SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: You ask what China’s development cost. Fair question. But it becomes a much less comfortable question when you apply it consistently. What did Western development cost? Coal smoke. Child labour. Plantation slavery.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2098026845082136882

Sony Thăng

You ask what China’s development cost.

Fair question.

But it becomes a much less comfortable question when you apply it consistently.

What did Western development cost?

Coal smoke.

Child labour.

Plantation slavery.

Indigenous dispossession.

Colonial extraction.

Policy-made famines.

Cleared forests.

Poisoned rivers.

Crushed strikes.

Suppressed unions.

Markets opened by gunboats.

Generations of workers whose suffering disappeared into the word "industrialisation."

You present China’s development as evidence against its system.

Western development, meanwhile, is granted the luxury of becoming "history," severed from the system that produced it.

That is not serious comparison.

It is moral accounting that begins only after one side has already accumulated the capital, infrastructure and power, then turns around and lectures those still climbing.

If the costs of development are going to be counted, then count them consistently.

Count all of them.

Quote

Mary Julia Koch

@MJ_Koch

Sep 9

America's Chinamaxxers marvel at the rapid buildout of Chinese tech and infrastructure. They don't ask about what it cost—labor exploitation, mass surveillance, political repression. My latest in @WSJFreeEx: