Here it comes again..

1. If your criticism is based on facts and logics, then your criticism is welcomed.
2. If your criticism is based on rumor and bias, then you will ran off and seek political asylum in USA, Canada or UK, like the pro-”democracy” activists in HK, eg, Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow Ting. Because you can’t make a living in China, everyone knows you and they put you into their blacklist, you can’t find a job. So the only choice is to go for your funder.
3. No one is excuted by the government for criticizing it so far.
4. No one believes in Xinjiang fake news, because those news reports targeted on you, not us. This is your government’s propaganda, not ours. We can tell the illogic and not-make-sense narratives at the first sight but you can’t, because the distance and language barrier made you not able to access information from a much wider range.

The answer lies in the theory of deterrence and enduring paranoia of that most iconic of Cold War doctrine’s “MAD” or Mutually Assured Destruction. If there is one man who was most responsible for both it is General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. LeMay was everything you imagine a Cold War air force general to be — a sports-car driving, martial arts practicing, HAM radio operating, steel-nerved commander for whom the killing of thousands or even millions of civilians was an uninteresting footnote in the larger strategic calculus of war. Indeed, he may well have been the source of that stereotype. he is certainly remembered as both the patron saint of the United States Air Force and as among the most infamous war criminals in history.

Along the way LeMay became one of the guiding lights of American strategic airpower. Now, LeMay didn’t like ballistic missiles. He was a bomber man. So if we asked LeMay this question he would probably respond the same way he did when he advocated for the continuation of the SAC bomber program in a memo dated January 4, 1964:

Ballistic missile forces represent both the U.S. and Soviet potential for strategic nuclear warfare at the highest, most indiscriminate level, and at a level least susceptible to control.

What LeMay is saying here is that the ICBM fleet is, by design, an all-or-nothing proposition. The fact that it exists — out in the middle of the Northwest Great Plains in full view of any satellite that cares to look down upon it — sends a very clear and unambiguous message:

1. The United States has the ability to reduce your homeland to a smoldering ruin
2. The United States will use these weapons if you use similar weapons against her
3. The United States has numerous redundant protocols in place to ensure that it will use these weapons if the time ever comes.

These three statements are the core of deterrence theory. They’re sometimes referred to as the “Three Cs” — Capability, Communication, and Credibility.

1. The enemy has to know that you are capable of destroying them.
2. You have to communicate under which circumstances you would do so.
3. And they have to find your threat credible.

This last “C” — credibility — is probably the hardest to nail down. Credibility amounts to a psychological state: are you really ready to kill hundreds of millions – maybe billions – of people to follow through on your threat? The ICBM fleet is about credibility. It is a Sword of Damocles, hanging over the enemy’s head.

That’s why they can’t have a disarm button.

The mere existence of the ICBM fleet is a compelling argument for the idea that the people that built it have accepted – in advance – the moral quandary of the nuclear age. They are not a gun brought to a knife fight; they’re a suicide vest rigged to a dead-man’s switch. But that promise of crushing retaliation loses some of its credibility if it comes with a “take-backsies” button.

But, paradoxically, the lack of that capability also diminishes the credibility of the ICBM threat. Because they are an all-or-nothing proposition, ICBMs offer very little proportionality. The United States may be more than willing to turn lose its missiles if a Russian first-strike is spotted coming over the North Pole, but would the Americans really jump to total thermonuclear war if just one warhead were used to clear a route for Russian tanks as they rolled into Germany?

Maybe not… and that creates a problem. It invites escalation and that escalation may bring about a general nuclear exchange which wouldn’t have happened if there had been some way to deter that first nuclear use.

This is the weakness LeMay saw in the missile based deterrent. The missiles have their place but, as LeMay puts it:

The employment of these weapons in lower level conflict would be likely to escalate the situation, uncontrollably, to an intensity which could be vastly disproportionate to the original aggravation. The use of ICBMs and SLBMs is not, therefore, a rational or credible response to provocations which, although serious, are still less than an immediate threat to national survival.

LeMay’s solution to this problem was – predictably – the bomber. The ICBM fleet could await the end of days in its silos, LeMay contended, the bomber would be there to handle everything short of that.

And that is largely the role of the American bomber force. Whenever Uncle Sam feels some “gunboat diplomacy” is in order, the bomber fleet is there: flying in joint exercises over South Korea

Rural towns are generally built around one or maybe two industries other than agriculture.

