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Samizdata unintended ironic quote of the day

“China is serious about building a cleaner, fairer, and sustainable society.”

As you know, I get press releases, and this one, from the Swiss private bank and investment manager, Vontobel, was too good not to let go without sharing.

Further comment from me is superfluous. Reading that comment, considering how the CCP operates and what it does, has left me dumbstruck.

15 comments to Samizdata unintended ironic quote of the day

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    But China is serious ‘about’ building a cleaner, fairer, and sustainable society. China is serious about not wishing to do anything that remotely resembles these things, while pretending to do them.

  • Zenden

    I work for a largish asset manager. Our obsession with all things ESG or ‘sustainable’ while kowtowing to anything which might offend the CCP – including eliminating references to Hong Kong as an independent entity from marketing material – is pretty nauseating.

  • Alan Peakall

    Natalie, do you think that this might be the precedent?

  • George Atkisson

    As defined by the needs of Chairman Xi and the CCP. CCP needs 100 more coal fired electric plants, they build 100 more coal plants. China’s current CO2 footprint exceeds that of the US and Europe combined.

  • Alan Peakall (September 27, 2021 at 6:03 pm), exactly half-way through the 1800s, the Royal Navy waged an undeclared war on Brazil, the last western-hemisphere holdout against declaring the slave trade illegal, until their inability to stop raids and cutting-out expeditions right into their harbours forced the embarrassed Brazilians to make the trade illegal. The ‘just for the English to see’ Brazilian anti-slave-ship patrols must have been either part of the treaty (so circa 1851 and after) or else a last ditch attempt by the Brazilians to persuade the angry Royal Navy that they didn’t need to bother (so circa 1849). Whatever the British foreign office negotiators thought was going to happen, the Royal Navy was very well aware the Brazilians would not enforce the treaty. Its sole purpose was to make it legit in international law for the RN to do what it had started doing anyway not long before. I am unsurprised that, as the article notes, the Brazilians still have the expression but have preferred to forget its embarrassing origins.

    The last comment below the article you linked mentioned other national-slur sayings, including ‘welshing’ meaning ‘reneging on a debt’. Not many in the UK know that this saying arose in mediaeval times when an English debtor could flee to those parts of the principality still under Welsh law, where his creditors could not sue him – i.e. it was corrupt Englishmen who ‘welshed’ on their debts.

    Perhaps Xi has some angry slur for such Hong-Kongers as manage to ‘British’ – to escape with at least some of their wealth and their free-speech habits from the reach of his predatory regime.

  • Plamus

    China is having a real energy crisis, having de facto banned Australian coal imports because the Aussies had the temerity to ask for an international investigation into the origins of COVID. Beijing is literally ordering companies to curb production or shut down completely because otherwise rationing. See, for example, here (behind paywall, but you can still view if you clear your site data and refresh).

    Also, I kind of liked this bit from a Reuters story: “But China’s energy crisis is partially of its own making as President Xi Jinping tries to ensure blue skies at the Winter Olympics in Beijing next February and show the international community he’s serious about de-carbonizing the economy.”

    If they can pass their energy problems off as “being green”, that’s just smart PR.

  • Mac the Knife

    “China is serious about building a cleaner, fairer, and sustainable society.”

    Yes, of course they are and I am chartreuse and my name is Whoa-ohblackbettybambalamchristmastittywahoink*

    *That statement is as truthful and makes as much sense as the quote at the top of your article…

  • nesalpers

    What has been preventing China from building fission plants? Western Greens have caterwauled to the point where we’re so tied in knots we’ll never be able to build another ourselves, but they’re *dirt simple devices*. Pile enough material together, and the reaction goes, hence “fission pile”. Doing so safely is not voodoo – just don’t let party hacks design the safety systems.

    It’d be a hell of a lot less work than mining and transporting millions of tons of coal. China controls mining throughout Africa, so they’re not out sources of uranium. They have technically skilled people trained in western universities.

    Not that I want to see these maniacs be more of a nuclear power than they are, but what internal holdup prevents them from switching largely to nuclear? They might be able to breathe their air after all the soot falls out.

