China Never Bothers What Others Say..
by a Patriotic Egyptian
I am a patriotic Egyptian and Middle Easterner.
Yet I freely admit that compared to the Chinese, we are simply monkeys.
A race of dumb animals. It doesn't matter who we are. Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, even Americans
Next to the Chinese, we are pathetic. We can't do what they do. We would have a mountain, an Everest of changes to make, and we would whine and bicker and fail at every one of them.
China's story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis.
Next to China the entire Western world from Alaska to New Zealand has stagnated.
Next to China the entire developing world from Brazil to Madagascar has progressed only at a crawl.
China, my friends, is the mother of all gargantuan bullet trains. Every day it manages to create something new and astonishing.
And unlike the United States, unlike the British Empire, unlike the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese or any other Western nation that had its turn at being a superpower in the past four centuries, China doesn't need to run anybody over or take something from somebody else, to rise majestically.
China is also standing up to the Western world all by herself. The West hates and fears that China is shooting up to the top.
They can't believe their four-hundred-year-old global supremacy is being challenged.
They hoped that the more China developed, the more it would submit to their influence, interests, and leadership. That didn't happen.
So now they will do anything possible, short of a nuclear war, to make China end. Their goal is to destroy this country.
That's why, although the United States has killed several million people and turned several regions of the earth into hellscapes since I was born in 1988, your TV, newspapers, Google newsfeed, and social media are all cursing, condemning and pandering panic and hatred of China 24/7.
China is the worst fear of our planet's Western masters. They want you to despise and dread a country that's done nothing to you, that hasn't invaded anyone, bombed or sanctioned anyone, that hasn't overthrown any foreign government, or used its military on anything since 1979.
You'll hate China and pray for its collapse, so that the West can continue to do what it's done since the age of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro — rape and pillage the earth from Latin America to Southeast Asia, and disguise its blood-spattered imperialism in the soft power and propaganda of “Western civilization" and world leadership.
China is the only major country in the nonwhite developing world, to stand up to the West. To look it in the eye when challenged or threatened, and say, No, I'm not afraid of you. Do your worst. I'm just as big as you are.
All other countries in the Global South are simply Western puppets who submitted long ago.
Even the most powerful ones. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India — their leaders are busy listening to the United States, pen and paper in hand, writing down all its demands and going, Yes sir, Mr. Yankee sir. Let me get on that right away for you.
The 1500s —1000s BC were Egypt's time. Antiquity belonged to the Greeks and Romans. The 1700s belonged to France, and the 1800s to Britain.
From 1945 to the present, the world has been under American overlordship. And they call it the Pax Americana but believe me, there isn't much Pax in it.
There's plenty of Pax if you're in Europe or Australia.
But the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Yemen in the past 20 years.
Latin America? They've destroyed that part of the world beyond any hope of recovery. Africa? It's only been spared because of disinterest. The US sees Africa as nothing. The whole West does.
But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the rise of China.
We are decades away from China becoming the greatest power on earth.
This will be China's time, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Attack China all you want, curse her and monger rumours and hysteria — but the truth is that none of your accusations are backed up by evidence, because you are a stooge of the Western press which is under the thumb of Western governments that want to stay on top of the world for all eternity.
And the truth is that China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies.
What's going on now, this stupid new Cold War, is nothing.
For her first thirty years, from 1949 to 1979, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West.
It didn't even have a seat in the UN General Assembly.
And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy, a tiny fraction of Japan's or Germany's GDP — not even able to prevent famine.
And it still didn't submit to pressure or take any orders. Why on earth would it do that now?
China will be the next global power.
There's nothing that can be done about that. The first stage is that its economy only needs to grow at 4.7 percent per year to become the world's largest by 2035.
That means the usual, historical bare-minimum of 6 percent is already overkill.
The US can build as many bases as it wants, slap as many sanctions as it wants, recognize whatever bogus genocides it wants.
