A Question of Zhì Qì (志气)

US Defense Secretary Llyod Austin has been trying to speak to his Chinese counterpart for months. Both the old and the new minister simply did not bother to return his calls. State Secretary Antony Blinken got a slot from Wang Yi, but only to shoot his own foot with the way he handled the “spy” balloon incident. He does not know when the “invitation” will come. Ditto for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Even Biden himself is also anxiously waiting for an opportunity to speak with President Xi Jinping.

Yet China has welcomed politicians who are no less hostile than them – people like the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. The lack of enthusiasm on China’s part is too obvious for everyone to see, yet these Americans are persisting. As far as China is concerned, Biden and his stooges have zero credibility. Why do you want to come? What is the point in talking?

 

You need China, yet you want to patronise China. Where is your brain? (Von der Leyen has certainly learned that!)

 

People like Biden and these four clowns of his fit a term my late mother often used to admonish me when I was young: zhì qì, or the lack of it. (Being the youngest boy in my family, I tended to throw tantrums at my older siblings if they ignored me. My mother would always throw this stern line at me: Yu Bok (my nick name), have some zhì qì!)

 

Zhì qì is 志气 in Chinese, which can be loosely defined as backbone, resolve, courage or ambition. But Mother meant more. She was pointing out a certain character flaw in me – the lack of strength to own up to mistakes and conduct oneself with pride and dignity.

 

And because of them, the United States as a whole has also been reduced to a nation that is collectively devoid of zhì qì. (I argued in a forum that the US is now not a nation in the strictest definition of the word; rather, it is now a mere country. Remember QAnon’s January 16 attack on Capitol Hill? More about the topic another time!)

 

Not too long ago, America was a haven many had aspired to live in and bring up your next generation – great universities, friendly neighbourhoods, smart leaders, and what-have-you.

 

The US prestige has taken a deep dive during the last couple of months. First, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Salman openly snubbed Biden. Then, France’s Emanuel Macron is openly urging European leaders to grow a bit of their backbone, and now Brazilian President Lula da Silva is telling all and sundry to ditch the US dollar.

 

What happened?

 

You can blame everything on Biden.

 

But there is really more to it. Let’s backtrack a little to November 2015, when America was going to the polls to elect a new President. The choice was between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

 

Trump won. The writing was on the wall: If a country could elect someone like Donald Trump as its President, then it must already be – as a nation – in a state of near-intellectual bankruptcy. This was certainly true in November 2015, and it has deteriorated further since then. (Of course, not every American was in that state, but the majority certainly was since the result of a presidential election such as the US’s represents the wishes of this majority. However, I am not implying Clinton was a better choice, rather, I was talking about the “state” of the nation the Americans were in then!)

 

The US had a chance to rehabilitate or rejuvenate themselves in 2019, but the Democrats chose to pick a half-demented candidate, even though they have better options, and Biden went on to become the new President.

Instead of focusing on the issues faced by its people internally, Biden wants to act like an international statesman. But he simply does not have the make of one!

 

Few could imagine, under Biden, America’s prestige could go down the drain so precipitously – all within a matter of months!

 

Since the beginning of this year, many leaders have visited China; but they did so at the invitation of China – besides Macron and Lula, they also welcomed Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

 

These leaders understand the value and the strategic-ness of maintaining good relations with China. Of course, you also have political midgets from time to time – like Marcos Jr who suddenly realised that his balls were actually not free to go with him and who had to do an 180⁰ turn soon after returning to the Philippines. There will always be many “show-me-the-money” types – especially leaders from some of the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and Africa. (I suspect the head of WHO – who is still accusing China of not cooperating on COVID-19 origin tracing – might also have been compromised by the Deep State.)  

 

When has the majority of America collectively lost its zhì qì?

 

Let’s go back a little further.

 

McCarthyism was a byproduct of the Korean War. The paranoia then was about the Yellow Peril. Mao Zedong’s China looked Stalinist and sinister. (So did many Chinese, thanks to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward Campaigns. Fortunately, China had Zhou Enlai to maintain some form of sanity in the country.) After Richard Nixon’s 1972 China visit, sentiments in American began to change.

