IT TAKES CHINA’S UNSTOPPABLE ECONOMY & ELON MUSK TO FINALLY EXPOSE THE WESTERN MEDIA FOR WHAT THEY ARE – PURE LIARS & MERCENARY PROPAGANDISTS! AND MOSTLY EITHER STATE-FUNDED OR CONTROLLED BY THE BILLIONAIRES CLUB WITH SELF-VESTED GEOPOLITICAL OR BUSINESS INTERESTS TO PUSH, LIE SHAMELESSLY TO STEAL OR HIJACK
China’s economy beats the grim predictions of Western wishful thinkers
Upon hearing the news, major economists, organizations, and banks quickly scaled up their forecasts for the year. Now expectations are that China will likely beat its own target and grow more than 6% this year as it recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the country’s growth and economy suffer due to sporadic lockdowns and containment measures.
The Chinese economy has yet again, amidst an absolute tidal wave of negative circumstances, surpassed expectations. Over the course of the last two years, there has been an endless parade of articles proclaiming that China’s growth miracle, its rise, and prosperity were all now over. The American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank, proclaimed ‘The End of the Chinese Economic Miracle’ in an article in November 2022.
The list of poor predictions is lengthy. A year earlier, a Forbes headline similarly said ‘China’s Economic Miracle is Ending’. There were more, such as an Al-Jazeera op-ed stating that “China’s period of rapid growth is likely over,” ‘Revising down the rise of China’ from the Lowy Institute, ‘The End of China’s Rise’ from Foreign Affairs, and just a month ago in the New York Times, ‘China’s Rise Relied on Ties to the West, Which Xi Is Now Loosening’.
How is it that so many organizations and publications, all churning out the same doom and gloom narrative, managed to get it wrong? You will rarely hear from these same outlets that the United States will barely grow at all this year – perhaps a bit over 1%, if that. Yet, the US economy is always treated in reporting with great optimism, even claiming that the US is growing faster than China. Why so? Because predictions and punditry around China’s economy are laden with ideological and political bias and aim not to reaffirm facts but to push the grander narrative that China’s system “must” and “will” fail concurrently.
In the world we live in now, the fear of China’s success permeates this psychology even further, ingraining the idea that China’s continued success is a vindication of its own model and ideology above that advocated by the West. Western ideology, after all, derived from Christianity, has a sense of “destiny” to it, the belief that it is the one “truthful” way and that all other belief systems are inherently false and doomed to fail. This concept is what spurred Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History” thesis, and even today he continues to believe that Western liberal capitalism will win in the end.
Such mindsets help us understand why, despite having become a laughingstock in some circles for publishing a book in 2001 predicting the collapse of China in 2011, Gordon Chang somehow maintains mainstream media credibility. There is a pressing belief in, a hope for, and a demand to propagate the narrative of Chinese failure, insomuch that every single development or setback the country faces is depicted as being fundamentally fatal to its success. As a result, the strict zero-Covid controls on China’s economy were depicted as being the death knell for its growth and development, even to the point that China would never succeed in overtaking the US.
Of course, there are real challenges these articles keep mentioning over and over, one of them being that demographic changes brought about by an aging population and low childbirth rates will undermine China’s international competitiveness, and therefore in the long run, its growth. But what these commentators often overlook is that China has a scope and ability to manage and organize its economy in a way which Western societies do not, which allows it to defy economic gravity and keep ticking forwards in ways not well understood. For example, this includes the ability to invest in and create infrastructure on a whim, in a way Western countries cannot. Also, the state has the ability to identify and subsidize industries of growth, and of course in this instance the sheer size of China’s ever growing and maturing consumer market, which is now springing back from the pandemic.
The Western pundits have bet against the Chinese economy so many times that they will never have anything good to say about it. Not only do they anticipate its failure and hope for it, but they also hope they can assist its failure by scaring away investors and souring the optimism which fuelled its growth. But there’s little sign that is happening, as China is the largest and most comprehensive trading nation in the world.
