EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- Changing Cultural Values -- September 19, 2020

 

 

Changing Cultural Values

 By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 19, 2020

 

 

Most domestic goods are a product of, and contain much of, a nation's cultural and value-based heritage. It may be difficult to find much culture in a ballpoint pen, but Chinese Moon Cakes are all culture. Brands and products that become famous, popular, and even beloved, in a nation earn that position because of the intrinsic cultural heritage embedded within them. They resonate with the culture, the traditions and values of the people. And in the buy and sell of international commerce, these myriad products cross the oceans and travel the world's continents carrying their cultural baggage with them, with that baggage unloaded in each other nation and assimilated in part or in whole by those societies from a conscious or unconscious adoption of their inherent cultural values.

 

Much of this cultural baggage is neutral in that it doesn't detract from indigenous cultural elements but may add to them, perhaps even in a positive sense. Westerners have embraced chopsticks, dim sum, and Dragon Boat races while the Chinese embraced Valentine's Day and the trappings of Christmas decorations, but these are superficial adaptations of charming and attractive foreign customs that do not replace local culture, and indeed the underlying cultural traditions are not even understood, much less adopted. Americans may enjoy watching Chinese lion dances and firecrackers during a Chinese New Year festival but these are appreciated only for their colorful visual appeal, the embedded values having been stripped out, with the underlying culture and philosophy holding no meaning. It is similar with Christmas in China, appreciated only for its colorful visual appeal and gift-giving to friends, the vast underlying cultural and religious traditions stripped out and irrelevant. The insertion of these items into a local culture is only superficial, and has been instinctively accomplished by local society in a non-intrusive way that does no harm and is not meant to replace local culture.

 

 

Foreign values and attitudes are sometimes embraced locally if recognised by the population as superior in some way or offering additional practical utility. Yoga might be one example of a foreign product willingly adopted by people from many cultures, and at least in part incorporating the underlying philosophy and values, a process accomplished by natural assimilation rather than promotion. It is similar with the adoption of Chinese Traditional Medicine in the West. But the entry of foreign firms into a nation's markets also contains risks in that these cultural elements possess a powerful ability to alter and control domestic social values, often in a detrimental way. As we so often say, 'the devil is in the details', in this case in the marketing.

 

 

There are three great differences between American cultural baggage, the values embedded in American products, and those of other nations. The first is that American cultural values are false. They do not exist in real life but, as we have already seen, are simply utopian ideals that bear no relation to reality in the world of America. The second is that American values are heavily politicised, based on the fabricated myths that underlie the vast American political-religious ideology. The third is that they are predatory, aggressive and belligerent.

 

The cultural values in American products are not only false and deeply political, but are on a kind of 'search and destroy' mission. They don't enter other nations, but instead invade them like a virus, with the intent of genocide. Americans do not promulgate their cultural beliefs to share them with you, but want their culture and beliefs to supplant yours. They want you to reject your beliefs, your culture and values, and adopt theirs, including the patently false ideas of American supremacy and moral superiority which are built into the cultural values of every American product, policy and system.

 

 

The Americans are so steeped in a belief in their natural superiority and God-given exceptionalism that they refuse to accept the validity or even the right to exist of other cultures. These deeply-implanted and false convictions, combined with their natural belligerence and thoroughly infected with a primitive and twisted evangelical moral superiority, result in not only an open contempt for other cultures but a reckless and even religious determination to eliminate them. Because of their intensive political-religious indoctrination and programming, Americans simply cannot abide a culture or a political-economic system different from their own and, in simple terms, they will either convert or kill anything different from them. The concept of "live and let live" does not exist in American hearts and minds when dealing with the world outside their own borders. American commerce and American religion are equally as predatory, equally as aggressive, and just as eager to conquer and colonise, as is the American military.

 

 

The cultural baggage attached to American commercial products is dangerous to other nations and societies precisely because it is political, white supremacist, predatory, and aggressively seeks to colonise. The US is the only country that practices this predatory policy, which is why most nations consider American products and values to be toxic. The American matrix destroys every culture it touches. This process is not accidental, but deliberate and carefully scripted. It is not by result of careless speech that an executive of an American industrial association recently claimed on behalf of Americans that "We will colonise China through products". The man knew precisely what he was saying. The Jewish-American neo-con policy-maker Robert Kagan openly conceded that the West's goal is to collapse China's government. He wrote, "By embracing the Chinese, by exporting our Western ways through our Western goods, we will bring them down." These are not idle claims, and the element of political destabilisation and control contained in them cannot be ignored.

 

 

One American wrote the following: "China has a choice: it can either accept Western values, or it can try to carve out an East Asian sphere to insulate itself from them. The latter course would provoke conflict not only with the US, but also with other Asian powers. China’s best possible future thus probably lies in accepting Western norms while trying to flavor them with "Chinese characteristics"." This viewpoint is essentially stating there are no other possible alternatives, that the Chinese can choose to become American and accept all American 'values', or risk the US declaring war on China for refusal to assimilate.

 

 

Through their immense marketing power, these firms are attempting to turn the world into one homogeneous mass of American clones, all with the same superficial and manufactured valueless desires. There are grave dangers lurking in this surreptitious colonising of a nation by inculcating fabricated foreign values meant to change the thinking of a nation's people, to make them discard their own heritage, silence their own good sense and adopt foreign, often foolish, and almost always empty, values. American business does not want to be profitable in China; it wants to dominate the markets in China. American commerce does not enter China to do business but to colonise it, to overwhelm and dominate every market segment, to control the market, the products and the pricing, and eventually the culture. It is all about supremacy and domination.

 

 

I have discussed elsewhere the US colonisation of the Philippines, where the Americans began by forcing their language onto the population, then following with literature, false history and propaganda, and eventually American products. They spent decades determining the best way to propagandise an entire nation of people to forget their own past, venerate their present colonial status, and learn to worship the Americans. The Americans then rewrote the history books to erase from consciousness those nations' heroes, traditions and hopes of freedom from American imperialism. To say the Americans were successful would be a gross understatement. It is almost heart-breaking to read today American commentary on the Philippines, virtually classifying that nation as a failed state, identifying the lack of progress and apparent absence of social cohesion, and blaming the nation's culture for these failings. A few years ago, James Fallows wrote an astonishingly insensitive and ignorant article on the Philippines titled "A Damaged Culture" which, to me, was typically blind and white supremacist American ideology masquerading as insight and wisdom. Fallows commented on "the dismal prospects" for that nation with classic blame-the-victim arrogance. The US did all possible to destroy and over-write the entire culture of that nation, but Fallows sees none of that in his repugnant moral superiority. Another article appeared in early 2014, written by Richard Javad Heydarian and titled "Why the Philippines Failed", that had roughly the same attitude, blaming the people and their culture. He tells us other nations "shook off bad habits" and went on to prosper, but it wasn't bad habits those nations shook off, but rather the pressure of American cultural colonisation. Japan today is successful because it is Japanese and not "American", as is true for Korea and other nations mentioned. Both these men blame everything imaginable except the real cause - the brutal American attempt at the cultural colonisation of the Philippines and the deliberate, concerted effort to destroy and over-write its cultural heritage.

