The Horse Has Bolted!

Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced that Malaysia will undergo a national lock-down starting from June 1, after seeing Covid-19’s daily infection figure had shot past 8000.

I suspect the measure will not help much. Spike will continue.

Even until today, the world for various reasons will not want to recognize that China is the only country that has succeeded in containing the virus. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Taiwan have often been cited as the success stories. But there is still so much tentativeness in these countries. Taiwan is a good example of how things can wrong again.

Fighting a virus like Covid-19 requires the discipline of both the government and its people. There is a complete determination not to allow the virus to spread. The moment a cluster emerges in China, everyone STAYS IN. Food is delivered and essential services are provided with well thought out and well organised logistics. And other provinces – far and near, and uniformed personnel and civilians – rush to help with all the necessary economic and medical back-ups.

No other country, even the western ones, seemed able to do this, hence the agony that most of their citizens have gone, or are now going, though. Countries that able to finally crawl out are those that have vaccinated enough percentages of their populations to slow down the spread. But the virus has not been wiped out yet.  

Malaysia is a sad story. It started well. But soon it faltered – both in managing the containment of the virus and the roll-out of vaccines.

First, about its efforts in virus containment: The state election in Sabah allowed ignited the first bush fire, half-hearted MCOs (Movement Control Orders) allowed the embers to simmer, and the tendency of the government to accommodate turned cultural and religious festivals into new sparks all over the country.

The definition of essential services is also vague. Succumbing to appeals, the government allows exemptions after exemptions and the rippling effect makes everything becomes porous again. The whole country is now infected; there are no “clean” pockets to assist, like what Wuhan had during the outbreak.

But more importantly, it is the lack of self-discipline that many Malaysians are exhibiting. You see people wearing their mask below their nose of chin everywhere you go, including those who hawk produce and serve food in the wet markets. You also see young people chatting away publicly. I go for my morning and evening walks every day. Many people, including those seemingly well-educated ones, are casual with SOPs, like keeping a safe distance or going single file when we walk past or cross each other.

Second, its vaccine roll-out: It is simply not doing it fast enough. It is the only way that we can contain the spread.

The roll-out has created much anxiety amongst Malaysians. The efforts seem not well coordinated. Hopefully with the amount of feedback, the government has come to grips with the process and no time should be lost to have the programmes executed in a speedy manner. And on this, there are tons of good examples to follow.

Taking up the West's Gauntlet

The president of Iran Hassan Rouhani is stepping down soon. Rouhani is generally considered a moderate. I read somewhere that an ex-president of Iran is making a comeback. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an anti-American and anti-Israel hawk. Obviously, he must have received the blessings of Iran’s present supreme leader Ali Khamenei to return to the political scene.

This development again demonstrates the short-term nature and short-sightedness of the American foreign policies. Barrack Obama succeeded in reining in the nuclear ambition of Iran to sign the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). His effort was only destroyed by Donald Trump with a stroke of a pen. Trump has let the genie out. Joe Biden knows that was a bad mistake, but he is not bold enough to repeal all the silly sanctions for Iran to halt its uranium-enrichment activities. The Iranians are a very smart race, they can easily produce nuclear weapons if there are no external constraints.

The situation is prompting Israel to do the pre-emptive stuff – attacking the Hamas. Soon it might train its guns on Iran and its allies in the region. If left unchecked, the war will spill over and the whole Middle East will be in turmoil again. Silly America!

America is indeed delusional. Couple of months before the outbreak of Covid-19, my wife and I took a month-long coach tour of America, from New York to San Francisco. The country has stood still for a long time, many parts have actually deteriorated to become unimaginable for a superpower to have. People looked laid-back; many are outright obese. New York is no longer vibrant; homelessness is third world like in San Francisco. But instead of gathering resolve to do something to rejuvenate America, politicians there are fighting head over heel to gang up with sycophants to make use of every opportunity to retard the rise of China, to threaten Moscow and to coerce lesser leaders in many countries not to work with China.

American hegemony began after the US emerged at the end of World War II as the undisputed superpower of the world. USSR tried to challenge it, but its brand of Communism simply could not make it happen. And Boris Yeltsin shot his own foot by dismembering the union. Russia is a shade of its former self in terms of influence now. There was no challenger to the US, for many many years.

