American Bible versus Chinese Dao Dejing, What is the real crisis of global order?

 

Modern capitalism has deep religion roots 

 

Andrew Sheng: My view is that the real crisis with the liberal democratic order is not whether autocracy is on the rise, but whether the liberal order is fit for purpose in a world threatened with existential climate change. After more than 40 years of liberal order, the world has had the highest social inequality, accelerating climate change, rising seas and natural disasters and failing governance everywhere.

 

American Bible vs Chinese Dao De Jing

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`
WRITING in Foreign Affairs magazine, Professors Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon argue that the core crisis lies in illiberalism on the rise. Namely, the contest of the century is not simply US-China, but liberal democracy versus autocracy.
`
This week, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned the recent Quad meeting in Australia that “China wants to dominate the world.”
`
On the other side, the Russians claim that it is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that is expanding eastwards, whilst China accuses the United States of Cold War mentality in trying to contain China and stir up trouble over Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
`
The American foreign policy community has always lamented that despite opening up economically, the Chinese did not convert politically to the liberal democratic model, thus justifying American sanctions against China.
`
By not converting to American ideals, the next step is to contain these “revisionist” powers.
`
This “convert or contain” approach smacks of fundamentalist Christian beliefs to either evangelise or defeat the non-believers.
`
Modern capitalism has deep religious roots.
`
German sociologist Max Weber was first to pronounce that the Spirit of Capitalism came from the Protestant Ethic.
`
Even though capitalism existed in ancient China, India and other cultures, its modern ethos was based on Protestant Christianity that revolted against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and 16th century Catholic monarchs.
`
The Puritan streak in American capitalism favoured hard work and acquisition of assets, not because it was greed, but because it was done for the glory of God.
`
Capitalism greed is, therefore, not only rational and modern, but founded on religious ethics.
`
To be rich is to be glorious (for God). Forget about the fact that wealth may have been founded on exploitation of other human beings and mother nature.
`
International relations theorist Alexander Wendt argued that modern social science (including international relations) is founded on the key assumptions of materialism (reality is physical); reductionism (complexity can be reduced to simplicity); things behave in law-like ways (determinism); there is cause and effect (mechanism); and there exists objective truth (perfect objectivity).
`
These assumptions are all embedded in American foreign policy of rational liberal democracy ideals, rule-based order; beliefs in individual human rights and in God that are enshrined in the US Constitution and coins – In God we Trust.
`
In contrast, Chinese statecraft is founded on the 10th century BC I Ching (Book of Changes) and the 4th century BC Dao Dejing (the Book of the Way (Dao) and Virtue or De). Unlike the Bible, the most translated book in the world, which begins with “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, the Dao (the second most translated book) begins with “The Dao that can be expressed is not the eternal Dao”.
`
In other words, the Dao challenges almost all the assumptions that lie in modern social science: that no rule is forever, rights are balanced with obligations, good is embedded with evil, and nothing can be taken for granted.
`
For Christians, God is perfect and man’s job is to seek perfection. According to the Dao, there is no perfection except constant change.
`
Life evolves through the interaction of complexity and its parts. The individual (a rational man in economics with rights) is part of a collective and therefore has obligations to society and nature.
`
There is no absolute good or perfect information, since Daoists believe that good and evil exist together in all beings and everything is relative, changing in cycles of time.
`
China’s dual circulation policy can easily be understood as coming from Daoist philosophy.
`
One example of the contradiction between liberal democrats and autocracy is the issue of legitimacy, often without self-reflection on their own record.
`
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 showed that based on samples taken across 27 countries, China has the highest trust amongst the general population (index of 83), compared with the United States (43) and the UK (44), with the US Trust Index declining 10 points since 2017.
`
Thus, the crisis in global order is not one of ideology, but very fundamental worldviews as to whether the world is unipolar and mono-culture, or poly-centric and where diverse systems and beliefs can co-exist and co-create with each other.
`
My view is that the real crisis with the liberal democratic order is not whether autocracy is on the rise, but whether the liberal order is fit for purpose in a world threatened with existential climate change.
`
After more than 40 years of liberal order, the world has had the highest social inequality, accelerating climate change, rising seas and natural disasters and failing governance everywhere.
`
The environmentalist say that we have less than three decades (to 2050) to get to net-zero on carbon emissions.
`
The demands on society to change are huge.
`
Democratic governments facing elections that cost more and more to campaign in order to win find it harder and harder to take tough structural adjustments that are necessary to achieve both carbon neutrality and social equality.
`
As Cooley and Nexon themselves admit, “in their current form, liberal institutions cannot stem the rising illiberal tide... Any attempt to grapple with this crisis will require policy decisions that are clearly illiberal or necessitate a new version of liberal order.”
`
The recognition that you may have to do bad things to get good results is at the heart of the difference between the Bible and the Dao. The simple, naive version is that good things can only be achieved by righteous good politicians. The Dao recognises realistically that there is no gain without pain and no perfect leaders.
`
For liberal democrats, the idealist search for the moral best has ended up with electoral promises remaining promises, no delivery of better jobs, human well-being and fairer social and ecological justice.
`
Whither global order?
`
For Christians, let us pray. Daoists will dialectically wait for more changes to come.
`
by Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