 

And thanks to China’s “blue ants,” consumer goods became very affordable in America. Nobody complained.

 

Fast track to November 2017, when Trump paid a state visit to China.

 

The emperor was lavishly received. Trump had expected to see a China that was still struggling to catch up with the world – crowded cities, bad pollution, clueless workers – but what he saw totally jolted him from his wet dreams. He lost no time in declaring a trade war on China.

 

Biden and his team, especially Yellen, knew the trade war was bad for America. But within months of his ascendency, his team realised that China’s economic progress was unstoppable. Their envy led them to initiate a new crusade to stop China at all costs.

 

With the might of their media, America went overdrive to demonize China and the results are bearing fruits.

 

According to the latest Pew research, as much as 82% of America does not view China favourably. (The figure was only 35% in 2005)

 

Even though it had done a lot of harm all over the world – assassinating leaders and toppling governments that were not to their liking – the US was seen as the beacon of democracy, thanks to Hollywood and the lack of social media availability then. (Back then, didn’t we burst into huge applause when John Wayne was riding triumphantly in to thrash the “Red Indians”? Didn’t we believe the US was our ultimate defenders against Soviet and Chinese Communism?)

 

Even as recent as September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York was brought down by the Al Qaeda terrorists, sympathy of the world was very much with the Americans. When George Bush decided to invade Afghanistan because it refused to hand over the Mullah Omar, few objected. Many of us even cheered.

 

2009 was a watershed year in the US; it was an election year.

 

George Bush had wasted the goodwill that he had won after America’s swift invasion of Afghanistan. He went on to destroy Saddam Hussein on the grounds that the latter was building weapons of mass destruction, when most of the world knew that Iraq had none. Even his hitherto greatly admired Collin Powell was forced to tell a big lie in the United Nations. Americans soon got tired of Bush and his Neo-Conservative hawks like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

 

Good sense seemed to have returned to America when Americans went to the poll that year.

 

Barack Obama became the 44th president of the US. He was the first Black to hold that office. Beating Mitt Romney, he was sworn in for a second term in 2013.

 

During his eight years in office, Obama negotiated a decent nuclear agreement with Iran and normalized relations with Cuban. He also scaled down America’s forces in Afghanistan. (He could not totally withdraw, for his hands were tied by the “Deep State,” I suppose.) Nonetheless, Obama did manage to restore US’s reputation and prestige somewhat, and its economy was also healthy under his watch.

 

Obama must also be the most intellectual President America has ever produced, but he is Black, and was sabotaged left, right and centre by the Republicans. But the “Deep State” was too formidable for him to change things. American politicians’ intellectual paradigm began to shift. They became increasingly delusional, self-centred, ostrich-like, arrogant, and what-have-you.

 

The nation’s collective intellectuality also began to take a deep dive. Showmanship rather than delivery credentials became the pick. Donald Trump got voted in. The tide enabled the Republicans to go on to control of both houses of the Congress.

 

Trump must be intellectually one of the most deficient Presidents in America’s history. Nonetheless, his non-conformist personality appealed (and still is appealing) greatly to the increasingly ignorant yet chauvinistic lot there, even though the decline of the country was very obvious for all to experience.

 

But Trump is a zero-sum businessman by nature, not a strategist or a good manager by any measure. (He was totally clueless on how to contain the coronavirus pandemic, except to keep pointing his finger in the air and shouting “China, China, China!”) Leaders joked behind his back in functions. But being a delusional man, he thought he was all popular – a classic example of Andersen’s emperor not knowing he had no clothes on fable. But he was not as vengeful or deadly as his successor. Trump loved bargaining; and China played along.

 

Entered Biden in 2021, which gave China a false dawn. China soon learned about this reality – during the Alaska meet between Yang Jiechi/Wang Yi and Blinken/Sullivan. The scar that Yang has inflicted on Blinken during the Alaska encounter must also have made Blinken a Sinophobe-extraordinaire. Their mission: to hold back China technologically at all costs. Never mind if this hurts them economically and geopolitically.

