An America Gone Rogue

The more I see and read about Joe Biden, the more I am convinced that he is another run-of-the-mill American politician. His latest antic being America’s decision to diplomatically boycott the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. This is in the wake of the seemingly chummy conversation (but the flip-flop days later) with Xi a couple of weeks earlier. To me, this is also the straw that breaks the camel’s back as far as his credibility goes. The use of human rights as an excuse is most disingenuous to the core. That silly accusation has long been debunked, but like a demented old man, he keeps parroting it regardless. And his minnows and sycophants in Canada, Europe and Australia were quick to chorus him notwithstanding. Despite its preeminence, the US is a world that is full of deep-well frogs – people who are ignorant, or uninformed, or disinterested or outright bigots. These people don’t quite exercise their brains. They either believe wholesale everything from CNN or Fox News. As a result, charlatans and half-bakes like Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Nancy Pelosi get voted in to assume high office. On the Olympics issue, Biden and his coattails would certainly have sounded more credible if they had simply said this: We don’t like Xi or China. Period.

In the first place, the Olympics is about sports, and not about politics. Why didn’t the US boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing? What has changed during the last 14 years?

Of course, these politicians do have a bigger agenda. It is certainly not their love for human rights, but China’s phenomenal progress that is the issue! It is all about their fear of a re-emerging dragon. Basically, it is their paranoia!

 

The ghosts they see in China

American politicians and their sycophants in the Five Eyes, QUAD and AUKUS fraternity are helplessly staring at a China that will be No 1 in terms of GDP maybe in 2026. Militarily, China is likely to beat the US and its allies if there is a war and it is fought in its front yard, with its formidable strength in its missile arsenal, not to mention its hypersonic capabilities. They also fear that if Taiwan returns to China, they will also be deprived of the chips which are so essential to their survival. We shall have more of all these later, but suffice it to say that these are the ghosts they see in China and Xi. China has already made it abundantly clear that it has no territorial design outside what is legitimately theirs. But instead of committing to China to this undertaking and allow both spheres to prosper, they want China to go back to subserviency. But the horse has already bolted; there is no way they can make China yield.

Wrong start from the very outset…

Everything boils down to the weakness of the American system in choosing leaders in a new global paradigm. I remember reading somewhere about Barack Obama saying this about his Vice-President: Don’t underestimate Joe’s capability to fxxk things up. In his book “A Promised Land”, he hardly credited Biden for anything, which speaks volumes of the latter’s relevance in his administration.

From his performance since he took over the presidency, Biden has certainly lived up to Obama’s true sentiment about his former deputy.

I, like many others, was full of hope when Biden was finally declared the president of the United States of America in January 2021 – after some nail-biting counts and recounts. Donald Trump was a universal joke. He was a president who was totally devoid of substance and is likely to go down in history as a president many future Americans – if they ever get to climb out of the deep well – would be very ashamed of. His incompetence and spurious pronouncements and claims, often ridiculed by the western press themselves, knew no boundaries; it stretched to every issue you can think of.

I was actually not impressed by Biden’s credentials from the very outset. Had Trump been less idiotic, Biden might not be the president today.

He had spent his entire public life in the US Senate before he became Obama’s Vice-President. We all know those Congressional roles were basically all talk but no action stuff. I particularly remember during the run-up to the presidency, he had on one occasion labelled Xi Jinping as a thug to a question from the audience. That was totally uncalled for. Xi had played host to him before; surely he knew nobody in his or her right mind would say Xi could be one! Nonetheless, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, since the choice, though not mine to exercise, was between an “idiot” and someone who appeared decent. To win the American election, he, as someone who had no better foresight or strategy, had to be seen to be more tough than Trump on China. 

A thug in Biden’s mind! 

No wisdom, foresight, nor strategy

True enough, Biden doesn’t have what it takes to make a great president. He doesn’t even know how to mobilize a great team to change America for the better, when the present window is so opportune for him to do so.

 

At the beginning, he did look good on the domestic front, especially in his exhortations to his fellow countrymen of the need to fight the coronavirus more seriously. However, his attempts to steer the economy were certainly less convincing. He didn’t see fit to stop the money printing press, nor did he think through the trillions that he planned to spend to rejuvenate America. But these are America’s problems, not ours.

I am particularly irked by his foreign policies, which are not only a continuation of what Trump has already failed to do, but executed more cluelessly, like the ones on Iran, Ukraine and Syria, or more antagonistically, like those on China and Russia. As for North Korea and Venezuela, they are largely non-existent to him. He fumbled on America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which also sent a clear signal of America’s ineptness to its allies. His hoodlum approach to contain China has obviously disturbed America’s long-term allies in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are now seeing China in a different light. Iraq has now asked China to build some 1000 schools payable in oil, even though America has not totally withdrawn from the country.

His slogan “America is back” is a mission to kill off China as an equal – politically, economically, technologically, and militarily. China’s Huawei and high-tech companies are the obvious targets. Not surprisingly, the CIA couldn’t find a shred of evidence to pin down Wuhan as the source of the coronavirus pandemic, otherwise, China would never have been able to shrug off the mud that has been constantly hurled at it. (Watch out China, America is still trying!)

Politically, he managed to enlist Lithuania, some corrupt officials in the Solomon Islands, the ultra-liberal Greenie newbies in EU politics (like the new German foreign minister) to irritate China. And militarily, he has also persuaded India to join QUAD. 

But no matter how hard he tries, he is simply unable to persuade the ASEAN leaders to jump onto his anti-China bandwagon, even though Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia are not entirely happy with the map that China has drawn for the South China Sea. Ditto with the leaders in West Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, they have already seen America’s true colours.

