by
Les May
I
HAVE
dabbled
with computers for forty years. For the last dozen years it has been
mostly ‘junked’
laptops I have resurrected by installing the free, as
in free beer and
free of Microsoft,
Linux
operating system. Though
not free like the old laptops, in recent months I’ve bought a
couple of tiny machines which are less than 3cm x 6cm in size and
cost me about
£5
each.
In
case you are inclined to think these are toys I will mention that
they have dual processors, and wifi and bluetooth built in. They are
meant for the ‘Internet
of Things’
(IoT).
I
write
programs on a
laptop, download
them
to
these tiny machines and
then they run autonomously.
(Scroll
down to the section of privacy and security concerns)
But
that’s not the most significant thing about them. They encapsulate
the real problem that Donald
Trump
and the rest of the USA
have with China.
Trump may like to claim that China is involved in the wholesale
theft of ‘Intellectual
Property’
from the US, but these devices are an entirely home grown product,
and
what they show is that, like it or not, China
is beating the USA at its own game;
innovating
and making things to sell to the rest of the world.
The
same goes for the UK.
In Britain
we refer to someone who makes ‘bath
bombs’
in their kitchen as an ‘entrepreneur’.
The Chinese have entrepreneurs too, and they encourage and fund
them, so
there may be a lesson for us here.
We may feel threatened by the face recognition technology is
ubiquitous
in cities, but lets face it, getting that working is a bit more
difficult than making bath bombs.
What
we have not noticed in the West is
that China is a communist country in name only. It’s got its share
of billionaires and an affluent middle class. Watch the videos and
TV footage and spot the Apple
shops, Burberry
shops etc.
MaoI recently heard a Chinese political scientist explain in impeccable
English that in the US you can change your party, but not your
politics, but in China you can change your politics, but not your
party.
What
he meant was that in the US the Republicans
and the Democrats
are just two sides of the same coin, whilst in China, since
the revolution which brought Mao to power in 1949 the political
landscape has changed immeasurably as the country has embraced the
market economy and in doing so has lifted something like a half a
billion people out of poverty, but that the same political party has
retained power throughout that time.
Asked
whether that made China a capitalist country like the USA he
explained why it did not by saying ‘In
the USA the politicians have
allowed
the capitalists to run the country; in China the politicians made
sure they do
not.’
Trump’s
use of ‘Kung
Flu’
to describe the virus which causes Covid
19
has predictably been labelled as ‘racist’,
but it tells us more about his juvenile sense of humour and misses
the point anyhow; Trump is signalling to
his followers that
China is the new enemy.
Thirty
years ago I heard schoolchildren describing something they did not
think much of as ‘Chink
made’
and
to many of
us
the Chinese were just that,
‘Chinks’.
We’ve
grown out of that, but deep down we still
believe
that they cannot
have
invented something themselves, they must have stolen the technology
from the West; they
cannot possibly have been successful in keeping the deaths from Covid
19 so low, they must be lying; if the virus was circulating last
autumn, (as
seems to be the case),
they must have known about it and did not tell the WHO; the virus
could not possibly have crossed the species barrier from bat to
‘what?’
to humans, they must have created it in the lab and were too careless
to
contain it. Is
this an example of what
is meant by ‘institutional
racism’?
Reagan
and Thatcher
could always point to a
communist
USSR
as ‘the Red
menace’;
Trump cannot do that with China as it is clearly communist in name
only. But
with
a little help from his friends in the West, Trump
has
floated all of these accusations in one way or another.
Have
his western friends just played the part of ‘useful idiots’? Is
he laying the groundwork for a new cold war which
will conveniently ‘hot
up’
a couple of months before the November election?
The
political systems in both the US and in China have one thing in
common; they
both rely upon an underclass to sustain them. In the US it’s those
who have two jobs and visit food banks just to survive. In China
it’s the migrant workers living three families to a single flat in
a city far from home. Some things don’t change it
seems.
Question:
Does having a market economy, irrespective of what you call the
political system, inevitably mean having very large differences in
income and wealth? Discuss.
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