That's what it's been doing all along. Has any of it made a difference? China can adapt to any situation.
It took China a mere ten years to go from being barred by the US Congress from participating in the “International" Space Station, to building its own Space Station from the zero.
See, the US has an $800-billion war budget, 800 military bases, 13,000 aircraft, 500 warships, 6,000 nukes — but it doesn't have what China has: invincible national resolve.
It takes the US about 5 years to renovate a bridge, and it takes China 43 hours. There's simply no competing with that.
China doesn't need to be a military superpower or empire. That was never part of the plan.
🇺🇸 US troops, God bless their souls, will continue sitting in their bases, scratching their balls, costing their government $800 billion a year to do nothing.
Meanwhile, China will continue to actually develop.
That's the part of the equation that America totally missed, because it has barely developed since Reagan's day.
China is a better place to live today than at any time in its previous 5,000 years; Americans saw their highest standard of living in the 1960s and those days will never come back.
So yes, China will be the next global power, and the Chinese are vastly superior to us in every way.
This is a fact that everyone can attack but that nobody can change, like the theory of evolution.
The difference between me and other people is that I ask, Why is this a problem?
Why is this something to be afraid of?
Why doesn't it mean — that the world will finally get better?
Look at you silly buggers, talking about China like it's going to be the next Nazi Germany.
Even many Middle Easterners I know fit in this foolish category.
Did you notice when the US invaded or overthrew the governments of 20 countries in the past 32 years (my lifetime)?
Did you even know?
You think just because you're ready to forget all that because of Beyoncé and Game of Thrones and Snapchat and other US cultural exports, it didn't happen and isn't still happening?
But but, I’m scared!
China's big and bad!
Because the US is feeding me terror-bytes about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Great Leap Forward!
I don't see any dead bodies, I can't show you one invasion or one example of Chinese regime change, I can't even find Hong Kong on a map or tell you one factual detail about Tiananmen Square, but the US State Department and all its media are telling me CHINA BAD! Wa, wa!
Even my father, brother, brother's in-laws have no real knowledge of any kind about the Western terror-bytes that have given them such an apprehensive feeling about China.
And they're Egyptian and Syrian, so imagine how blank the typical Westerner is.
Blankness doesn't stop prejudice and gullibility. That’s what most China-haters are.
As gullible as children getting told about the boogeyman to procure their obedience.
Aren't you at least curious to see what a world with a nonwhite, non-Western leader might look like, after 400 years? Because God knows that leader won't be us.
It won't be Brazil or Africa, or the Middle East or India or Indonesia or Nigeria or Pakistan. We're a mess.
China was a mess too. But we remain a mess many decades after we achieved independence, and the Chinese went their own way, disentangled their mess and created their destiny.
We’re not made of what the Chinese are made of. We might be one day, if we stop taking orders and cozying up to Western puppet-masters. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
Where's your concept of innocent until proven guilty?
You turn a blind eye to the country that gave you dozens of destroyed nations and millions of corpses to see as proof of its brutality, because it also gave you some amazing sitcoms
While a country you don't have the slightest objective knowledge of, is already Nazi Germany to you because its adversaries, who are also your historical and present-day oppressors, tell you so?
Come on. Let's wait to see one dead body, one invasion, one regime-change operation from the Chinese, before we fly into rage and hysterics about them! Is that so crazy?
We've seen centuries of horror from the US and we're still giving 'Murica the benefit of the doubt, even when the brutal truth is crystal-clear.
For myself, I see China as hope.
Hope that a colonized, brutalized, primitive and humiliated country, can rise above its past — refuse to be weak any longer — rebuild itself from nothing, with iron resolve, and become too strong to be overrun by the West again!
Hope that a nonwhite, non-Western country can look deep within itself and find its own solutions to its problems — proving that (foolishly) trusting the West to guide us isn't necessary.
Proof that if we can do what the Chinese did, there will be no limits for us.
Imagine a world where the US, France, Britain, Australia, are no more important than Uzbekistan or Paraguay.
