Two Chinese Sayings on the Conduct of America’s Geopolitics

Today I would share my application of two Chinese sayings: 临时抱佛脚 (Lín shí bào fó jiǎo) and 恶人先告状 (È rén xiān gào zhuàng) on the desperate attempts by America to hold back China. The former is often used to describe an ill-prepared student who just before an examination resort to hugging Buddha’s foot to seek divine help. The latter says that a villain will always try to pre-empt things by accusing the victim first. 

America is going around demonizing China, hence the latter; and its attempt to court souls hitherto considered unworthy and thus the former. 

Of course, it is not just the US that is trying to contain China. The entire Western world, Japan and even India are hoping America will succeed. But I would like to concentrate on the ringleader, i.e., Old Joe.

Old Joe pretending to play victim

I even suspect it is not Old Joe himself that is calling the shots. I just cannot imagine an American president would want to lose his credibility with anybody days after he had made a commitment. But that is exactly what he has been doing to Xi Jinping all this while. Not only that, but Old Joe is also doing that to his hoodlums in Europe, Japan, and Korea. I suspect he is quite demented to remember much of what he had said moments earlier. Old people tend to do that anyway. There must be a Deep State to choreograph his actions. Old Joe is just a very good tool for the Deep State to use to confuse China.

Each time I saw Joe Biden on TV, a phobia of loathsomeness immediately gripped me. I really hate to see that man! He is such a “snake,” a metaphor which we used to describe some of our lecturers in the University of Malaya’s Engineering Faculty. They were pretty sadistic; they love to fail students by setting examination questions that would catch students off guard or unprepared. Some very good students had to repeat a year or two and this has left a life-long scar in their psyche. In geopolitics, Biden is such a snake. He would undertake to Xi one thing, but only for China to see his officials staging a 180-degree turn after they parted, especially on high-tech sanctions against China and military movements in South and East China Seas. My wife always wonders why Xi bothers to meet this half-demented old heck.

(Old Joe is not the only one I loathe seeing; there are a few more – State Secretary Antony Blinken, Defence Secretary Llyod Austin, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Chief Trade Negotiator Katherine Tai and Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns. I also hate to see NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg, EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, and Japan’s Fumio Kishida, UK’s Rishi Sunak. They are part and parcel of the Deep State that is determined to retard China. Once you assume any of these positions, you get sucked in.)

What has China done to them?
None of them can answer that question, except to make the same silly accusations about genocides and forced labour in Xinjiang, suppressions of democracy in Hong Kong, China’s tyranny in South China Sea and the intimidation of Taiwan. There are many more: Debt traps for those who signed up on Road & Belt Initiatives, and about to come – human rights against Tibetans, not to mention the theft of Western technology, industrial espionage, and the danger China’s high-tech firms like Huawei pose to their national security. (With Huawei’s equipment, you cannot spy on others anymore!)

Blinken is fond of saying that China is not playing its part in a rules-based order world. What is that? He never explained. What we know is that America will challenge any WTO rulings that are against it. Both America and China are not state parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. So, is not this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? It also withdrew from WTO and the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, albeit they were done during Donald Trump’s presidency. In short Blinken continues to hold America has the birthright to stay preeminent in the world.

The inconvenient truth is simply this: China through its own hard slog is about to overtake the West. And this must be stopped.

To Biden and those in this Deep State, if you do not hold back China’s progress now, it will be too late. China’s Ru-Fuo-Dao 儒佛道 culture/philosophy are incompatible to Liberal Democracy and Liberal Capitalism. The West’s progress and wealth were built on conquests and colonization, China’s “co-existence and -prosperity” geopolitical model is alien to them. If China becomes No 1, they fear many new standards will be set by China and they will be at the mercy of China. This must not be allowed to happen.

But can China be stopped?
The West admired China, then known as Cathay to them, greatly in when the world entered the 2^nd millennium. Venetian merchant Marco Polo is said to travel to Yuan’s China in the later part of the 13^th century and was totally fascinated by what he saw. (I personally do not think he made the journey, but it does not matter.) Then came the British – George Macartney’s mission to Beijing in 1793. Despite the rebuff by Emperor Qianlong, he made the West understand that China was easy as cake for the West’s plundering, the rest is history.

