Remember Lai Teck?

 

A couple of days ago, I visited Gerakbudaya in Section 11, Petaling Jaya, to discuss my new book with Janice Cheong. As usual, before leaving, I took a look at its collection.

One title attracted my attention: New Perspectives on the Japanese Occupation in Malaya and Singapore 1941–1945. It is not new; it was first published in 2008. Perspectives on the war from the Japanese side are scarce for obvious reasons—the Japanese military systematically destroyed war-related documents after their surrender. This book sets out precisely to uncover some of that perspective; all seven contributors are leading academics in Japan, six of them Japanese.

I do not propose to review the book here. Suffice it to say that readers may be surprised by what they find. We are so used to reading material from our local sources and taking great pride in Chinese resistance to the Japanese invaders. But there is a great deal we really do not know about the roles played by the other communities during the Occupation. I encourage readers to read the book and find out for themselves.

What prompts me to write this article is a name that keeps coming up in a chapter entitled “Leaders of the Malayan Communist Party During the Anti-Japanese War”.

The name is Lai Teck.

Many older Malaysian Chinese would remember this name. But I doubt many younger Chinese would.

Lai Teck, to me, should be 賴德; however, this appears not to be correct. Apparently, it is 萊特—the Chinese rendering of an English alias, “Wright”. This is said to be supported by Chin Peng’s account of him. Be that as it may, another Chinese name associated with him was Huang Shao-dong 黃紹東.

Lai Teck was the Qin Hui 秦檜 – the Southern Song chancellor traditionally condemned for his role in the persecution and execution of the general Yue Fei 岳飛 – of his day.

Lai Teck, or Lai Tek or Loi Teck, was one of the most extraordinary infiltrators in the history of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP or CPM - Communist Party of Malaya).

He was probably Vietnamese, possibly of mixed Sino-Vietnamese background, and appears to have used several names. Historians have identified him variously as Phạm Văn Đắc or Hoang A Nhac. Before coming to Malaya, he is believed to have worked for French intelligence in Indochina. Historian Leon Comber concluded that he was later recruited by the British Special Branch in Singapore to penetrate the MCP. Astonishingly, he rose steadily through the party and became its Secretary-General in 1939, remaining in that position until 1947.

His most notorious period came after the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore in 1942. Lai Teck was arrested by the Japanese Kempeitai. Instead of being executed – as many communists were – he was released and began supplying the Japanese with information about his own comrades. In that sense, he had effectively become an agent successively of the French, British and Japanese intelligence services.

The worst episode was the Batu Caves Incident of 1 September 1942. Lai Teck was involved in arranging a secret gathering of senior MCP and Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army figures near Batu Caves. He himself failed to appear, later explaining that his car had broken down. Japanese forces descended on the meeting and killed a substantial portion of the MCP’s senior wartime leadership. Sources differ over the precise casualty total, but the episode was a devastating blow to the party.

What makes the story even more remarkable is that the MCP did not discover his treachery during the war. Lai Teck continued to head the organisation throughout the Japanese Occupation. He was therefore simultaneously the leader of an organisation whose armed wing, the MPAJA, was fighting Japan and an informer supplying intelligence to the Japanese security apparatus.

There is another historically important aspect. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, some within the MCP wanted to take advantage of the temporary power vacuum before British rule was fully restored. Lai Teck instead urged a comparatively cautious course: cooperation with the returning British, disbandment of the MPAJA, and pursuit of political and labour activity through legal organisations. Historians have consequently debated how much of this policy reflected genuine communist strategy and how much reflected Lai Teck’s relationship with British intelligence. What is clear is that the MCP followed his relatively moderate post-war line until suspicions about him became overwhelming.

Hara Fujio, the author of this chapter in the book, adds considerable detail to the picture. He painstakingly traces Lai Teck’s steps and lists those betrayed by him over the period. Some 22 high-ranking cadres were executed as a result of his betrayal. Many were still in their twenties when they were hanged by the Japanese.

By 1946–47, party members had begun assembling evidence against him. A Central Committee meeting was arranged for March 1947, at which he was expected to answer the accusations. He never appeared. Instead, he fled – reportedly taking a large proportion of the party’s funds with him – first moving through Singapore and Hong Kong and eventually reaching Thailand.

This is where Chin Peng enters the story in a decisive way. Chin Peng participated in the investigation and subsequently succeeded Lai Teck as Secretary-General. According to Chin Peng’s later account, he contacted communist organisations in Hong Kong and Thailand to help locate the fugitive. Lai Teck was eventually found in Bangkok in 1947.

Chin Peng was later told that three Thai communists attempting to seize him killed him during the struggle – apparently by suffocation or strangulation – and disposed of his body in a sack in the Menam, or Chao Phraya, River. Because this account ultimately came through Chin Peng and his contacts rather than an official death record, the precise circumstances should be treated as reported rather than absolutely established.

One particularly interesting point is that Lai Teck’s betrayal affected Malayan history well beyond the deaths he directly caused. The destruction of much of the older MCP leadership helped bring younger figures such as Chin Peng to prominence. Lai Teck’s exposure in 1947 also profoundly discredited the cautious strategy he had imposed after the war. Within about a year, the MCP entered the armed conflict that became the Malayan Emergency in 1948.