 

Fortunately, unfortunately…

Fortunately, the key people in Biden’s team are very weak. Biden himself does not know much about economics, let alone international economics. Blinken has few grey matters in his brain. (He keeps preaching his rules based world order, but has he ever defined it coherently?) Yellen is wearing her academic halo but in reality, she has become a Bidenomics apologist. Austin is a big potato and Raimondo is shallow, yet arrogant. The US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, must be playing his smartphone 24-7. (What is there for him to do there?)  And where is Katherine Tai? And each time Harris opens her mouth, she transforms herself into a 5-year-old forever-giggling kid.

 

Fortunately, the US is in bad shape. The political and race divide is deep, except for the common enemy, i.e., China, that their politicians and media have helped to create in their mind. Its economy is perilous, its gun violence is unstoppable, its homelessness is hopeless, and its infrastructure is Third World. Yet it is sending billions to Ukraine to fight a proxy war with Russia, instigating Tsai Ing-wen to raise cross-Straits tensions, and working with midgets like Marcos Jr to stage naval exercises to provoke China. The US is always talking about national security, yet a 21-year-old air national guardsman could leak highly classified defence documents with little efforts? Whose head should roll? Austin’s, of course!

 

Fortunately, the war in Ukraine has wakened the world of the danger of the America today. The weaponization of the US Dollar and SWIFT has led to concerns about the reserves you have in the US and its allies, and the vulnerability of your currency. The US will sanction you if you do not toe its line. Russia is bearing the brunt; the next one can be you. Nonetheless, many Europeans hold strong grudges against Russia, which is understandable, especially those who have lived through the Soviet era. But this time around, Vladimir Putin has been pushed to a corner instead. And you now have a NATO Secretary General who imagines everyone in Russia is a Putin and must be got rid of. Ditto the sentiment of von der Leyen. They fit into Biden’s script perfectly. Biden’s evangelism against totalitarianism was most persuasive, even Singapore decided to throw in their lots with the Ukrainians when the war first broke out. But the truth is emerging; the situation there is not a simple black attacking white case. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is no angel. But it is too late; much destruction has taken place. Unfortunately, many people still choose to be blind to the cause.

 

Fortunately, Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has also seen through Biden. He must have realised that Xi was no monster but a leader who is only trying to make Chinese live a better tomorrow. So have several others. Even Honduras defied US wishes and broke off with Taiwan to establish diplomatic ties with China. Australia’s Anthony Albanese also know they cannot put all their eggs in Biden’s basket.

 

Yes, many of Biden’s hoodlums in are still on his beck and call – Japan’s Fumio Kishida, South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, NATO’s Stoltenberg, EU’s von der Leyen, and new recruit Marcos Jr – and China must continue to maintain absolute vigilance against them, but also the weaklings in the Chips and several technology supply chains.  

 

Yes, we still have many Ah Qs and Qin Huis amongst Chinese. (Several days ago, I was watching a video clip featuring a forum in Stanford. A keynote speaker, a China-born assistant professor, began by speech by arguing that Xi’s suppression of high techs in general and Jack Ma in particular was the beginning of America’s loss of love for China. How shallow this academic can be! She must have been thoroughly brainwashed by the Western and pro-West media.) And you also have a President in Taiwan who openly wants the US to “protect” the island! She forgets that she is Yellow!

 

Yes, a lot of hope is being placed on BRICS to change the world’s financial system. But I do have my reservations. The joker in the pack is India. Narendra Modi swings to whatever that is deemed good by him for India, and India alone. He thinks India should always stand taller than China. Hopefully, realities will bring him to his senses.

 

A wounded lion 

The US has degenerated itself into a state that is always in self-denial. It is now a shade of its former self. Biden is evil.

 

I also now use the lack of zhì qì to describe the majorities in the West and the pro-West nations. Few can now stand up to the right cause! And they are voting in more and more intellectually or philosophically deficient leaders. These leaders in turn brought in yes men and women to manage national and foreign affairs. They seem incapable of reflecting, and they go around wielding canes.

 

 

The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes!

A cartoon by Richard Arthur (2018)

 

A child blurts out those words on seeing the emperor in a procession – a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837.