Taiwan Comes to the Forefront in the US-Chinese Military Standoff
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Vladimir Terehov
New Eastern Outlook
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he New Eastern Outlook has repeatedly noted the sharp increase in the role of Taiwan in the complex relations between the two leading world superpowers. Against the backdrop of a continuous deterioration in these relations, Washington’s desire to restore the format of its pre-1979 ties with Taipei is becoming increasingly clear.
The conceptual basis for the US policy on Taiwan, which began with the formation of the PRC in 1949, was made up of the words of General D. MacArthur who led the U.S. troops in South Korea and said in 1951 that “the loss of Taiwan will push our borders back to California.” The exceptional role of Taiwan in the military confrontation with China had to be sacrificed (partly, let us emphasize) in 1979, when the confrontation with the Soviet Union was aggravated and there was an urgent need to establish comprehensive relations with Beijing. After the breakup of diplomatic relations with Taipei carried out at the time, the functions of maintaining various kinds of contacts with it were in the hands of lobbyist organizations.Among them, there was the US-Taiwan Business Council (USTBC). Established in 1976, USTBC refers to itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of trade and business relations between the United States and Taiwan. From 1981 to 1989, in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, the Council was actively engaged in the development of various US-Taiwanese relations.In particular, defense and security issues have been discussed at the US-Taiwanese Defense Industry Cooperation Conference, which USTBC has held annually since 2002. It is there that the experts discuss and prepare drafts of (now official) US decisions to help strengthen Taiwan’s defense capabilities.It should be noted that Taiwan also has its own opportunities in this regard. However, Taiwan’s defense policy and development of military capability deserve separate consideration. Here we should only note a sharp increase (by more than 8%) in military expenditures in the 2020 draft budget, which was announced in August this year. Such an upsurge has not been observed in the military expenditures of Taiwan since 2008.The statements made by Washington on two deals on the sales of American weapons to Taiwan for a total amount of more than $10 billion coincided with the publication of its own plans in the defense area. Of that amount, Taipei will pay $8 billion for the delivery of 66 cutting-edge F-16 fighters (Block 70).Before the author comments on this event, which is extremely important for the situation both in the US-Taiwan-China triangle and in the region as a whole, let us give the floor to the President of the USTBC R. Hammond-Chambers: “Since 2001, this is the most important act of selling American arms to Taiwan.” Listing in this connection various aspects of the sharp increase in the combat readiness of the Taiwanese armed forces, he particularly emphasized the role of the purchase of the latest F-16 modification “as a bridge” to the purchase of 5th generation F-35 fighter planes.
For our part, let us single out several details. First, the unprecedented scale of US arms deliveries to the island with a population of 24 million. Let us emphasize that these are deals, not mere intentions (e.g. regarding Saudi Arabia). Secondly, the moment of their conclusion, as Taipei had first addressed Washington in 2006 with a request to sell the F-16. The third point will complement the words of the USTBC President concerning the main component of both transactions, that is, the aforementioned fighters.
First of all, the F-16 program, launched in the late 1960s – early 1970s by the American defense company Lockheed, is one of the most successful in the post-war aircraft industry. Originally developed mainly for land strike, the plane demonstrated 30 years ago (during the Israeli Air Force’s Operation to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak) its efficiency in overcoming the complex air defense system and delivering a preemptive strike against important, well-protected targets.
Taking into account the fact that the combat efficiency of the modern weapon systems is mainly determined by their diverse equipment of electronic and IT-systems, the F-16 Block 70 (which Taiwan will get) and the F-16 of forty years ago are only similar in their appearance.
That is, the very fact and scope of the recent transactions on the sale of US arms to Taiwan, their nomenclature and the moment chosen for official statements on this topic indicate that the relationship between the two leading world superpowers are indeed in the midst of extremely serious trials.
In the context of this article, it seems quite appropriate to also touch upon the prospect of possible deployment of the land version of the Tomahawk medium-range cruise (subsonic) missile in Taiwan. The US domestic tests of this version of Tomahawk, which caused a wide media resonance, were conducted almost immediately after the termination (on August 2 this year) of the Treaty prohibiting the possession of such weapons (IRNFT).
It is necessary to remind the reader about the author’s position on a number of important issues that accompany the (already de facto) termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Firstly, the Treaty was doomed due to the dramatic changes that have taken place on the table of the Great World Game over the 35 years following its signing.
Secondly, there are no military and strategic motives for developing a land version of Tomahawk. The (many) thousands of these missiles, which he US has already, deployed on the seas (Arleigh Burke destroyers), underwater (submarines) and in the air (strategic bombers) quite successfully solve the problem of overcoming any conceivable air defense system and the notorious flight time issue. Even without the use of other means of attack that are also available in excess.
The obvious advantage of the off-land strategy adopted several decades ago in both offensive and defensive (e.g., missile defense) weapon systems is that their mobility is dramatically increasing. That is, the necessary number of launchers can be quickly concentrated in a “menacing area” without asking permission from other countries’ governments.
And suddenly there is the prospect of the very same Tomahawks land use. Its “rational” explanation is seen primarily in the phenomenon of the US military and industrial complex, whose activities are not always linked to the real problems of the country. Which is what D. Eisenhower, a top-class military professional, mentioned 60 years ago.
It is also important to note such a possible motive as the concentration of the “electoral core” of the current US President in the industrial sphere of the US economy.
Where to deploy land Tomahawks, is to be decided by the officials of the US Department of State and the Department of Defense. At first glance, the most likely foreign partners are the élite of the East European limitrophe states ready to sell their territories (together with the population) to a more favorable owner for a penny.
But the latter is unlikely to need their services, because its key foreign policy problem is now located on the opposite side of the globe. The US will have to seek potential land Tomahawk deployment partners in the space surrounding the main geopolitical opponent, i.e. China.
The consent of the governments of the PRC’s neighboring nations will be required even if the land Tomahawks are deployed on mobile platforms that can be moved quickly by military transport aircraft. And the author highly doubts that even the official US allies such as Japan and South Korea, who, despite their mutual hostility, are quite successful in developing their relations with Beijing on a separate basis, will give such consent. Neither will Washington get it from Vietnam, nor from the other 9 ASEAN member countries, Nepal and Mongolia.
So far, there is no prospect that relations between the two Asian giants (India and China) will face such serious problems that Delhi will take a step (with most serious consequences) to allow Washington deploying land Tomahawks in its territory.
As for Taiwan, located only two hundred kilometers off the Chinese coast, it may turn out to be the main and most promising place of the (hypothetical, let us once again emphasize) Pentagon’s plans to deploy the land Tomahawks.
Especially since the recent arms deals between Washington and Taipei demonstrate the willingness of the parties to continue strengthening the military component in the de facto ongoing process of restoring the format of the pre-1979 US-Taiwanese relations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Terekhov, expert on the issues of the Asia-Pacific region, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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A San Francisco Every Month: How China’s Urbanization Pays for Itself
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The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. —Confucius, Analects.
China's construction is vertiginous (Wharton Edu.)
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]an Franciscans unable to afford the $3,600 monthly rental for a one bedroom apartment sleep in the streets and, like most world cities Beijing recently faced a similar problem. Twenty-three million prosperous Beijingers wanted meals from local restaurants but the quarter-million migrant workers who delivered them could not afford the city’s eye-watering rents. Resourcefully, they found neighborhoods condemned for renewal, hooked up illegal wiring to leaky buildings and moved in until the inevitable fires drove them as TV cameras recorded their misery. The city built one-hundred thousand low-rent apartments in twelve months, the problem vanished, yet Beijingers barely noticed. China has been building homes for a million people–the entire housing stock of San Francisco, every month since 1950.
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China’s landlords, the world’s oldest social class, maintained their grip on the country’s land for three thousand years until, in 1949, Mao placed it in public trust, divided[1] it, and began a series of experiments that continue to this day. In 1960 he combined individual plots into communal farms for the Great Leap Forward. In 1978, Deng redivided them into family plots that proved inefficient, but attempts to recombine them into larger, more efficient farms failed until 2012. Then a Trial Spot in Sihong County created land management rights that farmers could rent or pledge as collateral, so long as their land remained agricultural. Beijing promoted Sihong’s solution nationwide and, today, millions of rural people are unlocking twenty-two trillion dollars of previously inaccessible wealth. One farmer, Sun Zeshun[2], leased his plot to an agribusiness corporation, became a roofing contractor in a nearby town, and used his new income to build a house and buy an SUV, “Life is much better now. I have more freedom and my income is less affected by weather.”
Urban experiments began in 1953 when, to maintain food production and prevent slum formation, the government issued urban hukou, residency permits, to rural people only if they attended university, joined the Army, or worked in state-owned enterprises. The UN’s Alain Bertaud[3] says, “Urbanization didn’t happen because the government wanted the country to urbanize–they actually kept the hukou in order to slow it down. But the economy asked for it and people voted with their feet. The government has to cope with urbanization rather than it being a deliberate policy decision. In a way, they are paying the price of this rapid urbanization now.” Every year since then, as housing becomes available, ten million people converted their rural hukou into urban permits and soon only Tibet will retain hukou–so people won’t move to the country and overgraze fragile ecosystems.
China's Kunming suburbs. The nation's urbanisation phenomenon is the biggest ever in human history. (Shutterstock)
In 1960, city governments began building hundreds of millions of homes to accommodate the biggest baby boom in history, and, though individual floor space was only forty square feet, they charged tenants nominal rent. Planners trying to build a more productive economy saw housing as a nonproductive expense, but public attachment to its low cost accommodation made reform difficult. Then, in 1981, a Housing Privatization Trial Spot encouraged renters to buy the homes they lived in–for half their market value and the experiment’s success reverberated in every city in China. Within seven years, tenants purchased two-thirds of all urban housing–worth one-third of China’s GDP–and unleashed the biggest real estate boom in world history.
Planners had capital to invest, the economy boomed, and housing became a pillar of the country’s welfare system. When markets overheated, city governments simply released more land for development to keep housing supply aligned to local wage rises. When oversized apartments created problems, a Trial Spot halved their value by applying a progressive sales tax to floorspace, forcing speculators to release thousands of units onto the market. Yet local price bubbles regularly caused social unrest because, though eighty percent of buyers paid cash, twenty percent or would-be owners–rural folk moving to cities, cash-strapped first-time buyers, students, and migrant workers–found city prices out of reach. Another Trial Spot, in 2007, allowed them to pay half the deposit while the government paid the other half and guaranteed to buy or sell its interest on demand. Yet another Trial Spot gave land, permits, utilities, and loan guarantees to developers to build rent-only dwellings–on condition that rentals remained below fifteen percent of local wages. The canny developers pre-sold entire projects to insurance companies and retirement funds for their secure, long term cashflows. The work of urbanization will continue through 2049, when half the current rural population will be living in new cities.
Two million people living in regions prone to natural disasters, severe desertification, soil erosion or water depletion need special assistance. Planners are spending thirty-billion dollars (of which each villager contributes five hundred) building cities for them and will complete their relocation in 2021. The publicly owned banks financing the project will recoup their investment over thirty years from increased tax revenues because, in addition to normal wage growth, each year of city life adds two percent to residents’ income. Meanwhile, planners are spending five billion restoring and reforesting the vacated land.
Some local governments are blurring the urban-rural divide. In 2018 Beijing Province began providing its fourteen million urban and seven million rural residents with the same world class education, healthcare, employment, social welfare and housing. The positive public response encouraged the city fathers to extend the largesse to the rural poverty belt in adjacent Hebei Province.
Rural folk are naturally reluctant to leave their ancestral villages and grave sites until their new towns have utilities, public transport, schools, jobs and shops, and their hesitation leads to tales of ‘ghost cities,’ says Wade Shepherd[4]. “I’ve been chasing reports of deserted towns and have yet to find one. Over and over, I would read articles in the international press claiming that China is building towns that are never inhabited–only to find something very different upon arrival. Ordos, the most famous ‘ghost city,’ took ten years to populate but now has a thriving downtown and rising home prices. Xiangluowan, Lanzhou, Zhengzhou, Zhujiang, and Zhengdong, former ‘ghost cities,’ now host the biggest urban migration in history. Newer cities–backwaters a decade ago–are complete and awaiting occupants while others, like Xinyang New District, are finishing construction.”
Today, most urbanites and almost all country folk own their homes and fifteen percent own a second property. By 2020 housing will account for sixty percent of personal assets (twice the US level) and individual living space will be 450 square feet (half the US average). Housing quality already exceeds Japan’s.
The absence of property taxes makes carrying costs negligible and speculative pressures remain strong so the government barred rich people from buying extra homes and warned speculators to blame themselves if policy changes cause losses. As the Prime Minister said, “Houses are built to be lived in, not traded.” A homeowner in remote Kunming told me of his attempts to buy a second property after the policy went into effect:
Over the last few days I must have gone to nine banks and none of them will let me mortgage my property for a loan to buy another $300,000 apartment that is coming on the market in my neighborhood. The bank managers all told me that the government imposed tough restrictions on loans since last year so, if I really want to borrow the money, I will have to pay shadow bankers thousands in extra interest. Also, I cannot buy normal houses in my market because I already own one so, according to their policy, I cannot buy or sell my current one inside three years. When I bought my current apartment last year I could not buy in locations Kunming had zoned for college graduates who want to settle here. So our local real estate bubble isn’t going to burst anytime soon, as far as I can see.
