What does Tokyo Olympics 2020 say about America?

July 24^th, 2021 is the first day of Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Naturally I was enthused over the roll-out of the events and anxiously kept tabs on the medal count for the day. At the end of the day, I noticed that the US had failed to win even a single medal. I didn’t think much of it then, since it was the first day, until I saw the following headline in CNN: US fails to win medal on first day of Summer Olympics for the first time in nearly 50 Years.

     

Then I woke up on the 26^th morning to read “USA Basketball defeated in first Olympic loss since 2004”.

Sure, the US will certainly emerge as the top dog in Tokyo 2020 Olympics. But these two pictures also speak volumes of the state of America today!

Donald Trump and Joe Biden can scream until their throats explode that America is No 1, or is going to be back as No 1, but I for one am totally convinced these are not coincidental incidents but a precursor of what is already on the way – America’s decline, albeit a long-drawn one.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to tour the entire breadth of the United States just months before the outbreak of Covid-19. We used to like America. There was so much to learn from them. But the America we saw during our trip was no longer the America we thought we knew. Its country towns and national parks are still very breath-taking, but its cities are a far cry of their former selves. Not only we didn’t seem to see the whoa factor in its people, but we were also totally saddened by the degree of homelessness we saw in downtown San Francisco.

Much of this downward trend is self-inflicted.

Sure, the world was shocked by the September 11^th terror attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. But the sympathy America received from the world soon faded. First you have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by interventions in Syria, Libya and sabotages in Venezuela and what-have-you, America has been too consumed by its self-righteousness and the interests of its military-industrial complex. It has revived its 1960s ultra-anti-Communist doctrine during which its CIA went round the world to topple governments. (Some term it the “Jakarta” method.)

But despite possessing formidable intellectuality at so many levels, USA hardly bothers to define and build its nationhood. It thinks its love and championship for “freedom and democracy” alone can overlord the world. A nation is defined by the cohesiveness of its people. The American society lacks homogeneity in terms of racial make-up. It is a country with hundreds of different ethnicities. Whites are dominant, but Blacks are also numerically strong and, as all know, because of their history in the country, they will not hesitate to stage unrests each time they feel they are bullied. Hispanics and Asians, though significant in numbers, are meeker and the latter, especially, tend to suffer the brunt of the underclass anger felt by the Blacks.

Let’s be real in this fact: all of us are racists; it is a question of degree. But we keep prejudices to ourselves. Our prejudices are usually not anchored on assumptions that we are superior to another race, but rather, as a form of hard-to-believe or hard-to-accept behaviour exhibited by individuals or groups of another race. Many call it stereotyping.

But the racism as practised by Whites like Donald Trump is different. They think they are superior and are therefore entitled to be deferred by the lesser non-Whites. Of course, there are Whites who genuinely believe in racial equality but, by and large, some superiority complex is always evident even amongst them.

There has been no serious attempt in USA to bridge this superiority-inferiority gap. Lip services are often offered, but they are quite hollow in nation building. Only a culturally integrated approach based on shared beliefs or philosophy can make this work, which is not possible under the racial and religious mix of the American society today. The Blacks also do not have champions to rally their community to develop a culture that is worthy of sustainability and respect through education, behavioural change, etc. Hispanic politicians like Ted Cruz think they are as white as Whites.

Secondly, much of the American transformation in the past has been driven by its open-arm welcome to talents from all over the world. The Whites dominated this phenomenon before the advent of ICT. However, this has changed a great deal since then. Much of Wall Street is still White or Jew, but the productive forces in ICT and the digital economy today are very Asian-driven – the Chinese from Greater China and Southeast Asia, the Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from South Asia, the Japanese, and the Koreans. The Chinese are particularly good in applications, which translate into markets and money for the ICT and digital economy which help them to scale even higher planes in product research and innovation. Starting with Trump’s anti-China-ism and Biden’s continuation of playing to the home gallery, many Chinese who want to make America their home are beginning to have second thoughts. Some exodus will happen; this will certainly create an intellectual and entrepreneurial vacuum which is quite irreplaceable for a long time.

I take pride in the fact that I read widely, not only from the mainstream media, but also from the social media, academic journals, professional publications and even writings from not very credible organisations. But I hold dear to this belief: Keep an open mind of what you read or see.

Many from the American and Western intelligential world are world class in thoughts and concepts. They know exactly what is ailing America and have voiced out their concerns often. However, politicians in America and their sycophants in Europe, the QUAD/Five Eyes fraternity and amongst many Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan and even Singapore choose to be blind and deaf to realities and continue to subscribe to the cold war mentality that Trump and Biden are preaching. Many of these politicians and their sycophants are educated in the best universities, yet they continue to help Biden spew lies about China on issues like democracy in Hong Kong and genocides in Xinjiang. In this ICT age, nothing can be hidden. None has come up with evidence, which is most fundamental in Science, Law, and what-have-you.

Hong Kong has been under Britain’s colonial governors for almost a hundred years. Which governor had given Hong Kong the democracy the West has been preaching? I was reading an article written by a Nepalese Gurkha some days ago. Has Britain helped these Nepalese after they had served their purpose? Hong Kong is just a convenient ground for the West to sabotage China; their concern has nothing to do with democracy. The unfortunate part is that the successive Chief Executives of the Hong Kong Administrative Region have failed to address two things – one: the need to reeducate the Hong Kong young – through the education system – that they are Chinese and NOT British, and two: the need to solve the housing problems there.

Next is the genocide and forced labour claims in Xinjiang. Can any one of us believe that America and the West care about the Muslims there? Come on…

In his life Trump has never done an honourable piece of business. Do read his niece’s book to know who really this man is. Biden’s record may be cleaner; but he has never played a role where he has to be held accountable for. You may not like Xi Jinping, but he certainly had to slog hard all his life – from administrating villages to managing hundreds of millions at city and provincial levels – to be what he is today. And the people in the Politburo are there not because they have a great university degree, or they are scions of a great fortune, or their father is so-and-so. In China they must work like crazy to earn their stripes.

In America, all you need is to be able to articulate or debate well; it doesn’t matter whether you have substance or not. You have Blondie like Nancy Pelosi (she is not blond, though) who speaks as if she has forgotten to bring her brain along, and people like Mike Pompeo, who is a Harvard MBA, who openly admits he can lie and lie. So what, he says? Yet people like Jimmy Lai and Joshua Wong will travel all the way to worship them. And you have pseudo-scholars like Peter Navarro who can generate fictitious bibliographies. And I suppose there is no need for me to single America’s minions in Canada, Europe, Australia, and many parts of Asia for this citation.

What is disturbing to ethnic Chinese like me is America's newfound paranoia against China and by extension Chinese. Nations are like participants in a perpetual marathon. Over a specific span of time, you will see a leader, followed by close pacers, the bulk of also-runs and, finally, a bunch of laggards. In the past, you have great civilisations in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, India and China. Some have disappeared; others are just a pale shade of their former selves today. Then came the colonialists in the 1500s and the British became the undisputed leader until the end of World War II. Now the US is leading the pack. But this spoilt brat has a problem. He thought no one could possibly or should overtake him. All of a sudden, he realises someone is pacing very closely behind him. That someone is the "old hack" he used to take pity on. How dare he, he roars! Instead of pulling himself together to keep ahead, this brat slows to pick stones to throw at the old man. He also rallies his goons to floor the old man. But this old man, having survived the last five thousand years, is only interested to keep running! 

I chanced upon a recent book by S Condemi called “A Pocket History of Human Evolution and am taking the liberty to produce one of her diagrams here:

Condemi S (2018)

Contrary to earlier belief that Homo sapiens left Africa some 60,000 years ago, the latest research seems to show that the migration reached China more than 100,000 years ago. I do not want to speculate, save to say that there must be something more to it than meets the eye!

I read questions and answers posed in Quora frequently. Much of the world is still suspicious about China and Chinese. To be this is a failure on the part of China to tell its stories.

Readers may want to read a recent book written by Chris Kantha called China, China, Chyyna. To many in the West, I am sure he will be regarded as a China apologist. But he really writes things that the West should know about China. He also highlights China’s failure in its inability to do a good international PR job. This deficiency has been highlighted by many, significantly by Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani and even by yours truly in several of my earlier postings.