”The truth is the Chinese has an aggressive work ethnic to be admired”

——————–

‘Aggressive work ethic’, is an understatement.

Repeating comments from the thread on Chinese having legal title.
+++++++++++++++
Each nation that decides to invest brings good and bad with it. Where I think there is an issue, is that China’s presence is hard to separate sometimes as being state or private. That said, individuals are not the state.

China has a wide and varied economic and political agenda, and of course the population and economic muscle to make a lot of difference awywhere. Their interest in Barbados or other Caribbean islands is hard to explain in terms other than a bigger ‘footprint’. I do not know if Barbados has committed or will commit certain political favours to the Republic of China for not having fallen into the arms of Taiwan.

But, China’s economy represents a huge market and this region would do well to exploit what opportunities that presents. I think, personally, that our approach to China in certain areas has been too slow, too timid and too predictable.

We have very limited lingusitic skills in Chinese tongues but we also have an important business-oriented lineage to China in most islands (perhaps less so in Barbados) that we could/should use.

FYI, the Chinese government representatives here mentioned about two years ago the fact that the Chinese know little about rum (prefering spirits such as scotch), and wondered why Caribbean countries were not exploiting that possible market edge. I memory is right, Jamaica put in its embassy and is making strides in that market. The Barbados effort I think stalled but could be part of the new ambassador’s remit. But, truth is, we have few goods and services to offer and many more goods and services that the Chinese can supply. Work ethic and financial muscle are areas where the region stacks up poorly against the Chinese.

Poor governance can no longer be disguised. I believe that the Bajan population should be held responsible for their poor leadership. I wish the country of my parents a bright future. However from where I stand your future looks dim. I will be visiting Barbados shortly; I’m not expecting great things. Sorry for sounding pessimistic.

本典係歷史語言辭典，取音以兼收歷代字音為目的，故與教學使用或有差異，請詳見說明。

姓名標示. 您必須按照作者或授權人所指定的方式，表彰其姓名；但不得以任何方式暗示其為您（或您使用該著作的方式）背書。

Attribute this work:

所謂的「姓名標示」是什麼意思？引領你前來此處的網頁中嵌入了含授權資訊的後設資料，包括原作者想以什麼方式為人表彰等。你可以使用此處提供的 HTML 來引用此作品、並表彰出處。使用後，你的網頁上也會有授權後設資料，方便他人尋得原始作品。 為再使用或散布本著作，您必須向他人清楚說明本著作所適用的授權條款。（提供本網頁連結便是最好的方式。）
如果您取得著作權人之許可，這些條件中任一項都能免除。
這份授權條款中，沒有任何侵犯或限制作者著作人格權的條文。

**Adviser to the President** // August 9, 2009 at 7:58 am
“本典係歷史語言辭典，取音以兼收歷代字音為目的，故與教學使用或有差異，請詳見說明”[When I ran this through a translator program, it returned “To be applied externally. Must not be injested. Keep away from children.” Is that correct?]

@FED UP
While you choose or are obliged to sleep (depending on time zone), I write, and read, and cook breakfast, and watch the news, and monitor financial markets in Asia and the Middle East. Then comes church. Time is elastic. Multitasking is the way.

@Fed Up

I agree with you totally with regards to the multiple postings by Living in Barbados or dennis jones.

Usually I click on the comments section first,but as soon as I saw he had taken up the whole blog with his shite I just skipped to something else.

The very thing for which BU/David is admired,that is,his loose policy of free speech,may be the very thing that destroys this useful blog.

Hardly anyone visits Dennis jones’ site,so he comes here and completely dominates the blog with his trite remarks and nonsense statements on every conceivable subject,of which of course he has lots of information to dispense.

David seems to be the only one left that thinks living in barbados is actually making a useful contribution here and not instead ‘deliberately frustrating’ the bloggers.

May be who knows they will get so frustrated and eventually drop off BU and then living barbados will have acheived his aim.

Steupes.

@FED UP

BU will take the person who wants to share opinions over those who come to BU read and silently move on. We learn by sharing opinions. BU disagrees with LIB on many positions he espouses but the discourse generated is where some good value can be taken away.

Are you game?

“We learn by sharing opinions.”[We read and hear often that people in Barbados are afraid to speak out openly for fear of reprisals, etc. I am no unknown quantity, yet I speak out freely. Now, some want to say such expression is too much. But in a world/country where people seem afraid to speak, what can one do? Live in silence? Come on, people, give it some thought. The unheard voice has no weight, except as silent insolence.]

Speaking of Chinese in Africa, the article below is an example of what can happen when Africans migrate to China. BTW the sub head of the article is “For Africans, the US is yesterday’s news: China is today” Watch the video link of the protest

http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/674969

@ANONYMOUS

Everything and everyone has its moment in the spotlight, sometimes fleetingly other times for a longer time. Whatever happens on the go forward with BU our conscience is clear on what we think has been achieved.