 

 

The same process occurred in the US and Canada with the native populations: ignorant, reckless and inhuman attempts to over-write the culture of a people, all of which failed miserably, leaving the remnants of a once independent and proud people as nothing but burnt-out drunks. The old culture was largely destroyed but the new version didn't take, leaving an entire nation of people bereft of part of their soul in a way that cannot be repaired. The Australians did the same with their aboriginal peoples, quickly resorting to killing them when it became apparent that the Western culture would not be properly absorbed. It was only good fortune that prevented these people from being totally exterminated. New Zealand did better, facing reality and living with it, but almost no Western peoples have been willing to do this.

 

 

It must surely be obvious to thinking people somewhere that a nation's culture cannot be over-written without permanently damaging the national psyche in ways that perhaps can never be repaired. The US invaded the soul of the Philippines as they did in no other nation, a grotesque experiment that failed miserably, and now lay all the blame on flaws in the 'culture of the people'. Chinese and Russians, Germans and Italians, Dutch and Vietnamese, are entirely different people in their core, due to their culture. As an indication of the deep roots and subtle values embedded in a nation's culture, it is an axiom that Englishmen claim to be only beginning to understand their French wives after 25 years of marriage.

 

To attempt to forcibly over-write the Italian culture with a German one, or the Chinese one with American, would leave a national psyche that is nothing but a schizophrenic social mess that might never fix itself. The people would survive, but nothing would be natural or normal to them. In simple terms, they wouldn't know which way was up, and eventually society would cease to function normally. And yet this is what the Americans and their Zionist counterparts so deliberately and unconscionably do to other nations, driven by greed and by their infernal moral superiority fueling their lust for domination. Even worse, the real tragedy is that the Americans have no culture. They attempt to forcibly replace a real cultural heritage of a real nation with a fictional utopian concoction that is entirely fake, superficial and hypocritical, with so-called 'values' that the Americans themselves totally ignore in practice. The British did the same with India, which is why we have the schizophrenic mess in that country, Indians not now knowing if they are West or East, and that is one of the main problems with Hong Kong today.

 

 

A review on Amazon.com of Ethan Watters' book, 'Crazy like us: the globalisation of the American psyche', stated that "The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself ... In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad." And in his long tome Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley wrote:

 

 

"The destructive impact of Western Civilisation upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralise their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms. The Americans specialise in doing both. When one society is destroyed by the impact of another society, the people are left in a debris of cultural elements derived from their own shattered culture as well as from the invading culture. These elements generally provide the instruments for fulfilling the material needs of these people, but they cannot be organised into a functioning society because of the lack of an ideology and spiritual cohesive. Such people either perish or are incorporated as individuals and small groups into some other culture, whose ideology they adopt ...".

 

 

Quigley should have more clearly stated that in this process, society itself is destroyed, with no possibility of resurrection. He should also have clearly stated that this planned destruction of the cultures of nations is a template designed by the European Jewish Zionists and imposed upon the world through the power of (at first) the British military and then the US gunship diplomacy.

 

 

I mention this here for a supplementary reason, one I will deal with in more detail in a later article, this relating to Hong Kong where the British did to the Chinese there precisely as the Americans did to the population of the Philippines: they attempted to colonise the souls of the people, and failed. The major factor underlying many of Hong Kong's problems and symptoms today, most especially the political elements, was this century-long program of cultural genocide that left in its wake a schizophrenic emotional angst, which the US government is today milking for everything it's worth. The British followed the teachings of Lippman and Bernays as thoroughly as did the Americans, first forcing the change in national language, then doing their best to force the population of Hong Kong to forget their own past, venerate their colonial status, and learn to worship the British Empire. Hong Kong had one stumbling block for the British that the Americans avoided in the Philippines, which was Hong Kong's civil war in the late 1960s, a direct result of their savage cultural destruction of the Chinese people. There are many elderly Chinese in Hong Kong today who can tell you of being approached by small white children, being spat upon and called a "dirty yellow dog". It was the pent-up outrage of a century of humiliation and cultural assault that exploded into an eight-month war that left Hong Kong uncontrollable and with Chinese troops massed at the border to prevent an overflow into the Mainland.

 

 

Few people, and no young people, in Hong Kong have any knowledge of this part of their history because the British did what the Americans did - they burnt all the history books and re-wrote Hong Kong's history in an attempt to erase their sordid past from the consciousness of Hong Kong's people. Today most people in Hong Kong believe their civil war was merely a 'disturbance' created by 'leftists' from Mainland China, one of the many lies they've been told about their own history. It is heart-breaking to look at Hong Kong today, to see both the cause and the effects, and the lack of understanding of the existentialist dread that infects that city, the uncertainty, anxiety and fear manifesting itself in American-incited and financed puerile political demonstrations, racism and even hatred of the Mainland Chinese - hatred of their own people, of themselves - the schizophrenic overflow from a century of mostly-failed psychic re-programming. For the sake of cheap political gain, Hong Kong as a whole is being pushed very hard by the Americans and the Jewish-owned media to abandon its own civilisation and national identity and to adopt reprehensibly false American values. The Hongkongnese today have little to no understanding of this, and are being pushed to make choices that will in the end tear them apart emotionally. All to give the internationalists a platform from which they can stab at China from underneath.

 

 

As I've noted elsewhere, the American education system is one of the main conduits for the transmission of these toxic values to citizens of other nations, even including the testing system itself. In late 2014, a Chinese SAT coach, Kelly Yang, wrote that "the new (SAT) test, with its heavy emphasis on knowledge of the country's founding documents and civil liberties, has the potential to change the mindset and worldview of an entire generation of Chinese youth". She is absolutely correct in her assessment, and I find it deeply troubling that many people choose to ignore informed warnings like hers. In particular, Wang Xiangbo, a vice-president of the College Board, foolishly attempted to dismiss concerns that the redesigned SAT would indoctrinate Chinese students, claiming that "one of the basic requirements of these assessment tests 'is not to show any bias'", a claim so obviously dishonest as to be offensive. But worse, the entire US educational curriculum, whether in the US or through American educational institutions resident in China, is so heavily loaded with political ideology that it is often difficult to breathe.

 

 

This is one reason American polling firms like Pew, Gallup, Edelman and Nielsen conduct public polls and research in China; they are hired to look for the keys that will produce the most effective cultural resonance. Pew and Edelman especially do regular surveys in China, attempting to discover any weak points in Chinese public sentiment so US government agencies can better know where to direct their arrows of colonisation. They repeatedly question Chinese on their hopes for the future, on their loyalty to their country, their satisfaction with China's government, their perceptions of education, family loyalties, social security, medical care, as potential targets for cultural assimilation. You should not underestimate this, and you should not participate in any of their polls because if you do, you will be giving them the rope they will use to hang you.