Deng Xiaoping unleashed the dragon. Unlike `Mikhail Gorbachev, he did not blindly copy the West. He freed up the entrepreneurial spirts of Chinese. China continued to take pride in saying it is a Communist country. But its Communism is very different from that of the USSR’s or that the world has all along understood and associated – totalitarian, lack of human rights, so on and so forth. They did not (and still do not) know what was deeply embedded in China’s political system is “Confucianism” – rulers must do good for its people, people must respect for law and order, and public good must take precedence over individual rights – and the innate appetite of Chinese to learn, especially in STEM. Its millennia’s cultural philosophy became the bastion against superficial democratic beliefs and practices. China began to leap-frog.

However, it was not until the inauguration of Xi Jinping that China became a formidable challenger to the American hegemony. He fights corruption head-on, expedites the country’s infrastructure development, goes all out to alleviate poverty, and, in the eyes of America, the most “sinful” of all, advances the Road & Belt programmes to change the world order!

Xi has succeeded most of these and this has led America and the West to fear that if they do not do anything now, their lordship over the world will soon be over. This is delusionary. China will rise regardless, but it will be a nation that is happy to coexist with the world. It will not try to change the world in anyway, for it understands no single race, culture, religion, ideology, or system can claim supremacy; each is unique to its own needs and future.

However, China still has some distance to cover. Much of the country is already “intellectual”, again thanks to its Confucian heritage. The nouveau riche, on one end of the social yardstick, to the more rural simpletons on the end, are already conscious what constitutes proper etiquette, thanks to the “education” that its TV channels are introducing. Now you often see campaigns to ask people to exercise good “chopstick” practices, road courtesies, public space behaviours, etc. All these measures may look mundane, but they are transformational in essence.

Pro-independence Taiwanese should wake up. By running China now, you are only giving the West the opportunity to make you subservient to them in the long run. Only with a strong China, will all the yellow and brown skin people be safe in every part of the world. I do not mean to be a racist; but that appears to be the reality in front of us.

A Word for Biden

With a good education, many can climb the “intellect” ladder. Intellect has the “knowledge” as well as the “discerning, distilling or differentiating” dimensions. An intellectual do not see and interpret things in a linear fashion; he or she is able to extrapolate or see beyond the obvious. However, there is another level in cognitive grading that few can attain. That is WISDOM.

Wisdom is something that can hardly be learned. It grows into a person – through exposure to, and more importantly his own cognition to absorb from, people who have plenty of it. University professors are equipped intellectually, but not many have wisdom to offer. Wisdom is missing in most politicians.

Dr Mahathir is my favourite example. He is all by accounts a formidable intellect. But I would not rate him “wise” in the context of my understanding of the word. His Machiavellianism on race management when he had all the aura and resources to do a better job for posterity is the red card I think he deserves. Tunku Abdul Rahman was not a brilliant man; he was hardly known for his intellect. But most Malaysian would agree that he was indeed a great wise leader.

On the world stage, I held some high hope on Joe Biden when he was campaigning for the presidency. I thought he was only trying to play to the American gallery when he labelled President Xi of China as a thug. Maybe he would talk and walk differently when he became the president, this is what I though. This is despite what I have read about him in Barrack Obama’s “A Promised Land”. I could sense that Biden was not held in high esteem by Obama, even though the latter wrote fondly of him. Much of his counsel was not adopted by Obama. Nonetheless, he did strike me as a reasonably fair-minded man during his presidential campaign. (Maybe I was too influenced by my contempt for the conman Donald Trump, hence the good score for Biden without seeing him in action first!)

Notwithstanding, I was happy to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Alas, Biden shattered my confidence in him no sooner he took office!

Despite his age, and his long years of public service, Biden’s Wisdom Quotient is close to ZERO! His foreign relations behaviour beyond America’s sycophants borders infantility. He is even more vicious than Trump when it comes to China. He is behaving like a school bully and is rounding up the leaders of Australia, Japan, the UK, Canada, India, and several European countries to hurl mud at China. Of course, these lesser mortals have their own political agenda to chorus along. But sadly, many people in these countries have also lost their ability to think and are blindly believing in the lies and distortions his team are spewing about Xinjiang and Hong Kong. The Asian hatred that has been unleashed by Trump has continued, even though he has promised otherwise. Unable to take on the Whites, the Blacks in America, few of whom have the benefit of civilisational history and culture to shape their thoughts, are increasingly turning to the Yellows to vent their frustrations. And in India, neighbourhood jealousies have prompted many to spurn anything Chinese, even the help China is offering in the wake of the out-of-control Covid-19 situation the country is facing at this time.

