The old proverb “The purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others” scales up to the national level, if China’s swift and decisive reaction to the American Woke Cult is any indication.
Over the last few weeks, China has shown that it isn’t just charting an alternative course on economics and governance. China is also attempting an entirely new approach to modernization itself. Even if this approach fails, the choices China makes say important things about the decay of American liberal democracy.
The People’s Republic is launching what, at least superficially, looks like one of the most ambitious social-engineering efforts ever undertaken in a developed country.
The decrees have come in a vast wave over the past couple weeks. In the last days of August, China announced that, from now on, schoolchildren are banned from playing video games, except for three hours on the weekend.
Members of Gen Y roused to the defense of vidya should pause here before falling into a common Boomer error. Zoomers’ interaction with video games bears little resemblance to your cherished childhood habit of coming home from school, tossing your backpack on the floor, and getting in an hour of Star Fox before Mom returned from work. Today, Zoomers spend up to nine hours a day staring at screens.
Gen Y’s relatively moderate consumption of games, movies, and TV spawned the Pop Cult. Now imagine the Zoomers at 40 if current trends continue.
The Chinese did, and they’re taking steps to avert generational disaster.
“Teenagers are the future of our motherland,” Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. “Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people’s vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation.”
What does this national rejuvenation program entail? Technically it started some years ago with the repeal of the One Child Policy. That measure alone has proved insufficient to bolster China’s underwater birth rate, so Chinese officials have taken a step back, assessed the problem, and formulated a new action plan.
China’s top media regulator has announced a boycott of what it called “sissy idols”, among other new guidelines, during an ongoing “clean up” of the entertainment industry.
The authorities have been increasingly critical of the trend some refer to as “sissy men”, which include pop idols that wear make-up or who do not conform to “macho” male stereotypes prevalent in traditional Chinese culture. Some in China also see the popularity of such idols, often referred to as “little fresh meat”, as a threat to traditional social values.
Folks on social media are calling China’s ban on sissies “based”, but the rationale behind the move goes deeper. Nearby South Korea, from which most of the foppish celebrities in question hail, has a birthrate which is not only lower than communist China’s, it’s the lowest in the world.
China studied their liberal democratic neighbor and traced Korea’s ills to high costs of raising and educating children and excessively burdensome social demands on parents.
The burden of this pursuit has caught the attention of officials who want couples to have more children. China’s ruling Communist Party has tried to slow the education treadmill. It has banned homework, curbed livestreaming hours of online tutors and created more coveted slots at top universities.
China may have banned video games, but they also banned homework. Do CCP leaders secretly homeschool?
Looming even larger than the Korean education crisis is their increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the sexes. If those disorders sound familiar, it’s because South Korea imported them from us.
In America and many other Asian countries, coverage of “famous for being famous” celebrities has long stood out as one of the most garish and decadent aspects of modern popular culture. Think about Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the child tranny biopic I am Jazz, or before that, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie on The Simple Life.
In America’s liberal democracy, those elevated to celebrity status have become totems, sacred objects and leading indicators of what sickens American society. Consider the famous Kardashian clan. Kim Kardashian, the daughter of a famous participant in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, became “famous” in her own right after the release of one of the first viral sex tapes, featuring her and rapper Ray J.
Of course, one of the most famous members of the extended Kardashian clan is Bruce Jenner, who in 2015 became the “first wave on D-Day” shocktrooper of transgenderism.
“But the CCP persecutes Christians!”
Yes, they do. In fact, China’s new initiative includes a fresh wave of crackdowns on the Church. The state restricting Christians’ right to live their faith plain evil.
A state forcing children to worship Aztec demons, on the other hand, is downright abominable.
The idea isn’t to draw a false binary that crowns China with a white hat. Though, to be honest, the Chinese have a firmer grasp on the concept of “binary” than the West does. If you’re looking for good guys on the world stage, try Poland or Hungary. The point is that various nations are embracing or rejecting provably dysgenic behaviors to varying degrees, and on that count China is beating the US hands down.
China can look ahead to how society has evolved in countries that are richer than it. And right now, China looks at American culture, and the culture of its Korean satellite, and sees compelling examples of what to avoid.
This revulsion on the part of Chinese elites is a powerful indication of America’s decline.
As is our nominally Catholic puppet-in-chief’s vow to muster all government resources in defense of infanticide.
Still, the honest truth is that whatever China does to promote wokeness in the US is a drop in the ocean compared to America’s own political and cultural leaders. China may find “wokeness” geopolitically useful, but its leaders clearly regard it as absolute poison that must be kept out of China itself at all costs.
This, by itself, is enough to conclude that Chinese leaders in crucial respects care more about their nation and their people than American leaders do about this country and its people. When China’s leaders see poison coursing through society, they act to stop it. In America, our leaders promote, subsidize, or even mandate it. The poisonous woke agenda has become a defining feature of American identity. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the woke agenda is as crucial to America’s dominant institutions as the CCP agenda is to the dominant institutions in China.
The pernicious Conservative habit of referring to our existential enemies as Commies is not only Boomer cringe, it’s bad rhetoric. Good rhetoric is based in truth. Not only do avowed communists revile the Woke Cult, they take extreme measures to keep Wokeism from infecting their people.
That’s not to advocate for communism, as a thoroughly discredited nineteenth century economic theory, it’s frankly irrelevant to the spiritual and tribal struggles that will decide the future. The real takeaway is that foreign communist party bosses now look saner and more relatable than the rulers of the country that won the Cold War. The decades since the Berlin Wall fell have shown liberal democracy to be far worse for a nation’s long-term survival than archaic political parties based on crackpot economics.
Which, significantly, are failing to stop the growth of the Church despite their best efforts.
It is estimated that by 2030, there would be 250 million Christians in China.
For those keeping track, that’s about 50 million more than currently reside in the US.
Cardinal George’s prophecy continues its unbroken track record, only the Christians who will rebuild Western civilization will most likely come from the East.
In the meantime, don’t give money to people who hate you. Support artists who entertain you.