 

These American polling companies do not perform such research in all nations, but almost exclusively in countries like China and Russia, the reason being that both China and Russia are targeted for destabilisation and collapse, and these firms are tasked with finding the weak points. This is one more result of the discoveries and teachings of Lippman and Bernays. Just as P&G did with their Pampers, countless Departments, agencies and NGOs of the American government are looking for the hidden fears or weaknesses, to then fabricate key themes that will resonate with the Chinese population and to promote 'American values' to over-write China's own values and culture. Firms like Bain & Company and Kantar retail do something similar, collecting information from local Chinese to tell the American firms how well they are doing in excluding domestic FMCG and other products from a share of their own market. Once again, there is no need whatever for Chinese citizens to participate in these personal surveys performed by American companies because the political implications are seldom if ever absent.

 

 

In 2014, UCLA published a study on the examination of the changes in China's cultural values during the past 40 years, and evaluating the extent to which the Chinese are becoming Americanised. The authors of the study, UCLA professor Patricia Greenfield and Zeng Rong, a grad student at China’s Beijing Normal University and a visiting researcher at UCLA, used Google's Ngram Viewer, a tool that scans digitised books for frequency of words, to examine almost 300,000 books that had been published in Chinese, to determine the increasing frequency of terms like "choose, take, compete, private, innovation", equating the frequency of use of these words as equivalent to the Chinese people becoming more individualistic, materialistic, capitalistic, and less concerned with society, the family and the overall good of the nation. In other words, experiencing a dramatic shift in personal values to the American consumer-killer model. This might be less concern if the purpose were purely academic study but everything in America is heavily politicised, and the results of this study will find their way into the advertising world, the State Department and CIA, the NGOs, and a great many other places of concern.

 

 

Whatever the intent of this research, it will eventually be used as an evaluation tool of the success of the American propaganda that is flooding China for the sole purpose of changing China's cultural values. This is not a small thing. You might note the seriousness and determination of these Americans, to have examined more than half a million Chinese books, then selected, scanned and examined almost 300,000 of them, in an attempt to learn the extent to which Chinese values are changing to coincide with those desired by the Americans. Zeng should have known better than to participate in something like this, functioning only as a tool to further expose China to American cultural colonisation.

 

Few people, even inside China, realise the depth to which this goes. The Americans watch and record every word spoken by all Chinese leaders, then search for keywords to assess the effectiveness of their propaganda inside China. They record and publish, for example, every time a Chinese leader uses the words 'innovate', or 'restructure', or 'rebalance', or 'privatisation', and do the same with the Chinese media to determine the extent to which their propaganda messages are getting through. They count the words and compare the totals to those of the prior month and prior year. In the meantime, virtually every American in China is filling the ears of every available government official about the necessity to cease China's development and become an American clone.

 

 

Neilson recently performed a survey (probably for Citibank) in China showing that only 13% of Chinese have ever had a bank loan, the main obstacle being that Chinese "don't like the feeling of being in debt". The Chinese are also averse to paying interest on debt because so many do their borrowing interest-free within the family. You don't need to be very smart to imagine the advertising angle a Citibank will use to enhance its loan profits. The first task is to change your value system to glorify debt by rebranding it as "freedom" and "independence", and "being in charge of your life". But all you have to do is think. Nobody who is in debt is 'free'. It is one thing to owe money on a house or other asset that will rise in value and where the debt is a small portion of the total value. You still aren't 'free', though you are safe. But in listening to Citibank and borrowing money for consumption, as for a car, or using a credit card to the maximum, where is the 'freedom'? The goods purchased on credit are either consumed or have no residual value, and the resale value of the car is dropping like a stone, leaving only liabilities with no corresponding assets. How, exactly, does that represent either freedom or independence, or all the other good Citibank words?

 

 

The People's Daily published an article on this survey, parroting the words of Neilson's CEO, telling us that "success requires a sharp understanding of changing consumer habits". Yes, but it isn't consumer 'habits' that will be changed, but China's cultural values and the Americans, thanks to Bernays, do indeed have "a sharp understanding" of how to change your values. The article then foolishly claimed, "Chinese consumers will have a new understanding of loans and their consumption will be stimulated". I have two violent exceptions to this statement. First, the insinuation is that Chinese are not sufficiently sophisticated to properly appreciate the American value of debt as a way of life, and so must be taught to "understand" the religious benefits of owing more money than they can repay. The second is the claim that, having accepted debt as a new "value", Chinese will borrow to the limit and spend the money on useless American consumer goods. In response, I think it is necessary to say bluntly that borrowing money for investment can be sensible; borrowing money for consumption, and that includes cars, is usually an exercise in poor judgment. The article ended with the hopeful advice that if the Chinese are foolish enough to be seduced by the American promotion of personal consumer debt as a social value, "it will speed up China's economic transformation", as indeed it would - to a useless consumption-oriented spendthrift homeless society like the US. Is this what you want for your childrens' future or for China? I was so disappointed in the People's Daily, not so much for publishing the article but for the astounding demonstration of naïve ignorance.

 

 

Citibank staff have researched the psychological makeup of young Chinese, especially the 25 to 35 year-olds in the "emerging affluent class", having concluded their mindset is "I'm the king", and that these young people constitute the "me, me, me" generation and are asking for "more, more more". According to Citibank, they derive prestige not from owning things but from having experiences that other people don't have, and this means giving them "an elevated sense of premium status" with credit cards. Citibank's "key insight" into these young people is that they want to be recognised and respected, hence the slogan, "You are ready for the world and the world is ready for you. VIP lounges around the world are ready to host you. Top Gourmet restaurants are ready to seat you. All airlines are ready to take you on board. The world knows you before you know it. All you need is ... to grab your Citi Credit card and dive into it." Citibank is preparing to fill the heads of young people with the charming temptation that "you deserve to have it all today", and that "the world is waiting for you".

 

As much as it pains me to disagree with Citibank, you do not deserve to have it all today. You don't deserve it until you work for it and save the money to pay for it. Perhaps even more disappointingly, the world is not really waiting for you. The world doesn't even know you exist and, if it did know, it wouldn't care. Not only that, a credit card does not make you a VIP, no matter what Citibank tells you. You're just another dumb kid with a credit card, and there are another 300 million in China just like you. That's the truth. Live with it.