But I believe the most dangerous act of Biden is his decision to send his naval flotilla to South and East China Seas. His act has emboldened Taiwan’s present pro-independence leaders to think China will not dare to act even though China has made it abundantly clear that the island’s leaders have already breached their red line. Australia, Japan, and the UK are most keen to join the US to beat the drums. One can understand Japan’s design to help the US to keep China and Taiwan apart, but for Australia to do so is surely a folly, for China is its biggest trading partner. What threat does it pose to Australia, a question the leaders must surely ask themselves? And as for the UK, Boris Johnson is totally delusional; he thinks Hong Kong is still his!

Biden has also aggravated both the trade and tech wars between the US and China. He is not scaling back on the stupidities of Trump in the former. And by appointing Catherine Tai as his Trade Representative, he is using a blatant poison to fight poison strategy on China.

The US is depriving China access of chips and chip-making equipment made even by non-US companies, all in the name of safeguarding its national security. How absurd America can be? Its action has strengthened the Chinese resolve to work harder. And by denying Huawei’s participation in their 5G rollout, the US and many others are simply shooting themselves in the foot.

Over the past couple of months, you have also seen the Xinjiang cotton issue. Now that much of the mud has been washed away, it is spinning about forced labour being used by China there to produce solar panels. Even though WHO has set much of the record straight, the US continues to insinuate China’s role in the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. China had shown the world how the pandemic should be fought, yet few in the western world would give it any credit. The western world just loves to wear blinkers. Recently it even used the return of the Chinese rocket to Earth as an issue to find fault with China. The statements by NASA and its Secretary of Defense Llyod Austin reinforce how low they have stooped. Anyone who has a high school knowledge of rocket trajectories will tell you they were talking rubbish. The US has obviously forgotten that China, like them, has the capability to shoot a space object if they want to.

                                            Clueless?
 

The US-China “wars” have also shown how mature many of the ASEAN leaders are. Ditto some of the leaders in West Asia, Serbia and Hungary in Europe, and South America. They can see the hypocrisy in the US leadership and have acted rationally and objectively, despite the persistent pressure from the US government. The European Union is particularly disappointing; they easily caved in.

I had always held great admiration for people who were educated at Harvard. Not anymore – after what I have seen in Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken! The former is a thug, and the later, an incoherent jackal trying to be statesmanlike.

Biden is now giving the Americans a sense of false security. He has obviously done a better job in the country than his conman predecessor. (Anybody would be able to do that!) But its own race relations are in deep shit. Biden is also “printing” money feverishly to move the country forward – investments in infrastructure, education, and what-have-you. But the bottom line is simply that it has forgotten how to produce things competitively. Soon, inflation will return and if the US Dollar’s decline accelerates, it will soon have to bite the dust.

A wise leader will not follow conventional wisdom. He must bite the bullet and do the difficult things. But most American presidents cannot see beyond the tip of their nose, even though theirs are pretty long. And Biden is no different. China’s rise is inevitable. But China's rise is not going to threaten the West, let alone the US. Biden needs to think beyond his presidency. The country is so divided, and majority of the Americans hardly read and travel; most are intellectually deficient. Its infrastructure needs a generation’s efforts to improve, its rich-poor divide is like heaven and hell, so on and so forth.

And it really pains me each time I see Huawei’s Meng Weng Wenzhou leaving her cage to go to the Canadian court. How cruel the West can be? Yet, they are shouting about human rights!

                                            A victim of American tyranny?

My advice to China and Chinese all over the world is this: Hold dear to your Confucian values and course; things will work out for you finally. In the meantime, as the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokeswoman Madam Hua Chunying has suggested, we should present the US with a huge mirror for them to take a good look at themselves.

Maybe wisdom is something that one cannot really learn?

Biden may not understand this, China’s wisdom is not Xi Jinping’s alone. It is a culmination of thousands of years of learning, fighting, searching, tinkering, enduring, persevering, etc. Little has come easy for the Chinese.