In management studies jargon, Biden’s “America is back” is a mission statement, the objectives of which are blurry, and the strategy incoherent and inconsistent with what he is trying to achieve. It is utterly airy-fairy in the first place, or rhetorical in essence.

All boils down to leadership with little concept and with an inept team to steer a rudderless boat.

I suspect Biden is being nose-led by a couple of key advisors and the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki. Apparently, no off-the-cuff questions are allowed during press conferences. Much is stage-managed for him, as his nonsensical utterances, despite the big teleprompter right before him, are a source of embarrassment to these “key” staff. Biden might not be in complete control of the White House today.

An inept team…

I was listening to Charles (Chas) Freeman’s speech made at Brown University’s Watson Institute. He was talking about the tension between the US and China over Taiwan. Freeman, an ex-diplomat, reminds me of Kissinger. There is so much wisdom in this man. He spoke dismayingly of America’s total ignorance in the history and the cultural realities of East Asia in general and China in particular.  He was very critical of Biden’s team in handling basic diplomacy. Even though he did not mention names, who he had in mind was obvious.

An effective leader does not have to be very brainy. All he needs to do is to have a team of good lieutenants to make his ideas work. Richard Nixon might have been disgraced, but he is well remembered for some lasting diplomatic feats. He was prepared to do things differently on China, and he shook the world. He made good use of Kissinger. The rest is history. Indeed, America has many great thinkers – people like Charles Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs and Graham Allison.  But Biden chooses nincompoops. 

Left: Charles Freeman; Right: the two great Jeffreys – Cheah on the left and Sachs on the right.

The people whom Biden are counting on to help him bring America back are really a bunch of novices, despite their academic credentials. The most incompetent of them is none other than State Secretary Antony Blinken. Fresh from that false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Biden’s victory and too lazy to do any homework, Blinken assumed Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi were easy cakes whom he could throw his weight at when they called for that meeting in Alaska. He got walloped instead. At least Jake Sullivan was clear-headed enough to act more appropriately, diplomatically speaking. Blinken’s lack of finesse and his inability to overcome his emotional weakness were again demonstrated during his meeting with Wang Yi during the G20 Summit in Rome a couple of months later. Blinken didn’t even see fit to reciprocate when Wang Yi extended his hand, even though he was the one who sought to see Wang Yi in the first place. In our part of the world, we have a term of it: Kurang Ajar – or lacking in upbringing in the Indonesian/Malay language. Didn’t he know that Yang and Wang are two of the most seasoned diplomats in China?

Blinken’s recent attempt to persuade Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand to distance themselves from China was another diplomatic disaster. His embassies in these countries had obviously fed him only things he loved to hear. And like an emperor who did not know he had no clothes on, he went about criticizing China in these countries, like what Kamala Harris had done in Singapore and Vietnam. He should know the leaders of ASEAN countries are no simpletons. Having to govern in a very contentious region, they have already acquired a great degree of wisdom. They may not like China, but they certainly know they need to show good neighbourliness with China, the way their cultures treat neighbours at home.

And forget about Kamala Harris. Biden has obviously decided to confine her to his closet after her visit to Singapore and Vietnam.  Ditto Secretary of Defence Llyod Austin, who has largely gone quiet. (His bungling of the Afghanistan pull-out, making the US the laughing-stock of the world, and the failures of his 2021 South East Asian tours are recent conspicuous examples of his “substance”, or the lack of it.)

I am afraid Nicholas Burns, America’s ambassador-designate to China, will also turn out that way. During the Senate confirmation hearing, he talked as if he was all ready to slay an evil dragon. Obviously, he knows little about the eastern world. Let’s wait and see.

There is a common denominator in all these Biden stars. None has gone through the university of hard knocks. Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan were largely armchair policy wordsmiths before. Gina Raimondo has yet to prove herself as a worthy state governor, and she is a Donald Trump when it comes to China. Llyod Austin's elevation, I suspect, was largely a symbolic gesture because of the colour of his skin.

As for Catherine Tai, it is a classic case of using poison to fight poison.

Left: Antony Blinken, doesn’t he look totally stressed out? Right: Catherine Tai, poison to fight poison?

Left: Gina Raimondo, how much does she know about international trade? Right: A window dresser?

And now take a look at the China team… I have extracted some information about the two teams from Wikipedia (Appendix 1). Do form your own conclusion.

How Biden (or his team?) is stirring the pot to save his presidency…
Biden is obviously nervous about the mid-term elections, let alone his 2^nd term re-election chances. His popularity is low, and the Republicans are like silkworms munching their way into the mulberry leaf in him. Its looks like the Republicans will take back control of the Senate and the House of Representatives in 2023. In his perverse logic, he thinks by being tough on China and Russia, he can reverse the trend. America did succeed in breaking up the Soviet Union, but that was largely because the Soviet Union then had a drunkard by the name of Boris Yeltsin who was happy to shoot himself in the foot just because he was anxious to be the president of Russia. This strategy cannot work on China. Biden should have known this better. You cannot fight China’s resolve to stay as one nation. The CIA went all out to tear Hong Kong apart. After months of riots, its lackeys finally caved in. With the national security law now in place, Hong Kong is regaining its footing. And he certainly knew that there was no genocide or forced labour in Xinjiang. Yes, the Chinese did smash the terrorizing separatists there, but you don’t expect China to give these terrorists flowers, do you? What China did was to try to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society, hence those “jails” Australia’s ASPI was talking about. Remember the first thing Bush Junior did to the terrorists was to send them to Guantanamo Bay. Were the terrorists given any VIP treatment?

I believe the US is always trying hard to find new causes to attack. Tibet the next one maybe, but I suppose the Dalai Lama is too smart to get himself dirtied.