 

Citibank and the auto finance firms just want your money, and if you go bankrupt or lose your home in the process, that's too bad. Prior to the economic and social collapse in 2008, Citibank was in the forefront of encouraging Americans to extract and spend the increased value of their homes, which is largely the reason tens of millions lost their homes when market prices collapsed. That was Citibank's plan in America, and it is Citibank's plan in China. In the US, the bankers and propagandists succeeded to the point where Americans are the most indebted people in the world, owing several times their annual income in credit card and other consumer debt.

 

 

Consider the Chinese habit of thrift. The Western media tell us the Chinese save money only because the 'social safety net' is not yet strong enough, but that's disingenuous and self-serving. Thrift is a virtue almost embedded in Chinese DNA. But Citibank, even with their (so far) minor public exposure, are already promulgating one of America's three most treasured values, that of living perpetually in debt. Even though most Chinese have a strong dislike for the feeling of being in debt, such thoughts can easily take root in an inexperienced public, and over time can result in dramatic cultural changes to the detriment of society as a whole. Of course, the banks' marketing and PR departments will scoff at these claims, but one need only look at the spendthrift culture in the US and Canada to understand how successful are these marketing approaches. Recent statistics show that the average American family has mortgage debt of about $175,000, student loans of almost $50,000, auto loans of nearly $30,000, and credit card debt of more than $15,000. Canada and the UK are about the same. And if China listens to the Americans and permits them to over-write this fundamental part of Chinese culture, we can all guess where China will be in ten years. The solution is to not listen, to understand what are your core values and not permit greedy foreign bankers to change them.

 

 

We already see this cultural colonisation in many areas. Foreign cosmetics companies like L'Oreal are notably guilty, especially in their clever campaigns to promote make-up and skin care products for young men. A boy who thinks pretty skin is a virtue needs to have a long talk with his father, and soon. Another example is the foreign pharmaceutical firms selling their wares in China. According to one such company, birth control pills are not for preventing unwanted pregnancies, but are all about "freedom" and "being empowered" and "taking control of your body" and other such senseless American "values". This is culturally dangerous, the attempted colonisation of a nation by broadcasting foreign and, in this case, foolish, values to change the thinking of a nation's people.

 

Lest you think I exaggerate about the threats to society and values, let me relate a story from Canada. A number of years back, the major Canadian banks colluded and conceived what was in their estimation a royal road to riches by obtaining (illegally) personal information on all university students in the country, including mailing addresses, and sent every student a credit card. This was done without request from the students, without an application and with no credit checks; just free credit cards from the banks appearing in the mailbox like a gift from heaven. You can imagine the result. Countless thousands of kids, young, immature and thoughtless, with no financial experience, no education on dealing with debt, and no supervision or oversight. And very quickly countless thousands of young students and graduates beginning their careers in bankruptcy court, with a shattered credit rating and, too often, a cancellation of their studies. This would be a good case study in free-market capitalism and "letting the market decide". As the results became publicly visible, the Canadian government tried without success to have the banks rein in what was clearly a socially-destructive process that was not only harmfully altering the culture and values of an entire new generation, but was devastating large numbers of young lives. Then, in an astonishing display of sanity and responsibility, the government passed a law stating that any credit card received without a request and proper signed application could be used to the maximum limit with the user having no responsibility for repayment of the debt. All student credit cards were cancelled by the banks and disappeared overnight, and life slowly returned to normal. Today, this 'socialist' government act would be an impossible feat because no Western politicians would have the courage to take such an aggressively defiant stance against the major banks or large MNCs. They would be bullied, bribed, bought, intimidated and threatened with personal destruction long before any such proposals were presented to a legislature.

 

 

It is frightening to me to see that this is already happening in China with automobiles. Young Chinese students and graduates are being increasingly targeted and persuaded to abandon their cultural dreams of purchasing a home in preparation for marriage, for the temptation of being a modern world citizen and 'having it all now' by buying a car today - and mostly on debt. This is the standard pattern for America today where 80% to 90% of all autos are purchased mostly or entirely with borrowed money, and the presentation is indeed tempting to almost every young man with his first job and money, because he's immature. The American auto companies push debt financing for auto purchases because it is so lucrative. GM makes three times as much money on financing as it does on selling its cars. Foreign autos in China are already heavily overpriced, and financing will add another 20% or so to the cost, with most auto financing schemes being only borderline legal and consisting primarily of fraudulent advertising. The practice of pushing consumer debt onto primarily young people in China who have little or no debt experience, should be heavily controlled or banned outright, with absolutely no consideration given to the money-lenders since consumer debt is one of the most predatory and socially destructive of all American 'values'. It is especially disturbing that auto dealers are focusing heavily on university students who are the most unaware and vulnerable, the most likely to exhibit poor judgment and the easiest to deceive.

 

 

In one media report, Cao Xiang, general manager at Shanghai Fande Automotive, a dealer for BMW and Mini brands, said at least four out of 10 cars his company sells are financed. "Auto finance looks attractive to consumers that are younger and better aware of international trends. These people either have not enough time to save, or want to manage cash flow in a more flexible way." That is not true. It is not auto finance that 'looks attractive' to young people, but the automobile itself, and this attraction is not the result of being more 'aware of international trends' but of being young and foolish and having no money. To claim that a university student or a new graduate purchasing a first car, is so sophisticated as to employ debt because he wants to 'manage cash flow in a more flexible way' according to 'sophisticated international standards' is a lie that should be punished by public flogging. No Chinese student should be permitted to graduate from a university until he can demonstrate a full appreciation of the fact that the terms 'auto dealer' and 'incorrigible common thief' are interchangeable synonyms. Similarly, no Chinese student should be permitted to graduate without a demonstrated understanding that consumer debt is a disease, not a cure.

 

 

One of the most important set of values in China has been that related to the extended family, but family values and attitudes toward family are very different in the US and much of the Western world. In Western countries neither parents nor relatives will normally help their children buy a home. When children leave home after graduation, they are on their own and are expected to look after themselves as best they can. A rich family may help their children with money, but this is uncommon in other circles. In the US and most of the West, we would never expect, and would almost never ask, parents, brothers or sisters, uncles or cousins to lend us money to help with the purchase of a home. We do not lend money to family members any more than we would to friends or strangers. If you need money, go to the bank. Similarly, we are responsible for our own children and the extended family is not involved in the process. Parents seldom become involved in baby-sitting our children, perhaps doing so occasionally for a few hours or days at a time, but to do more would be unusual. This usually means hiring a full-time nanny or taking the child to a daycare center, often from the age of a few months so that the mother can return to work. Our children often are raised by strangers who may or may not be good mothers, and who may often have attitudes or values very different from our own. These day-care centers, which are businesses and not social services, normally hire the lowest-cost labor available, often from new immigrants, refugees, and the lowest class. The dangers and difficulties are obvious. In the English-speaking Western countries, it is extremely rare that families live together or that parents live with their children, the matter being partly tied to questions of sovereignty and individualism, these traits themselves largely responsible for the difference in family values. Such arrangements would almost always lead to antagonism and conflict. As well, the Western sense of responsibility for parents or grandparents is very different from the Chinese tradition of children tending to and supporting their elderly parents, one area where the American cultural values will be destructive to the Chinese.

