It’s interesting to think that if Wu had more love in the West that the Chinese authorities would have been more slow to crackdown on her…
I think we all remember back in 2017 or so when the Hong Kong protests were at the forefront of everyone’s mind and, still, the crackdown continued, and the resistance was crushed.
And what has China’s response to the popularity of the Ukraine war been? To question its generally positive relations with Russia? No, not at all. China shores up its own front against Taiwan and its trade with Russia is growing exponentially. BRICS gets stronger.
China will not bow to popular Western opinion no matter what. Blaming Musk for this is pretty asinine.
Russia lived with sanctions for 70 some years as the Soviet Union, and has always been prepared to endure more. They are an economy built around raw, natural resources and can be largely self-sustaining…
And it has been pointed out, that Iran has been fighting off sanctions very successfully over the last twenty, thirty yeas…
Their secret then is Russia’ secret now, more or less:
India will trade with anybody and be neutral, and it isn’t a large task to create a shell company in India that peddles your wares throughout the whole of the world, repackaged and rebranded. At the height of Trump’s reintroduced sanctions on Iran, I was able to eat Iranian dates in South Korea - a country that followed US protcols and actually made it impossible for Iranians to start new private bank accounts unless in specific circumstances and did everything they could to place barriers on trade.
Heed you, these shell companies used to exist in places like Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., but US sanctions shut this down. It all moved to India…
Which is likely where a lot of Russian exports head when they aren’t just being imported completely independent of the Western world to places like Iran and China… China, of course, is another factor, as trade between RU and CN have increased exponentially over the last few years since the war started…
I could go on but, already, I am rambling… Suffice it to say, there’s a mssive block of countries that hate Western imperialism and/or are neutral and/or already face sanctions, and this network continues to trade with one another, and they also have begun to help facilitate one another trading with the West, either knowingly or just because they lack the will or robust enough resources to police it up.
Globalization is its own enemy when it comes to the West trying to impose sanctions, IMO.