Take my hometown, for example. You basically work in some form of manufacturing, or you’re in dairy and crop farming. Go north a ways to some bigger rivers and it’s dairy farming and paper mills.

Every other business basically operates to support those two industries. Dollar General, Shopko, Piggly Wiggly? They provide the basic necessities for people who work in those industries. The specialty shops downtown provide luxury goods for people who work in those industries. The standard Wisconsin small town 2:1 ratio of bars to churches exist to support those industries.

The car dealerships don’t sell Priuses and sedans hardly at all; they sell pickup trucks and grocery-getter wagons/SUVs. Mostly used; the only new dealership in my town folded about 15 years ago and both lots are still vacant.

A hundred years ago, iron was king in my hometown. It was mostly blast furnaces making iron ore into pig iron and shipping it off to coal country to be made into steel. When the iron mines dried up, it switched mostly to manufacturing.

One of the four major manufacturers in the area closed almost 20 years ago now after it got bought up by a west coast equity firm. It wiped out probably a solid 15% of the school district area’s employment. It came at a bad time, as well, in the middle of a recession, so getting other work was pretty hard. Another industry in town laid off 50% of their workforce and automated two product lines.

Between transfers and people who had to move out of town to find work, enrollment in the school district dropped a solid 5–10%. My class was large, at around 125. By a decade later, the average class size was down to 80.

Automation in the other manufacturing industries has resulted in attrition of jobs there probably by another 50%, though I will seriously credit one of the local employee-owned companies for doing a great job of retaining employees and retraining them for other positions to keep them, which is probably why they’re one of the few manufacturers that has expanded significantly and actually increased overall employment in the last decade. The other manufacturers, not so much.

Then there’s agriculture and advances in that field.

Here’s what my great-great grandfather started farming with:

If you were fast and had a good horse and you worked sunrise to sunset, you could probably plow a 40-acre field in three or four days. Work it down in another two or three. Plant it in another two or three. If the weather cooperated and you worked your horse and your equipment and yourself hard. And the land was already cleared of trees and stumps. You could pull a two-row corn planter.

By the time my great-grandfather was ready to start working the farm, my great-great-grandfather was able to put together enough money for one of these:

That’s a John Deere unstyled model A. The first one on the farm had steel wheels, not tires. On the other side of this is a flywheel that you had to crank to get it started. It was insanely hard to do. But it didn’t get tired and need water every hour or so like a horse. And it would pull a two bottom plow. You could plow a 40-acre field in a hard day if you had enough light. You could probably do a 4-row corn planter with this.

By the time my grandfather was old enough to start working the farm, my great-grandfather had bought this:

This is a Ferguson TO-30. It might look smaller than the A, but it’s got more horsepower (26HP), hydraulics, and a three-point hitch. My great-grandfather bought it after the A needed a serious overhaul and the tractor salesman brought out one of these and a Ford 8N, and my great-grandfather said he’d buy whichever one got to the top of a hill with a two-bottom plow faster. The Ferguson won. (We still have the original in the family, plus the replica model the salesman gave him for buying it.)

You could plow, work down, and plant a 60-acre field in probably three good days’ work, if you were willing to work into the dark a bit. (My great-grandfather actually specifically ordered the tractor without lights because he believed if you were working into the dark, you were working too long.) Still a 4-row corn planter, but you could probably pull a larger grain drill than the A.

By the time my uncle was in high school, the farm was up to this:

That’s a Ford 7600 diesel. Almost 100 HP, over three times as much as the Ferguson. This would pull a four-bottom plow. Live PTO, making it possible to run better and better equipment. My family actually sprung for one with a cab because Grandpa was getting older, but he didn’t like it, actually.

With the four-bottom, a cultimulcher instead of a disk and drag, an 8-12-row corn planter instead of a 4-row that the Ferguson would pull, you could work a 60–80 acre field in three days if you were nice to the equipment, and probably still get some other stuff done.

By the time I was old enough to start really driving around tractors, the neighbors were driving these:

That’s a Massey-Ferguson 8220. The neighbors had an 8240, if I recall correctly. I remember when the guys around the corner bought one of these and a chisel plow. 150HP.

They worked down an 80 acre field in about two hours and planted it with a 16 row corn planter in about three hours two days later.

Today? I have an uncle who does crop and dairy farming. He’s got one tractor with 240 HP that can chisel plow a 120 acre field by GPS in 60–90 minutes, and will pull a 24-row John Deere corn planter. He probably wouldn’t even use it to work down a 40-acre field because that field would be too tiny to effectively turn around very well.