 

 

American health care companies are heavily promoting nursing homes in China because of the enormous potential profits. But to succeed in China, they must first embark on a program to change the values of young Chinese to the point where abandoning your responsibility to your parents is the best way to fulfill it. If we consider the ambitions of American firms in China and critically examine their approach, we will see bold attempts at cultural colonisation on a grand scale, and almost all that cultural baggage will be toxic to China and devastating to the Chinese culture and family. These traditions and attitudes which do not exist in much of the West are part of the treasure of Chinese culture and an important part of China's heritage. It is precisely these family values that the American corporations want to attack and destroy, because there will be no profits so long as these family loyalties exist. Executives of US corporations are well aware of Chinese cultural values and have obtained much assistance from psychologists and others in how to attack and change the values of a society. They will present their product on the basis of responsibility and "freedom", all in terms of American values they need you to adopt and internalise before they can expect you to buy into their cultural values and the "American way of life". And they will succeed, if you let them.

 

 

A perfect example of toxic cultural colonisation was reported in the Chinese media in July of 2014, this being a "house-for-pension" scheme that encouraged elderly Chinese to transfer full ownership of their home to a private vulture corporation in exchange for some extra cash in their hands and the "right" to continue living in the house, but with responsibility for maintenance and liability for loss. A pilot project involving insurance companies was begun in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan, where it reportedly met with "absolute rejection" as it so richly deserved to do. I must say that reading of this plan made me angry. A home is the main asset and security for all Chinese, and is a legacy for their children after they die. I can scarcely imagine a more frontal assault on Chinese traditions and culture, or a greater betrayal of the Chinese people, than to promote such an idiotic scheme. There is no way this abomination originated in China; this is very much a Jewish attitude, where the vultures and vampires circle the vulnerable, looking for a revenue stream anyplace they can find one, regardless of the social or human costs. Any homeowner can obtain a bank mortgage on a partial value of a home, at far less cost and no risk, compared to what was being proposed. And most often, if they need cash, they could do this within the family, at no cost and no risk. This is truly a betrayal of the Chinese people, and a good example of Chinese financiers having been terminally infected by the American values of greed and anti-social capitalism. There are enough ways for insurance companies in China to make profits without preying on the elderly. As Warren Buffet once said, "There is enough money to be found in the middle of the road. You don't have to look in the ditches". The people who hatched this God-forsaken egg, including any Chinese who participated, should have been arrested on charges of treason, and then shot, along with the government officials who approved it.

 

 

The toxic cultural infections will never end, so long as the Americans and Jews are in China. Crappy American automobiles are sold in China as fashion accessories magically containing "freedom" and "independence". American pharmaceutical companies today tell young Chinese women that oral contraceptives are not for preventing unwanted pregnancies, but are, magically, a ticket to the same "freedom" and "independence", with the added benefits of being "empowered" and "taking control of your body". It is always the same: moral superiority, political religion, the American dream, and social Darwinism, the sizzle without an underlying reality.

 

One of the more prominent features of American cultural homicides as they apply to commerce is that American companies will absolutely refuse to enter a foreign country, determine the products or kinds of products the local market would appreciate, then make and market these. This would be the logical path, but it never happens. Americans will persist in attempting to sell only those products they already make and, if rejected by the local population, will then spend unlimited amounts of time and money to change the cultural values of the nation to make their products accepted. One firm that boasts openly of its ability to do this in China is P&G who, with their psychiatric values-loaded marketing, created the perception that dandruff was a shameful health problem and social stigma deserving of and requiring urgent attention. Fortunately for China, P&G happened to have a product to solve the "problem", and product sales soared. For this, we must once again give credit to Bernays who argued that marketing should avoid appealing to rationality by presenting a product's true virtues, and instead find a way to feed off human weaknesses. And find a way, he did, by using psychology in advertising:

 

 

"to nurture deep-seated feelings of guilt and insecurity, and use these fabricated feelings to create emotional attachments to products. This projection of psychological needs onto a commercial product was to create a kind of idolisation of a commercial good, a way to twist fundamental human emotions to worshipping a product by placing in it hope of one's spiritual or social fulfillment".

 

 

Try to understand completely what that means. Bernays' fundamental premise - as communicated to P&G, who were his first advertising customer - was to avoid marketing a product on its merits and instead to prey on human weakness. His approach was to awaken in customers their deepest unspoken fears and insecurities, and to attach the relief of these to a specific product. It was a thoroughly despicable way to entice innocent and unsuspecting consumers to almost worship a product in the secret belief that its purchase could eliminate those deep fears and fulfill our secret hopes. This is why people buy Apple's iphones and Nike shoes, LV bags, and so many other products, but P&G had a head start and became masters of this manner of contemptible deception. Their marketing of Pampers in China is an excellent example. Chinese mothers did not often use diapers, and preferred washable cloth diapers in any case, strongly resisting P&G's marketing efforts for what was seen as an expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary product. In 2010, Forbes Magazine published an article titled, "How Procter And Gamble Cultivates Customers In China", from an interview with P&G's then-CEO, Robert McDonald.

 

 

"One of the things that interests me about China's many markets ... is observing Western consumer goods companies take a proven product from overseas and introduce it in an emerging market with no prior knowledge of the products’ use or existence. ... I’m talking about taking a product and literally changing consumer behavior to create a market for it."

 

 

In that article, Forbes wrote that P&G then conducted "some research to identify the qualities that might make a disposable diaper attractive in China", but that statement is an enormous lie meant to disguise the essential truth. What P&G actually did was to conduct extensive psychological and psychiatric research in attempts to identify the hidden fears and weaknesses in Chinese mothers so as to prey on those. And they found what they needed: the mothers' concern for their baby's health and his longer-term development and success in life. P&G then first created a scenario based on claims that increased sleep would not only improve a baby's health but would result in "improved cognitive development and academic achievement", thereby presumably guaranteeing wealth and a successful career. The second step was to produce so-called "studies" with "scientific results" that were palpably fraudulent, with either fabricated or cherry-picked data, claiming that Chinese babies wearing Pampers fell asleep 30% faster than babies wearing cloth diapers, and further that their sleep while wearing Pampers would experience "50% Less Disruption".

 

To add to the appeal, P&G then attached the insinuation that the parents would also receive much more sleep thereby transforming the earning power of a lower-middle-class family. So, if your baby wears my diapers, not only will you obtain so much extra sleep that your income will magically double, but your baby will become so smart he will earn a Ph.D. from an elite university. As a mother, how can you refuse? P&G were very proud of themselves for this manipulation. In an internal P&G staff promotional video, one Pampers brand manager boasted about his psychological fraud, saying, "We really had to change the mindset and educate [Chinese mothers] that using a diaper is not about convenience for you - it's about your baby's development." Is that clear? P&G were "educating" mothers to believe that wearing disposable diapers would dramatically enhance their child's mental development. And boasting about it. This is not clever marketing; it is evil manipulation.

