I was inspired to write this article after a discussion on Telegram regarding some techno-optimist Romanian Youtuber who was apparently anti-China; in fact people from the conversation maintained the idea that this guy was more anti-China than my Sofa associate, Lucian, the one publicly acclaimed by a Romanian boomer “God from the Sofa”. Jokes aside, this is true in the same way that, in the first Star Wars episode, when Obi-Wan and Anakin were in the ocean and attacked by colossal fish – there’s bigger fish out there.

Well, that is me; the one who, if I had a fleet on my hands, I would have blockaded all Chinese access to the Pacific with zero remorse.

Why such a radical statement?

The answer is both simple and complicated; the short answer would be that humanity as a whole has regressed irreversibly due to the addiction based on the world’s cheapo workshop, China; a sample of the consequences of globalisation, as well as the disproportionate addiction to a single industrial power that we observe now and for many years to come is when the entire planet was shoved into the chicken coop in 2020 and a few countries even in 2021; suddenly the logistical model of Just In Time deliveries went у пизду and a lot of supply chains have suddenly grinded to a halt due to component shortages, for example car chips. This is still the peak of the iceberg when it comes to problems and decisions taken at a political level, but the people themselves are not devoid of any fault, because it’s not like the status quo got shoved down their throats; the vast majority has chosen to comply to the system and not bother thinking about the potential future consequences of such choices.

Still, let’s get going with the story.

In the race to build stuff as cheap as possible, we became the slaves of globalisation

Go into any shop and become conscious of the place the products you buy are made in; you’re going to find out very fast that a lot of them are made in China, and plenty who are not directly made in China, use materials sourced from China.

China has became an expert in undermining critical economic sectors, because in the eyes of the CCP they would rather lose money through such stratagems if it came with a win on the geopolitics and economic front to dominate one of these. We’ve seen this recently in Serbia when it was about opening a lithium mine. Aleksandr Vučić being a bridgehead for China in Europe, managed to easily mobilise the plebs in order to not risk his relation to China by not allowing lithium battery factories to appear, whether directly or indirectly controlled by China.

Yes, almost all lithium batteries used in the electronic devices that we all have, from laptops, smartphones, electric cars, cuckmobiles (also known as e-scooters), external batteries…the list goes on. It’s not like you need something special or high-tech to fabricate batteries someplace else; Tesla has proven this pretty clearly, but Tesla is an exception because it is a niche company where the added value of products is very big, and Musk can afford such acts of independence; well, others are not so lucky: if you want batteries, you better make friends with Xi, because only Xi’s country has basically non-existent pollution regulations and artificially cheap and numerous labour force to undermine other Gigafactories like Tesla.

Any sort of smartphone manufacturer that you may be, when you invest tens, if not hundreds of millions in R&D, miniaturise compnents and still make them relatively accessible, it’s all for naught if you don’t have an electricity source to power the entire shebang; you would lose constantly against others who won’t have any problem buying batteries from China just because you want to go against the trend, and the public will punish you by not buying the product, because the public doesn’t care about such things.

OMG, what do you mean that the public doesn’t care?

When my Sofa associate says that people are not stupid, people are fucking stupid, it sounds like cynicism and absurdity, but it really is like that and if I were to gather sufficient evidence, we wouldn’t even end up enumerating, let alone explaining all of them by the end of 2030. Contextually to this article, people don’t care about where the things they own come from, and from that moment on we can’t also talk about the Science Fiction which are the consequences related to this ignorance.

People continue to buy iPhones despite its manufacturers jump out of the window to commit suicide and the company installed anti-suicide nets. People continue to buy fashion clothing and accessories despite the fact that forcefully sterilised minorities are transformed into slaves to source the cotton for them. You can’t argue that consoomers “didn’t know” what they were doing when they are voting with their wallet by buying such products, while at the same time there are a myriad of other things in the same situation, one way or another, that we buy without considering the consequences; there, now we removed the potential moral crusaders from the discussion.

It’s clear that from this point of view we don’t have an audience if we are to organise a campaign of informing people; people will continue to buy things taking into consideration in a great part the price of the product, the price which is kept artificially low; at the same time technologies got cheaper and trickled down naturally to be more affordable for the larger public, good or bad, but especially the ones we need to be observant are the unknown ones.

Undermining national economies

(This part is explained using Romanian examples, as it wasn’t intended initially to be in English, so apologies in advance if you don’t get the context)

Here is where I’m going to lose the appeal from some of you when I will say that from an economic point of view, Ceaușescu’s push towards industrialization was a good idea, but an exaggerated one at that. Where exaggerations occurred was that the inherent inertia from a centrally-planned economy who also wished for autarchy, these were the leading reasons where situations that were impossible to manage appeared, which inevitably led to the economic collapse and Ceaușescu’s self-helicoptering; however, in itself the decision was still good, but after the collapse of Communism that rug was pulled from under everyone’s feet part due to the political decisions, but also part due to the population which didn’t understand what is going on.