The Uyghurs and the Tibetan on the street know life is so much better now than any time before. They certainly do not need pseudo champions, whose intention in the first place is to use them to destabilize China and not fight for them. By boycotting Xinjiang’s products and produce, America hopes to deprive Uyghurs of livelihoods and in the process turn against China.

Containment of China and Russia is beyond Biden or America. The home issues will drown him in no time – principally the economy, the persistency of the coronavirus, and the great parochial divide between the Republican and the Democrats over everything, especially spending.  There is no way the infrastructure bills and his brand of “silk road” which he wants to build with the EU in the Third World can save him, for they will take decades to happen, if they ever can. His hoodlum approach has brought Xi and Putin to a level of relationship that will survive all sorts of instigations or sabotage, internal or external, or direct or indirect.

After World War 2, the US has fought many wars. It did win many battles, but  America has never won a war, despite its mighty industrial-military might! And you are angling for a war with China?

Leaders come in all shapes. Countries like India and Australia can be great in their own rights. Unfortunately, instead of emulating China, Narendra Modi chooses to grow green eyes. Indians have many great minds, unfortunately, they do not have the leaders to help them make things happen. Even one of its industrial patriarchs Ratan Tata was helpless when he tried to help build businesses and industries in his own country. A case in point is Air India which has degenerated into a casualty, not unlike Malaysia Airlines when politicians took over. Scott Morrison sees Australia's biggest trading partner is a security threat just because America says so. The federal government cancelled several agreements with China, of which two were related to Victoria’s Belt-and-Road Initiative with China. These agreements would have benefited Australia a great deal by being able to weave its expertise and goods and services into the network, since its quality is generally trusted all over the world. Foreign Minister Marise Paine said the move was not intended to target China! Who can believe that? And now Australia has signed up with Japan for a reciprocal access defence pact. Has Australia forgotten that Japan was virtually right at Darwin when World War 2 broke out? Has it forgotten that its solders had to fight the Japanese in the then Malaya and Singapore theatres, only to be shipped to Myanmar and North Borneo as PoWs?

Both Japan and South Korea are shackled to America. American soldiers are “defending” them. Whereas the latter knows its station, Japan is still harbouring ambitions on China and wants America to help make China weak. Canada’s Justin Trudeau’s handling of the Meng Wanzhou detention demonstrates abundantly clear that he is politically, morally and ethically a midget. Yet, he has the cheek to point a finger at China’s human rights record. Lithuania and many “green” MPs of the EU Parliament are basically a bunch of hare-brained politicians. And Biden knows the South China Sea is where he can drive a wedge between China and its neighbours in the region – Vietnam. the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei all have some claim to the sea there. Singapore says it will not take sides, for its fortune is too tied to a friendly China and happy America. The US cannot count on Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar to do any of its bidding. It can only pay some parties to create animosity towards China, like what they have done to one of the factions in the Solomon Islands.

I have mentioned earlier that the US is already losing its grip in the Middle East. Maybe its next target will be Mongolia, one of China’s immediate neighbours, on whom China depends a great deal for its iron ore supply. But Mongolia needs China’s money. It has few options.  

A country that has little history to anchor on

The US has only a short history to shout about. The Europeans rushed to colonize the continent in the late 1500s. But it was the British who became the sole masters. They went about systematically exterminating the natives. To build the country, they brought in slaves. It declared Independence from Great Britain on 4 July 1776. But it was not until 1865 that slavery was outlawed. The Chinese who went there to mine gold and help build railways were discriminated against and treated harshly.

The Americans think their concept of Democracy is the ultimate system of governance. In the 1960s and 1970s, they went about destabilizing legitimate foreign governments and installed corrupt military dictatorships in lieu, as long as any of the former was not to their liking. The campaign started in Indonesia first, after Sukarno championed non-Aligned movements. An author used the term Jakarta Method to describe their misdeeds all over the world – in Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, and many many countries in Africa and Latin America.

But the world has changed. America is no longer the beacon of good democracy; what is being practised is really chaotic democracy. The Anglo-Saxon’s sense of superiority breeds and sustains racism – Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics are lesser beings to them. Double standards appear to be the order of the day now. (Some top-of-the-food-chain Chinese were indulged for window dressing or for countering China purposes.)

 

Why the paranoia now?

In 2021, the US’s GDP in nominal terms stood at USD 22.68 tn and China’s USD 16.64 tn. But China is catching up! It has already surpassed the US in terms of PPP GDP in 2017. It is set to overtake the US in nominal terms in 2028 or even earlier. (See Appendix 2) A projection made by the IMF in 2021 shows the US is leading by USD 6.0 tn or 1.36 times on an exchange rate basis. However, the economy of China is USD $4.0 tn or 1.18x of the US on a purchasing power parity basis.

On a per capita basis, China is still far behind. But Americans should not bet on this. Productivity “potential” per capita in China is well ahead of that in America. China has awakened (or has been awakened), and the per capital GDP gap will close in a matter of time, certainly sooner than most Americans would imagine. China is already well ahead of the US in Agriculture and Industry. Agriculture Output of the US is only 17.58% of China and 77.58% for the Industry sector. The services sector of the US is still more than double of China, though.

Source: WTO

The US national debt stands at about USD 31.4 tn at the end of 2021. Japan is the largest US holder of US debt (1.31 tn), followed by China (1.07 tn).

All this speaks volumes of the economic health of the US. The US was happy to let things go before, but the US Dollar is under unprecedented challenge now.

