Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble.
This line has always been attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, circa 1816. (No scholar, however, is certain that he had actually said it!)
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Even though most of the stuff they use in their everyday life carried a “Made in China” product origin line in the package, many people around the world still think China is a poor Third World country. You ask an average Joe in Australia, chances are that he has not heard of BeiDou, neither does he know that China has landed a craft in Mars, or its space station is now orbiting the Earth. I am pretty sure that he also does not know his Wi-Fi router carries a Huawei logo. Before the current trade tension, roughly one-third of Australia’s exports went to China. Yet, this average Joe will tell you China is a big bad wolf. Has he visited China? No.
This is not peculiar to Australia; this ignorance is everywhere – right from the US heartland to Modi’s India.
In the Nancy-and-Ted’s (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Ted Cruz) world of America, the only China they know is their Chinatowns, the dragon dance, or the noisy tourists from China they see in downtown malls Many don’t even realise the gadgets they pick up from the local DIY outlets are from China, save that they appear to be very inexpensive compared to yesteryears'! Otherwise, China is the yellow peril that CNN and Fox News are constantly calling out: the genocides in Xinjiang (when perhaps three quarters of America do not know where on Earth it is), the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, the risk posed by Huawei, and the theft of American knowledge by Chinese scholars and students in American universities, etc. Sooner or later, they will also add in Tibet and Macau in their “concern” list.
There is a common denominator in this demonization of China: their news media. I have already written much about its mercenariness, suffice to say that it is getting worse by the day and the paranoia has begun to cascade down to non-western reporters and journalists who have, advertently or inadvertently, become a tool of the politically and financially powerful anti-China forces in the US, Australia, and Europe. (Several who write for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN or host for Aljajeera, for example, are Chinese, ethnically! You can also discern subtle skepticism - borne out of political biases than objective reporting - from South China Morning Post, CNA and The Straits Times from time to time.)
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| Remains of Summer Palace today |
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| Opium addicts |
Where does all this anti-China zeal come from?
During his presidency Bill Clinton was already conscious of the need for America to contain China. He didn't give China an easy ticket to join the World Trade Organisation. By Barrack Obama's time, that awareness is already cemented; his Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement was an obvious attempt to marginalize China. But the world at large was still a little benign about China's re-emergence. Everybody was happy that household goods that once considered "life-time" treats had become totally affordable. And Chinese tourists were filling up their hotels and swarming their souvenir shops. And although many may not like it, the value of their homes had shot up, thanks to the influx of wealthy Chinese who bought into their neighbourhood to house their school-going children, or park their money.
Even then, there was this live and let-live atmosphere until Donald Trump came around...
Trump is a through and through zero-sum businessman. He entered politics not because he had a strong ideological inclination. He did so to prove that he could run America the way he ran his business, a business which we in Asia would describe as one that has "ten shit tanks but with only nine covers". Nonetheless, American press loves superficialities. The "Apprentice" series that he starred became the K-pop of the mentality-shallow class there. What he saw during his official visit to China must have frightened him. China must be stopped! Trump's global perspective is narrow. He focused on trade, and he felt America could bring China to its knees along. Nonetheless, the leaders of the UK, Canada, Japan and Australia were happy to echo him. The Five Eyes alliance was an intelligence sharing vehicle between the five English-speaking countries of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand evolved during the Cold War to keep an eye on the world in general and Soviet Union in particular. How handy it is to use it against China! But New Zealand is not fully committed to this cause. Never mind, we have a ready replacement: Japan! And to ring-fence China, we invite India!
The QUAD was born.
Overnight, the Chinese government is demonized as Chinese Communist Party. And no sooner, protesters-turned-rioters surfaced in Hong Kong to fight for democracy, and a Uyghur genocide badge on pinned on China.
Many in China had thought Joe Biden would be voice of reasons when he became the president. Alas, how disappointed they are now.
Biden has in fact more Trump than Trump. He is now a Sinophobia by any yardstick. He knew he couldn't do much harm on China in the area of trade. He is rallying the Five Eyes and the QUAD to halt China on the technological and military front. I believe all of us have read enough of his actions to either agree or disagree on this description of him and there is no need for me to elaborate further.
But it may be good to reflect a little on history...
First, the British…
The British and Germans have an intimate knowledge of China and Chinese, thanks to their 19th Century gunboat diplomacy in China. However, unlike Angela Merkel, whose stateswoman stature is admired well beyond Germany and regardless of race, creed or colour, Boris Johnson is a parochial politician. His flip-flop over Huawei is a clear-cut case of the man’s indecisiveness and ever-readiness to please America at any cost. And the British and Irish ought to take note; the South Asians are returning to rule them! (I flew into Birmingham Airport not too long ago; I thought I was flying into an India of the 22nd Century. I Hope my South Asian friends take this as a compliment! I understand Johnson is also one-quarter Turk.)