My great-grandfather would have been stunned at that. He might have imagined it, but it would have been a wild dream.

One guy can work ten times the cropland that my great-great-grandfather could have with a quarter of the work.

And yields have gone up, too. Hybrid corn and advances in other crops have made it so that today’s farmers are growing an order of magnitude more per acre than my great-grandfather did.

But all of those advances come at a cost. A bag of seed corn or soybeans can cost upwards of $100 a bag, and is currently going for as much as $180 a bag for the 2020 corn planting season. My grandfather once stormed out of a mill with me 25–30 years ago as a kid when the same sized bag of seed corn was going to be $15 because it was “highway robbery” and he figured he could get it cheaper elsewhere.

The same is true of dairies. My great-grandmother milked 20 cows by hand; a large operation at the time. In the 50’s, they got an electric vacuum pump system after the farm got electricity, and built a bigger, modern milking barn. That bumped them up to 60 head. In the 70’s, they were able to add on and up that to 100 head. By the early 2000’s, they were a small dairy, starting to be unable to compete. My uncle made some bad decisions, but he leveraged the land like crazy and cheated my great-grandmother out of her share of the farm to afford a 240 head new barn with a milking parlor.

He’s still a small operation now and is close to bankruptcy.

There’s a farm about two dozen miles over that has 8,400 head and the farmers don’t even milk the cows now; the cows have an RFID tag and when the cow feels like it wants to get milked, it wanders over to a stall and a robotic milking machine reads the tag and hooks itself up. The system tracks the cow’s individual production.

When my great-grandmother was doing the milking, there were probably fewer than 8,400 milking cows in the county.

But that huge operation is probably over a $10 million investment. That would have been unfathomable for my great-grandfather.

Whether crop or dairy, it’s been evolve or die, and evolving requires growing into a massive factory farm. That equipment and the buildings are expensive. And the margins are thin. If you couldn’t get enough credit to expand, you went bankrupt. If you had a bad year or two, you went bankrupt. The margins on all of that are razor thin; the farmer is probably actually netting pretty little, if not taking a routine annual loss many years.

Small farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing right now because factory farms are keeping the prices so low as to make the margins non-existent or below break-even for the little guys.

The area where I grew up is a moonscape of rotted out, fallen down barns, abandoned outbuildings, and lonely old farmhouses with lonely old retired farmers who have given up. They sold off all the equipment, and if they can rent out the land for enough to pay off the mortgage, they do, or sell it off for enough to satisfy the liens and keep four or five acres with the house. And when the old man and his wife pass away, the kids, who have moved to the city, don’t want to take care of it anymore. I’ve seen a dozen or two of those old houses just demolished; the outbuildings used for storage if anything at all.

Maybe 10–20% of the farms that were operating when I was a kid thirty years ago are still milking. Six of the seven neighbors my grandparents and uncle had that were farming when I was a kid are out and quit wholesale. The one left isn’t doing dairy anymore, the kid, who’s almost exactly my age, sold off the dairy cows and most of the equipment, does some basic crop farming, and grass-fed beef. One of the last neighbors to sell had gotten up to about 1400 acres that he’d owned and another 400 he rented before he sold out to a guy from Iowa who trucks up even more massive equipment than I described above, works up the whole thing in less than a week, and moves on to the next bit.

One guy. With probably a dozen hands. I have no doubt that he owns or rents over 36,000 acres.

Who needs a whole town to support that anymore? He isn’t going into my hometown for groceries every week, or the downtown coffee shop on a routine basis. He isn’t in the bars regularly. He isn’t buying stuff from the local hardware store, or tires and oil changes from the local mechanic.

Even if he were local, he certainly isn’t buying the same amount as the 100+ farm families he’s replaced.

Infrastructure also drastically changed my home area. Infrastructure, especially transportation infrastructure, dramatically reduces the friction costs of commerce. If it costs less to move stuff to market, people will build stuff there. If not, people won’t.

The railroad was first on this. Wherever the railroad went, towns grew along it. Where the railroad didn’t go through, those places died or never grew. There’s a little town of about 300 people, about big enough to have an “unincorporated” sign and not much more.

There’s a huge Catholic cathedral there, built to serve probably a 150 family congregation. Today, it serves probably a few dozen for a whole area.

