When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend.
One thing hasn’t changed, though: Many Western politicians and business executives still don’t get China. Believing, for example, that political freedom would follow the new economic freedoms, they wrongly assumed that China’s internet would be similar to the freewheeling and often politically disruptive version developed in the West. And believing that China’s economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as those in the West, many failed to envisage the Chinese state’s continuing role as investor, regulator, and intellectual property owner.
Read more at:
What the West Gets Wrong About China
Showing posts with label Misconceptions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Misconceptions. Show all posts
11/18/21
4/19/17
The Trump Whitehouse: White House denies misleading public in aircraft carrier mix-up - Ellen Mitchel
White
House press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday denied that the Trump
administration misled the public when the president said last week that a
U.S. aircraft carrier was heading toward the Sea of Japan.
Read more: - by White House denies misleading public in aircraft carrier mix-up | TheHill
“The
president said that we have an armada going toward the [Korean
Peninsula]. That is fact. It happened. It is happening, rather,” Spicer
said during a press briefing.
The Navy announced on
April 9 that its Carl Vinson Strike Group would skip a regularly
scheduled visit to Australia and head toward the western Pacific Ocean, a
move the White House later said was meant as a deterrent to North
Korea's recent provocations.
Spicer denied the White House had misled the public and blamed the Pentagon for any confusion.
“[U.S.
Pacific Command] put out a release talking about the group ultimately
ending up in the Korean peninsula, that’s what it will do,” Spicer
said.
Note EU-Digest: total incompetence in this case shown here by the Trump White House
3/15/17
The Netherlands: What US Media Gets Wrong About Geert Wilders and Dutch Elections - by Feargus O'Sullivan
You just can’t get away from Geert Wilders right now. Browse any English-language site covering European news and you might assume that the extreme right politician, a key party leader in Wednesday’s Dutch election, is poised to take over the entire continent. Wilders has become so widely discussed and quoted—most recently by nativist controversy-hunter and Iowa Representative Steve King—that he may have unseated that actress who plays the Red Woman on “Game of Thrones” as the main Dutch person foreigners actually recognize.
Maybe this is to be expected. We live in a climate of political upheaval right now, and Wilders functions as a visually memorable bellwether for the West’s swing to the far right. Still, there’s a problem with the English-language media’s current obsession with him. Among British and American publications, the Wilders’ worries are as much a projection of domestic angst as a reflection of Dutch reality.
Something dramatic is indeed happening in Dutch politics right now. It’s just that Wilders and his party, the PVV, have far less to do with it than you might expect.
Like Dutch politics in general, this is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 12 parties (yes, 12) are currently represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century. Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’ PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. In the last poll available, the party is set to score 14 percent of the vote. That’s an improvement on their 2012 election score of 10.1 percent, but down on their 2010 showing, where they got 15.4 percent.
What the country is mainly experiencing is a game of musical chairs among the center-right and center-left. Wilders is unlikely to be accepted in any coalition, because the overwhelming majority of Dutch voters don’t want his party in power.
Read more: What Media Gets Wrong About Geert Wilders and Dutch Elections - CityLab
Maybe this is to be expected. We live in a climate of political upheaval right now, and Wilders functions as a visually memorable bellwether for the West’s swing to the far right. Still, there’s a problem with the English-language media’s current obsession with him. Among British and American publications, the Wilders’ worries are as much a projection of domestic angst as a reflection of Dutch reality.
Something dramatic is indeed happening in Dutch politics right now. It’s just that Wilders and his party, the PVV, have far less to do with it than you might expect.
Like Dutch politics in general, this is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 12 parties (yes, 12) are currently represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century. Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’ PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. In the last poll available, the party is set to score 14 percent of the vote. That’s an improvement on their 2012 election score of 10.1 percent, but down on their 2010 showing, where they got 15.4 percent.
What the country is mainly experiencing is a game of musical chairs among the center-right and center-left. Wilders is unlikely to be accepted in any coalition, because the overwhelming majority of Dutch voters don’t want his party in power.
Read more: What Media Gets Wrong About Geert Wilders and Dutch Elections - CityLab
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