This is Not About Sister Milk Tea
Or #Me Too
I have already written about her, twice. They are the most popular stories I have published on Medium and the ones I am least qualified to write.
The story that began in August, 2018 with worldwide coverage of rape accusations during the Summer Residency of the Doctoral program in Business Administration at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota has presumably ended.
The legal dimensions of the alleged rape of Liu Jingyao are now ‘settled,’ just before her story could be told in open court.
But this update is still a story about power, bullying, and rape.
Liu Qiangdong, or Richard Liu as he is known in the west, is The Force behind JD.com and is accurately described as the ‘Jeff Bezos of China.’ Richard and Jeff are the hard-driving brutally efficient billionaires who get us stuff Really Well.
Stuff that was pulled violently out of the earth using energy also extracted with great effort from the same place.
You know how it’s obvious that we can’t just keep taking and taking? …that sometime, duh, there has to be a bill to pay?
Well JD.com and Liu Qiangdong are directing us rapidly toward the bill collector — with our grumbling but willing compliance.
He’s just the salesman, the box mover, you might say. Someone still has to buy the stuff. Of course they do, and they buy to meet their perceived needs, which may or may not be created by images and influencers.
Liu and his super star wife Zhang Zetian, the former Sister Milk Tea, made themselves the vehicle for displaying a life millions of Chinese then decided to have delivered to them, usually within 24 hours. JD.com is that quick.
We are all complicit. Some are leading the way.
I don’t know if there ever was a significant #Me Too movement in China but it’s hard to imagine one now. Pressures were brought to bear against a young woman who knowingly accepted public humiliation (Liu Jingyao is not popular in China) to have her day in court.
Then at the last minute she didn’t. My guess is that people close to her — family or friends — were weaponized against her, but what do I know?
I know that, according to Gallup, opinion in the US about China hit 72% Favorable in the late 1980s. Favorability took a hit with Tiananmen, but the serious recent downturn is the result of relentlessly negative media portrayals that did not begin with the Trump Administration but have been getting louder and louder for about ten years.
I know that people in the US are being conditioned to accept war with China.
Presenting Richard Liu as an alpha-male rapist who bought his way out of trouble is part of that conditioning. If you just read that sentence and thought, ‘well, what other way is there to think of it,’ you’ve been conditioned. There are plenty of other ways to think about it and plenty of people in China who think them, which does not make them right.
There may even be other ways to think about China’s policy in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but it has been presented in such uniformly harsh and inhumane terms that even suggesting there may be other frames creates a political island.
The Chinese Government has chosen a different path, an independent path from how the US insists everything be done — from pandemic response to regulating hi-tech to foreign aid. Xi Jinping is mocked and criticized in the west for the steps he has adhered to in order to keep more people alive during the pandemic because there can only be one way. People have been denied vaccines because there can only be one vaccine.
When the US-China War happens, it will be the final violation of humanity. There will be survivors, but they will be traumatized for generations.
We have come to the point where we either stop creating enemies so we can fight them and try to sustain a Forever War machine, or most of us die.
I write about VR and Meditation and other topics I have no standing to write about on Medium and Substack.
I have a black belt in learning and I’ve been meditating for so long you’d think I’d be enlightened but I’m not.