That’s because the railroad was supposed to go through the town, which is why they built it. There’s half a dozen other old businesses that used to exist, too, the hollowed out remains of their buildings still visible, built in anticipation of a train that literally never came.

Because the railroad company built ten miles east, instead.

That town died. Or rather, never grew at all. The businesses mostly folded, with the exception of a bar and a butcher that finally relocated when I was a kid. There was a fancier restaurant there that closed up about five years back finally. It had a for-sale sign on it since before I graduated high school, but the guy who owned it could never find a buyer and finally just retired.

Today, railroads are largely replaced by highways and interstates, though freight rail is making a comeback in some places. Not enough to support a whole town, like it once did, but enough to keep some businesses going.

The main corridor in my home area is now I-41, 20–30 miles from town. It’s only recently been made into an interstate. When my parents were first dating, it was only two lanes. I still remember when there were no overpasses and it was cross-traffic most of the way by us.

As the interstate and a few four-lane state highways have grown, the towns along them have stayed steady or grown with them in some spots.

The towns between the main highways? They’re mostly gone or drying up. One got virtually wiped out by a tornado twenty-some years ago and never really recovered. Every year, they keep talking about consolidating the school district with a nearby one because enrollment is too low to sustain it independently. The elementary school closed fifteen years back and K-8 are all in one building now.

I remember a couple years ago, I was going through Iowa on my way to a wedding and they’d recently moved I-80. The main highway that it now paralleled used to go through a bunch of little towns. We got off the super-slab and went through some of them because we weren’t in a hurry to get to Colorado. Half of everything was boarded up. I asked the cashier about it. People don’t want to exit the highway and drive four miles south to get to Casey’s General Store. They just bypass the towns and wait until the next bigger stop. Where towns could, they’d tried to move towards the highway, but that’s often not possible.

It’s what happened to the towns on Route 66. A few remaining nostalgic pieces of it remain, but most of it’s just gone. Whole towns were just erased.

But even my hometown isn’t seeing new facilities getting built for manufacturing and the like, because of a lack of infrastructure. There’s a decent state highway into town that they keep in reasonable repair, but it’s a ways to the interstate still. The existing facilities keep churning out stuff, but if the companies are expanding, it’s along the four-lane highways and the towns and cities on those, still reasonably nearby enough, I suppose.

One company bought out that old plant that went bust I mentioned and turned it into a big R&D facility, since it doesn’t need much import/export and it’s smack in the middle of town. Getting trucks there is a pain in the ass. When they come up with something, they send the specs over to the shiny new plant two towns west, which is built on a four-lane highway with direct access to Madison and Milwaukee.

Internet is another infrastructural element that is significantly lagging in some of these places. Nobody’s running fiber to my hometown for the most part. A lot of people still have DSL. Maybe satellite. Apparently Verizon or Frontier is upgrading some of downtown somewhat. The last time I was at the local coffee shop to use the wi-fi, the speed test ran up to 15 megabits.

The cell coverage depends on the provider, but it’s spotty even in downtown. Verizon is okay. US Cellular is the preferred choice. Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T are complete dead zones. That makes it hard to operate a retail business these days, which is increasingly dependent on the internet for sales and backend that we take for granted. You’re not selling much if you can’t use so much as a Square reader at the local businesses. And you’re not getting a lot of tourists if their phones are off the grid before they get to the city limits.

And younger people don’t want to live in a town where they can’t get Netflix or Prime Video at even standard resolution half the time. So, they’re not moving there, or leaving for greener pastures if they can.

Because there isn’t enough demand, the cable companies don’t bother upgrading the lines unless they have to. Because there isn’t basic high-speed broadband, nobody moves there to create the demand. It’s a vicious cycle. My folks just moved out of the place where I grew up and moved to the edge of a moderately large rural town. They get one internet provider, which maxes out at 8Mb down, 4 up. If they were two blocks over, they could get another provider with much better bandwidth, but where they are, they’re just screwed. A lot of places are like that. There’s no competition, and relatively light demand, so there’s basically no reason for the telecoms to bother running anything out there.

At least my hometown and surrounding area are still close enough to major transportation routes that Fed-Ex and UPS will come all the way out. My in-laws have to drive 20 miles into town to pick up anything. They’ve been where they are for fifteen years and two weeks ago, a Fed-Ex truck actually went all the way to their house for the first time, ever. The delivery driver said he would never do it again. They don’t even get mail delivery to their place; they have to go up the minimum maintenance road five miles to a turnaround if it gets delivered, and they maintain a PO box in the slightly larger, but further away town for that purpose instead.