His life has almost the structure of a spy novel: a probable French agent becomes a British infiltrator, rises to the very top of the organisation he was supposed to spy on, changes sides when captured by the Japanese, betrays dozens of his comrades, survives the war still leading the party, reportedly absconds with party funds when finally exposed, and ends up being hunted down by fellow communists in Bangkok.

Lai Teck lived under numerous identities and deliberately concealed his background.

Accounts of the MCP’s investigation after his disappearance uncovered not only his business dealings but also his relationships with women. He reportedly maintained a Vietnamese wife in a bungalow near the beach at Katong, as well as two mistresses in Singapore—one Vietnamese and one Cantonese. The Vietnamese woman reportedly ran a bar around Hill Street. Another account refers to a woman described as his wife in Malaya, an old schoolfriend of MCP leader Yeung Kuo, who had just given birth to Lai Teck’s child when his betrayal was revealed to her.

That is particularly striking because Lai Teck was outwardly the austere Secretary-General of an underground communist movement. By early 1947, fellow MCP leaders were already questioning not only how he ran the party but also “his own lifestyle.”

One contemporary physical description comes from an MCP cadre who knew him personally from 1937. He remembered Lai Teck as small and short, no more than about 5 ft 6 in, with a thin, dark face, tightly closed lips and notably sharp eyes. His further description of Lai Teck as looking like a treacherous villain from Chinese opera was clearly a retrospective and highly hostile personal judgement rather than an objective description.

Before his MCP days…
For years, the standard story—followed by Leon Comber and many later writers—was that Lai Teck was born around 1903. He joined the Vietnamese communist movement when young, was arrested around 1925, and then agreed to inform for the French.

However, historian Marc H. Opper, drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, French and other sources, gives a much more precise—and somewhat different—reconstruction. He identifies Lai Teck as Trương Phước Đạt — 張福達, born in Phan Rang, Annam, in 1909.

According to Opper, he joined Thanh Niên, the Vietnamese revolutionary youth organisation associated with Hồ Chí Minh, in 1929. By March 1930, he had become a member of the Saigon City Provisional Executive Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party. This suggests that whatever happened later, he began as a fairly serious young communist activist rather than merely an opportunist who wandered into the movement.

He was arrested in November 1930 and subsequently fled to Hong Kong. There he actually met Hồ Chí Minh, who intended to send him to Moscow for further political training. On his way to the Soviet Union, however, he was arrested at Suifenhe on the Sino-Soviet frontier in March 1931. He remained detained until early 1932. He was arrested again in Shanghai in April 1933 and eventually deported back to French Indochina.

It was apparently after that deportation, rather than in 1925 as the older story has it, that the French Sûreté Générale recruited him. Opper says the French offered to spare him imprisonment if he would become their agent inside the communist movement. By this point, he had also apparently become disillusioned with communism. He agreed—but because he was well known among Saigon communists, his role as an informer was soon exposed.

The French then had little further use for him. He was passed to the British security apparatus, and by late 1934 he had entered the MCP claiming to be a Comintern representative. His genuine knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory made the cover particularly convincing. By 1939, he had worked his way up to the position of MCP Secretary-General.

So, the remarkable thing is that he was not simply an ignorant police plant pretending to be a communist. He apparently possessed considerable theoretical knowledge, had actually participated in Vietnamese revolutionary circles, had met Hồ Chí Minh, and had been selected for training in Moscow. That background made his subsequent infiltration of the MCP much more credible.

Top of Form

Conclusion
Many of us lost loved ones during this tragic period, and the scars left by the Japanese Occupation have not entirely disappeared even after so many decades. We rightly remember those who resisted, suffered and died, and we should continue to honour the great martyrs of that generation.

But remembrance should also go hand in hand with a willingness to understand history in its totality. The story of Lai Teck reminds us that history is rarely as simple as heroes on one side and villains on the other. There were acts of extraordinary courage, but also betrayal, collaboration, deception and political intrigue. Nor was the experience of the Occupation confined to any one community.

For many of us, much of what we know has come from accounts written from our own local or communal perspectives. They are important, but they cannot be the whole story. Other sources — Japanese, British, Chinese, Vietnamese and others — can sometimes reveal details, perspectives and uncomfortable truths that we may never have encountered before.

History should not be about choosing only the version that makes us feel good. The more sources we are prepared to examine, the closer we may come to understanding what actually happened.

End

 

P.S. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the work of my good friend and mentor, Dr Stephen Leong, is also widely quoted in the book.

Xi Jinping’s Impending Visit to Washington: A Waste of Time?

 

Preparations are clearly underway for Xi to visit Washington on September 24, albeit only for a day. However, it is interesting to note that China has not officially confirmed the visit.

Many are asking: given Donald Trump and his team’s constant flip-flopping, why would Xi waste his time?

Considering Xi’s Kung-tze-Sun-tze mindset, I can think of three possibilities.

a. An optical dividend that can be had
Xi can use the occasion to contrast his leadership with Trump's — without saying a word about it — even though it is probably not Xi's principal reason for going.

