Chairman Mao: The trade between our two countries at present is very pitiful. It is gradually increasing. You know China is a very poor country. We don‘t have much. What we have in excess is women. (Laughter)
Dr. Kissinger: There are no quotas for those or tariffs.
Chairman Mao: So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands. (Laughter)
Prime Minister Chou: Of course, on a voluntary basis.
Chairman Mao: Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. (Laughter)
from a transcript of a conversation, Feb. 17 1973. Although who can say what they really said? A few months later:
Chairman Mao: Let’s discuss the issue of Taiwan. The question of the U.S. relations with us should be separate from that of our relations with Taiwan.
The Secretary: In principle….
Chairman Mao: So long as you sever the diplomatic relations with Taiwan, then it is possible for our two countries to solve the issue of diplomatic relations. That is to say like we did with Japan. As for the question of our relations with Taiwan, that is quite complex. I do not believe in a peaceful transition. (To the Foreign Minister) Do you believe in it?
The Secretary: Do I? He asked the Foreign Minister.
Chairman Mao: I’m asking him (the Foreign Minister). (Prime Minister Chou said something that was not translated.)
They are a bunch of counterrevolutionaries. How could they cooperate with us? I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let’ it come after one hundred years. Do not take matters on this world so rapidly. Why is there need to be in such great haste? It is only such an island with a population of a dozen or more million.
Strange. Game (power addicted psycho) recognize game I guess.
A senior administration official told me that Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.
This seems like the kind of thinking that got many US presidents into trouble? Truman losing China: did we ever have it? That from Thomas Friedman’s long thing in NYT, ht my dad.
“This is a dangerous situation. I strongly believe that Biden would like to stabilise the China relationship but both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have staked out a very strong line which complicates things for Biden. I have a concern that Congress is underestimating the relative power of China, the permanence of China, and China’s relationship with so many other countries.”
Another small-town truism: the bill is as modest as the portions were large. Paulson and I walk around the corner to a private parking lot where he left his car. It is no longer there. “I’ve been towed,” he says, with a hint of panic. “I didn’t expect that.” What can I do to help, I ask. “No, no, you must catch your flight,” he insists. I feel a twinge of guilt glancing back at a stranded Paulson as I am being driven off in my Uber. He will have to bail himself out. I feel partly responsible for his unexpected misfortune.
That lunch at Ciao Baby! in Paulson’s hometown of Barrington, IL. Wikipedia learns us:
On November 27, 1934, a running gun battle between FBI agents and Public Enemy # 1Baby Face Nelson took place in Barrington, resulting in the deaths of Special AgentHerman “Ed” Hollis and Inspector Samuel P. Cowley. Nelson, though shot nine times, escaped the gunfight in Hollis’s car with his wife, Helen Gillis. Nelson succumbed from his wounds at approximately 8 p.m. that evening and was unceremoniously dumped near a cemetery in Niles Center (now Skokie), Illinois.
It seemed like whatever I wished would simply come true. But inside, I feared that one day these glories would pass. After all, not long ago, I was at the bottom of my class in China. And if I could not even catch up with my classmates in a city few people have even heard of, how am I now qualified to go to Cambridge University or Goldman? Have I gotten smarter? Or is it just that British people are stupider than the Chinese?
With these mixed thoughts, I began working as a trader at Goldman in 2007.
(ht Tyler Cowen)
One class was about strategy. It focused on how corporate mottos and logos could inspire employees. Many of the students had worked for nonprofits or health care or tech companies, all of which had mottos about changing the world, saving lives, saving the planet, etc. The professor seemed to like these mottos. I told him that at Goldman our motto was “be long-term greedy.” The professor couldn’t understand this motto or why it was inspiring. I explained to him that everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring.
A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband’s nephew but is forced to raise her son as her husband’s heir without revealing his parentage in this circular tragedy.
for example
Plus just trying to discern the basic premises the characters assume or the worldview of the movie assumes adds a whole other level
Been thinking about these movies in the context of a much, much, much more minor cultural revolution I perceive in the USA and especially Hollywood/the media, where people are like examining themselves and confessing to their political crimes.
Zhang was born in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province. Zhang’s father, a dermatologist, had been an officer in the National Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War; an uncle, and an elder brother had followed the Nationalist forces to Taiwan after their 1949 defeat. As a result, Zhang faced difficulties in his early life.
During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, Zhang left his school studies and went to work, first as a farm labourer for 3 years, and later at a cotton textile mill for 7 years in the city of Xianyang.During this time he took up painting and amateur still photography, selling his own blood to buy his first camera.[10]
Indeed, it has long been in the Chinese government’s interest to sow cynicism among its citizens about the mechanisms of democracy. The current Administration and its steady stream of blunders have made Beijing’s task appreciably less difficult.
Some years ago at a dinner in Shanghai a smart person gave me his a somewhat jaded take on what would happen if China got democracy. He described how some huckster demagogue from TV would get elected and be terrible.
Peggy Noonan worth reading as usual. She got me to subscribe to the WSJ:
Here’s an idea.
It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”
As Ms. Noonan points out that’s unlikely to be effective for long but it’s something positive.
Helytimes 