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 2nd 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 12th 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.
