I can tell you what the cost is.
Bourgeois influence.
Where? In the country where they took Jack Ma’s company away from him? In the country where a CPC representative has to sit on the board of directors of every company? In the country where the punishment for embezzling millions is death?
The existence of wealthy people does not mean those wealthy people have control. They have easy lives, riches, opportunities, sure, but they don’t have to have influence in how the country is run.
No, the joke is that they are getting rid of bourgeois influence in exchange for this stuff.
This image is just gonna get a few more inches stapled onto it every year, isn’t it?
Out of legitimate curiosity, what are the alleged costs they usually point at?
Basically fearmongering about China doing what the West has been doing for the last century and is still doing now. Debt-trap imperialism, loss of sovereignty, the crafty Chinese being schemey and underhanded, etc. The headline is all that really matters, these articles should be written by robots at this point.
The sinister oriental never does things for their own sake but always with some ulterior motive.
Protect the people from COVID? More slaves for the machine because the communists cynically want more workers for their factories.
Build a hospital in Africa? Colonialism! Just like how when the British went to India they spent the whole time building hospitals, I guess.
Unilaterally and unconditionally forgive debt for the poorest 20% of nations on earth? Scheming for influence and seeking to sway Africa away from western bankers who just want to help :(
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.” ― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
I always understood it to mean the “cost” is just more capitalist accumulation. “They could be enriching their/our bourgeoisie, but instead they do this?!”
So I gather from this answers that none of this news articles never articulate any concrete cost that they alleged? Because I know that anything they could say would be skin deep at most but never anything substantiated but I expected something, I’ll try to track down some of this news and check
Yep. At best they could argue that these decisions come with opportunity costs - China could have made more profit by allocating its money elsewhere.
At the cost of dipshits being able to do the exact opposite of what people who know anything about anatthing tell them to do.
China has achieved a utopian society. Here’s how it’ll negatively effef5 the stock market:
