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.