Joe Biden is making every attempt to provoke China in South China Sea and this is an opportunity for Johnson to ingratiate himself deeper with the former. A show-of-the-might fleet there is British’s nostalgic walk down the memory lane of the era when they were exercising gunboat diplomacy at will on China. But this is 2021! They forgot their HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk by Japan without much ado. Can their HMS Queen Elizabeth and its flotilla now loitering right in front of China’s front yard stand a chance if China decides to test their DF-21D missiles on them?
Second, the Japanese…
The terror that was inflicted by the Japanese army in China and Southeast Asia, especially to their Chinese populations, is still vividly remembered by some who are still alive today. China was in a sorry state for more than a hundred years before Mao Tze-tung took over in 1949. The later Manchu government was totally inept, and the country was constantly ravaged by natural disasters. The warlords and Kuomintang were happy to see the country burnt while they fought for territories and loot the masses. Whereas in Japan, the Meiji Restoration had already propelled the nation to be at par with the western powers in terms of sophistication.
The Japanese had a grand design to rule East and Southeast Asia and even Australia under their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere ambition. In their process of invading China, they began to cultivate a contempt for Chinese – borne out of the filth they saw in Chinese lives. To the Japanese, Chinese were sub-human, hence the slaughter without conscience.
And the US…
To the US, the tens of thousands who died in their hands – the Afghans, the Syrians, the Libyans, etc in the Middle East, and the Vietnamese and Laotians in Indochina – and the millions they caused the local regimes/dictatorships to exterminate in Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Central and South America and Africa all in the name of fighting Communist dominos (see Bevins V, The Jakarta Method, 2020) are just inconvenient collateral damages in their mission or zeal to uphold their concept of goodness to the world.
And Down Under…
For years there was a White Australian policy until it was formally dismantled by the Whitlam Government in 1973. Successive governments have been friendly until the present one came into power. Even then, Scott Morrison did not lend himself as an attack dog at the beginning, even though several of his cabinet members were already making strong anti-China statements from time to time. Things came to a boil when Trump came to power and Morrison was happy to lend a big hand to help Trump to contain China. There was no looking back since then. Australia is now a staunch American ally. Many would ask, why would Australia do it when one-third of its goods are shipped to China? But if you look into history, Australia has always been a willing partner to the UK and the US: First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and more recently the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And day in and day out, you read and watch incredulous stories about China spun by the Murdoch papers and channels!
The Real Winners of Genocide / Atrocity Medals...
If there is such a thing as a Genocide medal to be awarded in modern history, I am pretty sure the US, Canada, and Australia with their treatment of natives would have made it to the podium. And if there is such a thing as Atrocity Olympiad, then Japan with its deeds in China and Southeast Asia during World War II would certainly qualify to be No 1 with Germany in close second. But in the Unconscionable Killing category, the US is surely the indisputable champion during the last fifty years. Whereas Germany and to some degree Australia and Canada have expressed their guilt, Japan is still most reluctant to admit what they have done during World War II. To their misplaced mind, they were trying to do these victims a good deed!
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| Cotton slavery in America |
Who has not seen this image?
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| Under King Leopold II |
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| Australian guilt? |
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| Miserable China |
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| Where had these Canadian children gone to? |
And the last of the QUAD: Of all people, Modi’s India!
And in Narendra Modi’s India, it is all about tall poppies. How can China be more successful than us? The most formidable names in the world are headed by Indians – Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Harvard Business School, and even the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, which was founded by Chinese, etc. We were the first Asian to reach the Martian orbit. How Can China be more advanced than us?
Not many Indians have visited China. Their concept of China is not different from the Americans’: Blue ants and sweatshops. But they love the affordable mobile phones from China. I love to use the term Modi’s India to describe India. I have many friends who are Indian. We are intellectual equals, but I couldn’t help rubbing into them this irony: A country of 1.4 billion people and you have some of the best brains in the world, yet you have chosen a Donald Trump to be your prime minister!
I remember when I did my sixth form, many of our science textbooks were from India. When I was doing my Engineering degree, we knew many of the pioneers of our Keretapi Tanah Melayu (Malaysia’s railway authority) came from the Indian Railway.
And there was this Non-Aligned Movement (NOM) during which China’s Zhou Enlai and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru were together at the forefront to resist “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics. More recently you had the BRICS Summits where the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa would meet to promote political, commercial, and cultural cooperation between the five nations. No one doubted India’s non-aligned mindset.
However, the recent border skirmish with China and its inability to manage the corona virus pandemic must have jolted Modi and turned him into an anti-China fanatic. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, how true it is! The US became an overnight friend, hence the formation of QUAD hoodlums.