In 2020, China’s value of export was USD 2.50 tn, or 13.3% of the world’s total, versus the US’s USD 1.65 tn or 8.8% of the world’s total. But look at the trade balance, in the case of China, it was USD 429.6 bn, compared with a US deficit of USD 923.2 bn. US’s position vis-à-vis China and the major trading countries of the world is likely to continue to decline as the decade progresses. This, together with the decision to digitalize currencies by many others, simply means one thing: the accelerating of the dethroning of the US Dollar as the global monetary hegemon in no time, which will not only save countries like Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and be welcomed by America’s long-suffering friends like Japan.

Even then there is now fear by association in American academia, especially if you are doing something with China. National security is cited each time it decides to sanction a Chinese high-tech company. (In Australia, the desire to shoo off the Chinese from the Darwin port under the same pretext was, however, thwarted by their own Defence Ministry’s assessment which concluded that no national security issue was at stake!) Nonetheless, these embargo measures are many a time a double-edged sword. The rollout of 5G in the western world is stalled or has to be done at a much higher cost. Coercion and pressure on companies not to supply technology to China kill off hundreds of billions of revenue from companies like the Dutch’s ASML, Korea’s Samsung and Taiwan’s TSMC, not to mention the suppliers in the US.

On the military front, America is leading in most sectors (Appendix 3). (But if a war were to break out, you can be quite sure that many of the naval vessels involved would end up in the bottom of the East and South China Seas, thanks to China’s Dongfeng missiles.)  

No wonder the Chinese ghost is lurking in every politician’s mind in America.

 

Is the Chinese ghost for real?

I have attached in Appendix 4 a brief write-up on the parts of Chinese history which I think is relevant for my contention that the American fear of China is largely unfounded. Despite its long history, China was not quite unified until 221 BCE when Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, 259-210 BCE) declared himself the first emperor after he had conquered all of the other warring states. The Song (宋) dynasty (960 – 1279) was particularly prolific in inventions. But the dynasty was very weak militarily and had to bear the brunt of many invasions from the neighbouring tribes. It soon fell to the Mongol khans; Yuan’s (元)Kublai Khan extended his conquest to as far as Hungary, but that had very little to do with the Chinese way of life. Being a foreign occupation power, it could not last long, given the nationalistic nature of Han Chinese. The Ming (明) emperors (1368 – 1644) had the opportunity to make China the top dog of the world during their era. However, its inward-looking policy soon prevailed and within a hundred years, China lost its skill in making great ocean-going ships. And thanks to Admiral Zheng He, who was a Muslim, China helped Islamize Southeast Asia, which hitherto was very much Hindu/Buddhist in culture.

Qing (清) (1644 -1912) was Chinese complacency at its worst. False belief in its superiority made China a laughing-stock. Great humiliation followed even after the 1911 Revolution. Until Mao Zedong came along to make China stand up.

What can we conclude out of the last two millennia of China’s history? Answer: A people who have shown that they have no territorial design against others, even though they had the ability and opportunity to do so. Will they do it that under Xi?

 

The mandate of the Chinese heaven

China had been a feudal society for much of its existence, until Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing court. Legitimacy of an empire’s reign had always been based on the concept of the “Mandate of Heaven”. The Chinese heaven is not the abode of the all-powerful god that created and sustains the universe; rather, it is a court up in the clouds that comprises a timeless emperor and his entourage and detail, from both the literary and the military ranks, who had risen to heaven because of their great deeds in life. If an earthly emperor lost the trust of its subjects, then his mandate would certainly face termination by this court up in the sky, and soon, someone would be given a new mandate. Chiang Kai-shek “lost” his mandate and Mao rose to the occasion. All this may sound archaic or superstitious, but it is no different from how the legitimacy of the other forms of governments is thought of. If you lose an election, you have to give way to someone who has given new hope to the people. Xi has done a great deal for the people. He has the mandate, which the US and others are really in no position to question. After all, his approval rating, no matter how you want to discount it, is higher than any leader in the world. I tuned into CCTV to watch Xi address the nation on the eve of the 2022 New Year. He had only one mission in mind: to make China better. On no occasion did he attack any world leader.

Xi’s poverty alleviation success in China is for real. And the rural villages are undergoing makeovers on a massive scale. People are learning good etiquette in terms of table manners, the use of public toilets and are refraining from jumping queues and spitting indiscriminately, many of which are the sources of shame felt by fellow Chinese outside China before the coming of Xi. China is leapfrogging in STEM. It is already ahead on many technological fronts.

In a report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center entitled The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs the US dated December 2021, the executive summary states:

·       In AI, China is now a full-spectrum peer competitor;

·       In 5G, “… America’s 5G infrastructure rollout is years behind China’s…”;

·       In quantum information science, China has already surpassed the US in quantum communication and has rapidly narrowed America’s lead in quantum computing;

·       In the semiconductor industry, China is now a serious competitor and may soon catch up in two key areas: semiconductor fabrication and chip design;

·       In life sciences, China is competing fiercely across the full biotech R&D spectrum. Its researchers have narrowed America’s lead in the CRISPR gene editing technique and surpassed it in CAR T-cell therapy;

·       In green energy, today China is the world’s leading manufacturer, user, and exporter of these technologies; America’s green push relies on deepening its dependence on China.

In short, the US is no longer the global science and technology hegemon! But instead of seeing how it can co-exist, it is looking from the angle of zero-sum competition, meaning, I will kill or disintegrate you, for I am determined to be the sole victor.

The way China is managing the COVID-19 pandemic should have served as a good example how a disaster of this nature should be handled. Instead, the West is consumed by distorted logic spewed out by its mass media. Even if a success is obvious, it would be tempered with grudges and “but…” undertones (CNA’s Beijing correspondent Olivia Xiong’s trademark?). Even The Straits Times and Channel News Asia of Singapore and The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong are also reporting China in similar veins. It is a kind of bad breath from people whom you tend to think should have a set of good teeth about Eastern culture!