Xi's political style is controlled, deliberate and long-term; Trump's is highly personalised, improvisational and theatrical. Put the two beside each other before the world's cameras and the contrast largely creates itself. Beijing would probably be too disciplined to make the comparison explicit, especially because Chinese officials appear to be deliberately moderating criticism of Washington before the summit.

The symbolism could be particularly useful to China internationally. Xi can appear in Washington as the head of a government that is prepared to negotiate calmly with an increasingly turbulent United States.

Of course, there are real matters on the table — tariffs, trade, technology, AI, rare earths, Taiwan and geopolitical questions — but the sceptic in me says that whatever may be agreed to by Trump will always be reversed once Xi’s plane takes off from the tarmac for home. It is a waste of time.

b. A godsend that is to be protected
Trump’s midterm election hurdles are high. I am pretty sure China sees considerable advantage in keeping Trump politically viable and giving him enough victories to preserve a transactional relationship that Beijing has learned how to manage.

Xi is said to be bringing an unusually large delegation of Chinese business leaders to Washington. This will offer the White House potential economic wins ahead of the midterm elections.

China has also just bought roughly one million tonnes of American soybeans ahead of the visit, while a Chinese company has announced a new 20-year U.S. LNG contract.

All these suggest that Beijing understands perfectly well that giving Trump commercially attractive announcements on September 24 could help him politically.

Between Trump and the Democrats, we know who the worse devil to China is. The former’s political and territorial ambitions, doubts over America's security commitments in West and East Asia, trade conflicts with partners, and a more transactional approach to alliances can weaken precisely the coalition Washington would otherwise need to contain China's rise. Most leaders have growing doubts over U.S. reliability.

So, Beijing could simultaneously oppose many of Trump's policies towards China while regarding aspects of his presidency as strategically useful. Those two positions are not contradictory.

c. Xi producing Kim Jong Un for Trump
Trump is deeply infatuated with Kim. He has repeatedly said he wants another meeting with Kim this year. Xi certainly has channels to Kim. North Korea, however, has responded cautiously and appears determined to set its own conditions.

This possibility fits Trump’s psychology and Xi's Sun-tze instinct. Trump attaches enormous importance to personal summitry and has repeatedly spoken of his relationship with Kim. If Xi could quietly help make another Trump-Kim meeting happen, he would be giving Trump something Trump personally values greatly — at relatively little direct cost to China. It could also restore Beijing's position as the indispensable intermediary in Northeast Asian diplomacy.

Trump needs the September meeting to announce economic achievements he can take into the midterms, and perhaps another dramatic meeting with Kim. Xi has the capacity to help with all three. That, to me, makes the visit potentially far more consequential than many who call it meaningless suggest.

A possible last-minute abortion?
It was reported somewhere that Xi might cancel his trip to Washington if the U.S. goes ahead with its arms sales to Taiwan. But I doubt this is true. After all, no sooner will Xi return home than Trump may do an about-turn.

It was reported that Beijing had told Washington that Xi could cancel the September meeting if the U.S. approved new arms sales to Taiwan before the summit. I think it is more likely to be diplomatic leverage than an ultimatum requiring Trump permanently to stop supplying Taiwan.

Xi cannot arrive in Washington immediately after Trump has approved a large new arms package for Taiwan. Domestically and internationally, it would make Xi look as though China's most important “red line” could simply be ignored. So Beijing wants the sale postponed at least until after Xi's visit. A reported US$14 billion package is presently under review.

Xi knows Trump could reverse himself the moment the visit is over. Indeed, there is precedent for exactly this sort of sequencing. After Trump's May meeting with Xi in Beijing, Trump said he had not yet decided whether the Taiwan arms sale would proceed, even though his administration had already authorised it. In other words, the issue can conveniently be put into the refrigerator during a summit and taken out again afterwards.

Trump’s precariousness in the midterm elections
Trump looks very precarious. But there are two different questions: 1. Whether Republicans lose Congress, and 2. Whether Trump himself loses his grip on the Republican Party. On the first, he is in genuine danger; on the second, much less so.

As of 15 September 2026, the clearest warning sign is Trump's own standing. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll puts his approval at only 35%, after touching a career low of 33% in late August. More importantly for the midterms, Democrats lead Republicans 44% to 37% on the generic congressional ballot. Democrats have even edged ahead, 38%-37%, when voters are asked which party they trust more on the economy — traditionally an important Republican advantage.

The House looks particularly dangerous for Trump

Republicans currently have an extraordinarily narrow 219-214 House majority, including an independent who caucuses with them. Cook Political Report's September 11 ratings classify 21 House seats as Toss Ups — and 16 of those are presently Republican-held, compared with only five Democratic-held seats. That is an uncomfortable defensive position.

Indeed, Cook wrote earlier this month that the most plausible scenario had become a “really bad” election for Republicans, potentially costing them roughly 26–35 House seats, although that is an analytical projection rather than a forecast of an exact result.

So, if the election were held under today's conditions, a Democratic takeover of the House would appear almost certain.

The Senate is no longer safe either

The Senate originally looked considerably safer for Republicans. They currently hold 53 seats, against 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats therefore need a net gain of four seats to take outright control.

But even that firewall has weakened. It was reported that what Republicans had regarded as a fairly comfortable Senate defence has turned into a genuinely open contest, with Democratic opportunities appearing even in states such as Texas and Iowa. Cook currently identifies nine principal Senate battlegrounds, six of them Republican-held and three Democratic-held.