By Tan Sri Andrew Sheng (born 1946) is Hong Kong-based Malaysian Chinese banker, academic and commentator. He started his career as an accountant and is now a distinguished fellow of Fung Global Institute, a global think tank based in Hong Kong.^[1] He served as chairman of the Hong Kong Sec

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Western concept of democracy lacks historical contexts, disrespect cultural difference, conquest by force, colonisation, slavery, genocide, human rights, doctrine of discovery embodied in their laws !

 

THE GLOCALISATION OF HUMANITY

  https://youtu.be/oS5QqS9C_xw

 

Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West. What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy? (PIC: Chinese President Xi Jinping waves as he attends a gala in connection with the anniversary - AP)

 "Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force".

China Does Not Recognize The Rule-Based International Order imposed historically by Conquest, Colonisation and Force !

 https://youtu.be/_ThU1vvW0A4

China has never interfered in the internal affairs of other countries and never obstructed their development. It will never accept any country interfering in China's internal affairs and obstructing its development. Today's China has long been different from the China of 100 years ago. No one and no force should underestimate the Chinese people's firm will and strong ability to defend national sovereignty, security, and development interests.

WHY is Marxism thriving in China and not in Marx’s place of birth? Why is Buddhism more practiced in East Asia than in India? Why has Islam more followers outside Saudi Arabia?

Ideas and religion spread through globalisation, but it was really their localisation that created more believers and followers.

What succeeded was not globalisation, but glocalisation, the internalisation of universal ideas and beliefs by the many, and not just the few.

Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West.

What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy?

London School of Economics Emeritus Professor Megnai Desai, writing on “Marx’s Revenge”, made the shrewd observation that the Chinese Revolution in the 20th century was very different from the French and American Revolutions in the 18th century.

The French Revolution was a domestic rebellion against the monarchy and the landed gentry, whilst the American Revolution was rebellion against British foreign domination

Both created republics and preached equality, liberty and freedom, but both went on to create empires, one by conquering lands from the native Indians and Mexico, and the other through Napoleon’s rampage in Europe.

The Chinese Revolution was different because it was simultaneously a struggle against foreign invasion (Japanese and earlier Eight Nations Alliance) as well as the Nationalist government that favoured the capitalist and landed classes.

The CCP won because it represented the rural peasantry, rather than adopting the Comintern strategy of starting the revolution from the cities. In short, the CCP localised universal Communism with Chinese characteristics. It was practical rather than ideological.

By the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Chinese thinkers struggled with what would replace the old order.

The country fell into warlordism. The Nationalist Party under Sun Yat-sen struggled to balance the conservative wing that represented the landlords and capitalists, and the left wing influenced by Communism and socialism.

Chinese revolutionaries followed closely the Russian Revolution in 1917, because it was then the most recent model of social transformation. The Chinese elite understood that the rebuilding of China from the collapse of the old order was a monumental task. The country was backward and the uneducated masses were unprepared for modernity, vulnerable to foreign conquest.

Even though they felt the burden of history, they also understood that there was no parallel in history on the scale of Chinese transformation.

The Chinese Left took to Marxian thinking because Marx gave both a historical and political economy perspective on how capitalism would evolve, as well as a philosophical tool in terms of Hegelian dialectics.

Marx used the profound insights of the Prussian philosopher Hegel that transformations come from contradictions of opposites, in which change will not happen in a smooth line, but through revolution or discontinuity.

Marx’s discovery of dialectic materialism – in everything, the contradiction and interaction between opposites lead to the destruction of the old and emergence of the new – was music to the ears of those who sought a path out for the New China.

Furthermore, the fundamental ideas of dialectics were very similar to the Chinese yin-yang philosophy of the I Ching and Dao Dejing. As Lenin put it, “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things. Development is the struggle of opposites.”

