Remember Lai Teck?

 

A couple of days ago, I visited Gerakbudaya in Section 11, Petaling Jaya, to discuss my new book with Janice Cheong. As usual, before leaving, I took a look at its collection.

One title attracted my attention: New Perspectives on the Japanese Occupation in Malaya and Singapore 1941–1945. It is not new; it was first published in 2008. Perspectives on the war from the Japanese side are scarce for obvious reasons—the Japanese military systematically destroyed war-related documents after their surrender. This book sets out precisely to uncover some of that perspective; all seven contributors are leading academics in Japan, six of them Japanese.

I do not propose to review the book here. Suffice it to say that readers may be surprised by what they find. We are so used to reading material from our local sources and taking great pride in Chinese resistance to the Japanese invaders. But there is a great deal we really do not know about the roles played by the other communities during the Occupation. I encourage readers to read the book and find out for themselves.

What prompts me to write this article is a name that keeps coming up in a chapter entitled “Leaders of the Malayan Communist Party During the Anti-Japanese War”.

The name is Lai Teck.

Many older Malaysian Chinese would remember this name. But I doubt many younger Chinese would.

Lai Teck, to me, should be 賴德; however, this appears not to be correct. Apparently, it is 萊特—the Chinese rendering of an English alias, “Wright”. This is said to be supported by Chin Peng’s account of him. Be that as it may, another Chinese name associated with him was Huang Shao-dong 黃紹東.

Lai Teck was the Qin Hui 秦檜 – the Southern Song chancellor traditionally condemned for his role in the persecution and execution of the general Yue Fei 岳飛 – of his day.

Lai Teck, or Lai Tek or Loi Teck, was one of the most extraordinary infiltrators in the history of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP or CPM - Communist Party of Malaya).

He was probably Vietnamese, possibly of mixed Sino-Vietnamese background, and appears to have used several names. Historians have identified him variously as Phạm Văn Đắc or Hoang A Nhac. Before coming to Malaya, he is believed to have worked for French intelligence in Indochina. Historian Leon Comber concluded that he was later recruited by the British Special Branch in Singapore to penetrate the MCP. Astonishingly, he rose steadily through the party and became its Secretary-General in 1939, remaining in that position until 1947.

His most notorious period came after the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore in 1942. Lai Teck was arrested by the Japanese Kempeitai. Instead of being executed – as many communists were – he was released and began supplying the Japanese with information about his own comrades. In that sense, he had effectively become an agent successively of the French, British and Japanese intelligence services.

The worst episode was the Batu Caves Incident of 1 September 1942. Lai Teck was involved in arranging a secret gathering of senior MCP and Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army figures near Batu Caves. He himself failed to appear, later explaining that his car had broken down. Japanese forces descended on the meeting and killed a substantial portion of the MCP’s senior wartime leadership. Sources differ over the precise casualty total, but the episode was a devastating blow to the party.

What makes the story even more remarkable is that the MCP did not discover his treachery during the war. Lai Teck continued to head the organisation throughout the Japanese Occupation. He was therefore simultaneously the leader of an organisation whose armed wing, the MPAJA, was fighting Japan and an informer supplying intelligence to the Japanese security apparatus.

There is another historically important aspect. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, some within the MCP wanted to take advantage of the temporary power vacuum before British rule was fully restored. Lai Teck instead urged a comparatively cautious course: cooperation with the returning British, disbandment of the MPAJA, and pursuit of political and labour activity through legal organisations. Historians have consequently debated how much of this policy reflected genuine communist strategy and how much reflected Lai Teck’s relationship with British intelligence. What is clear is that the MCP followed his relatively moderate post-war line until suspicions about him became overwhelming.

Hara Fujio, the author of this chapter in the book, adds considerable detail to the picture. He painstakingly traces Lai Teck’s steps and lists those betrayed by him over the period. Some 22 high-ranking cadres were executed as a result of his betrayal. Many were still in their twenties when they were hanged by the Japanese.

By 1946–47, party members had begun assembling evidence against him. A Central Committee meeting was arranged for March 1947, at which he was expected to answer the accusations. He never appeared. Instead, he fled – reportedly taking a large proportion of the party’s funds with him – first moving through Singapore and Hong Kong and eventually reaching Thailand.

