How China Does Tourism Without Losing Itself
China is… China. The tourists are mostly Chinese, seeing different sites in China. The food is mostly said Chinese taking different bites of China. There are many different cultures, but each still a slice of China. The technology is recognizable to an outsider, but every byte stays in China. And the money is ephemeral, but the platforms are emphatically China. China is obviously not part of any empire, nor are they trying to adapt to the foreign eye, either. China is just… China.
This should go without saying. Sri Lanka should be Sri Lanka, Korea should be Korea, Ghana should be Ghana. But it doesn’t, because the colonizers keep staying and calling their imperialism other names, like tourism, like culture, like technology, like money. This is why I say we (the above and more) live under one White Empire and have for centuries. We live under what Karl Marx called double government. We had the appearance of (and chance at) independence, but for most of us that got rolled back posthaste. What they call the Cold War was, for most of the world, World War Too, with them putting down every socialist rebellion. But China made it. And now you can see that they made it made it. You can see when you just visit that China is different, and I could see even plainer that Sri Lanka ain’t the same.
Sri Lanka has an extremely servile relationship to tourism, with many foreigners-only spaces (unofficially) and foreigners-only bathrooms and queues at the airport (officially). Sri Lankan culture is still deeply Trojan Horsed with White democracy (beware Greeks bearing gifts) and education and their depraved culture in general. And our tech stack is almost all Western (beware geeks bearing gifts), there’s very little indigenous that they can’t periodically use to bamboozle or overthrow us. And don’t get me started on money, our merchants pay a 3% tax to our White Mastercards every time we swipe. Sri Lanka is obviously part of a White Empire that hides behind no names and many names all the same. Sri Lanka is not just Sri Lanka, as you can see when you go some place actually independent.
Is Sri Lanka China? Could Sri Lanka be China? No, as mentioned, China is China, and any development lesson from them is that you have to develop yourself your own way (though Marxism-Leninism is a good starter base). Sri Lanka got independence indirectly through India, and I fear that we’re not free until India’s free, and India’s getting less free by the day, and messed us up pretty bad along the way. This is all inside cricket, irrelevant except that this White Empire is big and you’re also, probably, inside of it. My rule of thumb is that if you’re not fighting the White Empire, you’re in it, so look around. Do you see yourself where you live, as tourists? Do you see your products on your screens? In your wallet? If not, your wallet is being picked, your eyeballs are being poked, and any idea of independence is a joke. I never quite understood ‘the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house’ but I kinda get it now. You’ve got to get out.
If your people don’t have enough money and wherewithal to see their own country, is it really theirs at all? Or are you just a servant class for the invisible White Empire and its risible heirs? I look around my country, or even worse off places like Bali, and see a neocolonial elite of ‘nomads’ and ‘expats’ and ‘sexpats’ and other ‘paupers of aristocracy’, as Marx said about the detritus dumped on India in the 1850s. You look at all the (increasingly brown) Whites dumped on us as consultants and NGOs and advisers and IMF administrators and it sounds like what Marx called the “invention of alleviating exhausted countries by burdening them with new sinecures for the paupers of aristocracy.” There is no substitute for developing your own people to develop your own country and if that means closing off your tourist ‘industry’ for decades as China did, so be it. It makes for a very different tourism when they reopened, one with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
If you don’t control and preserve your culture, aren’t you in the cult of Whiteness instead? White culture is really the act of erasing all traces of other communities in the consumerist worship of the self. It rotates around a White Hole of nihilism and hedonism, never-satisfied attachment, leading to continuous suffering in the Buddhist sense. This inexorably leads to Epsteinism or Dubaism out of the sheer boredom at the ‘end of history’, these people have to do more and more depraved things to feel anything. Epsteinism is not some aberration in White culture; it is its ultimate expression, as you can see from the wide cross-section of elites in participation. As Uncle Ho Chi Minh said, “They disseminate a depraved culture to poison the youth in areas under their temporary control.” Give it a generation or so and their control is not so temporary, no? Hence you saw corrupted satraps also on Epstein Island, pimping out their children too.
Also (I’m going through the same list in different paragraphs), if you don’t control your technology, have you not just dragged a Trojan Horse inside your walls? At any time a cannibalizing color revolution can pop out, or they can molest you by cutting you off from (what you’ve made) normal intercourse. Finally money, the point of it all. If you need a Visa in your own country, are you Mastercard of your fate at all?
These are all pitfalls I see China having avoided, painfully at first, but look at them now. Instead of getting modernity on credit from colonizers, they built it themselves and are truly free now. Each pit starts off well-lined and convenient, but that’s what makes them so hard to climb out of, even before the spikes get you.
It is easy to take the money from tourism, but what are you doing? You are prostituting your country out in an unequal relationship that just replicates colonialism. Often quite literally, with ‘sexpats’ raping your men, women, and children. They say prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but it’s hardly the most profitable one.
In the same way, it is easy to adopt White culture. You can assimilate into existing imperial education and employment systems immediately, but at what cost? You lose your natural-born children and they lose or, worse, sell out their motherland.
It’s easier still to just adopt the White tech stack, it’s a simple subscription service instead of blocking them and building your own (for which you also get scolded and possibly overthrown). But if you rent, then what do you own? As they say, if you’re not paying (the capital cost) then you’re the product (to capitalists). Your people become theirs to data-mine, psychologically experiment on, and use for political perturbation.
And finally what comes easiest still, in their rule by fiat. The money, always the money. The dollars very dear to us, which they just print it whenever they feel. If you have an ‘independent’ Central Bank (independent of your own democratic oversight), if you depend on foreign moneylenders and banks, and bureaucratic leg-breakers like the IMF, you may have a sovereign currency, but you’re not really sovereign at all.
At what cost is what the White media always asks about China, which is an accufession of course. We’ve been made to think that developing our own systems is too expensive and we are poor, when it is their systems that keep us poor in the first place. China obviously paid the cost for all of the above, but look at us who got it all for free. We lost our freedom in the process. When I came back to Sri Lanka this time, with Uber and gambling ads in the airport and the same poverty in the streets, I wanted to weep. It’s not that we should be China. We should be we.
Random gallery of China photos for paying subs. Includes me meeting Xi Jinping and holding a goat. How China Does Tourism Without Losing Itself
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