As a first time home buyer, he was required to make a thirty percent deposit, so he put down $100,000–$37,300 from savings and $63,700 from his father, sister and friends (for a second home, the deposit jumps to sixty percent and third homes must be purchased for cash). He’s willing to invest in housing because, along with everyone else, his wages have grown twelve percent annually for the past decade and annual per-capita disposable income has jumped from $1,800 to $8,000.
An airline stewardess friend owns a shabby, $300,000, fifteen year-old[5], one-thousand sq. ft. apartment in outer Shenzen, across the bay from Hong Kong. Her fiancé’s similar flat inside Shanghai's Inner Ring Road, she says, cost one million dollars while, in her inland home town, it would be one-hundred fifty-thousand. Like most employees, she contributed to her employer’s Housing Provident Fund which matched her contribution when she signed the sales agreement. Since her salary is over twice the payments, loan approval was automatic.
With seven of the ten most expensive cities on earth for residential property, Chinese prices are disproportionate to local incomes. The minimum wage in coastal Xiamen, for example, is $300 and the average wage is $2,000, yet ninety percent of families own apartments, of which eighty percent are mortgage- and lien-free. Their secret is collective action. Chinese evaluate potential spouses more realistically than we do: a good-paying job and a home are essential for familial approval, so multigenerational clans and even school friends pitch in and, since parents often move into their children’s homes in old age, they often contribute a large portion of their savings. Low-income parents take second jobs to help with the deposit, canvass their social networks, and borrow the balance. Since owners spend one-third to one-half of their incomes on mortgage repayments, only eighteen percent of households nationally have mortgages[6] and loan default rates are barely one-third US levels.
Access to housing in big cities is becoming difficult and, partly because cities have low population densities[7], and Tier One cities are capping their populations. Non-residents moving to Shanghai must buy for cash and pay city taxes and social insurance for five years before applying for a Shanghai houkou. Tier Two cities are deleveraging and Tier Three and Tier Four cities are optimizing their population density, infrastructure and efficiency.
This urban growth has lifted demand–and competition–for skilled workers. The balmy island province of Hainan (pop. nine-million), is developing medical tourism and advertised, “Talented people coming to Hainan won’t have to worry about affording a home.” Medical professionals receive eighty percent of their home’s equity after five years and clear title after eight. Inland Chengdu (pop. fifteen-million), lures researchers and entrepreneurs with subsidized rents and home finance, cash incentives, prioritized service at banks and hospitals, discounts on subways, free bicycles, and free entry to museums, events, and the local panda research center. Nanjing, plagued by labor shortages, lowered home deposits to five percent and was rushed by cash-strapped couples.
Since the effective size of a labor market is defined by the average number of jobs accessible in a sixty minute commute, well-designed infrastructure is vital to the current phase of urbanization. Cities generate ninety percent of the world’s economic growth, so Chinese planners studied prosperous megacities like Seoul and Tokyo and concluded that there is no need to limit their size if they are well planned. Now they are creating nineteen supercity clusters, the five biggest of which average 110 million people, which they expect to generate ninety percent of the national economy by 2030.
The first step is to strengthen the links between cities along two horizontal and three vertical corridors to create mega-regions, of which Beijing has prioritized three to drive national economic development by 2020: the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and planners expect two medium-sized clusters, Yangtze Mid-River and Chengdu-Chongqing, to eventually join them.
Though each is ambitious in its own right, the government plans to turbocharge them by linking the clusters along two horizontal and three vertical corridors, the five biggest of which will average 110 million people, three times the size of Tokyo. The two horizontals are the Land Bridge Corridor in the North and the Yangtze River Corridor; the three verticals are the Coastal Corridor, the Harbin-Beijing-Guangzhou Railway Corridor, and the Baotou-Kunming Railway Corridor.
By linking the Yangtze River Corridor’s existing airports, railways, highways and waterways horizontally they will anchor the ‘land’ end of the Belt and Road Initiative, while the Coastal Corridor anchor the maritime road. Clustering will reallocate resources from bigger cities to smaller ones which tend to be at earlier stages of industrialization, and help them move up the value chain and away from heavy polluting industries. New free trade zones (FTZs) will help bigger clusters attract innovation-based investments and focus on the Made in China 2025 industrial strategy. Alain Bertaud says, “When I saw the original plan for Shenzhen, a fishing village that became one of China’s richest cities, I told them, ‘You’re being too ambitious.’ But I underestimated China’s enormous ability to get these things done.”