Having theory is one thing, but putting these ideas into practice is another. We can only appreciate China’s miraculous transformation from a backward economy to the second largest economy in the world by understanding that this was done through essentially three dictums: “seek truth from facts”, crossing the river by feeling the stones” and “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

In other words, make fact-based decisions, always try or test under uncertainty, and above all, be practical and have an open mind. Change is a process between conflicting contradictions. There is no absolute black and white.

Historian Ray Huang, one of the finest sinologists of his generation and a former Nationalist soldier, wrote in the Preface to his classic “China: A Macro-History”: “Chinese history differs from the history of other peoples and other parts of the world because of an important factor: its vast multitudes.

In the imperial period as well as in the very recent past, practical problems had to be translated into abstract notions in order to be disseminated.

In turn, at the local level the message had once again to be rendered into everyday language.”

It is the reduction of very complicated policies into simple language that the Chinese people had to understand and own that enabled them to buy into the transformation, despite the huge sacrifices at the individual and community levels. The people’s eyes are clearer than those of the elites.

The US-China rivalry has done the world a favour by contrasting very fundamental worldviews. When the West preaches a value and rules-based order, what is meant is that freedom, democracy and individual rights are absolute – essentially a zero-sum “my way or no way.” Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force.

When China, Russia, India or any other country deviates or disagrees with that, then they must be contained, confronted or sanctioned. Localisation or being different is almost seen as deviant rather than a celebration of diversity.

Civilisations reach their highest levels through tolerance and openness. When they become inward-looking, fundamentalist and mono-thinking, fragility and decay sets in.

The world is simultaneously becoming more global in inter-connectivity, even as regionalisation, fragmentation and localisation speeds up.

Glocalisation, the simultaneous contradiction between global and local, is to be welcomed, rather than feared.

The future will always be open, uncertain and contradictory. Such diversity is the nature of humanity.

Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own

Source link

 

Footage of a brutal gang attack on Asian students |Daily Mail ...

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9751931/Footage-brutal-gang-attack-Asian-students.html

 

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The much larger group attacks the three Asian students outside an Inala shopping centre (pictured) as one girl is pulled to the ground by her hair

 

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THE GLOCALISATION OF HUMANITY

 

https://youtu.be/oS5QqS9C_xw

Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West. What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy? (PIC: Chinese President Xi Jinping waves as he attends a gala in connection with the anniversary - AP)

 "Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force".

WHY is Marxism thriving in China and not in Marx’s place of birth? Why is Buddhism more practiced in East Asia than in India? Why has Islam more followers outside Saudi Arabia?

Ideas and religion spread through globalisation, but it was really their localisation that created more believers and followers.

What succeeded was not globalisation, but glocalisation, the internalisation of universal ideas and beliefs by the many, and not just the few.

Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West.

What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy?

London School of Economics Emeritus Professor Megnai Desai, writing on “Marx’s Revenge”, made the shrewd observation that the Chinese Revolution in the 20th century was very different from the French and American Revolutions in the 18th century.

The French Revolution was a domestic rebellion against the monarchy and the landed gentry, whilst the American Revolution was rebellion against British foreign domination

Both created republics and preached equality, liberty and freedom, but both went on to create empires, one by conquering lands from the native Indians and Mexico, and the other through Napoleon’s rampage in Europe.

The Chinese Revolution was different because it was simultaneously a struggle against foreign invasion (Japanese and earlier Eight Nations Alliance) as well as the Nationalist government that favoured the capitalist and landed classes.

The CCP won because it represented the rural peasantry, rather than adopting the Comintern strategy of starting the revolution from the cities. In short, the CCP localised universal Communism with Chinese characteristics. It was practical rather than ideological.

By the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Chinese thinkers struggled with what would replace the old order.

The country fell into warlordism. The Nationalist Party under Sun Yat-sen struggled to balance the conservative wing that represented the landlords and capitalists, and the left wing influenced by Communism and socialism.

Chinese revolutionaries followed closely the Russian Revolution in 1917, because it was then the most recent model of social transformation. The Chinese elite understood that the rebuilding of China from the collapse of the old order was a monumental task. The country was backward and the uneducated masses were unprepared for modernity, vulnerable to foreign conquest.

Even though they felt the burden of history, they also understood that there was no parallel in history on the scale of Chinese transformation.

The Chinese Left took to Marxian thinking because Marx gave both a historical and political economy perspective on how capitalism would evolve, as well as a philosophical tool in terms of Hegelian dialectics.

Marx used the profound insights of the Prussian philosopher Hegel that transformations come from contradictions of opposites, in which change will not happen in a smooth line, but through revolution or discontinuity.

