China: the long march of the incompetent celestials

"There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horace, than your philosophy dreams of ”. The good William Shaker could never have imagined how well suited his prose would be to the events of our day.

In the last two years we have seen, and lived, just enough to fill a large part of an existence. Sons of an era in which the moon seems so accessible that if the powerful on duty does not venture a trip to Mars, he risks winning the pyrite plaque of the boor of the year, we had to discover on our skin the anguish of an ancestral nightmare. that doesn't seem to want to have an end.

From the stars to ... what? Well yes, the celestial sphere also has its own. But as with Covid, it seems that fate has nothing to do with it.

Let's go in order. A few days ago, leaving the house early in the morning, many of us turning on the radio, after the now usual and "viral" bulletin, found it hard to grasp the news; it was not a swarm of Perseids in advance of August 10, but the much more substantial wreckage of a Chinese missile. The name is bombastic and worthy of the highest expectations, Long March; belonging to a geographical quadrant that has made philosophical doubt its belief, and permeated by a skeptically light-hearted spirit, we thought with indulgent and domestic "Yes ... long, of course ...", but we certainly never imagined that the journey of the astral titan from Peking could be so short.

Passing also the fleetingness, and patience for some engineer who, we have the feeling, will not fare so well, but also having to wait for the plunge of several tons of scrap, well, maybe we would not have deserved this. But after all, how many of those who have left us due to a virus carried nothingpopodimenoche from a bat, did they deserve the atrocious end they had to endure? We help you: nobody.

As indeed we all would have been entitled to clear explanations without cloying rhetorical trappings, about the imprudent welcome given to the fallacious sanitary materials purchased by the legendary battleland which, despite having no less than 1 billion inhabitants, has hardly credibly complained a few thousand victims and a ruthless censorship. But this is another matter, it is part of the things Horace has to deal with on earth.

Wanting to believe the cabal, given the messages released on Weibo from an account connected to the CCP and relaunched by some pathetic phenomenon about the difference between the fire of the Indian funeral pyres and that given off by the engines of the Very short march (pass us the boutade), perhaps there was a justice, unfortunately belated, but which perhaps could have helped to illuminate the darkened cerebral convolutions of great helmsmen e red princes. But we don't believe in it. Indeed not at all.

What is not clear to many, either out of laziness, or because they are part of the quadrant where Carlo M. Cipolla¹ positions the stupid dangerous and hopeless, is that China, without the need to undertake abstruse interplanetary travel, is really another world. We don't necessarily like it. In 1989 the Chinese government bloodily repressed the protests of students and workers: the pavement of Tiananmen Square still drips in a deafening silence with the blood of people machine-gunned by carts, many are still waiting for a gesture of human resipiscence. Human, in fact, which belongs to human beings. Can the person who shot Tiananmen be defined as such? Yet fear is still rampant, commemorations are forbidden, and the authorities have managed, also thanks to advanced artificial intelligence systems, to censor numerous online contents that brought the memory back to this page of history. We do not know, nor will we ever really know how many died, how many were forced to bear the signs of what happened in their souls and on their skin. Yet we live in the happy terrestrial sector, we are so ecumenical and perfect that, ready to massacre - verbally - a boy dressed in blue tights who only intends to give a kiss to a cardboard princess, we forget those rights we enjoy every day, and to which we are so addicted that we do not even know what the famous human rights are.

In a moment of awareness, we are truly aware of the fact that the munificent China, the country that smuggled into the world, with our guilty and neglected acquiescence, the image of carefree Italians who sang the hymn of the Dragon on the balconies ( sic!), does not recognize the rights of Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols?

Honor to the British government which, at least diplomatically, had the courage to raise its voice on Hong Kong, and made visible the malaise felt by a government and a ruling class intolerant to criticism, and which did not accept the revocation of the license to broadcast for the state broadcaster China Global Television Network by the English authority, given the absence of editorial responsibility for the contents, all of which belong to the CCP. Indeed, a culprit, if we want to call it such, here is the relentless BBC that dared to document systems of torture and rape against Uyghur women locked up in the centers of vocational transformation for Xiniang Muslims.

Hong Kong is following the same fate: by the formula one country, two systems, it has come to only the Patriots rule Hong Kong, with the elimination of internal opposition, and the barrage of arrests that are marking the fate of city autonomy; a city on which the long applause of the 3.000 CCP delegates who approved the amendment of its constitution rang like a death knell, which will lead to ensuring that those who are against the party and its government can no longer sit in parliament. It is a question of having knowingly disregarded, by virtue of international treaty law between States, the agreements made at the time, which should have protected the economic, democratic and judicial systems inherited from the United Kingdom; it is a question of having legitimized a free kick in the sponge.

The Chinese repression against the Uighurs and other minorities does not ethnically Chinese it is not applied only thanks to arbitrary detentions, but also with forced assimilation, which in recent years has rewarded marriages between Han men and women of Uyghur ethnicity, which since 2017 have also been subjected to pressure to undergo abortions and to sterilization². After years of denying the existence of detention facilities, and then claiming they were closed, China now claims the camps are actually vocational education and training centers, essential for eradicating extreme thoughts. And let's be clear, for the avoidance of doubt: religion and rights in terms of free sexual expression are not tolerated, even if secret negotiations continue between the Vatican and the government for episcopal appointments with an imperial trait.

The party gained power but lost large stakes soft power, despite an economic recovery of unusual vigor, accompanied both by the usual anti-corruption campaign and by the control exercised on the technological giants³ so that they do not acquire too much power; all while the core of the party loyal to the president watches over geopolitical fault points, and the sinization of dissident provinces continues.

In the background, the Plenum gave the green light to the fifteen-year plan, maintaining the prediction of Xi as great (eternal?) helmsman, scrupulously attentive to the care of the military sector, never so at the center of attention, and to the preparation of the National Congress of 2022, which could deliver an unprecedented and further political consecration, also in light of the personal limits reached by many elders, which would allow to create holidays to fill with new and younger ones faithful. La great rebirth of the Chinese nation is at the top of every project, inextricably linked to the figure of Xi.

Let's go back to ours totem, the rocket; launched to send the central module of the permanent space station into orbit, it weighed at least 270 tons. Obviously the hypothesis of a ruinous relapse, according to the People's Daily, is declassified as malevolent and disparaging "western countryside". Except that the prototype had already crashed into the Atlantic on 11 May 2020 Long March 5B, one would think that, nomen numen, the title less powerfully gramo.

More prosaically, we are faced with the demonstration of a technological awareness that is obviously still immature and unreliable, which loves to pose, but which still has little substance. The problem is that the technical absence is associated with an almost total lack of emotional inspiration, to marry an empty presumption that rests on the nothingness of a snooty ignorance which, it hurts to say, evidently has not lived and if, has lived it , he understood absolutely nothing of a drama that is consumed in the whirlwind of sparks and ashes of thousands of pyres. And this is a particularly narrow-minded event, given that a few days earlier an account from the Chinese public security ministry published a post in which he compared the Indian cremations with the setting up, a year ago, of the "Mountain of the fire god" hospital. ".

If the boundary between genius and madness is blurred, the one between stupidity and petty wickedness is inconsistent and, at least for this week, thrives in a China so touchy as to be resentful for the slightest note, but so light as to forget that the contagion has started, between a thousand lies, from Wuhan.