Yes, the Senate might be harder for Democrats to capture than the House, because they must win several difficult states simultaneously. But it is certainly no longer implausible that Trump could lose both chambers.

But there is a bigger problem…
It is the economy — compounded by the Iran War.

Trump's weakness is not simply personal dislike. The prolonged Iran war has disrupted oil supplies and pushed American fuel prices sharply higher, while inflation and borrowing costs remain politically painful. His approval deterioration has accelerated since the Iran war began.

That is particularly dangerous in a midterm because voters can use congressional elections as a referendum on a president without having to decide whether they prefer an alternative presidential candidate. Trump himself has effectively encouraged this by telling Republicans to behave as though he is on the ballot.

His recent promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain Congress looks like a sick politician’s last rabbit out of the hat. In the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63% of Americans opposed it, including four in ten Republicans.

What would defeat actually mean for Trump?

If Republicans lose only the House, Trump remains president and still controls the executive branch, but much of his legislative programme becomes extremely difficult. A Democratic House would also acquire subpoena and investigative powers and could potentially initiate impeachment proceedings.

If Republicans lose the Senate as well, the consequences become substantially greater: Democrats could obstruct many judicial and executive appointments, control committees and investigations, and essentially put Trump on the defensive for the remaining two years of his presidency.

If he loses both chambers badly, I think the political interpretation would be severe. Because Trump has deliberately made these midterms about himself, Republicans could hardly blame an anonymous congressional campaign. It would amount to voters delivering a national rebuke to the second Trump presidency.

There is an important qualification, however: electoral weakness is not the same thing as weakness inside the Republican Party. Trump continues to dominate the GOP. Even after a bad midterm, I would not expect Republican politicians suddenly to abandon him en masse. Many owe their nominations, political identities and voter bases to the MAGA movement.

So, my assessment today would be: Trump is politically vulnerable, the House is in serious danger, and even the Senate is now at risk. He is not yet facing political collapse, but a two-chamber defeat on November 3 would leave him a dramatically weakened president for his final two years.

Maybe he can start a world war. He might then even try to suspend the U.S. Constitution and remain President for as long as the war lasts.

End

Paranoid? Perhaps.

A friend recently suggested that I might be a little paranoid about the West and about pro-Western forces.

Perhaps I am.

But there are certain things that irritate me almost instantly.

One example is when I read an article — usually in the South China Morning Post — and the journalist feels compelled to introduce China as: “the world’s second-largest economy.”

Why is that qualification necessary every bloody time China is mentioned?

China did not become the world’s second-largest economy yesterday. It is hardly breaking news. The phrase has long since become a stale, tiresome tagline, endlessly regurgitated by writers who seem determined to keep reminding readers that China is still “second” — invariably to the United States.

There is a Chinese expression, 画蛇添足 — having drawn a perfectly good snake, you decide to add legs to it.

That is precisely how I feel.

China is China. If the subject is its economy, by all means give us the relevant figures. But why this almost ritualistic need to remind readers that it is “second”?

Second to whom?

Of course, we know the answer: the United States of America.

To me, this constant ranking reflects something much deeper than innocent description. Either the writer has stopped thinking and is merely repeating a journalistic cliché, or he remains intellectually trapped in a world in which the United States must somehow occupy the top position and everybody else has to be ranked beneath it.

What amazes me further is that quite often the writer has a Chinese name!

Perhaps this is what my friend means when he says I am paranoid. But I do see the same habit everywhere.

The United States is routinely described as “the world’s largest economy”, “the richest country in the world”, “the world’s most powerful military”, “the leader of the free world”, and who knows what else.

My question is very simple: What do these labels actually mean today? And largest by What Measure?

Yes, measured in nominal US dollars, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. No argument there. But economics is not a beauty contest in which one number settles everything.

Measured by purchasing-power parity — which attempts to compare what money can actually buy inside different economies — China has already been larger for years. World Bank figures for 2025 put China’s economy at roughly US$41.3 trillion in PPP terms, compared with about US$30.8 trillion for the United States. Yet in nominal-dollar terms, the United States was still substantially larger: about US$30.8 trillion against China’s US$19.5 trillion.

So which country has the “larger economy”?

The answer depends on what you are trying to measure and that is precisely my point.

Repeating “the world’s second-largest economy” as though the issue were settled by a single nominal-dollar league table is intellectually lazy.

More importantly, what matters to me is not merely the size of an economy on paper but what that economy can actually do. 

Can it build?

Can it manufacture?

Can it provide infrastructure?

Can it produce the machines, ships, power plants, batteries, vehicles, electronics, chemicals, steel and industrial equipment upon which a modern civilisation depends?

Can it mobilise resources when necessary?

Can it educate enough engineers and scientists?

Can it sustain its population without living indefinitely on borrowed money?

These questions tell me far more than a nominal GDP ranking.

The Difference Between Financial Wealth and Productive Power
Superficially, the United States remains extraordinarily wealthy. Nobody needs to deny that. It has some of the richest individuals and corporations humanity has ever produced. Wall Street can move trillions of dollars around the world. American technology companies command astonishing valuations. The dollar still occupies a privileged position in international finance.