  • Paul Marks

    I do not know why anyone is shocked or amused by this – the devotion of the international establishment (including the banks) to the “Chinese Model” has been obvious for a long time. People such as Klaus Schwab (Swiss – not that his nationality makes any difference) and his “World Economic Forum” (which is backed by the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and so on) are open in their desire for tyranny (“Agenda 21”, “Agenda 2030”, “Sustainable Development” – whatever the latest name for totalitarianism is).

    As George Orwell might have put it – if you want to understand the future, imagine a boot stamping down on a human face, for ever. That is what the international establishment want.

    Even the Roman Catholic Church has praised the People’s Republic of China (and using almost exactly the same words as this Swiss Private Bank – essentially all the international establishment are working from the same script word-for-word).

    Real Catholics are savagely persecuted in China – but fake Catholics who worship the Communist Party (portraits of the dictator in the churches – and all the rest of it) are fine. And Cardinal Theodore McCarrick negotiated Vatican recognition for the FAKE Catholic Church in China (stabbing real Catholics in the back).

    This is the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick who was a Marxist agent-of-influence for many years and a serial sexual predator.

    I remind everyone that I type under my real name (Paul Marks) and my address is a matter of public record.

    Should lawyers for Theodore McCarrick wish to get in touch with me, I would be happy to see-them-in-court.

    As for the support of Big Business (including this private bank) for the vicious dictatorship in China. Once such support would have shocked me – but no more.

    Now I am not shocked or amused by such conduct – because it is exactly how I expect them to behave. They support the tyranny in China, because they want to introduce such tyranny here – snuffing out what remains of liberty in the West.

    They are “educated” Corporate Managers.

  • Paul Marks

    In case anyone replies with the “the McCarrick stuff was many years ago” defence.

    The McCarrick deal with the Communist Party regime in the People’s Republic of Chinas was signed in September 2018 – how is three years “many years ago”?

    It was wildly know what McCarrick was (and is) by then – very wildly known.

    How can Pope Francis and others claim not to have known?

    Why was Theodore McCarrick, a known Marxist (“Social Justice”) agent-of-influence and known serial sexual predator, appointed as the person to negotiate this deal (indeed why were negotiations going on at all) and why was the deal, the stab-in-the-back for Christians in China, signed? Not “many years ago” – September 2018.

    So it is not just banks who have questions to answer.

    Although I do NOT expect these questions to be clearly answered – at the Glasgow Climate Change meeting in November (yes Pope Francis will be there – with the international corporate types and government ministers) or anywhere else.

    As for the claims that the Communist Party dictatorship in China is building a “sustainable future”, “carrying out Church teaching” and so on.

    It is difficult to be polite about such claims – so I will just say that such claims are falsehoods, and stop here.

  • Sam Duncan

    Surely it all depends on what is meant by “cleaner”, “fairer” and “sustainable”. I think we can probably all agree that the last of these, as used by the “élite” (there goes another one) doesn’t mean what the rest of us mean by it. There is no way, for example, that the mad obsession with wind-generated electricity is in any way sustainable.

    The same is clearly true, when used in a Leftist context, of “fairer”. Stealing people’s money just because they happen to have it isn’t fair. But Lefties think it is. And “Fairtrade” is anything but.

    So we must assume that “cleaner” is also one of these double-meanings. I’m not sure what the Chinese communists and their Swiss friends do mean by it (I assume it’s connected by a green thread to “sustainable”), but it’s a pretty safe bet they don’t mean cleaner.

    Of course, none of this is to suggest that they’re actually serious about any of that

  • rxc

    You are seeing her the result of applying the Gramsci methodology, patiently and unrelentingly, over 50 years, to western society. The leftist ideas have finally taken root and taken over, completely. They dominate all of the information sources (media, education, intelligensia), are the primary philosophy provided to children by government organs, and even private capitalist industry and finance has accepted them and is actively teaching them to workers. It is only a matter of time before the society collapses, as the leftist ideas hollow out the energy production and delivery systems At that point, the mass of the people will finally realize what they have wrought. It will not be pleasant.

  • Paul Marks

    rxc

    I wish I could disupte your analysis – but I can find no flaw in your reasoning. I wish I could find a flaw in your thinking – but I am unable to do so.