The China train rolls on, and the country’s development, despite severe geopolitical challenges, a fraying global economic climate, and some genuine issues which do exist at home (we shouldn’t pretend they don’t), is still doing well. Thus, its latest growth figure, and the independent third-party forecasts, have brought embarrassment to so many publications this week. – WRITER – Timur Fomenko, a political analyst – RT
Western Media Suddenly Hates Twitter’s ‘Government-funded’ Labels
Recently, some media outlets have quit Twitter over what they see as unjust labeling, which leads to the question – where was their outrage when the same rules were being applied to their competition?
Where was the Western fury when the social media platform was slapping labels of state affiliation or funding on media linked to Russia and China, like RT? Nowhere to be found. How about when the platform was extending that same labeling to individual journalists contributing to those platforms? Again, silent. It’s only now that they can’t object strongly enough. So what changed?
The platform’s ‘newish’ owner, Elon Musk, woke up one morning recently and decided to level the playing field by slapping Western media recipients of state funding with the “government funded” label. Britain’s BBC has protested its tagging, America’s National Public Radio rage-quit the platform over its new designation, and Canada’s CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) suspended posting. “Twitter can be a powerful tool for our journalists to communicate with Canadians, but it undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work they do to allow our independence to be falsely described in this way,” CBC spokesman Leon Mar said.
The Western media outlets object to these tags being applied to them because they’ve long accepted the negative connotation that such tags carry when they are exclusively applied to media or journalists linked to Russia or China. They didn’t care that the integrity of those journalistic competitors was smeared by a scarlet letter. They didn’t appreciate or support the coverage offered by those labeled platforms that offer alternative information and analysis to the mainstream Western establishment agenda and related narratives.
It apparently never occurred to the Western press – even to the CBC, which received $1.24 billion in 2021-2022 from the Canadian federal government – that they could be next in line for this kind of labeling. At least not enough for them to stand up against such labels. Why? A likely explanation is that they felt that social media platforms like Twitter would always fall in line with the Western establishment agenda and narrative. Also, that it was just an extension of the ongoing efforts to marginalize geopolitical competitors and alternative sources of information that might challenge them. Labeling of Western media makes no sense in that context, so they likely presumed that they were safe.
However, Musk came along and opened Pandora’s Box, with Western media now haggling with him over precisely how much funding they ought to be able to get from the state without being slapped with a “state-affiliated” moniker. “Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re ‘less than 70% government funded,’ so we corrected the label,” Musk tweeted, stating that he had amended CBC’s label to “69% Government-funded media.”
Musk has also managed to make Western politicians denounce the tags, which they previously supported when it was used against press sources that they didn’t like. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hysterically played the class warfare card in defense of the CBC, accusing Conservative Party opposition leader Pierre Poilievre of cozying up to US billionaires (an obvious reference to Musk). Poilievre had written a letter to Twitter drawing attention to the fact that the CBC shouldn’t be left out of the labeling spree.
“We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media. That is why I’m asking @Twitter @elonmusk to accurately label CBC as ‘government-funded media’,” tweeted Poilievre.
Canadian conservatives routinely accuse the public broadcaster of kowtowing to a left-leaning establishment agenda, and marking it as associated with the current Trudeau-led government would effectively assist in its marginalization.
CBC officially exposed as ‘government-funded media’,” Poilievre tweeted after the labeling was applied. “Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news.” Sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric that Trudeau and the entire Western establishment have used against foreign news competitors. And now it’s being used against those they like.
But hey, Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, so he can do what he wants with his own private company, right? At least that was the argument made by those who supported banning dissenters and activists of all kinds under Twitter’s previous establishment-friendly leadership.
Who’s to say that the tagging will end here? If anyone at Twitter digs deeper, they’ll learn, for example, that the Canadian media – even privately-held – is largely government-funded and subsidized to a far larger extent than meets the eye. And what about the corporate US news media that’s largely concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires – 15 of them, according to Forbes – and whose interests may or may not be entwined with special interests that drive Washington’s agenda?
This entire labeling rabbit hole could have been entirely avoided. If Western media outlets, politicians, and journalists had stood up for press freedom and free speech when the targets were their competition. Maybe they wouldn’t now find themselves in exactly the same firing line.
RT.COM
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