Marx’s discovery of dialectic materialism – in everything, the contradiction and interaction between opposites lead to the destruction of the old and emergence of the new – was music to the ears of those who sought a path out for the New China.

Furthermore, the fundamental ideas of dialectics were very similar to the Chinese yin-yang philosophy of the I Ching and Dao Dejing. As Lenin put it, “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things. Development is the struggle of opposites.”

Having theory is one thing, but putting these ideas into practice is another. We can only appreciate China’s miraculous transformation from a backward economy to the second largest economy in the world by understanding that this was done through essentially three dictums: “seek truth from facts”, crossing the river by feeling the stones” and “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

In other words, make fact-based decisions, always try or test under uncertainty, and above all, be practical and have an open mind. Change is a process between conflicting contradictions. There is no absolute black and white.

Historian Ray Huang, one of the finest sinologists of his generation and a former Nationalist soldier, wrote in the Preface to his classic “China: A Macro-History”: “Chinese history differs from the history of other peoples and other parts of the world because of an important factor: its vast multitudes.

In the imperial period as well as in the very recent past, practical problems had to be translated into abstract notions in order to be disseminated.

In turn, at the local level the message had once again to be rendered into everyday language.”

It is the reduction of very complicated policies into simple language that the Chinese people had to understand and own that enabled them to buy into the transformation, despite the huge sacrifices at the individual and community levels. The people’s eyes are clearer than those of the elites.

The US-China rivalry has done the world a favour by contrasting very fundamental worldviews. When the West preaches a value and rules-based order, what is meant is that freedom, democracy and individual rights are absolute – essentially a zero-sum “my way or no way.” Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force.

When China, Russia, India or any other country deviates or disagrees with that, then they must be contained, confronted or sanctioned. Localisation or being different is almost seen as deviant rather than a celebration of diversity.

Civilisations reach their highest levels through tolerance and openness. When they become inward-looking, fundamentalist and mono-thinking, fragility and decay sets in.

The world is simultaneously becoming more global in inter-connectivity, even as regionalisation, fragmentation and localisation speeds up.

Glocalisation, the simultaneous contradiction between global and local, is to be welcomed, rather than feared.

The future will always be open, uncertain and contradictory. Such diversity is the nature of humanity.

Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own

Source link

 

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Flawed perception remembering Heroes and Zeroes

Yuen, a Special Branch officer, spent most of his time being hunted down by the communists and was even shot in the chest. 

Remembering heroes and villains 

There is a flawed perception that the fight against the CPM was a battle only between the Chinese-dominated movement and the Malay-majority soldiers and police. Many innocent Chinese lives were also taken by the CPM.

THIS is not another comment about Chin Peng but a reflection on how two Special Branch officers, both of Chinese descent, fought against him. It is also a timely reminder to many of us who have not heard about them, or simply forgotten about these heroes in our midst.

It is also about the thousands of Chinese civilians who lost their lives because of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), a reality which many have forgotten or, worse, chosen to ignore.

There is a terribly flawed perception that the fight against the CPM was simply a bitter battle between the Chinese-dominated movement and the Malay-majority soldiers and police.

The two Malaysians who dedicated their lives to fighting the communists were the late Tan Sri Too Chee Chew, or better known as CC Too to his Special Branch colleagues; and Aloysius Chin, the former Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police and Deputy Director of Special Branch (Operations) at Bukit Aman.

Too was highly regarded as the master of psychological warfare and counter-insurgency and his deep knowledge of the CPM helped the authorities to fight the guerrillas. In fact, he was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s top experts on psy-war as head of Bukit Aman’s psychological warfare desk from 1956 to 1983.

In the words of his long-time friend, Lim Cheng Leng, who wrote his biography, “CC Too could read the communist mind like a communist.”

The web of intrigue of how friends can become foes is exemplified in Too’s relationship with Kuantan-born Eu Chooi Yip, the communist mastermind in Singapore. Eu was Too’s special friend and Raffles College mate, but the two ended up as foes in different arenas.

Aloysius Chin also dedicated his life to fight the CPM and I had the privilege of meeting Chin, who wrote the book The Communist Party of Malaya: The Inside Story, which reveals the various tactics used by the CPM during different periods in their attempts to overthrow the government.

Malaysians have never had much fondness for serious history books. Worse, their views of historic events are often shaped by the movies they have watched.

Unfortunately, movie producers, armed with what is called poetic licence, often dramatise events to make their movies much more interesting.

Who can fault them as they have to sell their movies?