Nothing last forever!

LIB ”mental independence is a daily dose”

You are allowed to be mentally independent as long as you conform to pre-conceived ideas of what that ‘definition’ means in the minds of certain others.

LOL

Peace

@ Sargeant // August 9, 2009 at 9:01 am
The story is of course complex and sits interestingly with another posted link on a BU thread about Chinese attacking merchants in Algeria. But ‘protecting turf’ occurs on both side of any ‘transaction’ as vested interests battle for control.

“For a decade now, thousands of African traders have descended upon Guangzhou – the hub of a region called “the workshop of the world” – to buy goods cheaply and re-sell them back home for a profit.”[I discussed this trend with some businessmen here yesterday, citing my experience in west Africa: the shrewd traders do something else–they keep their foreign exchange outside the country, if there are exchange controls in place, fearing that official reallocation of FX may mean that they will be begging to get back what they have already earned. They mentioned this as a particular concern for them in Barbados, and how they keep all but the minimum FX on island.

In Guinea, this kind of behaviour eventually unhinged the exchange rate of the country concerned, where at least one set of parallel rates developed with a huge spread between the official and the parallel rates; FX shortages were stark; and economic functions made more fragile. There it was made worse by a banking system that could not cope and an economy that was essentially cash based.]

LIB

I hope those politicians were speaking on the record. We want names, dates and places, no anonymous quotes. It’s interesting that the BLP & DLP ministers engage each other while some bloggers always have their political battle armor on. I know the PM reads the blogs (at least he used to) not so sure now that he has his hands full but don’t keep us in suspense we want to know what the former PM said over those “mangoes”.

@FED UP

Carry on smartly and Good Morning to you!

Whereas, we in the People’s Democratic Congress (PDC) do favor Barbados having – in principle – closer ties and cooperation with the government and people of mainland China, and esp. as part of a thrust to diversify Barbados’ overall political, social, cultural, material and financial relationships away from those ones that we have long had with many countries in the West, and which themselves have long essentially entailed, to a greater degree, a colonial imperial domination by Great Britain over Barbados from the 1600s – 1960s, and since the 1960s imperial domineering by the USA over us, and which too have long essentially signified, to a lesser degree, chronic dependence by Barbados on those said countries in the West for its further survival and development, we nevertheless believe strongly that Barbados must NEVER EVER see Barbados-China relations as being fashioned or mediated by considerations of Barbados being at the behest of yet another future possible imperial behemoth in this increasingly complex global political material age. NO!! NOT EVER!!

Therefore, Barbados MUST NEVER EVER voluntarily devolve final determination over the running of many of its political affairs to another global superpower, like it would have been doing for so many years ( post 1966 ), as in the case of the USA – OR MUST IT EVER allow itself to be colonized again by another country.

In the interim, though, what we in PDC have done is to recognize that the People’s Republic of China has achieved the status of being a nuclear armed great power in international relations, or of being a rising hegemonic power in global politics and economics – as partly defined by its strengthening military capabilities – by its sending of men into space ( the first Chinese into space took place on 15 October, 2003 ( Wikipedia) – as partly defined by its ever growing political economic market clout across the world – by its massive accumulation of foreign reserves – by its relative quickness at becoming a WTO member, and by its brilliance at hosting the 2008 Olympics.

Having stated the above, and without even pretending to hide our own acceptance of the intellectual biases inherent in the Western concept: ” super power” – we wish to say that we are NOT THOUGH PREPARED to view China even as a RISING SUPER POWER, NOT even in the next 20- 30 years if ever at all.

While we in the PDC will never wish to see again a unipolar world after the USA collapses as the lone super power, or a bi-polar world, as was the case with the Cold War politics of the USA and the USSR, our clear position is that China will NEVER EVER become a super power essentially because China has NOT EVEN started to replace the USA as the de facto dominant force in major international bodies like the UN, IMF, etc.; China – in spite of having the largest population on the earth – has NOT even been able to create a known set of distinct national ideologies for assisting in cultivating domestic and international material progress – presently its huge and phenomenal material and financial growth is mainly coming through its adopting and practicing of many Western economic, investment, currency , stock market and financial principles; China – as a potential military test of of its imperial capacity — has as YET to take back Taiwan or conquer any far flung territories via the export of aggressive militarism; it has NOT been able to establish itself as a technological leader of this world ( even India, an erstwhile competitor with it, seems to be further ahead than it is in this area); it has NOT been able to develop and market a specific identifiable set of nationally based internationally accepted cultural brands like those that America has developed with Coke, Mac Donald’s, NBA – ( its image has been badly damaged by contaminated food and toy exports); and it has yet to greatly develop many of the top strong transnational corporations of this world like the USA has done with IBM, GM, Exxon Mobil,etc.

