I can’t even. Two choice bits:
Beijing’s urban design looks like something straight out of James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”. The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes - blocks of 10 adjacent 30-story buildings demarcated by 8-lane roads. The government buildings follow the same pattern: huge structures divided by extremely wide boulevards. This layout seems designed partly for social control - during zero-COVID, authorities could lock down 10,000 people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces through the city.
I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.
“They’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build skyscrapers”
Only 500 years old? So pretty new, then.
“I went to see the amazing Buddhist temple in the middle of Emeishan”
Oh I guess the bulldozers missed that one.
This talking point is very common among reactionaries of his ilk. I can’t articulate the broader point but what they try to say is something like people in eg. USA being able to resist losing their homes to larger projects impedes development. This is pretty insane considering poor people have their neighbouhoods gentrified everyday. But also they only view this from the angle of authoritarianism. Meaning that a more authoritarian government will be able to push people out of their homes better than a less authoritarian one. They completely gloss over the issue of how the affected are compensated.
I don’t actually know what kind of procedure China follows when relocating those in the path of large projects but it shows how weird these guys’ thinking is.
Western perspective contradicting itself again, of course. Whenever a “nail house” in China comes up on Western media people ridicule the government for just building around them, because the government and developers lacked any legal way to forcibly relocated people. You never see that in Western countries with their eminent domain laws.
Once again, reality is the opposite of the prevailing narrative.