But financial wealth and productive capability are not the same thing.

America has spent decades shifting production abroad while congratulating itself on becoming a sophisticated “service economy”.

China did almost the opposite. It built factories. It built ports. It built roads. It built high-speed rail. It built power stations. It built supply chains. It trained engineers. It accumulated industrial capability on a scale the world had never seen.

Above all, the government cares for its people. 

China has remained the world's largest manufacturer for many years. In 2025, Chinese manufacturing output grew by 6.8%; US manufacturing grew by about 1%.

So, I cannot say America “produces nothing”. It plainly does, and still on a huge scale. But the direction of travel is what interests me.

For decades, America allowed large parts of its industrial ecosystem to migrate overseas, while China methodically accumulated one industrial capability after another. And now Washington suddenly discovers “industrial policy”.

Now it talks about reshoring. It now worries about shipbuilding, about about semiconductors and about about batteries, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, machine tools and supply-chain security.

Why?

Because at long last it has realised that you cannot run an economy forever on financial engineering, asset inflation, consumption and somebody else’s factories.

The Richest Country — With What Kind of Richness?
The phrase “richest country in the world” also deserves examination.

Rich for whom?

America undoubtedly contains enormous private wealth. But it also contains enormous insecurity.

The Federal Reserve reported this year that 37% of American adults could not meet an unexpected US$400 expense entirely from cash, savings or a credit card paid off immediately. Thirty percent said they could not cover three months of expenses by any means if their main income disappeared.

That is not destitution, but neither is it the picture normally conjured up by the phrase “the richest country in the world”.

Look at homelessness. According to the US government itself, 745,652 people were homeless on a single night in January 2025, including more than 266,000 living unsheltered.

Anyone who has walked through parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other American cities does not need a lecture from an economist to understand that something is seriously wrong.

And now the US federal debt has passed forty trillion dollars, and borrowing costs are rising.

Yet we continue to hear the same majestic descriptions: “The wealthiest country.” “The largest economy.” “The indispensable nation.”

But we should in fact ask: indispensable to whom, and for how long?

What Is the World's Most Important Economy?
To me, an even more interesting question is not: Which is the largest economy? It is: Which is now the most important economy in the world?

If China suddenly stopped manufacturing tomorrow, how many global supply chains would continue functioning normally?

How many factories elsewhere would discover that some component, chemical, machine, magnet, battery, solar module, electronic part or industrial input was no longer arriving?

How many countries would find their construction projects delayed?

How many manufacturers would suddenly discover how much of their supposed “domestic production” depended upon Chinese inputs?

That, to me, is economic importance.

China has become deeply embedded in the physical functioning of the world economy.

Yes, America still remains important in finance, technology, capital markets, aerospace, software and many advanced scientific fields.

But increasingly China sits at the centre of the industrial economy. 

And Then There Is Military Power

The same lazy ranking occurs with military power.

We are repeatedly told that America has “the most powerful military in the world”.

Again I ask: Measured how? Number of aircraft carriers? Military expenditure? Foreign bases? Nuclear warheads? Aircraft? Satellites?

If warfare were simply a matter of adding equipment into an Excel spreadsheet, perhaps we could settle wars before firing a shot.

But modern warfare does not work that way.

What matters is the whole system: surveillance, satellites, drones, missiles, electronic warfare, cyber capability, industrial replenishment, logistics, command networks, air defence, anti-ship weapons and — above all — the ability to replace what gets destroyed.

China understands this.

It is not simply trying to build the same number of aircraft carriers as America.

Its military development has concentrated heavily on what strategists call anti-access and area denial — making it extraordinarily dangerous for an opposing navy or air force to operate near China. Even the US Department of Defense openly acknowledges the scale and speed with which China has developed these capabilities.

That is why counting aircraft carriers tells only a small part of the story. Aircraft carriers themselves are hardly floating pieces of divine machinery.

Look at the recent saga of the USS Abraham Lincoln. 

The mighty symbol of American naval power spent an extraordinary period continuously at sea. Reports emerged of food shortages, broken toilets, plumbing problems, water issues and serious stress among the crew. After 286 days of deployment, some 5,000 sailors finally reached Thailand for respite in early September.

Those toilet stories particularly amused me.

Here is supposedly one of the most formidable weapons ever created by mankind — nuclear-powered, carrying sophisticated combat aircraft and billions of dollars of equipment — and sailors are circulating videos of toilets they cannot properly use.

Perhaps warfare has indeed entered a new technological age: stealth fighters outside; clogged toilets inside!

Of course, broken toilets do not prove that an aircraft carrier cannot fight but they do provide a useful antidote to the almost religious awe with which American military hardware is sometimes discussed.

Machines are machines; ships are ships; and sailors are human beings!

Would the United States Defeat China?

I constantly hear people declare confidently that America would defeat China in a war.

Really?

A war where?

Off California?

Or off China’s own coast?

Those are two completely different questions.

A conflict fought thousands of kilometres from the continental United States but close to China’s industrial base, missile forces and logistical infrastructure would be nothing like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

I do not pretend to be a military strategist, but I certainly would not accept the silly proposition that because America spends more money on defence and owns more carriers, victory over China must therefore follow. Indeed, my own view is stronger than that.