Water is increasingly an issue, too. New water treatment plants with higher capacities are expensive and getting more so. Rural areas have a lower population density to spread that cost around, and that means either a need for increased state aid, or higher property taxes.

If you don’t live right in town, that water isn’t probably coming to you. So, the farmers and people who live outside of town, but who are in the township and so would pay the increased taxes to pay for it, vote against it. They’re already paying literally tens of thousands of dollars for septic systems and wells; paying more property taxes for someone else’s water on top of that, while getting nothing in return, is a hard sell.

Even trash collection is an issue here. Depending on the size of the town, you might have to do it yourself or contract with a company, because the town itself might not provide it. Again, friction cost for a business, and another thing that sometimes makes people not want to move there. I grew up with it, so the idea of a garbage guy that actually comes to your house is still weird to me, as are the ideas of a) not having an organic bucket that needs to get hauled out to the brush pile by the line fence, b) not having a burn barrel for paper garbage, c) not needing to separate out metals from other recycling to take to the salvage yard when there’s enough to get the higher price, or d) that the garbage guy comes at a specific time rather than taking it to the dump on Saturday morning or dropping the cash in the can or slot to pay for the bags you put in if you come not on a Saturday morning.

When rural areas lack easy access to the kinds of infrastructure that reduces commercial friction costs, they’re at a serious disadvantage. It’s more expensive to do things, it’s more difficult to attract workers, and as a result, what sustains these small towns begins to go elsewhere.

The decline itself then turns into a vicious cycle. As the major sustaining industries and businesses give out, or the resources like a clay or gravel pit start to dwindle, the people that can leave, do, especially younger people.

That increases the concentration of people remaining in poverty.

And with an increased concentration of poverty comes a lot of the problems that arise out of that: increased crime, increased drug use as depressed people try to self-medicate, depressed property values that make it even harder to get out, and more.

The schools end up with lower enrollment, and lower tax revenues, and lower state aid. So they have to start cutting services. And then people move out of the district because they want their kids in a better school, if they can.

Any young people who can get out flee. That leads to a brain drain of the community. It’s hard to get young professionals to move back if they think they’re never going to make enough money to justify it, or lose a quality of life that they enjoy elsewhere.

So, that means fewer social workers, attorneys, doctors, etc. serving these areas that can help mitigate these problems of poverty, and it spirals downward even more. People of means have fewer kids; people without them have more but can’t support them. Services get progressively thinner, making people more desperate.

More and more desperate people often end up getting into the criminal justice system one way or another, and once you’ve got a felony, everything is substantially harder. Housing, employment, everything. That traps more and more people, as well.

People that are trapped get more and more hopeless. Suicide rates skyrocket.

Eventually, the whole thing just gives out. The remaining people die off. The houses and businesses are abandoned and left to crumble.

We’re not just talking about your boom and bust ghost towns of the Wild West. There’s plenty of these that are modern, some dying in the last few decades. There’s a few places I know of around where I grew up where the last living inhabitants were present just a few years ago. Today, there’s a handful of vacant buildings and nothing else left. You can walk right in a few of them. Some of them are so far gone that you wouldn’t even know that several thousand people once lived there in some cases as recently as thirty or forty years ago just by looking at them.

One town near where I grew up used to actually put up their own population sign and an old man would repaint the number by hand every time someone died or moved away, until he died and nobody took over the task. There was a lumberyard/building center there, a church, and a bar, when I was a kid at least. It was a quarry town for limestone before that, but the easily accessible limestone ran out in the 60’s. There were probably 100 residents total, maybe, when I was a kid, but at one point there were about 1900 people who lived there. The businesses closed and the church is boarded up now. About twenty houses remain; two others were destroyed by fire – one started accidentally by a homeless person who was squatting in it after it was abandoned. The businesses are all vacant, the for-sale signs faded and dusty.

Sometimes a natural disaster comes in and finishes the job. Gays Mills in Wisconsin has been flooded completely out several times in the last decade. Hundreds of residents just gave up and never came back when the insurance gave them an out. Some businesses are trying to stick it out, or relocate as disaster relief has tried to make it possible to move the town to higher ground.

Lastly, the death rate is exceeding the birth rate. Sixty to eighty years ago, you needed ten kids to run the farm, and the infant mortality rate was considerably higher.