Many scholars contend that India was never a nation until it gained independence from the British. A nation as defined by Cambridge Dictionary is “a country, especially when thought of as a large group of people living in one area with their own government, language, traditions, etc.” In another dictionary, it is “a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own.” To a hair-splitter like me, India is not a nation in the strictest sense of the word. It is a country of many peoples – in terms of religion, culture, language, history, and what-have-you. In the Tang Dynasty, circa 600-900 AD, there was already a strong bond between China and "India". The glue of this bond, as we all know, was Buddhism. I honestly believe most Indians today do not think that historical foundation is significant enough for posterity.
How do the Rest of the World See China today?
Far away in Africa and Central America, the China and Chinese they notice or understand come in the form of images of quiet and hardworking technicians who are putting up infrastructure in their towns or running the mines in their outback. The West is saying that the Chinese are there to strip Africa’s resources. Yes, the minerals are being mined and stacked at ports waiting for shipment to China. But do the Chinese exploit them like what the colonial powers had done? Remember how cruel King Leopold II of Belgium was to the Africans? And the number of slaves that were ended up in America’s cotton fields?
Come on, Americans and Europeans, you should not just parrot what your government and armchair journalists said about genocide or forced labour to China! You need to go there if want to know the truth!
Waking up China…
Samuel Huntington talks about the looming clash of civilisations (2003). His argument, if I remember correctly, is based on the incompatibility that he sees in many aspects of the cultures of the nine distinct civilisations that he has mapped out. I supposed he was more alarmed about the widening of the value gap between the Judah-Christian west and the Islamic world than the rest. That was the prevailing concern then; for Islam was increasingly seen as a new world destabilizing force. The emergence of China was not apparent then.
However, after the ascension of Obama, the pivot was shifted to a rising China. Only two civilisations are in danger of clashes – the western, led by the US, and China’s. That need to check China became Trump’s political capital. And instead of rationalizing the whole need, Biden went on to build on it. He wants to outdo Trump, lest he becomes a one-term president.
The clarion call has been issued. At one corner is the US’s brand of evangelism, and at the corner is the reluctant China, guided by its Before-Christ, principally Confucian, philosophy.
Had Trump and Biden not burned the dragon’s whiskers, China would have been content to just plod on to fulfil its xiao-kang (小康) or “moderately comfortable” ambition. From time immemorial, save the century of humiliation in the 1800s to 1900s, China had always been an advanced nation of the time, but it had never wanted to go beyond the Himalayas in is southwest, the Steppes and deserts in its west and north, and the seas in its east. It was an agricultural nation! People have to till the land! It built the Great Wall to deter the constant threat posed by the Mongols and the central Asian tribes. If Chinese had the western mindset, many parts of Southeast Asia, Australia and East Africa would have been China’s colonies for a long time. The three hundred years after the Ming dynasty was an aberration in China’s nature to better themselves.
Now China realizes it needs more than its formidability in supply-chains to do so. It cannot count on anyone anymore. It has to build its own capabilities in chip-making, advanced jet engines, military, and space explorations, among others. The US is going all out to choke off China in all these fronts, particularly the chip supplies. But it fails to basically understand this reality: many of the scientists and engineers in chip-making industries, from machines to design to production, are ethnically Chinese. Now that China has made up its mind to be self-sufficient in this field, it is only a matter of time this DNA would return to China and help make it the No 1 in this technology.
Ditto on military capabilities. The way the US is rallying its partners to demonstrate their naval power right in front of China’s doorsteps – all in the name of navigational freedom and “protect” Taiwan – forces China to invest in defence and space capabilities and to strengthen its resolve to take back Taiwan. Had the west and Japan not been encouraging Taiwan to go independent, China would have been happy to allow Taiwan to prosper under the one-country-two-systems arrangements. And Hong Kong would not have to pass those laws to ward off western hypocrisy.
America is seeing a Chinese ghost everywhere it goes. It is gripped by hallucinations. And this has made its policy totally incoherent. So far, only Canada, the UK, Japan, Australia, and some minion countries in Europe are happy to become America's blood brothers. Much of the rest the world is paying lip service. They simply must think where the food on the family table is going to come from.
Whereas Trump’s focus was on trade and technology, Biden’s is all out blockades. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is like an ant on a hot plate – right behind Wangi Yi everywhere the latter went. But he is not achieving much of what Biden has asked. Wendy Sherman looked ill at ease in China, despite her formidable reputation. Llyod Austin looks as clumsy; he simply does not know the protocols. A case in point is their visit to the ASEAN countries. There is a cultural wisdom in these countries, having lived side by side with China for hundreds of years. America has never paid much attention to them, and now they are trying to woo them to its cause or mission. These countries have millions of people of Chinese descent in their midst. They are loyal to their respective countries, but many are also proud of the civilization they belong to. And they know, only a strong China can help them to stand tall. And the silliest of all America’s diplomatic attempts – to try to influence Russia to go against China. Vladimir Putin easily puts Biden into his pocket! Putin is a leader extraordinaire. He is made of solid steel!