 

What is driving the US-China tension?

You use tariff as a weapon basically to protect your own industries. But the US is using it to stall China. It simply does not have the industries that are producing the stuff Americans need day in and day out. They still have to buy from China even though prices are now heading drastically north. But instead of unwinding what Trump had done, Biden appointed China antagonists Gina Raimondo and Catherine Tai to put up more hurdles and blockades. Tai wants to prove that she is more American than Trump! The US is also urging firms to leave China to either return or relocate in other countries. But business is all about making money. It will take a long time before Vietnam and Indonesia can reach China’s scale. And forget about India; I just couldn’t help thinking how shallow many other western presses can be when they evaluate capabilities. (Maybe they don’t have that capability in the first place!)

a)    The western and pro-west presses…

Someone conned the term “prestitutes” to describe the present breed of journalists in the western media. The root word of it, I suppose, is “prostitute”. Biden has decided to hand out billions to wage a media war on China. I suspect many are already enjoying the largesse of Biden’s generosity, which is causing them to lose their souls, ethically and morally. You can disagree with what you see, but you also need to lay out your arguments to support your disagreements. You may not agree with what China was doing and had done in Hong Kong and  Xinjiang, but to parrot the distortions of ASPI (Australian Strategic Policy Institute) or pseudo-scholars like Adrian Zenz, Gordon Cheng and Peter Navarro is not only sheer laziness but an insult to one’s intelligence or outright dishonesty, which many are doing in the west, even with supposedly authoritative publications and channels like The Economist, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Aljajeera, South China Morning Post, The Straits Times and Channel News Asia. Many would have noticed that many of these authors are actually ethnically Chinese – Nectar Gan, Helen Gao, and Muyi Xiao, just to name a few. I suppose they have to justify their existence by writing more provocatively on China. (I would particularly like to single out Elizabeth Teoh who anchors CAN’s business section. China would have collapsed many times if what she “feared” each time was a statement of fact!) These mercenaries are the Qin Hui of modern China. (Qin Hui 秦桧, 1090–1155, a chancellor of the Song Dynasty, generally regarded as a traitor for his part in the persecution and execution of Yue Fei (岳飞), a general who fought bravely for the Song against the Jin dynasty, during the Jin-Song Wars of the 12^th Century.)

 

b)    The war on chips…

Caught in the great power struggle is TSMC. It is being forced to lay bare all its secrets to the US government. Billions of dollars of revenue from sales to Huawei have also been killed. On top of that, it is being coerced into building plants in the US, knowing that it is the last place an efficient plant should be located. A similar fate is also being experienced by Samsung, AMSL and other semi-conductor niche giants. How would this pan out? China’s advances would certainly be held back but the deprivation also makes China more resolved to be self-sufficient on this front. The US should realise that many of the people working in these embargoed companies are Chinese. The companies will stagnate if their products cannot sell well. The reverse migration has already started. Yes, it may take a couple of years for China to catch up, but once they catch up, the trend is irreversible. America forgot that their progress was a result of talent flows from all over the world, especially from China.

 

c)     The tool in Tsai Ing-wen

Taiwan was once one of the leading tigers in the world economy. MIT stood for “Made in Taiwan” in those days. It is still a very prosperous island today. But it is caught in an untenable situation following Tsai Ing-wen’s hostility to China. She is happy to be used by the US to retard China.

 

There is really no good reason for Tsai to antagonize China, which has all along been prepared to live with a Taiwan under the one-country-two-systems advocation – as long as Taiwan acknowledges it is a part of a greater China. But Tsai wants a different destiny for Taiwan.

 

Tsai’s PhD controversy reflects her true character. You don’t need to have a PhD to run for political office, but she was proud to wave it high as part of her solid credentials. It is quite clear that she did not complete her PhD at the London School of Economics. Notwithstanding, she had the audacity to claim that the university had in fact considered to award her one-and-a-half PhDs! (No one in the academic world would understand this contention!) That was not only a blatant lie but a criminal act, since it was based on this claim that she secured a tenure academic position with it at National Chengchi University. This might explain her insistence to pursue a course for Taiwan that is fake in the first place. (Before that, another Democratic Progressive Party president Chen Shui Bian had also tried to champion independence for Taiwan. They were all protégés of Lee Teng Hui. Chen spent time behind bars for corruption. But none was as audacious or blatant as Tsai.)

 

What Biden should be looking at

The conditions in many of America’s subways reflect what the country is today – archaic, unsafe, grubby, and decaying. Walls are usually full of graffiti, floors covered with rubbish everywhere, toilets broken, trains tired looking and what-have-you. Between cities, it doesn’t have any high-speed trains. (The one between Los Angeles and San Francisco has yet to be completed.) Although its airports, roads and bridges are adequate, they are certainly not the type you would like to see in First World, let alone the No 1 country on Earth. If the Japanese management system can be hailed as a model for adoption by top graduate American business schools, why can’t China’s advances in infrastructural engineering be sourced to help transform America’s landscape? (Its road and bridge building machines like Kunlun SJL900, or its tunnel boring machines like CRCH 1 or its rail track laying machines lime CKP500, just to mention a few.) No one can produce steel, aluminum, and other engineering materials more cost-efficiently than the Chinese. 