This aspect still applies for the current political class (because our politicians still come from the same population), already the global situation is complicated where, in the European Union you are undermined from 4 sides: German mercantilism, straight-up undermining from China, then the strangulation of ever-expanding hyper-regulation from Brussels and from Bucharest (same principle applies for other European nations, btw; look at how idiotic local and national laws are for economic activities); for the first two it’s difficult to do something without a parallel structure that could compete economically (something that the Intermarium Initiative could solve in the future), but for the last two, especially the national regulations, that is why we live in collective misery and we live with the mantra “the one that bows his head, the sword shall not cut him”.

In Bucharest it’s fascinating to walk in all sorts of random shops where, instead of finding garlic from the Giurgiu region, 20-50km South of the capital, you find garlic brought all the way from China. At the same time we haven’t got a national retailer built up from domestic capital anywhere in the top 20 national retailers (on the 21st being Annabella with shops around Dâmbovița and surrounding counties, and further down the Unicam Cooperative which started from Satu Mare and has a few shops around Transilvania and Vaslui).

You can never convince me that a super-state entity like the self-serving Brussels bureaucrats, that function like in the former USSR (that is why we part-joke and part-seriously use the term EUSSR or Европейский Союз) knows better what is the perfect curvature of bananas, how drinking water actually does not hydrate you, or why you should have a tampon tax of 5% just because the Commission decreed so. Let’s not even talk about the monstrous Common Agricultural Policy, this neo-Valev Plan of the European Union. (English source materials about this policy are scarce – like all relevant elements of Soviet policy that might make people reexamine the Европейски съюз)

No, no, hell no, and if you insist, you deserve to be hit with the shovel straight in the head, under the expectation that maybe your synapses will rearrange themselves, in order to not pretend that this EU circlejerk can have an opinion related to domains far away from their realm of understanding even remotely.

The same thing can be said about Romania, where aside from the regulation shoved down our throats by the EU, we got out own class of self-serving bureaucrats on the Soviet model from Bucharest, who think that Uncle Lajos from rural, Hungarian-majority region Harghita needs to be told the number of maximum pigs he must have on his property and how to take care of them, or now in the current energy crisis, to no one’s surprise, the State gains the most out of it.

No one should mess around with food or other strategic sectors if we are to look at the historical standard of the people, but the economy overall, in sectors critical to the well-functioning of the country, a people undermined from the outside and from the inside will remain on par with the proles described by Orwell in his famous book. Sure, if something will change regarding perception, it’ll happen at a grassroots level, but we got to get rid first of all of this omnipresent mentality of “the State should do this and that”.

Covert colonialism via Belt & Road

Always pay attention to people who speak positively about China, because friendships with China already end up being disastrous for the country that is bewitched by the miracle of “reciprocal economic development and friendship between the people”. We got a considerable list of victims that fell for plenty of reasons, most of the times due to a mix of naivete and corruption, in the trap of modern colonialism:

This list is by no means complete, but you get the idea how venomous Chinese investments are. Things will continue as they are because there are plenty of countries and political structures ripe for exploitation by Chinese imperialism, but at least let’s learn something from the examples provided by these nations to not fall in the same trap, but in particular to boycott a Communist state which transforms entire countries into colonies of debt slaves for their interests. Each country has its own Sinophiles, but there are also threats from the EU itself which is full of Sinophiles, led by the German political class which also threatens security when we talk about relationships with Russia.

Okay, what is there to be done?

Boycott anything of Chinese manufacturing; plenty of times products made locally or in another place close by are just marginally more expensive, but on the longer term more reliable when you factor in the cost, but also its lifespan. This applies to electronics, but also household appliances, clothes, products and the sites that made a business out of selling copies, like Alibaba/Aliexpress.

Undermine Sionphile sympathies; like in the case of avalanches, it’s sufficient just for a few CCP agents or shills for free to enter in political structures, and from that moment on it’ll be much more difficult to uproot the cancer, at a considerable cost as well.

Pay attention and undermine propaganda coming from international Chinese institutions; The Confucious Institute in particular is the main culprit, being a significant institute that initiates naive people in sympathising and shilling for the CCP, by using the rich Chinese culture in baiting people towards them. TikTok is also a significant problem, being used constantly by a humongous population of naive people, especially young people over the age of 13, without them being aware that they play China’s game, when we look at how prevalent pro-China propaganda is on the platform.

Victor Crainic

Lived on three continents. Financial consultant. Co-host and content judge for World Sofa Report on Freedom Alternative.