In the last 20–30 years, though? People aren’t having babies. The birth rate in a lot of these rural areas is well below replacement. The oldest generations are dying off with increasing rapidity every year.

Death rates among 18–64 year olds in rural areas are also on the incline. The opioid crisis really has disproportionately affected rural areas not because it’s higher per capita, but because there’s just fewer people overall and so the same per capita impact has a greater overall impact.

But suicides are where it’s gotten really out of control. The rural suicide rate is bonkers higher than urban areas. It’s as much as 25% higher in some areas, and it’s risen over 40% in the last 20 years. There’s been a lot of research into this, with hypotheses ranging from lack of health care (both in insurance and in care providers) to stigma around mental health to simply increased access to guns, but there has not been a good consensus around what factors are most prevalent or most contributory.

This is perhaps the most literal reason rural towns in America are dying: they are literally seeing more death than birth.

Some other rural towns are growing around new industries. In Kansas, feedlot and meatpacking plants are growing substantially. Feedlots are smelly as hell. You don’t want to live anywhere near them. Seriously. Even setting aside the animal cruelty issues that are often present, they’re just awful places to be within ten miles of. But, they also provide jobs. For the desperate rural worker, any port in a storm.

In Minnesota, it’s chicken and turkey processing. There’s a handful of towns that have poultry processing, and they’re doing pretty well for now.

But those jobs are not very secure. They’re hard labor, and if someone gets laid up, there’s enough people willing to take the jobs that someone can just be replaced. Anti-union sentiment from conservatives that dominate these areas don’t make anything easier, either.

Additionally, these industries also creating a lot of tension because the local natives don’t want those jobs due to the lack of security and don’t often apply, or can’t pass a drug test to qualify; instead, these jobs are attracting a lot of immigrant labor, such as Somali refugees. These are more typically than not legal immigrants, but that makes little difference to some people who are already mistrustful of any outsiders. I have a relative who moved into a rural town thirty years ago and still is considered a transplant and given second-class citizenship to a generational local.

But many of these industries are also boom-and-bust. The oil fields in the Bakken and the Permian Basin led to huge expansions of parts of North Dakota and Texas, but as quickly as they exploded, they’ve died off as oil prices crashed in recent years.

Those feedlots and chicken processing plants are likely as insecure. All it takes is a commodity oversupply, or a trade war, to shutter whole plants. And if that’s the primary employer for the area, it can take a significant piece of the town when it goes.

Some rural towns are still doing okay, or even growing a little, and in sustainable ways.

What’s kept my hometown alive is that it’s a good bedroom community that’s 30–45 minutes driving from two reasonably large urban areas and less than two hours from two more metro areas. Those are people who want to live in a small, safe, quiet neighborhood, but they don’t work there. They commute to the larger cities in the region.

Enrollment is back up a little in the school district with people moving in to live in a quiet spot, and class sizes are back up to about 95-ish. The school has some good programs such as an award-winning music program that have brought in school choice students from neighboring districts (with corresponding state aid), or even gotten some individuals to move there.

The tax base has remained about neutral or grown a little as developments and new housing grow slowly. Areas that were farm fields when I was a boy are now subdivisions generating more property taxes than the agricultural zones they once were.

There are some rural areas that have this geographical quirk and are mostly becoming the new form of suburbs for those wealthy enough to either buy a nice place in a small town, or a couple acres of former farmland and build a house out in the country. The cost of living is usually reasonable or even sometimes lower than the city or suburbs; housing is certainly cheaper even if certain commodities are a bit higher.

But there’s a lot of rural areas that don’t have that quirk of geography.

Get out in the middle of Nebraska, or Iowa, or Kansas, or Minnesota and there’s a lot less. It’s a long, long way to the urban centers.

Those places are increasingly seeing the demise of rural America the hardest.

No, I don’t think the Chinese government would take such an approach.

“If you sanction me, I must retaliate against you and launch corresponding sanctions, otherwise I will be weak.”

This is a common understanding in Western society that governments must respond to public sentiment. If other countries “hurt us”, we “must tit for tat”. Retaliation must be direct, reciprocal and obvious. Only then can public sentiment be released, and politicians’ approval ratings not drop.

So we discovered a key point: the way of revenge is centered on politics, not interests. No one cares whether doing so will bring greater benefits to society or cause greater harm.

“If you sanction me, I must retaliate against you, but the method may not be reciprocal. How to do it is left to professionals.”

