China and Ukraine: Cultural Diplomacy & Soft Power
"Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" -Anthony Blinken (Poll)
I did it. I’m glad I did it. I’d totally do it again. It made my Mother proud!
文工团歌唱科长
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Chinese Soft Power in Action: You would have it otherwise how, exactly?
Soft Power attracts voluntary compliance, emulation, replication. It is the attractive power of beauty, truth, and good ideas well expressed, persuasion and setting the example rather than compulsion and command. People LOVE to be asked and advised so They can make better choices but we HATE to be ordered to do anything or else!
You can accomplish anything if you don’t care who takes credit for it. This is because then you don’t get bogged down by conflicts along the way and others are likelier to work to your goal since you are no threat or competitor and this is how I build or destroy.
We are building a world of peace through prosperity, a world of tolerance and inclusion.
Guess who is doing the opposite of that?
Looks like Wagner has burnt through all the convicts. 80% of all Wagner prison recruits dead or missing in action.
Wagner supposedly no longer recruiting prisoners.
In fact, there aren’t any left to recruit, they are all dead or have been pardoned and released. No volunteers. So Russia will act like they don’t need them, which is yet another lie.
smashed-by-ukrainian-mines-and-artillery-russias-winter-offensive-just-ground-to-a-halt-outside-vuhledar
Psychology, Culture, and Conflict:
Chinese people venerate their ancestors.
Mao Ning’s ancestor is Mao Zedong.
If you want to really get to her just remind her of that and ask her to stand up for her ancestors’ ideas and ideals…
China calls on EU to force Ukraine to Negotiate Peace
China would naturally prefer if Ukraine and Russia were not killing each other. However, the aggressor is Russia.
The Chinese government is entirely aware the on-going conflict means: cheap Russian oil for China. The Chinese government also knows the collapse of the Russian war criminals’ regime would greatly strengthen China in Central Asia and basically turn North Korea and perhaps even Mongolia into Chinese client states.
China simply has no down-side in this conflict: ALL possible outcomes are favorable to China.
However, the Chinese government, having failed to prevent the conflict and, to present, having offered no realistic solutions or negotiation forum mistakenly imagines itself as able to influence the course of this conflict. In that respect the Chinese government is mistaken. China can do little or nothing to influence the conflict. Sun Tzu was right: every war is won or lost before the first battle, and it is won by the side which more accurately calculates risks and costs, outcomes and eventualities, the side which has truly and better thought out all the iterations and has developed realistic effective plans for any twist or turn in the course of events which have been plotted out iteratively to include all possibilities, even unlikely ones.
Although China did not stop this conflict, it tried. China is trying not to make a bad situation worse. In this case their best option is to stand back. Russia got itself into this mess. It will get out when its government collapses in a coup, civil war, and/or popular revolution. How the Putin regime ends and what happens thereafter are the real stakes in Ukraine. Russia will descend into civil war, coup, popular revolution, and be disaggregated into its constituent republics. Thereafter Turkey, Finland, and Estonia will contend with China for influence in the Turkic and Finnic republics in what used to be the Russian Federation. Whether NATO and China will sensibly relate thereafter (as economic partners, but security rivals) is still an open question.
Brain Science, Bugs, War in Ukraine, Jack Ma Ant Financial:
Good language exercise illustrates how one may talk about one thing (here, insects) to address other things (Ukrainian war and Jack Ma’s Ant Financial). Note: this is the nicest way to call the enemy insects you’re ever going to see. War is cruel vicious mean and horrible, but so am I.
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