I do not believe any outside force today can confidently expect to defeat China in a major conventional war fought on China's doorstep.

Anyone advocating a preventive war against China on the assumption that it would be quick, clean and victorious is, in my opinion, a "Pete Hegseth". He may discover otherwise only after hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people have paid for his stupidity.

Trump — China's Windfall

I have said before that China could hardly have asked for a more helpful adversary.

Trump seems determined to accelerate many of the very trends that are weakening America’s international standing. He quarrels with allies. He threatens friends. He imposes tariffs and then modifies them.

He announces one thing today and another tomorrow. He treats diplomacy as though he were bargaining over the rent of a Manhattan shoplot.

And whenever markets force a retreat, somebody invents another explanation for why the retreat was actually a magnificent victory. Hence the wonderful acronym: TACO - Trump Always Chickens Out. 

Crude?

Certainly. But that's the real Trump.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping behaves almost exactly in the opposite manner.

Whether one likes Xi or not is irrelevant. Just watch his demeanour - Measured, Controlled, Expressionless when necessary, No shouting, Rarely boasting about himself. Rarely behaving as though every international negotiation were an episode of reality television.

The contrast fascinates me. Trump throws tantrums, Xi waits. Trump brags, Xi watches.

Trump wants everybody to know he is the strongest man in the room; Xi seems perfectly content to allow time to demonstrate where the power lies.

That must be infuriating for Trump and we are about to see the contrast again.

Xi is expected in Washington on 24 September, offering the world another opportunity to observe the two men together.

Whatever agreements emerge from that meeting may matter less, in the longer sweep of history, than what the meeting symbolises.

One leader presides over a country desperately trying to preserve a primacy it has enjoyed for generations. The other presides over a country that does not need to announce every morning that it is rising. It simply continues building.

So Am I Paranoid?
Perhaps my friend is right. Perhaps I am paranoid whenever I see the phrase “the world’s second-largest economy”. Perhaps I read too much into it.

But words reveal assumptions.

For decades, much of the Western commentariat — and, unfortunately, many Asians educated to think through Western eyes — has treated American primacy almost as a natural law.

America is No. 1. Therefore, everybody else must be No. 2, No. 3 or No. 4.

I no longer accept that framework. The world has changed. Economic power is changing. Industrial power has changed dramatically. Technological power is becoming much more widely distributed. Military assumptions that looked reasonable twenty years ago are increasingly questionable.

And the centre of gravity of the world economy is moving eastward whether Washington likes it or not.

The American political establishment — Democrats and Republicans alike — may rage against China and Congress may pass resolution after resolution. Think tanks may devise more sanctions and politicians may scream about “containing China”. Military hawks may even fantasise about bombing it before it becomes too powerful.

But they cannot legislate history backwards. Nor can Donald Trump tariff the twentieth century back into existence.

China has already crossed too many thresholds.

It is too large, too industrially complete, too technologically capable and too deeply connected with the rest of the world simply to be pushed back into the subordinate position that Washington would prefer.

So, the next time someone introduces China as: "the world's second largest economy...", I shall probably still get irritated. These people are still wearing the twentieth-century American spectacles. 

End

America’s Death Spiral

 

When Americans entered the polling booths to elect their 47th President in November 2024, they had only a Hobson’s choice between two mainstream candidates — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. One was a crook; the other a dumb-dumb.

The US as a country was no longer capable of thinking, which is hardly surprising. Trump ushered in the decline when he was the 45th President, and the semi-demented Joe Biden sealed the country’s path. And the return of Trump was another godsend for China.

Each time China was mentioned by the Western and pro-Western press, it was invariably described in terms of the “Chinese Communist Party”, rather than simply the Chinese government. We all know the sinister intent, not to mention the ignorance. (The correct name is the “Communist Party of China”, if you want to be exact.)

I am always contemptuous of politicians with serious character flaws. Trump is the personification of this.

In 1994, when Trump was struggling with the Riverside South development in Manhattan, a consortium of Hong Kong businessmen led by Henry Cheng and Vincent Lo came to the rescue. They acquired a defaulted mortgage of about US$250 million for roughly US$90 million and provided the financing that kept the project alive. Trump even retained a 30 per cent interest in the profits. It was, by any reasonable description, a rescue at a particularly difficult time in his business career.

He was given extraordinary treatment when he visited Beijing in November 2017, including a reception at the Forbidden City. Within the following year, the United States and China were in a full-blown trade war. On 6 July 2018, Washington imposed 25 per cent tariffs on US$34 billion of Chinese imports.

Gratitude is totally absent from Trump’s worldview. Those who have read the book written about him by his niece will also tell you how unkind he could be even to his own folks.

Then came Huawei.

On 1 December 2018, the Canadian toyboy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrested Huawei princess Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the request of the US. We all knew the three-year detention was totally uncalled for. Her release was perhaps the only good thing Biden had done in his whole presidency!

The last eight years taught China one thing about the Americans and the Whites in general: Never trust the US leaders, regardless of political affiliation. China cannot count on the Whites and the pseudo-Whites.

Then came 2 April 2025 — “Liberation Day” — when Trump announced his sweeping global tariff decrees.