And look at how China has rolled out its Road and Belt projects:

How China is changing the world…

Top: The Yunan-Laotian high speed train; Below: The port of Piraeus in Greece

Left: The road in Kenya; Right: The Padma bridge in Bangladesh

And how it is helping to vaccinate the world…

The vaccines to Argentina

If all these had been done instead…

The US keeps telling the world that it is the standard bearer of democracy. But all you have to do is to listen to China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying’s common-sense Coca Cola analogy: Democracy is not like Coca Cola where it should taste the same everywhere!

Biden should think more like a statesman than a parochial politician. He could have learned from history’s many greats. Of course, he would not want to learn anything from the East. But there are so many others he could take a leaf off – leaders like Angela Merkel, or even South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. Mandela was released after years in prison, he could have turned on the Whites, instead, he talked about forgiveness and reconciliation. And despite the setbacks inflicted by his successors, South Africa remains one of the few viable nations in the African continent.

Upon Biden's winning the presidency, he should have declared Trump’s policy on China quite misplaced. He should have drawn upon the US’s relationship with China during World War 2, and the Chinese contributions to the US when thousands were enlisted to help build railroads in America. Planet Earth is certainly big enough for the US and China to co-exist, especially when China has demonstrated that it has no imperial design against any country. The US can continue to provide leadership in basic Sciences, and China can help bring products out of them. This is the theory of comparative advantage at its best.

Biden should have declared all this after he won the election: Yes, we have dropped the ball for too long; let’s pick it up and move forward. Yes, we have been looking silly everywhere – Internally the pandemic, our aging infrastructure, our gun violence and deaths (I just read the latest statistics: 20,000 gun deaths and some 20 million guns were retailed in America in 2021), our racism, our rich-poor and class-divides, our homelessness, our declining education, the QAnon stupidity, etc; and externally, our misplaced holier-than-thou wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and our silly sanctions of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, which have made the people there poorer, the fake news about genocide and forced labour in Xinjiang, and our double-speaks on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the silly trade war with China. Yes, we shouldn’t blame anyone but ourselves. And surely, we can learn something from China and East Asia! Yes, let’s use their affordable steel and aluminum to help rebuild our infrastructure. Yes, let’s sell them more chips and have them them build cheap phones and consumer products for us. Etc, etc, etc. All we must do is to make sure they don’t become aggressive militarily. Yes, let’s each strengthen our own sets of comparative advantages. Give me eight years and I will deliver a great America back to you. World trade will soar, ditto our stock markets, and even our industrial-military complex. And Americans will enjoy the highest quality of life!

 

A new dawn will certainly emerge…

The US should send more delegations to visit China, to see for themselves the workability of other systems and cultures. Surely there are many lessons to be learned from the way China manages its Xinjiang and Tibet regions. Ditto the Confucian values that America can adopt in many instances. As it is, there are already many westerners living in China. Judging from the people who are doing business, or working, or even learning martial arts in China, we certainly can conclude that such a proposition is not unfeasible or untenable. Cross-cultural exchanges will always result in creating an equilibrium in terms of acceptances of things hitherto foreign to one. Americans should take a good look at how the Muslims coexist with the Han Chinese in regions like Xi-an, Ningxia, Lanzhou, and many places elsewhere. (The Confucian institutes can help pave the way!)

China is still far from being a perfect society. Its people’s individualism and boundless entrepreneurship can be ugly. You often hear of internet scams from China; the runaway greed of the real estate players like Evergrande, Kaisa, Shimao, etc; the billions lost by ordinary people in P2P lending; a potential bomb in Jack Ma’s Ant Group attempt; still some shoddy products and fake TCM medicines and teas being churned out despite crackdowns; the nouveau riche mentality; outlandish architecture and show offs; and provincial-, city- and county-level corruptions. But Xi and his team are losing no time to transform the Chinese society to usher in a new China.

Without American intervention, Taiwan would melt into the greater China quite seamlessly. It can continue to excel in semiconductors and sell its chips to any country. Once the Taiwan irritant is removed, there is no reason for the two countries to fight each other anymore. And Japan will certainly know its place in the Pacific. The other minnows are irrelevant, nonetheless, they will also benefit from China’s import of their resources and produces.

A reminder of how far American politicians can go…

See the attachment on her left ankle!

Appendix 1

The Global Olympics...

The US Team

Antony John Blinken (born 1962). His father was once the US ambassador to Hungary. He followed his mother to Paris and attended École Jeannine Manuel. He attended Harvard University from 1980 to 1984. He entered Columbia Law School in 1985 and earned his J.D. in 1988. He previously served as deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under President Barack Obama.

From 2009 to 2013, Blinken served as deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to the vice president. During his tenure in the Obama administration, he helped craft U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran.

 

Jake Sullivan (born 1976) attended Yale University, where he majored in international studies and political science and won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford. He graduated with a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2003.^[5]

He was previously a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and her deputy chief of staff at the Department of State. He worked in the Obama administration as deputy assistant to the president and the vice president's national security advisor, when Biden was U.S. Vice President.

 

Gina Marie Raimondo (born 1971) previously served as the first female Governor of Rhode Island from 2015 to 2021.

Of Italian descent, she graduated a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Harvard College. She was also a Rhodes scholar and later received her Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School.

 

Katherine Chi Tai (1974) is the first Asian-American to serve in as Trade Representative. Tai grew up in Washington, D.C. Her parents, who were both born in mainland China, but grew up in Taiwan and later immigrated to the United States. In 1996, Tai graduated from Yale University in history. Tai went on to study at Harvard Law School, where earned a Juris Doctor in 2001.

After her undergraduate education, she taught English at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou as a Yale-China Fellow for two years, from 1996 to 1998.

 

Nicholas Burns (Born 1956) is a professor of diplomacy and international politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.  During his career in the State Department, he was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the Bush administration.