Moreover, in huge contrast to the USA – a country largely founded on a divergence of migrant and enslaved people – China has NOT even been able to properly integrate many of its dissident ethnic, linguistic and religious regions and groupings into the mainstream of Chinese society, through whatever appropriate political arrangements – for example in the Tibetan region there is always a great clamoring for independence from China.

Furthermore, the ethnic and religious pluralism that is pervasive in China is so seriously in conflict with the so-called anti-democratic one China communism of the rulers of China that if such pluralisms were allowed by the Chinese Communist Party to become fully defined and asserted at any time in the future such pluralisms would threaten the existence of the current Chinese state formation, which quite unlike the USA was never founded on so-called liberty and happiness, but has been result of the long long march away from internalized dynastic rule.

One major reason why the Soviet Socialists/Communists were able to become a super power in the 50s to the 80s was because they were able to greatly unify many of these ethnic and linguistic groupings through the exaltation of the supremacy of the ideology of communism, and as a substantial consequence of that there having been the minimization of the racial, social and other conflicts that were realized among so many ethnic groups in the states and regions that had made up the Soviet Union. Well, many of these potential internal conflicts were indeed externalized through the Soviets taking over of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan etc. What country is China taking over now??

Another reason why the Soviet Union became a super power was because Russia was the dominant state in the Union.

Hence, one reason why China will never become a super power is because it has failed massively to have a FEDERAL ARRANGEMENT – which for a country like itself is one of the necessary pre-conditions for developing into a super power. Comparatively speaking, the Han people – though the vast majority of Chinese and the dominant ethnic linguistic most productive people in China – are NOT even an equivalent to the Russian state and the role that it had played in Soviet and by extension international affairs.

Therefore, the fact of these many restive regions and very bitter inter-rivalries between conflicting peoples and the various huge costs its takes for the Chinese state to rule over them constitute a check on any serious territorial and spatial expansionism that China would otherwise have had to do if it were to harbor false notions and ambitions of becoming a super power. As such, these kinds of factors, as well as China’s proclivity to cling to tradition, do seriously eliminate its potential for being a modern or traditional global super power. No wonder millions of Chinese still think and behave as if China is still a developing country!!

Also, other disabling factors to its achievement of such a status are that the Chinese “communists” have NEVER properly demonstrated enough maturity to allow for greater freedoms and responsibilities for many of the quasi-nation peoples coming under its rule, like the dominant Muslim regions in the north west and south west of China. And even though it has to some extent crushed the local pro-democracy movement and local the spiritual Falun Gong movement, it still has NOT been able to properly recognize that with greater freedom and democracy and human rights being systematically granted to more and more of its people, that such granting of rights and responsibilities and the political and other benefits derived from such, will surely further lay the basis for greater Chinese progress, development and prosperity, and hopefully for the rest of the world.

Finally, while we in PDC welcome the increasing and balancing role that the People’s Republic of China has to play in global affairs, it is far more important for Barbados not to overstate the importance of China to Barbados, esp. given our colonial experience and our history of imperial relations; given the kinds of commentaries we have just made, generally, and given the fact that China will NEVER EVER become a SUPER POWER, particularly.

Surely, we in Barbados need to remember the Barrowian philosophy: “friends of all and satellites of none” – as a central statement that has helped to define many of our foreign our foreign relations. Surely!!

PDC

David I like the newer and older comments feature.

It saves time scrolling through 200 plus comments to post a new remark,as well as giving you the choice to read just the latest posts.

@FED UP
“By the way, you’ve only to tell me to stop reading your (and LIB’s) blog. No problem.”[I do not recall a comment from this ‘name’ on my blog. I welcome feedback, positive or negative, as I think does David/BU. I can assure you that blogspot.com (that I use) does not show IP addresses. WordPress.com (used by BU), however, does. Maybe David/BU willl corroborate that.

Re the Chinese authorities stopping and checking Africans’ immigration documents on the street and raiding areas searching for illegal immigrants “intimations of ethnic cleansing” anyone?

Wasn’t that the accusation made when Barbados sought to enforce its Immigration laws? If Ramphal can finger point why shouldn’t the Nigerians?

@WoW

Themis has a point.If the status quo is carried into the next general election PM Thompson will have to battle a credibility issue. Remember it took Thompson the staleness of a BLP government to overcome the ‘waving of the IMF letter’ in Queen’s Park in 1994.

I think we should take a lesson from China on how to develop both our Agriculture sector and Manufacturing Industry.

and Bimbro’s indicating that he is bored, suggests at least a need for some interaction–even with his much disliked Jamaicans.

****************

No thank you, LIB!! I’d rather remain bored than nauseated!

Not happy about the Chinese mocking Bajans at all. What do the Bajans plan to do about it? Improve their behaviour or don’t change!!