 

 

There is a hidden issue here, critical to the understanding. This kind of marketing is psychological propaganda and, like all propaganda, it functions and survives only in the dark, meaning that the basic tenets cannot be openly stated. Consider the Pampers example: if P&G were to make the open claim as I stated above, that using disposable diapers would increase your child's IQ and guarantee his future and your income, the statement is so obviously foolish it would be openly ridiculed. So P&G, and all marketers, are careful to only awaken the fears, then independently associate their product with a solution, and permit consumers to connect the dots themselves.

 

This is the most reprehensible of all forms of marketing. This is why poor people will spend unaffordable sums of money on an LV bag or a pair of Nike shoes promoted by some basketball star. It is why people buy iphones and why Americans buy American cars and drink Coca-Cola. This is why people will pay ten times the value for P&G's shampoos and personal care products. It is the way most baby milk powder in China is marketed today, reprehensibly twisting a mother's concern for her child into the purchase of a grossly-overpriced, and often substandard, foreign milk product. This is why Nestlé were so successful in marketing their baby milk powder in Africa, even at the cost of the deaths of millions of babies.

 

 

Almost all of us, in our quiet moments, will recognise our vulnerability in a very large and sometimes frightening world and, perhaps without ever giving voice to our feelings, would ask, "What will happen to me? Will I ever be loved? If people really knew me, would they still like me? What will happen to my child? Am I really a good mother?" Thanks to Bernays, the brand advertisers use clever phrases and images to awaken these deepest fears and longings, exposing our emotional vulnerability, then quickly offer salvation and dream fulfillment. Our deepest and most vulnerable hopes and fears are shamefully manipulated to make us believe a sport shoe, a shampoo, a handbag, a face cream, a brand of baby milk, an automobile, will make us happy, popular, admired and lovable, and will somehow fill that well of doubt and emptiness inside us. Christian religions do precisely the same thing in the same way, and even more shamefully.

 

If you buy this face cream, you will be as beautiful and popular as me. If you buy this handbag you will be admired, envied and respected. If you buy this dress and pair of shoes, you will feel confident and empowered, and your popularity will soar. If you buy our baby milk, you will be an excellent mother and your child will be beautiful, intelligent and successful. If you spend your entire life savings so your child can attend this American school, your child will become a king and will fulfill all your aspirations. If you buy our Pampers diapers, your income will double and your kid will get a Ph.D. If you buy this pathetically-engineered American car, you will be "empowered" and "free" and your life will be filled with adventure - mostly caused by wondering when your General Motors car will decide to turn off its ignition switch on the highway, killing you and your family in the process.

 

However, we have had at least one success in rejecting American "values", indicating there are some American icons the Chinese will not accept. Mattel's Barbie is dead. "After two years of living in her 4,000 square meter, six-story Shanghai mansion, Mattel’s Barbie doll is moving out. The dream house has officially closed and, according to analysts, it’s because Barbie didn’t quite cut it with Chinese shoppers in the big city." Mattel spent hugely to open that flagship store that has now closed its doors. And good riddance. People say that the Chinese like to save face, but listen to Mattel: The hugely-expensive Shanghai Barbie store was "meant only to establish Barbie’s brand in China. It did that successfully, so it's time to move on."

 

For those of you who don't know, Barbie was never intended for children. Barbie was a sex toy named 'Lili' that was created in Switzerland in the 1950s and was popular primarily with perverted single men in Europe. At the time, a Jewish-American woman named Ruth Handler, who with her husband, owned the then-small company named Mattel toys, was on holiday in Germany and apparently fell in love with this doll, brought it to the US and began marketing it as a "more mature" toy for little girls "exploring womanhood". Most mothers were either disturbed or horrified by this, especially since Barbie's "mature" body was essentially "borderline pornographic" and was seen as a serious danger and "potentially damaging to young girls' psyches". That view is still held very strongly by millions of mothers all over the world who have banned this doll from their homes. My friends in Shanghai tell me they too are bothered by the over-sexed appearance of this doll, and that Barbie negatively affects the image their little girls have of themselves. But Handler, like all Jewish marketers, brought in psychiatrists to learn how to change the values of American mothers in order to market this doll. The advice was to instruct mothers to consider Barbie as "a tool for teaching their daughters about the importance of appearance and femininity." And the importance of promiscuous sex as a way of life. Just what every 3 year-old girl needed to help her grow up into a wholesome young woman - a plastic doll with big breasts and a sports car. I have always hated that doll. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Barbie and Mattel join a growing list of US brands that are struggling in China. Thank God.

 

 

It is a worthy question to ask why this is happening. Even the American stubbornness in the commercial aspects is by no means so simple as greed displacing ethics. There is something much deeper here. The Americans and the Jews are in China in full force attempting to forcibly change China's family values, the country's legal system, transportation policy, attitudes toward health care and education, and so much more. Why? Why are they working so hard to push China to completely revamp China's legal system? Why would the Americans possibly care how China administers its laws? In August of 2016, Chinese media reported that Chinese courts were adopting on a trial basis the American practice of plea-bargaining for offenses. This is the first step in the dissolution of China's entire court system, and the destruction of one of the most important pillars of China's 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. The reason is simple: the process of plea-bargaining ensures that most of the evidence on a case will be buried, never to see the light of day, and the entire process of the presentation of evidence, the ascertaining of guilt, and the determination of punishment is now entirely removed from the courtroom and the control of the judges, and placed in the hands of the lawyers who will say and do whatever they are paid to say and do. And, as in the American system, this is where justice is subverted and the system becomes corrupt.

 

 

This is not nothing. Americans and Jews will absolutely not look to the culture of a foreign country and attempt to create products to suit that culture, but will in almost every case utilise psychiatry, psychology, marketing deceit, and gimmicks to force a change in that foreign culture to accept the products American firms want to make - in other words, attempt to inflict American values, attitudes and products on every nation in the world. This is commercial imperialism at its worst, since this process naturally results in the eventual destruction of most of the treasured national brands of each country, and a corresponding destruction of the culture itself. The Americans were so successful in the Philippines that no national brands remain in that country, resulting in a permanent destruction and loss of a fundamental portion of that country's cultural heritage. The Americans did the same to Canada, with the result that pitifully few Canadian brands have survived and the few that remain are again being sold off to the Americans to destroy.