Burns was in 2020 a Fulbright scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, with a concentration in European history, from Boston College. He also studied abroad at the University of Paris. He received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1980.

 

China’s Team

Xi Jinping (习近平; born 1953) has been President of China since 2013. His late father was a Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun. He was exiled to a rural county as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution. He studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua as a worker-peasant-soldier student and rose through the ranks and became Governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming Governor and Party Secretary of neighbouring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao’s successor.

 

In 1985, as part of a Chinese delegation to study U.S. agriculture, he stayed in the home of an American family in Iowa. This trip, and his two-week stay with a U.S. family, is said to have had a lasting impression upon him and his views on the United States.

 

Former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew said he felt Xi was "a thoughtful man who has gone through many trials and tribulations". Lee also commented: "I would put him in the Nelson Mandela class of persons. A person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings affect his judgment. In other words, he is impressive". Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson described Xi as "the kind of guy who knows how to get things over the goal line". Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said that Xi "has sufficient reformist, party and military background to be very much his own man".

 

Li Keqiang (李克强; born 1955), China’s Prime Minister is an economist by profession. Li rose through the ranks through his involvement in the Communist Youth League. From 1998 to 2004, Li served as the Governor and Party Secretary of Henan. From 2004 to 2007 he served as the Party Secretary of Liaoning. From 2008 to 2013, Li served as the senior Vice-Premier under then-Premier Wen Jiabao, overseeing a broad portfolio which included economic development, price controls, finance, climate change, and macroeconomic management. Li has also been a major force behind the implementation of the "comprehensively deepening reforms" announced in the fall of 2013. Made in China 2025 is a strategic plan issued by Li and his cabinet in May 2015.

 

Li read law at Peking University and his PhD in economics in 1995.

 

Liu He (刘鹤; born 1952), the man who is always in Xi’s entourage, is a current member of the Politburo and one of the Vice Premiers. He is also the director of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission.

 

Liu graduated from Renmin University-Beijing Union University in industrial economics. He later studied at Seton Hall University and and received his Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University.

 

He has published widely on macroeconomics, Chinese industrial and economic development policy, new economic theory and the information industry. 

 

Beginning in 2013, Liu began advising Xi on a series of economic initiatives and is believed to be one of the primary architects of Chinese economic policy at the time. In May 2018 Liu was also appointed top trade negotiator with the US.

 

Yang Jiechi (杨洁篪; born 1950) spent much of his professional life in the US, where he was China’s ambassador from 2001 to 2005. He served as Foreign Minister between 2007 and 2013. Since 2013, he has been the director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, the highest diplomatic position in China. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost contemporary architects of China's foreign policy.

 

Yang Jiechi was admitted to the Shanghai Foreign Language School in 1963. Affected by the Cultural Revolution, he dropped out in 1968 and entered an electric meter factory as a worker. During the four years in the factory, he continued to learn English. Yang was selected in 1972 to attend Shanghai Foreign Language School and later the University of Bath and the London School of Economics. In 2006, He received his PhD from the Nanjing University through distance learning while serving as the ambassador to the US.

 

Wang Yi (王毅; born 1953) has been China’s Foreign Minister since 2013 and a state councilor since 2018. He served formerly as China's Vice Foreign Minister, Ambassador to Japan and Director of the Taiwan Affairs office.

 

Wang was born in Beijing. After graduating from high school in September 1969, he was sent to Northeast China. He subsequently served in the Northeast Construction Army Corps in Heilongjiang Province for eight years.

 

In December 1977, Wang returned to Beijing, and in the same year was enrolled in the department of Asian and African Languages of Beijing International Studies University where he studied the Japanese language, graduating in February 1982 with a bachelor's degree. He is known to speak fluent English and Japanese.

 

Wang Huning (王沪宁; born 1955) is China’s leading political theorist. he has been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee since 2017. He is also the chairman of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization and served as the director of the Central Policy Research from 2002 to 2020.

 

Widely regarded as the “Grey Cardinal”, Wang is believed to be the chief ideologue of the Communist Party and principal architect behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders since the 1990s: He has held significant influence over policy and decision making over all three paramount leaders, a rare feat in Chinese politics. Wang was regarded, along with Wang Qishan, as one of the two primary advisors and decision makers for Xi.

 

A former academic, Wang was a professor and dean of the law school at Fudan University. He entered Shanghai Normal University in 1974 to study the French language. He was enrolled in the Department of International Politics at Fudan University in 1978 to pursue his postgraduate degree while conducting research for the Shanghai Academy of Social Science. He received a master's degree in law from Fudan University.

 

After graduation, Wang stayed at Fudan University as an instructor, associate professor, and professor (1981–89). He was named professor of law at age 30 in 1985, becoming the youngest law professor in the history of the university.

 

Wang served as chairman of Fudan University's Department of International Politics (1989–94), and as dean of the law school (1994–95).

 

In 1988, Wang was a visiting scholar in the US for six months, spending the first three months at the University of Iowa, three weeks at the University of California at Berkeley, and visiting many other universities. During his time in the United States, Wang visited over 30 cities and close to 20 universities. This experience led to his 1991 book America Against America.

 

Source: Wikipedia

Appendix 2

 China’s GDP in PPP terms (Source: IMF)

Appendix 3

 Relative Military Strengths (Source: SCMP 12 July 2021)

Military expenditure in 2020

US      : US$778 billion

China  : US252 billion

 

Total manpower

US      : 1.35 million active US military personnel and 800,000 in its reserve.

China  : 2 million active personnel in 2019

 

Technology and Equipment are more important than weight of numbers in modern warfare and both countries are reducing the emphasis on manpower.