The US is a country that is deeply divided – between Democrats and Republicans, between races, and between extreme wealth and abject poverty. Its very foundation is indeed at risk of crumbling. Its cities and infrastructure are decaying. Its finances are in deep sinkholes. An important pillar of economy, namely, Chinese talents, is having second thoughts about their future in America. A pandemic is still ravaging. Yet, it keeps looking back to whack China, just because it is pacing behind in the run.
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| Just another Black life? |
The "Way-of-Nature" Forward
Look at the picture below. Maybe it can offer us some wisdom. Few had heard of Taliban, despite the fact that not even the mighty Soviet Union could subdue them - until September 11th 2001. Afghanistan was blamed for the al-Qaeda terror. The country was duly invaded. At that time, the world was on America's side.
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No Tuxedo?
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However, after spending a trillion US dollars and sacrificing some 2500 American lives in Afghanistan, America is now calling it quits. The Taliban have always been thought of as a bunch of medieval Islamic fighters that are incapable of institutionalized governance. That may be so, but they are certainly not idiots. They must have thought very deeply about their future before they made this trip to China, which has been branded anti-Islam by the West in the first place.
It is time for the leaders in the West, Japan and India to realise the world has changed. In this Internet world, no lies can stand long. America's hegemony is going to be a thing of the past. No ideology can last forever. Neither can any doctrine. To the Chinese, nothing is set in concrete. The Ying and Yang forces are at work all the time. Its I-Ching (Scripture or Sutra of Change) has for millennia advocated the constant need for one to adapt - when the situation arises. And their concept of crisis is written in these two characters: 危机 (Wei-Chi), literally risk-opportunity. The Western paradigm tends to be linear; the Chinese, multi-dimensional.
The world economy has largely been a zero-sum game in the past - one country would gain at the expense of the other, or vice versa. The Chinese believe in win-win, which they have abundantly demonstrated since their joining of the World Trade Organisation.
The West can never change China, neither China is interested to change the West or the rest of the world, which it has declared time and again. What you are seeing China today is just the emergence of another Confucian dynasty in Chinese history. Its rulers are not emperors; they emerged through a multi-layered filter - from village functionaries to city bureaucrats to provincial and finally national decision-makers. The "emperor" is simply the most hard-driven, the crème de la crème, of the lot. And most importantly, he is not not vulnerable to short- or long-term political pressures or threats, from both within the country or outside.
Thanks to the failure of Soviet Union, Communism has always been thought of as a form of evil system which the masses will naturally reject when they are liberated, like what has happened to East Germany. This has also held true in hitherto satellite states of Soviet Union in west and north-west Europe. However, chances of that happening to China are NIL. If the West understands the two characters that defines Communism in Chinese, namely 共产, taken together, the term simply means "produce together [for the greater good of society]". Who can fault that sense of mission?
Japan understands Confucianism and much of its people's lives also revolves around the ethos of this philosophy. Chinese forgive but not forget. If Japan can own up to their World War II guilt and make it a point to live with China without playing the US card, then the future of the region is certainly assured, thanks to East Asians' great strengths in STEM. Korea is a very strong part of this equation, and its unification with North Korea should be encouraged genuinely.
If Modi can shake off his pseudo-sainthood and humble himself to learn a little from China and the Indians in Singapore, then Indians can also look forward to a better life faster. It is now lulled by the West's constant pat on their back. No, The Economist's praises are shallow; you need to transform your country and society and that's a long haul. Who else can show you the way? Think about it. Deluding yourself and acting beyond your pay-grade is the surest way to fall flat.
The West has their niche. Its universities will continue to be the incubators of great scientific ideas and breakthroughs. But the US is in a precarious position. Biden says he protects Asians, but perception is everything. Chinese and Chinese students simply don't feel safe in America and many parts of the western world today. The US needs to reconcile itself to the fact that it is no longer able, or even necessary, to contain China. It should just live the world as a prosperous and don't-bother-me gentleman in the upmarket neighbourhood of the city, like what they did before World War II.
As for the rest of the world, be yourself. You don't have to join or attach yourself to any alliance or coalition. Slavery and subserviency are things of the past, and nobody can exploit your resources any more. You want? You pay. Some may still harbour delusions about themselves, about their faith, about their race, or about their destiny, no one is going to give two hoots what they think - if they don't work hard enough to earn them.
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Acknowledgement
My good friend Lilian Low, who is the author of The M Quotient: From Muar to Singapore (2017), helped me to put many pieces together. Without her input, the message I wanted to send would have been quite incoherent. My many thanks to Lilian!
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