But we really need to read up more about the events during the Emergency era, especially the assassinations of Special Branch personnel and the many ordinary policemen, who were mostly Chinese.

The CPM’s biggest hatred was directed at the Chinese policemen, who were regarded as “running dogs” as far as Chin Peng was concerned.

The reality was that these Chinese policemen were the biggest fear of the CPM as many had sacrificed their lives to infiltrate the movement, posing as communists in the jungle.

It would have been impossible for the Malay policemen to pose as CPM fighters, even if there were senior Malay CPM leaders, because of the predominantly Chinese make-up of the guerrillas. It was these dedicated Chinese officers who bravely gave up their lives for the nation.

Between 1974 and 1978 alone, at least 23 Chinese SB officers were shot and killed by the CPM, according to reports.

In one instance, a Chinese police clerk attached to the Special Branch in Kuala Lumpur was mistaken for an officer and was shot on his way home.

The CPM targets included a number of Chinese informers, who provided crucial information, as well as Chinese civilians.

One recorded case which showed how cruel the communists could be was the murder of the pregnant wife of a Special Branch Chinese officer at Jalan Imbi as the couple walked out of a restaurant.

This was the work of Chin Peng’s mobile hit squads. The assassination of the Perak CPO Tan Sri Koo Chong Kong on Nov 13, 1975, in Ipoh was carried out by two CPM killers from the 1st Mobile Squad who posed as students, wearing white school uniforms, near the Anderson School.

Other members of the same squad went to Singapore in 1976, shortly before Chinese New Year, in an attempt to kill the republic’s commissioner of police, Tan Sri Tan Teik Khim, but they were nabbed.

Another notable figure in our Malaysian history is Tan Sri Yuen Yuet Leng, a former Special Branch officer who spent most of his life being hunted down by the communists during and after the Emergency years, as one news report described him.

Yuen was shot in the chest in Grik back in 1951 in an encounter with the CPM and the communists even tried to kidnap his daughter while he was Perak police chief, so much so he had to send her to the United Kingdom in the 1970s for her safety.

Their top targets included former IGP Tan Sri Abdul Rahman Hashim who was killed in 1974 and the Chief of the Armed Forces Staff Tan Sri Ibrahim Ismail who faced three attempts to kill him.

The CPM targets also included many active grassroots MCA leaders. After all, at the Baling talks in 1955, the government side was represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, David Marshall, the Chief Minister of Singapore, and Sir Tan Cheng Lock of the MCA. The CPM was represented by Chin Peng, Chen Tian, and Abdul Rashid Maidin.

The talks broke down after two days – the deadlock was simple with Chin Peng wanting legal recognition for the CPM while the Government demanded the dissolution of the CPM, or, in short, their surrender.

In a research paper, Dr Cheah Boon Kheng wrote that as of June 1957, “a total of 1,700 Chinese civilians were killed against 318 Malays, 226 Indians, 106 Europeans, 69 aborigines and 37 others.”

At the end of the Emergency, the final toll was as follows – 1,865 in the security forces killed and 2,560 wounded, 4,000 civilians killed and 800 missing, and 1,346 in the police force killed and 1,601 wounded.

The figures, quoted by Dr Cheah, a renowned CPM expert, were taken from Brian Stewart’s Smashing Terrorism in Malayan Emergency.

The fact is this – many innocent Chinese lives were taken by the CPM, and the killings continued even after the Emergency ended in 1960.

Anthony Short, in his book The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960, also wrote that the Chinese civilians suffered the highest casualties in the fight with the CPM.

At Chin Peng’s funeral wake in Bangkok, some of his old comrades put on a brave front to say they fought for revolution.

But they must have been let down by China, which they looked up to, because in the end, it was Beijing which first down-graded its ties with CPM and eventually stopped funding them entirely when it forged diplomatic relations with Kuala Lumpur.

And today, China is a communist nation in name only as its elites and people openly flout their wealth and compete for the trappings of a capitalistic society along with its ills, including corruption.

The CPM said they wanted to fight the Japanese and the British but in the end, faced with the resistance of the Malay majority, the people they killed the most were Chinese civilians and the policemen.

And let us not also forget the indigenous people of the peninsula, Sabah and Sarawak who served in the security forces and were renowned for their jungle tracking skills. They too suffered many casualties.

Among our forgotten heroes are some who were awarded the highest bravery awards. The point here is that all laid down their lives for the country as Malaysians.

These are the facts of history. There’s no need to be bleary-eyed because, in the end, we should let the realities and the facts sink in.

Comment contributed by  WONG CHUN WAI \

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