 

 

One of the few nations to escape this imperialistic net is Japan, whose citizens refuse to permit the Americans to corrupt or dilute their culture and consequently refuse to purchase American products. Apple's iphone is a complete loser in Japan, whose people shun it in favor of their own preferred brands. Apple will never be able to compete in Japan because the company's executives, being American, are both unwilling and unable to even recognise the existence of a Japanese culture, much less willing to fit into that culture by designing products for it. All US MNCs are determined to inflict American values and products on every nation. It is so very important that the Chinese people build this level of pride in their own country that they too will reject all American goods and values as substandard.

 

 

The propaganda so cleverly developed by Lippman and Bernays involved creating binary emotional responses to statements and proposals put before the public, in the same way that Starbucks wants to create an emotional response to give you an "experience". Marketing is the same, looking to create an emotional response to a brand, and to do so it must rely on sizzle rather than steak, presenting false images that will produce an emotional resonance. Because of this, brands and branding are philosophical propositions involving culture, lifestyles and values, associating a brand or product with cultural values the marketers want you to adopt. Changing a society's values follows the same process by awakening fears and attempting to create a positive emotional response strong enough to over-write the cultural values you now hold. The Chinese values of thrift and of being debt-free will be derided as old-fashioned, backward and unrefined, lacking the necessary sophistication of a modern world, and will be replaced by false "feel good" images of freedom, confidence, self-assurance, independence and a happy life that will result when you mortgage your home, use more credit cards, and spend every penny you have on things you don't need. And it isn't only debt and consumption; China's family values are equally under attack, as are things like education, health care, the raising of children, the purchase of automobiles and so much more.

 

 

The main weapons in this cultural assault are American advertising and American movies, both of which are fully Jewish industries and controlled by Jews, and should be viewed with suspicion and caution, and deliberate effort made to isolate and identify the value-changing propaganda that is cleverly and deliberately built into them. It is important to appreciate that American culture and values consist primarily of historical and social myths that are "engineered values" assimilated into the commercial culture and now proselytised all over the world as truths, which they most emphatically are not. And that is how US companies believe they will succeed in colonising China with products - by a transfer of cultural values through identification with the brands.

 

People in other nations learn only the myths and seldom the reality of what is America, therefore the picture portrayed to the world of the US is essentially one very large lie, not unlike the contrived "experiences" that Starbucks wants to create, long on fiction and short on reality. Some Chinese lament the fact that China does not produce American-style movies and, while it is generally admitted that Hollywood produces some good movies, they are not in any sense "American" movies and it is not Americans who are producing them. It is the Jews who produce those movies, Hollywood being entirely a Jewish entity. All the major Hollywood studios are owned by Jews and a very high percentage of all the actors and actresses in all those movies are Jewish as well. In itself, that is no bad thing. The Jews as a people are good entertainers, and they seem to have the ability to make some great movies. The problem is not the people making the movies but the political and other values embedded in those movies, which serve two primary purposes: they keep Americans hopelessly ignorant about their own country and history while feeling good to be an American, and they are often exceedingly political while grossly misrepresenting historical truth and transmitting vacuous American 'values' to the rest of the world. Television is the same, with American sitcoms and serial programs transmitting the same false values.

 

 

The point I want most to make is that American brands and American values are just hype; they are myth and illusion without substance. The American government, the elites, the large corporations, the media, have created a vast collection of myths that they have successfully marketed to Americans, and increasingly attempt to market to the rest of the world. I am not much concerned about 'the rest of the world', but I am worried about China because the Americans are propagating a deception on an immense scale, a deception that increasingly affects all parts of daily life. Everything emanating from the US is polluted with American so-called "values", most of which are heavily politicised, all of which are utopian rather than real, and all of which are destructive and culturally toxic. The US propaganda machine brands everything American with what appears as high values and prestige but is actually only the thinly-veiled myth of a white and racist moral superiority. I will say again, it is not possible to adopt American values without also adopting a de facto American supremacy and accepting American moral superiority. Think for a moment about a TV ad for Nike shoes or some such product, one typically featuring a black American basketball player demonstrating some superhuman prowess while dripping with cool. The entire message contained in that ad is: "I am better than you", and that translates to "I am morally superior to you." If you examine any ad for any American product, or watch any American movie or TV program, that same message of American moral superiority is embedded somewhere within it. The message is false, the very idea of American moral superiority is ridiculous, but that's how American values are marketed to the world.

 

 

One serious problem is that as American firms purchase and kill ever larger numbers of Chinese brands, they not only permanently kill off important parts of Chinese culture and heritage, but when a foreign firm obtains about a 30% level of control in any market, it will then control virtually the entire cultural base of all products in that market. A 30% foreign domination of a product market or an industry sector is sufficient to gradually over-write a domestic culture with a foreign one, and by this means gradually change a nation's basic values, and thus commercial market control becomes a de facto cultural colonisation. This is what has already happened to cosmetics, much clothing, some electronics, FMCG and personal care products, and many other areas within China, and the pace is not slowing. P&G until recently controlled about half of the shampoo market in urban China, the necessary prerequisite for an effective cultural colonisation, one reason market domination is important to them. But, and this is a message I will repeat constantly, the American commercial agenda is primarily political in nature, the real thrust being toward political domination, not commercial success.

 

 

In a Counterpunch article in November of 2014, Gary Leech wrote that the world needs a revolution against the United States, to eliminate the brutal authoritarian and imperialist results of American foreign policy against the other 96% of the world's population. He wrote that national borders are repeatedly decimated in the name of free market capitalism so violently practiced by the Americans and their European banker friends that affect the lives of almost everyone on the planet. He stated that all nations are not equal, and that the US has adopted the old European colonial role with a disproportionate amount of military and political power that it is not the least hesitant to use. It is for this purpose that the US has overthrown the governments of more than 50 nations to install a puppet amenable to the plundering of his nation. In Leech's words,

 

"When governments do come to power and challenge US interests then Washington inevitably responds with economic sanctions, support for a military coup and, if necessary, direct military intervention. The objective is to ensure that the capitalist model is the dominant social model throughout the world. And in order to ensure that this model is accepted as legitimate it is crucial that populations around the world internalize Western liberal values. The acceptance of Western liberal values is essential for the perpetuation of capitalism and many of these [American] individualistic values contravene some of the collectivist values found in [other nations]." Think about that.

 

 

And think about the quote earlier from Robert Kagan, in his open statement that the West's goal is to collapse China's government, where he wrote, "By embracing the Chinese, by exporting our Western ways through our Western goods, we will bring them down." This is what is happening in China today. The signs are everywhere, for anyone who cares to look. Many people in China dismiss such concerns as exaggerated, but most Chinese have no idea of the depth and breadth of the American influences in the country that are dedicated to Westernising the values of the Chinese people, and not primarily for selling consumer products but with the intent of collapsing China's government system and "bringing China down". As I noted elsewhere, the US government spends more than $300 million inside China each year, on this 'value-based' political propaganda.

