This is a placeholder.
To remind me to write a piece around the story a mate from Beijing, currently in Hong Kong, told me the other night when he visited us here in Hong Kong.
He told us that the atmosphere in China these days is the worst and most negative he's felt in the nearly half century he's been in China.
As an example: he said that he'd been in Bar in Shanghai, which was raided by the local cops. Who demanded a blood test from everyone in the place. If you refused, you were assumed guilty. If foreign you were deported in 48 hours.
If you assented to the Blood Test, and you tested positive to any drug at all, you were deported within 48 hours. If Chinese, you were arrested.
Families of those charged with the crime of having drugs in their blood, were deported or arrested along with the culprit. A form of "Collective punishment", I murmured.
Someone said she thought Beijing's current harshness of its crackdown on drugs might hearken back to the Opium Wars. The Century of Humiliation. They are paranoid about the country again becoming a nation of addicts.
"Oh, god, still blaming the colonists, after two hundred years!" I screamed. But left it at that...
The convo moved on. I thought of a lot more things after. Which will be the subject of a later post.
The theme will be:
China has played the Victimhood Card ever since the Opium Wars. It has used and continues to use that victimhood card to guilt-trip the west into giving them favourable treatment, as we did for its accession to the World Trade Organisation.
To make that case, I have to make the case that the Opium wars, that opium itself, were not as bad, as horrid, as pernicious, as they Chinese have made them out to be.
That turn out to be an easy case to make. The data support it.
I'll make it later though.
Right now, I have to handle a Brie Cheese that I'm in the process of making and maturing. Gotta go... TTFN.