But too bad: China was already ready. While the lesser countries were crawling to ask for favouritism, China totally neutralised Trump’s foolishness.

Even his own court ruled him wrong.

Yet the tariff gun has hardly been put away.

Trump would undermine — for his own ego and personal interests — the enormous strategic advantages that America spent three-quarters of a century building: trusted alliances, an open economy, world-class universities, the attraction of global talent, confidence in the dollar, and the belief that when Washington gives its word, that word means something.

Trump seems determined to spend that inheritance.

While Sleepy Joe and his eunuchs — Antony Blinken, Katherine Tai, Nicholas Burns, etc. — were still coming up with all sorts of sanctions to try to retard China, Trump was mobilising a bunch of nincompoops — a harebrained chap called Pete Hegseth, an economic truth-distortionist called Auntie Scott Bessent, fellow Epstein-buddy Howard Lutnick, and all — to strengthen and glorify his supreme-ness. Meanwhile, China was transforming its entire landscape in economics, the military, science and technology, and what-have-you, to surpass every nation on earth.

Yet the Western and the pro-Western press keep telling the ignorant world that China is facing unprecedented woes in the real-estate sector, youth unemployment, etc., etc.

They simply do not — or refuse to — understand that China is correcting these issues in the most fundamental, albeit difficult, way.

Again, I go back to Trump’s character flaws to celebrate.

Look at Canada, one of America’s closest friends and trading partners. As recently as 21 August 2026, Washington imposed new 50 per cent tariffs on some US$20 billion of Canadian goods after negotiations collapsed. Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended the talks and announced dollar-for-dollar retaliation.

Is this how a great power treats its closest neighbours? Trump seems to confuse fear with respect, and submission with friendship.

Notwithstanding all this, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is still trying hard to suck up to Trump, although it is very obvious that he DOESN’T like this blonde! Ditto Sanae Takaichi of Japan.

But in global politics, there will always be clowns like them and minions like Ferdinand Marcos Jr and a couple of others.

Venezuela
On 3 January 2026, US forces entered Venezuela, captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and carried them to the United States. Maduro is now being held in New York awaiting a trial scheduled for June 2027.

I have no fondness for Maduro. Anyone who wears his type of moustache is usually one who carries a complex. But here is the larger question: Can we keep allowing the US to enter another sovereign country, seize its leader and carry him to the US for trial?

Military power can remove a man. It cannot by itself create legitimacy, prosperity or stable government. America should have learnt that lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Apparently not.

And Now Iran
The same hubris is playing out on a vastly more dangerous scale in Iran.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on 28 February 2026 in the opening US-Israeli strikes. Washington evidently hoped that decapitating Iran’s leadership and smashing its military infrastructure would produce either capitulation or political collapse.

Nearly six months later, where is the triumph?

Iran has been badly damaged. Thousands have died. Its economy is under enormous pressure. But the war continues, the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted, and Tehran retains enough missile and drone capability to keep the region dangerous. It is a costly standoff rather than the quick strategic victory Trump might have imagined.

It is not that Iran is “winning”.

The much more important point is that America is expending enormous military, political and economic resources simply to prevent itself from losing control of the situation.

The United States is now racing to rebuild its missile inventories. American high-end munitions stocks have been severely strained by Ukraine, the Middle East and now Iran.

But where will it get the rare-earth elements?

Despite all the sanctions, China continues to buy the overwhelming majority of Iran’s exported oil. Reuters puts its share at around 80 per cent. China simply doesn’t give two hoots about Trump anymore.

There are also growing signs of deeper Chinese-Iranian technological and military links. US officials say China’s SMIC supplied chipmaking equipment and training to Iran’s military. Reuters has reported prospective Chinese missile supplies to Iran, although Beijing has denied some of these reports.

The point is not that China controls the Middle Eastern battlefield. The point is that the US can no longer simply issue an order and assume that the rest of the world will fall into line.

The US$40-Trillion Debt
Meanwhile, back home, the numbers are becoming frightening.
The US national debt has now crossed US$40 trillion. Long-term Treasury yields have risen sharply; on 21 August, the 30-year yield ended at about 5.28 per cent, around its highest level in nearly two decades.

Auntie Bessent can explain, reassure and pontificate as much as he likes.

But he cannot talk away US$40 trillion.

Nor can America permanently borrow its way to prosperity, cut taxes, fight expensive wars, maintain military forces across the world, subsidise favoured industries and somehow expect the arithmetic never to arrive.

Wall Street, of course, remains extraordinarily good at keeping the music playing. AI enthusiasm has sent valuations skyward.

But musical chairs is an interesting game.

It works wonderfully — until the music stops.

And China?

Here, too, I think much Western commentary remains stuck in yesterday.

First, let us settle one argument.

If GDP is measured at market exchange rates, the US remains the world’s largest economy. But that is merely of statistical interest. You go to America and straightaway you can conclude that it is nonsense.

GDP has to be measured by purchasing power parity — unless your country is still very dependent on the US dollar — and China is No. 1. Period. World Bank data put China’s 2025 GDP at roughly US$41.3 trillion in PPP terms, against about US$30.8 trillion for the US.

So simply shouting “China is still No. 2” without specifying the measure is increasingly meaningless.