This is a common perception in Chinese society, which is full of patience and believes that professional officials can handle it better than public sentiment.

With this premise, we return to the Tiktok case. If Tiktok is forced to sell by the United States, will China’s retaliation be to force Apple to sell it? No, that’s simply impossible

There is a proverb in the Chinese world: If a dog bites you, it does not mean that you have to bite the dog too.

There are many ways to take revenge, you must choose the one that is most beneficial to you.

In the past few years, China has been challenging the status of the United States in global economic activities, and the United States is in a state of hysteria. They are trying to use all available means to contain China. However, we find that China’s response has always been mild, even making people feel a little weak.

In fact, they have been choosing the way that is best for themselves, rather than the most “tit for tat” way.

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The United States has imposed tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods; they believe that in order to contain China, it is worth raising prices in the United States.

China’s most “relieving” response should be to impose additional tariffs on $200 billion of U.S. goods, but China believes that this will affect the import of technology and raw materials by Chinese companies, which is not worth it.

China’s actual approach is to expand BRI, join RECP, seek to join CPTPP, expand trade scope, offset the influence of the United States, and stop buying soybeans from American farmers.

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The United States has imposed five rounds of comprehensive sanctions on Huawei; they believe that it is worthwhile to undermine the fair international image of the United States and use “national security” crimes against a company in order to curb the development of China’s 5G technology.

China’s most “tit for tat” response should be to select an American company, such as CISCO, or Microsoft, or others, and impose five rounds of comprehensive sanctions. But China believes that this will affect these companies’ operations in China, reduce Chinese jobs and government tax revenue, and this is not worth it.

China’s actual approach is to change foreign investment laws and allow foreign companies to independently invest in telecommunications, automobiles and other industries. Then successfully brought Tesla to China.

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The United States has imposed “Chip and Science Act” sanctions on hundreds of Chinese companies; they believe that destroying the market and revenue of the US semiconductor industry can delay the development of China’s AI technology, which is worthwhile.

China’s most “tit for tat” response should be to select a group of American companies, such as General Motors, Ford, Walmart, and Starbucks, to implement some kind of reciprocal “sanctions bill.” But China believes that this will affect these companies’ operations in China, reduce Chinese jobs and government tax revenue, and this is not worth it.

China’s actual approach is to sanction several U.S. arms dealers and ban the export of rare earths to the United States. Launch the semiconductor development plan encouraged by the government, establish the National Semiconductor Fund, and recruit talents from all over the world to strengthen its semiconductor industry.

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Some Western public opinion has produced many similar news: Tesla is banned in China, and Apple mobile phones are banned in China. They seem to want to tell us: Look, they are just as bad as us;

But the truth is there, these are lies. The CEOs of Tesla and Apple have both praised the performance of the Chinese market.

Some Western public opinion will also tell us: Google is banned in China, Youtube, X and Ins are banned in China; so it is reasonable for us to ban Tiktok.

But some facts are deliberately ignored. Bing is running very well in China, and Amazon and Paypal have been running in China for 20 years. The crux of the matter is that China has enacted laws, companies that are willing to abide by them stay, and those that are unwilling to abide by them leave. China actually does not have a “ban” against a certain American company.

Now, the United States is demanding that Tiktok be forced to sell, maybe it will be Temu’s turn in the future, Shein

China’s most “tit for tat” method should be to choose an American company, such as Apple mentioned in the question. Asking them to “force a sale”

But China will definitely not do this. On the contrary, we may see them take more opening measures to encourage more foreign companies to participate in the Chinese economy.

They are deliberately taking a completely different approach to doing things than the United States. Use openness to fight closure, use trade to fight sanctions; use win-win to fight zero-sum games; use construction and manufacturing to fight bombs and destruction.

They are very patient and they are creating a global persona:

I don’t have many slogans, and I’m not very good at publicity and storytelling. I will only use actual actions to tell the world: who represents justice and friendship, and who represents evil and destruction.

In the short term, China’s approach seems inefficient, negative, and weak. But over time, many things change.

How about my high school principal?

Waaaayyy back, early 1970s, everyone arrived at school and was greeted by an announcement to go to homeroom.

Sounds normal, except that we only went to homeroom for things like report cards. Normally our first period class was attendance center, so a sudden announcement of starting the day with homeroom was weird.

Everyone went to homeroom, and there was a lot of wondering what was up – even the teachers seemed puzzled.

The principal then made a strange and rambling speech over the PA system.

