🔥📜☭ 🇨🇳 ★ A highly recommended recapping of personal account and insightful advice for the current batch of sinologists from someone who's seen and experienced most if it, Geremie R. Barmé 👇

Thanks to livelihoods and eventually whole identities being dependent on 'playing ball' (i.e. collaboration and collusion) with the CCP party-state apparatus, the sinologist contingent were always going to pay by providing cover and excuses for the never-ending (un-critical!) engagement and appeasement, logically considered to be necessary for the ultimate prize: business.

Some sinologists had the nous and moral compass to try and minimize the corruptive aspects of the engagements aiding the party-state.

Most I believe took the easiest and most lucrative road and became useful tools for the machine that fed them. This ranged from learning to withhold criticism of the Party to becoming shameless firebrands promoting CCP ideology no matter how deranged. (case in point: the so-called "peaceful liberation" of #Tibet by the Chinese communist party's army oxymoronically named the 'PLA').

The china-trained sinologist army was then recruited as academic advisers for foreign ministries across the globe, spreading their gospel of the necessity of (uncritical!) engagement and appeasement over the decades. Thanks to this decades long normalization of dictatorship many people are now shocked (!) when exposed to harsh critical evaluation of the uncritical #appeasement era. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(sorry for the typoes!)

#longread #GeremieRBarmé #ethics #ccp #prc #xijinping #china #chinese #sinology #academia #sinophilia #oldchinahand #selfcensorship #HandelOhneWandel #zeitenwende

https://thechinaproject.com/2023/09/15/in-a-retro-mood-the-ethical-dilemmas-of-cutting-a-deal-with-xi-jinpings-china/