China certainly has problems, but its leaders are fully aware of them and fully committed to solving them. Anyone who cannot see China’s industrial power is looking in the rear-view mirror.

The New Technology Juggernaut
My own shorthand has always been this: America and the West have, in modern history, been superb at 0-to-1 innovation — creating something radically new. But China has become extraordinarily good at 2-to-10 — engineering it, improving it, scaling it, driving down its cost and manufacturing it by the millions.

And in the real economy, 2-to-10 matters more.

Consider electric vehicles and batteries alone. In 2025, China produced roughly 16 million electric cars, close to three-quarters of global output. It accounted for more than 80 per cent of global battery-cell production, around 85 per cent of cathode active material and more than 90 per cent of anode active material.

That is not propaganda.

That is industrial capacity.

In robotics, an extraordinary pattern is emerging. Chinese companies increasingly demonstrate an ability to produce breakthroughs and industrialise them cheaply and rapidly. Their “robot dogs” will knock out the US ones with both eyes closed.

In semiconductors and AI, yes, the US does possess some technological advantages, but we should describe them correctly.

The world’s dominant advanced-semiconductor foundry is not American. It is TSMC of Taiwan, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of global foundry revenue. America’s strength lies elsewhere in the semiconductor ecosystem — in chip design, AI accelerators, software and intellectual property, together with crucial allied capabilities in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Europe.

How long that advantage lasts is another question.

And AI contains another delicious irony.

America’s greatest advantage has always been its ability to attract the world’s cleverest people. Chinese talent forms a remarkable part of that strength. Data on leading AI researchers show just how deeply the American AI establishment depends upon foreign — and particularly Chinese-trained — scientists. MacroPolo’s latest talent tracking finds that 38 per cent of the researchers it studied received their undergraduate education in China, with a very large proportion subsequently working in the US.

My oft-used description — “Chinese Chinese versus American Chinese” — is not entirely without basis.

The strategic lesson for America should be obvious: if you make talented foreigners feel unwelcome, you may eventually send some of your greatest intellectual assets straight into the arms of your competitors.

And the Military Balance?
China has been flight-testing at least two new-generation tailless combat aircraft — the J-36 and J-50 — since late 2024. These are real and impressive.

The Pentagon claims that its new “Trump” stealth fighter — the F-47 — will fly in 2028.

Let’s wait and see.

The battleships are languishing everywhere. One was even left adrift after it lost power. All these speak volumes. America is NO longer enormously powerful.

China is MORE than an equal.

The seas within the 2nd Island Chain will become the graveyards of US and allied fleets if a war were to break out there.

Xi Is Coming to Town
Xi Jinping is expected at the White House on 24 September 2026. He will be in town for only one day.

And you can bet on this: Bessent and Lutnick will certainly come up with some new sanctions the moment Xi’s plane takes to the skies.

But does China care?

The relationship has changed.

Xi comes as the leader of the only country with the industrial scale, technological depth, military resources and economic weight capable of toppling the US across every dimension simultaneously.

That is the reality Trump should understand.

Instead, he still seems to believe that every international relationship is a Manhattan property negotiation: frighten the other fellow, threaten to walk away, squeeze him for the last dollar and announce victory.

At the end of the day, Trump is actually a weak President. The acronym TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — is most apt for him.

And that is why I continue to regard Donald Trump as something of a godsend for China.

Conclusion
The Statue of Liberty no longer shines as convincingly as the symbol of freedom and democracy it once was. The model of predatory economics that the West has spent decades preaching to the rest of the world is also coming under increasingly serious question.

There is, of course, another model emerging from China. Unfortunately, it is not one that can easily be replicated elsewhere. China’s system is the product of its own history, culture, institutions and extraordinary capacity for long-term planning.

But the larger lesson is much simpler.

The problem is self-denial. Too many Western and pro-Western leaders remain blind to the most basic principle of government: leaders must work for the people. Whatever one may think of China’s political system, its leaders understand that legitimacy ultimately depends on delivering for their people — building infrastructure, raising living standards, reducing poverty, strengthening the country and planning for generations rather than for the next election cycle.

Certainly not leaders like Trump.

Perhaps the greatest consequence of the changing world order is that countries, large and small, are discovering that they no longer have to kowtow to an international tyrant. They need not accept lectures, threats, sanctions and bullying simply because these come from a country that once regarded itself as the indispensable nation.

Every country has the right to safeguard its own interests, choose its own path and take pride in its sovereign dignity.

I am afraid that, under Trump, the US is suffering from a terminal illness. Power without wisdom, leadership without responsibility, and arrogance without self-reflection can only accelerate the spiral.

And that, to me, is America’s death spiral.

End

 

P/S
Some friends have been asking whether I have lost steam with my blog, as they have not seen any new articles from me for several weeks.

Far from it. I have simply been totally consumed by the preparation of two books.

The first is Following the Chinese Footprints: A Journey through the Chinese Diasporas Across Five Continents. It is now in PDF format and available on request.

The second is More Than Friends and Acquaintances: Remarkable People I Have Met Along the Way. This will come in two versions: a digital edition, which will be available free on request, and a printed edition, for which I will charge only at cost.

So, no, I have not lost steam. I have merely been spending it elsewhere!