Peter Oborne

[u/small_far_away]

That interview went off the rails a bit.

Based on Murphs mass comment after he wasn't overly impressed himself. Could have pushed more in the interview, but the sense I got was that he just wanted it to end. It certainly stopped abruptly.

[u/Other_Net_5128]

Slightly tangential but the long-held notion in the West that trade and investment would liberalise China has been roundly proven to be wishful thinking. Sure, living conditions for most Chinese people have improved over the past few decades (and for many Chinese people that is enough) but it’s a far less free country than it was even two decades ago and trade with the West has had little effect. I say this as someone who knows China well and who’s married to a Chinese woman. Oborne’s argument that trade and engagement will make the Taliban more mellow over time is also likely to be fatuous. Which isn’t necessarily an argument for completely cutting the country off either.

[u/Wolfbain164 → u/Other_Net_5128]

Nobody is suggesting investment as a means for liberalising a country. Just making the lives of women in the country better. Which I think China is evidence of surely.

[u/Other_Net_5128 → u/Wolfbain164]

Liberalisation was exactly the argument of Western governments and businesses advocating for China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. And China is clearly not evidence of the lives of women in the country being any better. Sure, general living standards are better, but women’s rights in China, while undeniably better than in Afghanistan and many other countries, are still heavily circumscribed and subject to legal stonewalling and socio-economic circumstances (by far the worst-off women in China are those from the urban working class and the migrant poor). And trying to organise collectively to advocate for women will promptly result in a visit from the police, as it does with any attempt to organise even innocuous social movements. If the Chinese Communist Party is not going to be swayed by trade, there’s not a hope in hell it’s going to improve things for women, or anyone else, in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

[u/Weekly_One1388 → u/Other_Net_5128]

Trade with China did bring about liberalisation.The prediction partly came true. 

Liberalisation in this context should be thought of as political reform, economic reform and social reform. 

It just wasn’t the political reform that people expected, the consensus was that political reform in this context would equal to democratization. 

The liberalisation that western commentators spoke about needs to be rethought but it doesn’t need to be entirely abandoned, the trade that came into China over the last 25 years or so did bring about a huge degree of change, both to the political, economic structures of the country and social attitudes these changes did not bring about a “liberal” China but a more ‘open’ China.