Around 25 years ago, wise commentators said China may, in due course, be able to produce acceptable basic, manufactured white-goods but making motor cars that would sell globally was not conceivable. Far too many complex inputs went into making a modern family sedan compared to a refrigerator. As for landing a rover on the Moon and Mars – unimaginable. Those rovers successfully landed in 2013 and 2021 respectively. And now China has become the largest builder and exporter of motor cars on the planet. The Global West, especially, is widely surprised, indeed, startled.

John Pilger provided an acute, extended explanation of this startlement, in the years prior to his recent untimely death. He nailed a set of crucial reasons the Western world maintains such distorted, low-success expectations of China. Pilger argued, convincingly, that the Global West – and its Mainstream Western Media (MWM) – unceasingly demonise Beijing because: “Today China has matched America at its own great game of capitalism – and that is unforgivable.” That same MWM has played a “new yellow peril” pivotal role, as Pilger says, in turning the extraordinary industrious community that is the real China into “a fantasy-based monster trying to take over the world.” “In less than a decade, the ‘good’ China has been airbrushed and a ‘bad’ China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.”

Never-mind that the Chinese economy is 50 times larger than it was 50 years ago and that China has lifted around 850 million people out of abject poverty, China is still according to this (wishful) narrative, perpetually on the road to becoming a stalled, floundering state. Thus, celestial rovers and record-levels of successful car-making initially prompt how-can-this-be-happening exclamations, prior to comforting........

© Pearls and Irritations