 

There is another, even more sinister aspect to this. I wrote earlier that as a Chinese, you should never participate in any of the polls conducted by American firms like Pew, Gallup, Edelman and Nielsen, because they primarily conduct their "market research" in nations targeted for destabilisation, and are tasked with finding the weak points. If you participate, you will be giving them the rope they will use to hang you. I should note here that these polling firms and other similar groups have already mapped out China in these political terms, identifying the precise areas of each province where one can find a majority with a conservative political outlook. In April of 2015, Foreign Policy magazine published an article on a paper produced by researchers Xu Yiqing of MIT and Jennifer Pan of Harvard, in which they mapped political ideological trends within the Chinese population. Their data can identify those areas where people support China's current socialist political system but, more importantly, those areas where Western "ideals" are viewed more favorably and where the people might tend to provide support for American promulgation of "free market" reforms and propositions to replace China's government with a Western model. In fact, the conclusions already formed among American political analysts in the State Department is that Chinese society could be split along the ideological lines of those favoring Confucianism and those with an affinity for Western capitalism. If this doesn't frighten you, it should, because these ideological rifts are the way all internal dissent and revolutions are caused by Westerners and our European banker friends. You can rest assured these plans are already in motion, and you cannot afford to be so naïve as to underestimate their destructive intent.

 

 

The media and political attacks and pressures exerted on other nations, especially including Russia and China today, are due to the challenges these nations represent to "the implementation of the Western liberal values essential for capitalist globalization". Western values and cultural practices are vital for the success of the US-European (Judeo-Christian) form of anti-social capitalism, which is what has driven the US to support all those corrupt regimes for the past century. All the rhetoric about interfering for freedom and human rights is bitterly false propaganda and smoke; the truth is that it's only about the money and control. Human rights and freedoms have always been irrelevant in this context, as they are today. International free-market capitalism priorises money over human beings, making the populations of all countries totally disposable if they refuse to accept this form of capitalism.

 

To accept Western capitalism, it is necessary to adopt American values, from the twisted and warped moral superiority to the cutting of social services and the privatisation and looting of the nation's assets, and the immunity of corporate executives to criminal charges. These are the real "values" being promoted in China today. They are unrelated to democracy, freedoms, rule of law and all the other moralistic jingoisms that Americans spread so freely. Instead it is all about opening wide the nation for the plundering of every possible revenue stream, and to delude the population that this is a good thing by masking the attacks (and they are attacks) in high-sounding morality. To re-state simply, the task is to obtain total financial and political control over a nation so as to loot it to the maximum extent, and the primary tool for this invasion is the propagation of so-called "American values". To ignore this warning is to be blind indeed.

 

 

Just as China's leaders are adamant about preserving a national government system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, so must they also be equally adamant about products in the Chinese market having not only Chinese characteristics but containing Chinese cultural values. And that means preserving and protecting Chinese brands and their embedded culture, and rejecting most American brands and products for this same reason - the toxic embedded cultural values. Canada failed miserably both in anticipating this US predatory cultural onslaught and in its attempts to deal with it. And today, Canada is in many respects a US clone, having been surreptitiously colonised - in a real sense - by American products and values.

 

 

President Xi Jinping made some very important observations at an international conference to commemorate the 2,565th anniversary of Confucius' birth. He said that China must preserve and develop its culture and promote exchanges between civilizations to make the world a better place. In his words,

 

 "Culture is the soul of a nation. If a country does not cherish its own thinking and culture, if its people lose their soul, no matter which country or which nation, it will not be able to stand."

 

No words more true were ever spoken. And I must say I cheered when on January of 2015 I read in the news that China’s education minister vowed that "western values" will never be allowed into the country’s classrooms. In a Financial Times report on this issue, Jamil Anderlini, the famed semi-naked underwear model, claimed this was from an effort to "consolidate autocratic rule and stave off demands for democracy and universal human rights". But not so. It was from an attempt to prevent Chinese children from being perverted by the so-called values of Anderlini and people like him.

 

 

Foreigners in China quickly become aware that most Chinese have a vast network of friends and acquaintances upon whom they draw for assistance in accomplishing tasks large and small. No matter what we need to do, we always know somebody who knows somebody who can help us get it done. The West has nothing like it, and most certainly not the Right-Wing countries like the US. In discussing this with an American, her response was that (1) Americans were independent by nature and could function without a network of contacts, and (2) Americans anyway didn't need many contacts because they had good rules and a system within which they could do things by themselves. But that is 180 degrees from the truth. Laws and rules develop in response to the mentality and attitudes of a population. The US developed a clear, black and white system of procedures because Americans had no network of contacts and were forced to accomplish things by themselves. By contrast, China has always had the vast networks of friends and contacts, and a black and white system of rules and policies was not so important, which is why Chinese society functions so well in their absence. These Chinese networks consist of friends and associates with real, and uniquely Chinese, emotional bonds. The American understanding of this is laughably superficial. Westerners coming to China expect to see the same simple processes they have at home, and are totally flummoxed when confronted with the labyrinthine Chinese system. They complain that China is too complicated, too difficult, too mysterious, when it really is none of those things. It is just Chinese. In their ignorance, Americans condemn China for being backward or for having confusing policies and no rule of law. They are completely wrong, but they will never understand. They do not have the cultural background to work within China's system, and are too ideological and rigid to adapt.

 

 

The best they can do is rail at China, condemn the system, and demand that China recalculate all its laws, methods and policies in a way that will make the Americans more comfortable. Well, why should China do that? The US certainly won't amend anything to make life more comfortable for its immigrants, Chinese or otherwise. In the US, you do it my way, or you can die in the parking lot. But the Americans, in their morally superior and propaganda-filled little minds, believe their way is the only right way and, in their arrogance, demand that you redesign your country in their image. But their way isn't the "right" way - except for them - and they should keep it at home where it belongs. In your house, you do things the way you want. In my home, I set the rules and you do things my way.

 

China cannot afford to destroy its own heritage and culture in a misguided and foolish attempt to either emulate or please the Americans. To do so, would be an unforgiveable crime against the Chinese people. There is already far too much of this happening. This applies to laws, to courtroom procedures, to the mechanics of forming and registering companies, to buying and renting homes, to labor and employment, to holidays and hospitals, to air and train travel, to finance and banking, to thousands of large and small methods and processes that are part of China's 5000-year-old culture. One refrain that all Chinese must learn, and learn soon, is this: "If you want to live here, you do it my way". If you're Chinese, this may sound harsh and unaccommodating, but this is the only way to deal with Americans because it is the only thing they will understand. If you're Chinese, you really must clear your head of the foolish and uninformed notion that Western methods and culture, and especially American ways, are morally superior to yours. They are not. Again, in my home, you do things my way. If you don't like it, you know where the door is.

 

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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

 

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Larry Romanoff is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new COVID-19 anthology ''When China Sneezes''.

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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, 2020