It was about the parasites infesting our school.

It turned out that his definition of parasites was students who wore their coats to class, students who sat on the floor, students who held hands with :::gasp::: students of the opposite sex, students who, well, acted like teenagers.

Any student seen doing these things would be suspended for the rest of the day.

It didn’t take long.

By second period, everyone was wearing their coats. Half the school had on pieces of paper that read “I’m a parasite and I’m proud.” Members of the football team (all boys at that time) walked from class to class, holding hands. Any student with a free period was in the core, sitting on the floor around the tables instead of in the library or somewhere else. The Madrigal singers, in full costume ready for a performance, promenaded through the main hall with their hands in position (boy raised, holding girl’s in an “elegant” fashion), but not touching (it looked really stupid). I’m sure there was more, but that’s all I saw.

His policy was rescinded the next day. It’s really hard to suspend 2000 students, and that’s what it would have taken.

I suggest you visit China. It reversed my preconception. I am from Norway, North Europe. A rather modern and advanced society.

On my first visit to the US over 20 years ago, I was surprised at how backward and old fashioned it was. Movies had let me to believe it was the epitome of modern society. I visited several states on the East/South-East. Very backwards digitally. Terrible infrastructure. Unwalkable. Dirty. Hard to find quality restaurants outside of big cities. Dead city centres in medium sized cities.

I went to China a year or two later, and the opposite struck me. It was a highly modern society. Highly digital. Fantastic high-speed infrastructure (that is even better nowadays). Super clean, modern cities. I was mainly in the Jiangsu province that time. Loved it!

I suggest everyone to go and form their own opinions. I really fell in love with Suzhou, not far from Shanghai.

I had been away for a couple of months diving and arrived home after a long flight. As soon as the taxi pulled into the parking square I noticed that where I once had a solid wooden door to my house I now had plywood sheet. So I immediately knew something was wrong. I got out of the taxi and approached my house where I was met by my neighbours who told me that the previous night, the Police had broken into my house and searched it. Now furious I called the Police and demanded an explanation.

A few minutes later the Police arrived and together we entered my house. Once inside they explained that a few weeks earlier a body had been found on the beach in the North West of the country, and there had been a public appeal to help identify the deceased. Following this appeal my brother (who I have not seen for over 30 years) had called the Police and claimed the body was me. He had even been taken to identify the body. With this information the Police arrived at my address and spoke to my neighbours who confirmed that they had not seen me for a number of weeks. This reinforced their incorrect assumptions that the body was mine, and as it was considered a suspicious death, they decided to break into my house and examine it, in case there were any clues that could help them solve the death.

The body found on the beach was later identified.

So yes there had been someone in my house, the Police, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling knowing that they had been through all of my possessions, and then I was left with a bill for a replacement door, as damage caused by Police in the execution of their duty, is apparently excluded from house insurance.

China takes countermeasures on US company, two individuals against Washington’s Xinjiang-related sanctions

China has announced countermeasures against a US company and two individuals that have long collected sensitive information to provide so-called evidence for illegal sanctions by the US, after the US newly added two Chinese officials and three Chinese companies onto a sanction list citing so-called human rights concerns.

US intelligence data company Kharon and Edmund Xu, director of investigations of Kharon and Nicole Morgret, a former researcher from Center for Advanced Defense Studies, will be prohibited from entering China (including China’s mainland, the Hong Kong SAR and the Macau SAR), said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning on Tuesday.

China will freeze the property of Kharon and the two persons in China, including their movable and immovable property, and prohibit organizations and individuals in China from transactions and cooperation with them.

In December, US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced to sanction two Chinese officials for alleged link to human rights abuse. Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security added three more Chinese companies to the so-called “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” (UFLPA) blacklist.

In response, Mao said that the US once again fabricated and spread false narratives about China’s Xinjiang region, imposed illegal sanctions on Chinese officials and companies under the pretext of so-called human rights issues in the region, seriously interfering in China’s internal affairs, seriously violating international law and basic norms of international relations, seriously tarnishing China’s image, and seriously damaging the legitimate rights and interests of relevant Chinese officials and companies.

China firmly opposes and strongly condemns this and has made solemn representations to the US, Mao said, urging the US to stop slandering and smearing China, revoke the illegal unilateral sanctions against Chinese officials and companies, and stop implementing erroneous bills such as the so-called UFLPA.

If the US refuses to change course, China will not flinch and will respond in kind, the spokesperson said.