When I saw the story above last night, what I foolishly call my mind raced to two other related matters. One was the failed pseudo-sequel to “A Fish Called Wanda,” “Fierce Creatures,” in which the entire cast of the earlier, far superior comedy reunited to perform a John Cleese screenplay about a corrupt zoo-owner who, among other schemes, tries to pass off a mechanical panda as the real thing. The other was this story….
…from 2011.
I believe the Chinese zoo episodes have greater significance than their obvious silliness. It is evidence of how thoroughly Mao’s cultural revolution and the grotesquely warped Bizarro World ethics they required have obliterated Chinese ethics alarms throughout the culture. This is a nation that first and foremost, as no respect for its own people, and is prone to treating them like morons. Second, it is a nation that breeds managers, leaders and persons of authority who think cheating, lying and achieving objectives by any means possible is the way to succeed. Finally, China has a society, culture and government that cannot be trusted, and is unlikely ever to be trustworthy. Not because its zoos try to deceive its visitors, but because only in a sick and devastated culture would any public zoo even try such a thing—-and Chinese zoos have tried it twice.
This is also part of the reason Ethics Alarms continues to and will always call the pathogen that did such terrible and in many respects permanent damage to our society and culture “the Wuhan virus” and not the anodyne, woke substitute “Covid.” China’s corrupt society inflicted the malady on the world and we should remember that. It was a lot worse than painting dogs to look like little pandas, but the catastrophe was part of the same ethics rot.
We’re not there yet. Here, we just disguise radical Left mediocrities as moderate, competent leaders and assume our idiots will fall for it.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s also a reason never to set foot inside a single China made mega structure.
These structures oft appear in propaganda pieces with some subtitle “China built this in a year why can’t the West do things like this?” or “craftsmanship and pride in work are dead in the West”
Only when those structures start cracking and decaying by year 2, you never see the follow up piece.
Anyway- all authoritarian regimes that require a fear of a subordinate every surpassing you naturally squashes individual excellence BUT they know they have to fake excellence to show their system to be better than Free Market Republics. So, all authoritarian regimes end up being giant Potemkin villages.
I spent a single evening in China, on a stop-over on the way to Mongolia. In the supposedly decent hotel I was at, I was harassed the whole time by a hotel employee trying to sell me women “for fun.” He called, he knocked on my room door. And Disney and the NBA, among others, suck up to these people.
All cultures have flaws – many cultures have far more flaws than others. Some cultures have so few flaws compared to their good sides that you can *almost* ignore the flaws.
We’ve been destroyed by moral relativists and cultural relativists that ALL cultures are equal. You can’t even rightly criticize what is absolutely dismal about some cultures nor can you extol what is good about your own.
Wait, I forgot, you CAN denigrate the culture that got us to the level of liberty and prosperity we enjoy today. That one is up for critique and dismantling.
And in such an authoritarian regime – you’ll never know if this guy was running a black market side hustle or if he was a government agent baiting you into an incriminating circumstance.
Oh, I highly suspect this was ingrained in Chinese culture long before Mao. Mao may have intensified it, but this is an imperial culture where you don’t dare say that the emperor has no clothes.
Exactly. It’s a culture custom made for authoritarianism. And has been authoritarian forever. As is the case in Japan. In many respects, the U.S. has been unique in pushing back against authority. The French rebelled but now they’ve willingly gone back under the spell of the current royalty, the EU technocrats in Brussels. It’s so amazing that most of Europe still reveres its royal families. What are they thinking? The Russians killed the Czars but promptly installed Stalin and have had dictators ever since. Hispanic culture and Muslim culture revere strongmen. The American left wants passive aggressive strong persons. They vilify a normal leader like Trump as a strongman. No, he just stands for something. Which is verboten in left land.
Everyone should go to China and see it firsthand. Eye opening.
Remember during the Wuhan virus initial spread? We saw reports of how China put up emergency hospitals in days! The West can’t do that!!!!
Turns out the abysmal death traps looked like indoor water parks at the first sign of rain. I recall seeing a video that managed to leak out of China of water pouring through a ceiling light fixture.
Personally, I think I most resent China’s having introduced compulsive mask wearing into U.S. culture. Yuck. It’s embarrassing.
Whatever the mechanism to bring about the hiding of a face – religion, pandemic, whatever – I think it’s all a component (intentional or not) of degrading the individual with a public display of forced submission.
And it wears down an individual personality.
Asian culture (east Asian at least) to a tee. In the US, it’s “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” In Confucian countries, it’s “the tall nail gets hammered down.”
I heard a discussion on Confucianism- for all the claims the dirty hippies make that eastern philosophy is an enlightened approach to ethics, it actually sounded pretty problematic to me.
But then again, never trust a hippie, they’re bad people pretending to be good.