 

Ground force

China has been adopting lighter and more powerful automated weapons for its ground forces, shifting much of the operational burden from physical grunt work to digital technology. The United States, with its 6,333 tanks, has the second-largest armour holdings in the world, while China is third with 5,800 tanks, according to Forbes.

 

Air power

America maintains its edge with more than 13,000 military aircraft, 5,163 of which are operated by the US Air Force. Its forces include the F-35 Lightning and F-22 Raptor, which are among the most advanced combat jets in the world.

 

China’s aviation force is the third-largest in the world with more than 2,500 aircraft, of which around 2,000 are combat aircraft.

 

China’s most advanced stealth fighter jet is the J-20. It is producing its own high-thrust turbofan engine which could speed up mass production of the planes is ongoing.

The two countries are also working on new bombers, with China developing its Xian H-20 strategic bomber.

Meanwhile, the US Air Force released new images and details of its next-generation B-21 Raider stealth bomber on Friday.

Naval power

China now has the world’s largest navy, with about 360 ships compared with the US fleet of 297.

 

But China’s numerical advantage is down to smaller vessels, such as coastal patrol ships. When it comes to larger warships the United States has the advantage in numbers, technology and experience.

The US has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The carriers are able to accommodate 60 or more aircraft each.

China has just two carriers – the Liaoning and Shandong. Each can carry 24 to 36 J-15 fighter jets.

However, China has plan to equal US naval strength in the Pacific region, launching two dozen large warships – from corvettes and destroyers to huge amphibious landing docks – in 2019 alone. It plans to launch a third aircraft carrier equipped with the most advanced electromagnetic launch catapults and start work on a fourth this year.

Nuclear warheads

The US has the second-largest nuclear arsenal in the world after Russia.

China has not disclosed how many warheads it has; it is believed it has 1,000 in 2021.

Missiles

While the US has far more nuclear warheads, China has a virtual monopoly in one area: ground-based ballistic missiles that can carry out both nuclear and conventional strikes.

 

Based on the latest intelligence report, China’s hypersonic technology is years ahead of the US’s.

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix 4

 

China – A Threat to the West?

China was not a unified state until Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, 259-210 BCE) declared himself the first emperor, after he had conquered all of the other warring states. But the Chinese have been proud of their common culture since time immemorial. They always consider themselves the children of the Yellow Emperor, a legendary figure who is said to have ushered in China’s civilisation some five thousand years ago. 

But much of China was, save for the silk that was coveted, not known to the western world – until Marco Polo bragged about his visit and influence on the court of Kublai Khan (1260 -1294). (I personally am not convinced that he had been there, since there was no record of his stint in Chinese history for that period.)  Before the Sui-Tang (隋-唐) era, China was largely an insular culture, even at the height of its great literary roll-out during the Spring & Autumn period (Chun Chiu 春秋, 771 - 476 BCE). It was very much a “middle” kingdom to its people, meaning, anything outside was peripheral. Regardless, the philosophies that sprang out of the period has influenced the way the Chinese conduct themselves as a culture since then. The first sections of the Great Wall of China – for defending against the northern and central Asian tribes – is said to be built at that time. Qin Shi Huang joined them up.

 

During the Sui-Tang period (581 – 618 – 907), thanks to the eagerness to learn more about Buddhism, China began to look out in earnest, even though there were already monks like Fa-hsien (法顯) (trav. 319 - 413) and Xuan-zang (玄奘) (trav. 629-645). Yi-jing (義淨)  did it during Tang-proper (trav. 671-695).

 

The Song (宋) dynasty (960 – 1279) was particularly prolific in inventions. One British scholar even contended that the world’s First Industrial Revolution actually began there. (The Eastern Origins of western Civilization (JM Hopson, Cambridge University, 2004). But the dynasty was very weak militarily and had to bear the brunt of many invasions from the neighbouring tribes.

 

After that, Yuan’s (元)Kublai Khan extended his conquest to as far as Hungary, but that had very little to do with the Chinese way of life. China under Yuan (1271 to 1368) was largely a foreign occupation of the country. It could not last long, given the nationalistic nature of Han Chinese.

 

The Ming (明) emperors (1368 – 1644) had the opportunity to make China the top dog of the world during their era. Unfortunately, the opportunity was squandered and within a hundred years, China had lost its skill in making great ocean-going ships. On top of that, thanks to Admiral Cheng He, who was a Muslim, China helped Islamize Southeast Asia, which hitherto was very much Hindu/Buddhist in culture.

 

Qing (清) (1644 -1912) was Chinese complacency at its worst. While Japan understood the prowess of western technology, Qing’s pseudo-scholar emperors blew their chances. False belief in its superiority made China a laughing-stock. Great humiliation followed, until Mao Zedong came along.

 

(China weakness prompted two vassal states – Korea and Vietnam – which were largely contemptuous of China after it was weakened by the foreign forces to do away with Chinese characters in their writing. While the Koreans had developed their unique form, Vietnam chose to Romanize Chinese to suit their local phonetic form of franca lingua.)

 

Mao Zedong might be the Zhu Yangzhang (朱元璋, or Ming’s founding Hongwu Emperor) of China’s 20^th Century, but if the trend continues, Xi Jinping is likely to go down in history as China’s Zhougong (周公Duke of Zhou, circa 11^th Century BCE, the brother of the emperor who solidified the power of the Zhou dynasty (1046-356 BCE) and who was esteemed by Kung-tze (Confucius) as the paragon of great governance. If there is going to be a sage-ruler in China’s history, he would certainly be the one.

 

What can we conclude from the last two millennia of China’s history? A people who have no territorial design against others, even though they have the ability and opportunity to do so.