But Xi’s China is no longer a pushover. Its infrastructure – highways, bridges, tunnels, metros, intercity highspeed rails, airports, power generation, clean water supply, telecommunications facilities – is the envy of the developed world. It is ahead of the West in 5G and AI. Militarily, its missiles technology has surpassed America’s.

In electric vehicle manufacturing, oil and gas exploration and extraction, chip designs, and shipbuilding, China has already overwhelmed every competitor. Sooner, its nuclear technology will also awe Americans.

There is still a gap to close in fighter jets, space exploration and precision engineering. China is now being strangled by the US in advanced chip production. Without the foundry equipment, like ASML’s EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography systems, it is unable to produce 7nm and below chips. This albatross around its neck has slowed down much of its progress to help usher the world into the 4^th Industrial Revolution. But in the longer run, China will have a way to circumvent it.

Few countries can do as well as China in food security, poverty alleviation, basic healthcare provision.

China’s unstoppability is based on one thing: Chineseness, which is epitomized in its emphasis on education, regardless of whether one is rich or poor. China is producing four times the number of PhDs the US is doing, and most of them are in the fields of engineering and technology. (Nonetheless, Chinese culture is also not without weaknesses. These two lines of doctrine 礼义廉耻 公明正大 (lĭ yì lián chĭ. gōng ming zhèng dà; though some say the latter should read 光明正大 guāng míng zhèng dà) encapsulate the Chinese Ru-Fuo-Dao 儒佛道 philosophy, which I have written before (Japanese: Asia’s Honorary Whites, 7 December 2022). However, I seem to see that the teaching is lacking in the aspects of cleanliness, orderliness, and personal hygiene. Might this be the reason provincial Chinese are generally causal about these needs in exercising social etiquette?)

It has a well-coordinated effort to manage the country’s commodity needs – oil from Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Venezuela and even America, and minerals from South America and Africa.

Despite what China has shown to the Western world how it has successfully managed the COVID-19 pandemic, Western journalists are still pouring oil into the bush fire China is now working on to extinguish following the lifting of quarantine restrictions there the last couple of days. The caption in a CNN article yesterday reads “China could see nearly a million deaths as it exits zero-Covid, study says.” CNA’s Olivia Siong quoted an even higher figure – 1.5million and insinuated that the fatality figures released by China’s official channels were high suspect. She is based in Beijing, yet she was happy to quote a Western report. Do they think officials in China like Zhong Nan-shan is stupid? Friends, the world is facing the Omicron and not Alpha strains now! Omicron is more infectious but less lethal. Like people everywhere, the first few days of opening are always a time of trepidation and people will flock to hospitals even on the account of a mild cough.

The Yellow Bananas
Three weeks ago, I went with a Singapore friend to see some people in Jakarta. To my dismay, he made this wild claim on the Covid situation in China: China’s vaccines are useless, and China’s hospitals are useless. I believe he was trying to ingratiate himself to this people by ridiculing China. I quietly said to him that President Jokowi was inoculated with Sinovac. My friend is an Ah Q through and through; I suppose he was trying to differentiate himself as a higher-end Chinese, not China’s Chinese. 

I no longer think the vaccines, be they Western or Chinese, are that relevant to most of us anymore. I had had four jabs of Pfizer, yet I contracted Covid two weeks or so after my fourth jab. The symptoms were mild and discomfort little. But the coughing did persist for a while after I tested negative.

If you listened to people like Elizabeth Neo and Olivia Siong without putting on your thinking cap, then you would think China would collapse tomorrow, like what the pseudo scholar Gordon Chang said in his “best seller” (The Coming Collapse of China) many years ago.