This is where Chin Peng enters the story in a decisive way. Chin Peng participated in the investigation and subsequently succeeded Lai Teck as Secretary-General. According to Chin Peng’s later account, he contacted communist organisations in Hong Kong and Thailand to help locate the fugitive. Lai Teck was eventually found in Bangkok in 1947.

Chin Peng was later told that three Thai communists attempting to seize him killed him during the struggle – apparently by suffocation or strangulation – and disposed of his body in a sack in the Menam, or Chao Phraya, River. Because this account ultimately came through Chin Peng and his contacts rather than an official death record, the precise circumstances should be treated as reported rather than absolutely established.

One particularly interesting point is that Lai Teck’s betrayal affected Malayan history well beyond the deaths he directly caused. The destruction of much of the older MCP leadership helped bring younger figures such as Chin Peng to prominence. Lai Teck’s exposure in 1947 also profoundly discredited the cautious strategy he had imposed after the war. Within about a year, the MCP entered the armed conflict that became the Malayan Emergency in 1948.

His life has almost the structure of a spy novel: a probable French agent becomes a British infiltrator, rises to the very top of the organisation he was supposed to spy on, changes sides when captured by the Japanese, betrays dozens of his comrades, survives the war still leading the party, reportedly absconds with party funds when finally exposed, and ends up being hunted down by fellow communists in Bangkok.

Lai Teck lived under numerous identities and deliberately concealed his background.

Accounts of the MCP’s investigation after his disappearance uncovered not only his business dealings but also his relationships with women. He reportedly maintained a Vietnamese wife in a bungalow near the beach at Katong, as well as two mistresses in Singapore—one Vietnamese and one Cantonese. The Vietnamese woman reportedly ran a bar around Hill Street. Another account refers to a woman described as his wife in Malaya, an old schoolfriend of MCP leader Yeung Kuo, who had just given birth to Lai Teck’s child when his betrayal was revealed to her.

That is particularly striking because Lai Teck was outwardly the austere Secretary-General of an underground communist movement. By early 1947, fellow MCP leaders were already questioning not only how he ran the party but also “his own lifestyle.”

One contemporary physical description comes from an MCP cadre who knew him personally from 1937. He remembered Lai Teck as small and short, no more than about 5 ft 6 in, with a thin, dark face, tightly closed lips and notably sharp eyes. His further description of Lai Teck as looking like a treacherous villain from Chinese opera was clearly a retrospective and highly hostile personal judgement rather than an objective description.

Before his MCP days…
For years, the standard story—followed by Leon Comber and many later writers—was that Lai Teck was born around 1903. He joined the Vietnamese communist movement when young, was arrested around 1925, and then agreed to inform for the French.

However, historian Marc H. Opper, drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, French and other sources, gives a much more precise—and somewhat different—reconstruction. He identifies Lai Teck as Trương Phước Đạt — 張福達, born in Phan Rang, Annam, in 1909.

According to Opper, he joined Thanh Niên, the Vietnamese revolutionary youth organisation associated with Hồ Chí Minh, in 1929. By March 1930, he had become a member of the Saigon City Provisional Executive Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party. This suggests that whatever happened later, he began as a fairly serious young communist activist rather than merely an opportunist who wandered into the movement.

He was arrested in November 1930 and subsequently fled to Hong Kong. There he actually met Hồ Chí Minh, who intended to send him to Moscow for further political training. On his way to the Soviet Union, however, he was arrested at Suifenhe on the Sino-Soviet frontier in March 1931. He remained detained until early 1932. He was arrested again in Shanghai in April 1933 and eventually deported back to French Indochina.

It was apparently after that deportation, rather than in 1925 as the older story has it, that the French Sûreté Générale recruited him. Opper says the French offered to spare him imprisonment if he would become their agent inside the communist movement. By this point, he had also apparently become disillusioned with communism. He agreed—but because he was well known among Saigon communists, his role as an informer was soon exposed.

The French then had little further use for him. He was passed to the British security apparatus, and by late 1934 he had entered the MCP claiming to be a Comintern representative. His genuine knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory made the cover particularly convincing. By 1939, he had worked his way up to the position of MCP Secretary-General.

So, the remarkable thing is that he was not simply an ignorant police plant pretending to be a communist. He apparently possessed considerable theoretical knowledge, had actually participated in Vietnamese revolutionary circles, had met Hồ Chí Minh, and had been selected for training in Moscow. That background made his subsequent infiltration of the MCP much more credible.

Top of Form

Conclusion
Many of us lost loved ones during this tragic period, and the scars left by the Japanese Occupation have not entirely disappeared even after so many decades. We rightly remember those who resisted, suffered and died, and we should continue to honour the great martyrs of that generation.

But remembrance should also go hand in hand with a willingness to understand history in its totality. The story of Lai Teck reminds us that history is rarely as simple as heroes on one side and villains on the other. There were acts of extraordinary courage, but also betrayal, collaboration, deception and political intrigue. Nor was the experience of the Occupation confined to any one community.

For many of us, much of what we know has come from accounts written from our own local or communal perspectives. They are important, but they cannot be the whole story. Other sources — Japanese, British, Chinese, Vietnamese and others — can sometimes reveal details, perspectives and uncomfortable truths that we may never have encountered before.

History should not be about choosing only the version that makes us feel good. The more sources we are prepared to examine, the closer we may come to understanding what actually happened.

End

 

P.S. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the work of my good friend and mentor, Dr Stephen Leong, is also widely quoted in the book.

Xi Jinping’s Impending Visit to Washington: A Waste of Time?

 

Preparations are clearly underway for Xi to visit Washington on September 24, albeit only for a day. However, it is interesting to note that China has not officially confirmed the visit.

Many are asking: given Donald Trump and his team’s constant flip-flopping, why would Xi waste his time?

Considering Xi’s Kung-tze-Sun-tze mindset, I can think of three possibilities.

a. An optical dividend that can be had
Xi can use the occasion to contrast his leadership with Trump's — without saying a word about it — even though it is probably not Xi's principal reason for going.

Xi's political style is controlled, deliberate and long-term; Trump's is highly personalised, improvisational and theatrical. Put the two beside each other before the world's cameras and the contrast largely creates itself. Beijing would probably be too disciplined to make the comparison explicit, especially because Chinese officials appear to be deliberately moderating criticism of Washington before the summit.

The symbolism could be particularly useful to China internationally. Xi can appear in Washington as the head of a government that is prepared to negotiate calmly with an increasingly turbulent United States.

Of course, there are real matters on the table — tariffs, trade, technology, AI, rare earths, Taiwan and geopolitical questions — but the sceptic in me says that whatever may be agreed to by Trump will always be reversed once Xi’s plane takes off from the tarmac for home. It is a waste of time.

b. A godsend that is to be protected
Trump’s midterm election hurdles are high. I am pretty sure China sees considerable advantage in keeping Trump politically viable and giving him enough victories to preserve a transactional relationship that Beijing has learned how to manage.

Xi is said to be bringing an unusually large delegation of Chinese business leaders to Washington. This will offer the White House potential economic wins ahead of the midterm elections.

China has also just bought roughly one million tonnes of American soybeans ahead of the visit, while a Chinese company has announced a new 20-year U.S. LNG contract.

All these suggest that Beijing understands perfectly well that giving Trump commercially attractive announcements on September 24 could help him politically.

Between Trump and the Democrats, we know who the worse devil to China is. The former’s political and territorial ambitions, doubts over America's security commitments in West and East Asia, trade conflicts with partners, and a more transactional approach to alliances can weaken precisely the coalition Washington would otherwise need to contain China's rise. Most leaders have growing doubts over U.S. reliability.

So, Beijing could simultaneously oppose many of Trump's policies towards China while regarding aspects of his presidency as strategically useful. Those two positions are not contradictory.

c. Xi producing Kim Jong Un for Trump
Trump is deeply infatuated with Kim. He has repeatedly said he wants another meeting with Kim this year. Xi certainly has channels to Kim. North Korea, however, has responded cautiously and appears determined to set its own conditions.

This possibility fits Trump’s psychology and Xi's Sun-tze instinct. Trump attaches enormous importance to personal summitry and has repeatedly spoken of his relationship with Kim. If Xi could quietly help make another Trump-Kim meeting happen, he would be giving Trump something Trump personally values greatly — at relatively little direct cost to China. It could also restore Beijing's position as the indispensable intermediary in Northeast Asian diplomacy.

Trump needs the September meeting to announce economic achievements he can take into the midterms, and perhaps another dramatic meeting with Kim. Xi has the capacity to help with all three. That, to me, makes the visit potentially far more consequential than many who call it meaningless suggest.

A possible last-minute abortion?
It was reported somewhere that Xi might cancel his trip to Washington if the U.S. goes ahead with its arms sales to Taiwan. But I doubt this is true. After all, no sooner will Xi return home than Trump may do an about-turn.

It was reported that Beijing had told Washington that Xi could cancel the September meeting if the U.S. approved new arms sales to Taiwan before the summit. I think it is more likely to be diplomatic leverage than an ultimatum requiring Trump permanently to stop supplying Taiwan.

Xi cannot arrive in Washington immediately after Trump has approved a large new arms package for Taiwan. Domestically and internationally, it would make Xi look as though China's most important “red line” could simply be ignored. So Beijing wants the sale postponed at least until after Xi's visit. A reported US$14 billion package is presently under review.

Xi knows Trump could reverse himself the moment the visit is over. Indeed, there is precedent for exactly this sort of sequencing. After Trump's May meeting with Xi in Beijing, Trump said he had not yet decided whether the Taiwan arms sale would proceed, even though his administration had already authorised it. In other words, the issue can conveniently be put into the refrigerator during a summit and taken out again afterwards.

Trump’s precariousness in the midterm elections
Trump looks very precarious. But there are two different questions: 1. Whether Republicans lose Congress, and 2. Whether Trump himself loses his grip on the Republican Party. On the first, he is in genuine danger; on the second, much less so.

As of 15 September 2026, the clearest warning sign is Trump's own standing. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll puts his approval at only 35%, after touching a career low of 33% in late August. More importantly for the midterms, Democrats lead Republicans 44% to 37% on the generic congressional ballot. Democrats have even edged ahead, 38%-37%, when voters are asked which party they trust more on the economy — traditionally an important Republican advantage.

The House looks particularly dangerous for Trump

Republicans currently have an extraordinarily narrow 219-214 House majority, including an independent who caucuses with them. Cook Political Report's September 11 ratings classify 21 House seats as Toss Ups — and 16 of those are presently Republican-held, compared with only five Democratic-held seats. That is an uncomfortable defensive position.

Indeed, Cook wrote earlier this month that the most plausible scenario had become a “really bad” election for Republicans, potentially costing them roughly 26–35 House seats, although that is an analytical projection rather than a forecast of an exact result.

So, if the election were held under today's conditions, a Democratic takeover of the House would appear almost certain.

The Senate is no longer safe either

The Senate originally looked considerably safer for Republicans. They currently hold 53 seats, against 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats therefore need a net gain of four seats to take outright control.

But even that firewall has weakened. It was reported that what Republicans had regarded as a fairly comfortable Senate defence has turned into a genuinely open contest, with Democratic opportunities appearing even in states such as Texas and Iowa. Cook currently identifies nine principal Senate battlegrounds, six of them Republican-held and three Democratic-held.

Yes, the Senate might be harder for Democrats to capture than the House, because they must win several difficult states simultaneously. But it is certainly no longer implausible that Trump could lose both chambers.

But there is a bigger problem…
It is the economy — compounded by the Iran War.

Trump's weakness is not simply personal dislike. The prolonged Iran war has disrupted oil supplies and pushed American fuel prices sharply higher, while inflation and borrowing costs remain politically painful. His approval deterioration has accelerated since the Iran war began.

That is particularly dangerous in a midterm because voters can use congressional elections as a referendum on a president without having to decide whether they prefer an alternative presidential candidate. Trump himself has effectively encouraged this by telling Republicans to behave as though he is on the ballot.

His recent promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain Congress looks like a sick politician’s last rabbit out of the hat. In the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63% of Americans opposed it, including four in ten Republicans.

What would defeat actually mean for Trump?

If Republicans lose only the House, Trump remains president and still controls the executive branch, but much of his legislative programme becomes extremely difficult. A Democratic House would also acquire subpoena and investigative powers and could potentially initiate impeachment proceedings.

If Republicans lose the Senate as well, the consequences become substantially greater: Democrats could obstruct many judicial and executive appointments, control committees and investigations, and essentially put Trump on the defensive for the remaining two years of his presidency.

If he loses both chambers badly, I think the political interpretation would be severe. Because Trump has deliberately made these midterms about himself, Republicans could hardly blame an anonymous congressional campaign. It would amount to voters delivering a national rebuke to the second Trump presidency.

There is an important qualification, however: electoral weakness is not the same thing as weakness inside the Republican Party. Trump continues to dominate the GOP. Even after a bad midterm, I would not expect Republican politicians suddenly to abandon him en masse. Many owe their nominations, political identities and voter bases to the MAGA movement.

So, my assessment today would be: Trump is politically vulnerable, the House is in serious danger, and even the Senate is now at risk. He is not yet facing political collapse, but a two-chamber defeat on November 3 would leave him a dramatically weakened president for his final two years.

Maybe he can start a world war. He might then even try to suspend the U.S. Constitution and remain President for as long as the war lasts.

End

Paranoid? Perhaps.

A friend recently suggested that I might be a little paranoid about the West and about pro-Western forces.

Perhaps I am.

But there are certain things that irritate me almost instantly.

One example is when I read an article — usually in the South China Morning Post — and the journalist feels compelled to introduce China as: “the world’s second-largest economy.”

Why is that qualification necessary every bloody time China is mentioned?

China did not become the world’s second-largest economy yesterday. It is hardly breaking news. The phrase has long since become a stale, tiresome tagline, endlessly regurgitated by writers who seem determined to keep reminding readers that China is still “second” — invariably to the United States.

There is a Chinese expression, 画蛇添足 — having drawn a perfectly good snake, you decide to add legs to it.

That is precisely how I feel.

China is China. If the subject is its economy, by all means give us the relevant figures. But why this almost ritualistic need to remind readers that it is “second”?

Second to whom?

Of course, we know the answer: the United States of America.

To me, this constant ranking reflects something much deeper than innocent description. Either the writer has stopped thinking and is merely repeating a journalistic cliché, or he remains intellectually trapped in a world in which the United States must somehow occupy the top position and everybody else has to be ranked beneath it.

What amazes me further is that quite often the writer has a Chinese name!

Perhaps this is what my friend means when he says I am paranoid. But I do see the same habit everywhere.

The United States is routinely described as “the world’s largest economy”, “the richest country in the world”, “the world’s most powerful military”, “the leader of the free world”, and who knows what else.

My question is very simple: What do these labels actually mean today? And largest by What Measure?

Yes, measured in nominal US dollars, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. No argument there. But economics is not a beauty contest in which one number settles everything.

Measured by purchasing-power parity — which attempts to compare what money can actually buy inside different economies — China has already been larger for years. World Bank figures for 2025 put China’s economy at roughly US$41.3 trillion in PPP terms, compared with about US$30.8 trillion for the United States. Yet in nominal-dollar terms, the United States was still substantially larger: about US$30.8 trillion against China’s US$19.5 trillion.

So which country has the “larger economy”?

The answer depends on what you are trying to measure and that is precisely my point.

Repeating “the world’s second-largest economy” as though the issue were settled by a single nominal-dollar league table is intellectually lazy.

More importantly, what matters to me is not merely the size of an economy on paper but what that economy can actually do. 

Can it build?

Can it manufacture?

Can it provide infrastructure?

Can it produce the machines, ships, power plants, batteries, vehicles, electronics, chemicals, steel and industrial equipment upon which a modern civilisation depends?

Can it mobilise resources when necessary?

Can it educate enough engineers and scientists?

Can it sustain its population without living indefinitely on borrowed money?

These questions tell me far more than a nominal GDP ranking.

The Difference Between Financial Wealth and Productive Power
Superficially, the United States remains extraordinarily wealthy. Nobody needs to deny that. It has some of the richest individuals and corporations humanity has ever produced. Wall Street can move trillions of dollars around the world. American technology companies command astonishing valuations. The dollar still occupies a privileged position in international finance.

But financial wealth and productive capability are not the same thing.

America has spent decades shifting production abroad while congratulating itself on becoming a sophisticated “service economy”.

China did almost the opposite. It built factories. It built ports. It built roads. It built high-speed rail. It built power stations. It built supply chains. It trained engineers. It accumulated industrial capability on a scale the world had never seen.

Above all, the government cares for its people. 

China has remained the world's largest manufacturer for many years. In 2025, Chinese manufacturing output grew by 6.8%; US manufacturing grew by about 1%.

So, I cannot say America “produces nothing”. It plainly does, and still on a huge scale. But the direction of travel is what interests me.

For decades, America allowed large parts of its industrial ecosystem to migrate overseas, while China methodically accumulated one industrial capability after another. And now Washington suddenly discovers “industrial policy”.

Now it talks about reshoring. It now worries about shipbuilding, about about semiconductors and about about batteries, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, machine tools and supply-chain security.

Why?

Because at long last it has realised that you cannot run an economy forever on financial engineering, asset inflation, consumption and somebody else’s factories.

The Richest Country — With What Kind of Richness?
The phrase “richest country in the world” also deserves examination.

Rich for whom?

America undoubtedly contains enormous private wealth. But it also contains enormous insecurity.

The Federal Reserve reported this year that 37% of American adults could not meet an unexpected US$400 expense entirely from cash, savings or a credit card paid off immediately. Thirty percent said they could not cover three months of expenses by any means if their main income disappeared.

That is not destitution, but neither is it the picture normally conjured up by the phrase “the richest country in the world”.

Look at homelessness. According to the US government itself, 745,652 people were homeless on a single night in January 2025, including more than 266,000 living unsheltered.

Anyone who has walked through parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other American cities does not need a lecture from an economist to understand that something is seriously wrong.

And now the US federal debt has passed forty trillion dollars, and borrowing costs are rising.

Yet we continue to hear the same majestic descriptions: “The wealthiest country.” “The largest economy.” “The indispensable nation.”

But we should in fact ask: indispensable to whom, and for how long?

What Is the World's Most Important Economy?
To me, an even more interesting question is not: Which is the largest economy? It is: Which is now the most important economy in the world?

If China suddenly stopped manufacturing tomorrow, how many global supply chains would continue functioning normally?

How many factories elsewhere would discover that some component, chemical, machine, magnet, battery, solar module, electronic part or industrial input was no longer arriving?

How many countries would find their construction projects delayed?

How many manufacturers would suddenly discover how much of their supposed “domestic production” depended upon Chinese inputs?

That, to me, is economic importance.

China has become deeply embedded in the physical functioning of the world economy.

Yes, America still remains important in finance, technology, capital markets, aerospace, software and many advanced scientific fields.

But increasingly China sits at the centre of the industrial economy. 

And Then There Is Military Power

The same lazy ranking occurs with military power.

We are repeatedly told that America has “the most powerful military in the world”.

Again I ask: Measured how? Number of aircraft carriers? Military expenditure? Foreign bases? Nuclear warheads? Aircraft? Satellites?

If warfare were simply a matter of adding equipment into an Excel spreadsheet, perhaps we could settle wars before firing a shot.

But modern warfare does not work that way.

What matters is the whole system: surveillance, satellites, drones, missiles, electronic warfare, cyber capability, industrial replenishment, logistics, command networks, air defence, anti-ship weapons and — above all — the ability to replace what gets destroyed.

China understands this.

It is not simply trying to build the same number of aircraft carriers as America.

Its military development has concentrated heavily on what strategists call anti-access and area denial — making it extraordinarily dangerous for an opposing navy or air force to operate near China. Even the US Department of Defense openly acknowledges the scale and speed with which China has developed these capabilities.

That is why counting aircraft carriers tells only a small part of the story. Aircraft carriers themselves are hardly floating pieces of divine machinery.

Look at the recent saga of the USS Abraham Lincoln. 

The mighty symbol of American naval power spent an extraordinary period continuously at sea. Reports emerged of food shortages, broken toilets, plumbing problems, water issues and serious stress among the crew. After 286 days of deployment, some 5,000 sailors finally reached Thailand for respite in early September.

Those toilet stories particularly amused me.

Here is supposedly one of the most formidable weapons ever created by mankind — nuclear-powered, carrying sophisticated combat aircraft and billions of dollars of equipment — and sailors are circulating videos of toilets they cannot properly use.

Perhaps warfare has indeed entered a new technological age: stealth fighters outside; clogged toilets inside!

Of course, broken toilets do not prove that an aircraft carrier cannot fight but they do provide a useful antidote to the almost religious awe with which American military hardware is sometimes discussed.

Machines are machines; ships are ships; and sailors are human beings!

Would the United States Defeat China?

I constantly hear people declare confidently that America would defeat China in a war.

Really?

A war where?

Off California?

Or off China’s own coast?

Those are two completely different questions.

A conflict fought thousands of kilometres from the continental United States but close to China’s industrial base, missile forces and logistical infrastructure would be nothing like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

I do not pretend to be a military strategist, but I certainly would not accept the silly proposition that because America spends more money on defence and owns more carriers, victory over China must therefore follow. Indeed, my own view is stronger than that.

I do not believe any outside force today can confidently expect to defeat China in a major conventional war fought on China's doorstep.

Anyone advocating a preventive war against China on the assumption that it would be quick, clean and victorious is, in my opinion, a "Pete Hegseth". He may discover otherwise only after hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people have paid for his stupidity.

Trump — China's Windfall

I have said before that China could hardly have asked for a more helpful adversary.

Trump seems determined to accelerate many of the very trends that are weakening America’s international standing. He quarrels with allies. He threatens friends. He imposes tariffs and then modifies them.

He announces one thing today and another tomorrow. He treats diplomacy as though he were bargaining over the rent of a Manhattan shoplot.

And whenever markets force a retreat, somebody invents another explanation for why the retreat was actually a magnificent victory. Hence the wonderful acronym: TACO - Trump Always Chickens Out. 

Crude?

Certainly. But that's the real Trump.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping behaves almost exactly in the opposite manner.

Whether one likes Xi or not is irrelevant. Just watch his demeanour - Measured, Controlled, Expressionless when necessary, No shouting, Rarely boasting about himself. Rarely behaving as though every international negotiation were an episode of reality television.

The contrast fascinates me. Trump throws tantrums, Xi waits. Trump brags, Xi watches.

Trump wants everybody to know he is the strongest man in the room; Xi seems perfectly content to allow time to demonstrate where the power lies.

That must be infuriating for Trump and we are about to see the contrast again.

Xi is expected in Washington on 24 September, offering the world another opportunity to observe the two men together.

Whatever agreements emerge from that meeting may matter less, in the longer sweep of history, than what the meeting symbolises.

One leader presides over a country desperately trying to preserve a primacy it has enjoyed for generations. The other presides over a country that does not need to announce every morning that it is rising. It simply continues building.

So Am I Paranoid?
Perhaps my friend is right. Perhaps I am paranoid whenever I see the phrase “the world’s second-largest economy”. Perhaps I read too much into it.

But words reveal assumptions.

For decades, much of the Western commentariat — and, unfortunately, many Asians educated to think through Western eyes — has treated American primacy almost as a natural law.

America is No. 1. Therefore, everybody else must be No. 2, No. 3 or No. 4.

I no longer accept that framework. The world has changed. Economic power is changing. Industrial power has changed dramatically. Technological power is becoming much more widely distributed. Military assumptions that looked reasonable twenty years ago are increasingly questionable.

And the centre of gravity of the world economy is moving eastward whether Washington likes it or not.

The American political establishment — Democrats and Republicans alike — may rage against China and Congress may pass resolution after resolution. Think tanks may devise more sanctions and politicians may scream about “containing China”. Military hawks may even fantasise about bombing it before it becomes too powerful.

But they cannot legislate history backwards. Nor can Donald Trump tariff the twentieth century back into existence.

China has already crossed too many thresholds.

It is too large, too industrially complete, too technologically capable and too deeply connected with the rest of the world simply to be pushed back into the subordinate position that Washington would prefer.

So, the next time someone introduces China as: "the world's second largest economy...", I shall probably still get irritated. These people are still wearing the twentieth-century American spectacles. 

End