservations about that, but I do believe that the current “patriotic enthusiasm” in which Chinese people have rights,  are a distraction from much bigger issues – issues about “small people”. Big, because there are many “small people”.

The really big issue is that inside China – not out there in the seven seas where the barbarian man-eaters are ambuscading you – basically anyone has the “right” to break a “smaller” compatriot’s neck. (Of course, the perpetrator needs to be Chinese to exercise that right which has been Chinese since ancient times.)

____________

Related

» The World’s most Useless Husband, Nov 11, 2011

____________

Posted on Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 1:18 pm in blogging, China, human rights, ideology, propaganda   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2 Comments to “A Chinese Right since Ancient Times”

    
  1. kingtubby1
    Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 9:13 pm

    I hope I have the gist of your post here JR. Waving the British flag in HK, Mao’s portrait recently on the mainland. It is Mainland domestic for the most part, even though the govt orchestrated the whole Japanese outburst.

    Note that the great majority of Mainland demonstrators are young, urban and probably reasonably well educated by PRC standards. Be great to survey them to ascertain employment status. My guess is that the majority are unemployed, will remain unemployed into the medium future and also highly pissed off about their society and its leadership generally. To be sure a volatile mix easily caught up in nationalist rhetoric, but when another powerful symbol emerges, they could prove to be quite a hand full for the govt and internal security. They don’t need any articulate leadership, just phones and social media which always outstrips censorship.

    You may laugh, but I’m a great believer in the Freudian concept of condensation:

    Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that many features of dreams were usually “overdetermined,” in that they were caused by multiple factors in the life of the dreamer, from the “residue of the day” (superficial memories of recent life) to deeply repressed traumas and unconscious wishes, these being “potent thoughts”. Freud favored interpretations which accounted for such features not only once, but many times, in the context of various levels and complexes of the dreamer’s psyche. WIKI

    As employed by Louis Althusser;
    http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/glossary.htm

    You don’t have to accept the whole Althusserian structuralist mess, but he places the idea of condensation firmly within the process of social and political change.

    Memory symbols and thoughts are not fixed: rather they are fluid entities which, at the moment in China are assuming an extreme nationalist form.

    One thing is certain, China is now beginning to enter a phase of accelerated change.

    It could continue on a trajectory of outwardly directed extreme nationalism, or reverse itself and challenge the internal domestic order.

    Or maybe I just misspent too many years studying the wrong subjects at uni.

    Like

  2. justrecently
    Friday, September 21, 2012 at 8:09 am

    I’ll leave the issue of governmental orchestration out for now, KT, and rather address the condensation issue, and what seems to surround it. Difficult for me to judge if what you write is the gist of what I wrote, because I’m quite unfamiliar with these psychological terms. I think I’ll approach the whole thing with some questions.

    Condensation, displacement and fusion appear to be siblings, as I understand it – condensation being kind of “true”, but simplified; displacement being a deflection of intense feelings from their original object (before reaching that object); and fusion being rather similar to condensation. Is that right? But if so, why the need to distinguish between condensation and fusion? And how do Althusser and Freud differ (I’m taking it for granted that they don’t see eye to eye about these terms, be it only because Althusser seems to address collective processes)?

    How does condensation differ from fusion, if displacement can give way to either condensation, or fusion?

    Like

    

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.