Western journalists and others like Elizabeth Neo and many Yellow Bananas love to belittle China. They are still stuck in the “West is superior” model and simply do not believe Xi is someone who is going to change the destiny of China. When seeing the Chinese authorities clamping down on their crazy developers, they think China’s property market is finished. When the financial authorities stopped the Ant group from trying to turn China into a debtors’ nation, they empathized with Jack Ma. Public good, which Xi is trying to ensure that his officials uphold, is not alien to their minds. They seem to have more confidence in crooks like crypto currency exchange FTX’s Sam Bankfried.

Of course, Chinese by nature are enterprising and entrepreneurial. These traits also helped create many crooks. They will hatch all sorts of outlandish financial and love scams to cheat people. Many have been caught in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Malaysia. They deserve firing squads.

Hugging Buddha’s leg…

Just a couple of days ago, Old Joe said he planned to commit USD55 billion to Africa over the next three years when he hosted a two=day meeting with Africa leaders. And he declared, “Improving Africa's infrastructure is essential to our vision of building a stronger global economy that can better withstand the kinds of shocks that we've seen the past few years.”

 

Do you believe that?

 

Of course, these African leaders had a good time in Washington. Afterall, it was a free holiday. His administration has made similar promises to the leaders of the Americas, ASEAN and even the Pacific islands. I suppose behind Old Joe, everyone would say, “Show me the money, man!”

 

Blinken explicitly announced to the world that these invites were not designed to contain or compete China. Any three-year-old will know that is exactly what America is trying to do. He would be more credible if he said so. They are so fake when they talk about things like climate change, peace, standing up for Taiwan, human rights, etc.

Hegemon America is not capable of learning. It is no longer able to call the shots; yet it wants to act like one. Biden was rebuffed by its own neighbours a year or so ago; he was given cold shoulders by the Arabs just a month or two ago. His teeth must be grinding hard and fist clenching tight when saw how Xi was welcomed in Riyadh.

I am afraid, save for a couple of saints – people like Jeffrey Sachs – virtually the entire Western world, together with the honorary Whites aka Japan, is no longer untrustworthy.

I could not help to add a long observation of many. Many Indians, despite their sad history of years of colonization by Britain, still find it hard to embrace Asian. Soon, India’s population will surpass China’s, which I thought is no good, yet it is being awaited like a great trophy. Oh, our demographic is young, we have overtaken Britain in terms of GDP, no sooner, we will surpass China. There are a lot of syiok sendiri (Malay term, self-gratifying) bravos there. Western press loves to give them hope. To me, unless they have a transformative leader to bring its masses out of the cultural doldrums, their rich and poor gap will be even greater and their religious divide even wider.

I have just chanced upon the following article in Australia’s ABC News. The caption speaks volumes of India’s sense of complex.

More Taiwans and Orange Revolutions, please! But…If the West had not used the Hong Kong protests as an opportunity to try to discredit or destablise China, Xi would have like his predecessors left Hong Kongers very much to their own to run the island. The heavy presence of foreign agent provocateurs was a wake-up call for China, hence the intervention.

Ditto with Taiwan. If not for the riots in Hong Kong and the distorted lenses that were worn by many Taiwanese, Tsai Ing-wen would have failed to get reelected. She does not think China is “motherland” (祖国,Zǔguó, ancestors’ land). The kinship between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese was hitherto most heartening for Chinese all over the world to see – until Tsai Ing-wen decided to ditch the 1992 Consensus and went all the way to spike China with her “America is my god” policy. 

The proxy war between Russia and NATO in Ukraine has caused horrific tragedies to the people there. It is very draining to the Russian economy and military, which is what NATO wants. Now grounds are rumbling in Mongolia. A possible Orange Revolution there? Mongolia is sandwiched between Russia and China. It is a great place to be embedded to undermine these two countries.

Blinken is also working hard on ASEAN and the Pacific islands. I believe the ASEAN leaders are too wise to take side, even though some are not quite comfortable with China. Seeing the Arabs and China are getting close, Blinken might drive to court Iran to create jealousy there. Oh, there are so many things America is or may be trying to do to kill China.

End

Stop Press 26.12.2022

Below is a perfect example of 恶人先告状 (È rén xiān gào zhuàng)! And the accessory: Nikkei Asia!