A world where the World Court might be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the World Bank in New Delhi, the United Nations in Jakarta, the IMF in Cairo.
A world liberated from the US banking system and the dollar as its reserve currency, so that Washington can no longer tell 200 other countries who they can and can't trade with.
A world where an American can be tried for war crimes at the Hague, not just an Iraqi or Liberian or Serb.
A world where we don't hear about a non-Western-made vaccine and grunt to ourselves, Oh, it must be poison.
A world where we don't have to immigrate to the same countries that turned ours into hellholes, to work as sales clerks or taxi drivers, or even if we're brilliantly employed — to drain our brains from our homelands in the best of cases, and use them to reinforce Western riches and supremacy in exchange for a fat paycheck, instead of using them to make our own countries semi-habitable.
When I hear that China has built its own Space Station, landed a rover on Mars, ended extreme poverty, built the Earth's biggest city, dam, telescope, 5G network, highway, air purifier, or whatever the heck it is that will come tomorrow — I feel the same pride as if I were Chinese.
It's not happening for all of us, but it's happening for one of us and that's a start.
There's got to be such a thing as developing-country nationalism — a common nationalism for all the countries that were colonized and plundered, and remain economically and politically captured by their ex-rulers.
A nationalism for the Global South. We are too divided, too brainwashed, too fooled and weak — most of us still worship the countries that destroyed us, are non-Western on the outside and Western on the inside, are hating and fearing and buying all the lies about the only one of us that's made it, and are leaving our countries in droves to let them burn while we “make a better life for ourselves" in the West.
Do you want to live on a Western-dominated Earth for another 400 years?
If you do, keep doing what you're doing. But I don't!
You know what'll happen for all of us if America's sick wishes come true and its global thuggery does make China collapse? Nothing.
Eternal repetition of the status quo.
More enslavement, hijacking of our resources and weak corrupt governments, neo-colonialism, invasion, regime change, sanctions, MISERY.
Haven't we already seen this? Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Belarus, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Soviet Union. Rest in peace.
Even FRANCE and JAPAN for God's sake. What does the United States do when any other country says NO, or simply becomes too powerful, too good at honest competition?
IT CRUSHES IT LIKE A BUG.
Japan was a Western-style democracy crawling with US troops, with a US-authored pacifist constitution and almost no military and an extremely pro-US government and populace, and it STILL got crushed when it looked like it would become the #1 economy in the 80s.
Do Indians really believe that if China goes down, India will be allowed to become a great power?
Do they not see that a strong or wealthy India would immediately fall victim to the same despicable US tactics?
Don't make me laugh. I remember 10–15 years ago when China was still relatively poor and impotent, and Bush and Obama would talk about China as sweetly as swans.
Obama happily had dinner with Xi Jinping in late 2015, called China a crucial partner of the United States, and said the US welcomed China's rise; it was all horseshit.
Today Biden, who was there with Obama in late 2015 as Vice-President, angrily rebukes a reporter who merely said that Biden and Xi were old friends.
America has taken off its mask.
China made it, it wasn't supposed to make it, so now it must die. What a difference 5 years can make. China went from “crucial partner" to “number one threat.”
We should be helping and supporting China to keep climbing to the top, and giving her some serious solidarity as she withstands the new Cold War of Western imperialism. It’s been a long 400 years.
China is the first non-Western country to even come close to reaching a status of ultimate global importance.
She is akin to the the first member of an impoverished family to go to university.
That is our family of nations. And when China gets to the top, believe me, it won't be a repeat of the French, British, or American Empire.
Not a single developing country on earth will be worse-off because of China becoming #1.
There will be something good in this for all of us, so let's wake up and let's go!
Why is Marxism thriving in China and not Marx's place of birth? Why is Buddhism practised more in East Asia than India? Why does Islam have more followers outside Saudi Arabia?
Ideas and religion spread through globalisation, but it was really their localisation that created more believers and followers. What succeeded was not globalisation but glocalisation, the internalisation of universal ideas and beliefs by the many and not just the fewew Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West. What was it about Marx that resonated with a Chinese civilisation that prided itself on its own enduring philosophy?
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
Economist Meghnad Desai, in his book Marx's Revenge, notes that the Chinese Communist revolution in the 20th century was very different from the French and American revolutions in the 18th century.
The French revolution was a rebellion against the monarchy, while the American revolution was against foreign British domination. By contrast, the Chinese Communist revolution was simultaneously a struggle against foreign invasion and a struggle against the Nationalist government that favoured the capitalist and landed classes.The Communist Party prevailed because it represented the rural peasantry instead of adopting the Communist International strategy of starting the revolution from the cities. In short, the party localised communism.
By the time the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, Chinese thinkers struggled to replace the old order. The country fell into warlordism. The Nationalist Party under Sun Yat-sen struggled to balance the conservative wing that represented the capitalists and landlords, and the left wing influenced by communism and socialism.
Chinese revolutionaries followed closely the Russian Revolution in 1917 because it was then the most recent model of social transformation. The Chinese elite understood that the rebuilding of China after the collapse of the old order would be a monumental task.When East and Westcottt deny each other's civilisation
The country was backward and the uneducated masses were unprepared for modernity, vulnerable to foreign conquest. The Chinese felt the burden of history, and also understood that the scale of transformation required had no parallel in history.
Chinese leftists took to Marxist thinking because Marx gave historical and political perspectives on how capitalism would evolve, as well as a philosophical tool in terms of Hegelian dialectics: specifically, the insight that transformation comes from contradictory factors, so change - the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new - will happen not in a smooth line but through revolution or discontinuity.
This was music to the ears of those seeking a path to New China.
Furthermore, the fundamental idea of dialectics is similar to the Chinese yin-yang conceptualisation of the universe. As Lenin put it, "Dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things ... it is the 'struggle' of opposites."
Still, theory is one thing; practice is another. We can appreciate China's miraculous transformation from a backward country to the world's second largest economy by understanding that it was accomplished through, essentially, three dictums: "Seek through from facts"; "Crossing the river by feeling the stones"; "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice".
In other words, make fact-based decisions, always try or test something out when uncertain and, above all, be practical and have an open mind. Change is a process between contradictions. There is no absolute black and white.100 years in the making: China's distrust of US-led global order
Historian Ray Huang, one of the finest Sinologists of his generation and a former Nationalist soldier, wrote in the preface to his classic China: A Macro-History: "Chinese history differs from the history of other peoples and other parts of the world because of an important factor: its vast multitudes. ... In the imperial period as well as in the very recent past, practical problems had to be translated into abstract notions in order to be disseminated. In turn, at the local level the message had once again to be rendered into everyday language."
It is the reduction of very complicated policies into simple language that has allowed the Chinese people to understand them, own them and buy into the transformation of China, despite the huge sacrifices required at the individual and community levels. The people's eyes are clear.As for the rivalry between the United States and China, it is a clear case of very contrasting world views. When the West preaches about values and the rules-based order, its assumption is that its values - freedom, democracy, individual rights - are absolute. This is essentially a zero-sum formulation, "my way or the highway".
Globalisation, as understood by the West, is the universalisation of Western values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force.
So it is that when China, Russia, India or any other country deviates from or disagrees with that, they must be contained, confronted or sanctioned. Localisation is almost being seen as deviance, rather than celebrated as diversity.
Civilisations reach their highest levels through tolerance and openness. When they become inward-looking and fundamentalist, fragility and decay set in. The world is simultaneously becoming more global in terms of connectivity, even as regionalisation, fragmentation and localisation speed up.Glocalisation, the simultaneous process between globalisation and localisation, is to be welcomed rather than feared. The future will always be open, uncertain and contradictory. Embrace it.
Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspectiveThis article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP)