The mayor of remote Chongqing[8], whose thirty million people are clustering with Chengdu’s eight million says, “We became part of the high-speed rail network in 2017. Today we’re seeing China’s old pattern of provincial production based on self-contained industries being replaced by a more rational division of labor and production across the nation in a unified, efficient domestic market. Our objective was to become the economic center and major growth pole of Western China by 2020 and for our large urban and rural areas and to balance our urban-rural development. Today, fifty-one percent of us live in urban areas and forty-nine percent in rural areas. Once our urban population reaches seventy percent we will have three urban layers: one large metropolis, thirty medium cities and a hundred small cities. We’re creating a livable, green, drivable, safe, healthy Chongqing.”
Of all the urban projects, Beijing’s Xiong'an New District, sixty miles to its south, is probably the most ambitious. The forty square mile development, which physically connects the world’s richest city to its poor hinterland, will re-house industries incompatible with the needs of a world capital. Its twenty-five-acre city hall opened last year and seven hundred miles of new track put Beijing thirty minutes away and keep all commutes in the region under sixty minutes.
More commuter lines connect the district’s city centers, universities, factories, hospitals, offices, institutions and government departments and, to optimize space, much transport, water and electricity infrastructure is underground. Four high-speed train lines will run through the region and connect its three new airports: Beijing Daxing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang. Since airlines must choose between Beijing’s existing airport and Beijing Daxing, planners doubled the speed of the trains running to the more distant airport to make them equi-temporal.
Xiong’an’s infrastructure runs on 5G Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, big data cloud computing, smart sensors, smart lighting and integrated facial recognition–all to reduce energy, time and manpower investment, improve energy efficiency and reduce management overhead. Local media claim it will have neither traffic lights nor traffic jams because Alibaba’s CityBrain AI platform provides its traffic management and Baidu and China Mobile are running remote controlled self-driving vehicles.
Who will pay for this whizzbang technology? Alain Bertaud says the new clusters will give Xiong’an a productivity edge over competing cities, just as the Industrial Revolution gave England a productivity advantage over the world in its day. Like China’s high speed rail network, it will pay for itself.
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[1] In Fanshen, William Hinton tells how this was accomplished in a single village.
[2] China’s Reforms Allow Villagers to Rent Out Land and Boost Incomes. Bloomberg
[3] Endless cities: will China's new urbanisation just mean more sprawl? Helen Roxburgh. The Guardian. Bertaud, formerly the World Bank’s urbanization advisor, now advises Beijing.
[4] Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World's Most Populated Country. by Wade Shepard. Asian Arguments. May 15, 2015
[5] Chinese housing has a designed life of thirty years
[6] The corresponding figure is fifty percent in the USA.
[7] London’s population density is twice Beijing’s.
[8] The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State by Weiwei Zhang
About the Author
Godfree Roberts, a senior contributing editor with The Greanville Post, is a British expert on Chinese and Far Eastern affairs. He resides in Thailand.
Hong Kong’s increasingly xenophobic protests are devolving into chaos with help from US government regime-change outfits and a right-wing local media tycoon with close ties to hardliners in Washington.
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]resident Donald Trump tweeted on August 13 that he “can’t imagine why” the United States has been blamed for the chaotic protests that have gripped Hong Kong.
Trump’s befuddlement might be understandable considering the carefully managed narrative of the US government and its unofficial media apparatus, which have portrayed the protests as an organic “pro-democracy” expression of grassroots youth. However, a look beneath the surface of this oversimplified, made-for-television script reveals that the ferociously anti-Chinese network behind the demonstrations has been cultivated with the help of millions of dollars from the US government, as well as a Washington-linked local media tycoon.
Since March, raucous protests have gripped Hong Kong. In July and August, these demonstrations transformed into ugly displays of xenophobia and mob violence.
The protests ostensibly began in opposition to a proposed amendment to the extradition law between Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Macau, which would have allowed Taiwanese authorities to prosecute a Hong Kong man for murdering his pregnant girlfriend and dumping her body in the bushes during a vacation to Taiwan.
Highly organized networks of anti-China protesters quickly mobilized against the law, compelling Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to withdraw the bill.
But the protests continued even after the extradition law was taken off the table — and these demonstrations degenerated into disturbing scenes. In recent days, hundreds of masked rioters have occupied the Hong Kong airport, forcing the cancellation of inbound flights while harassing travelers and viciously assaulting journalists and police.
Fu Guohao, reporter of GT website is being seized by demonstrators at HK airport. I affirm this man being tied in this video is the reporter himself. He has no other task except for reporting. I sincerely ask the demonstrators to release him. I also ask for help of West reporters pic.twitter.com/sbFb0L3s92
The protesters’ stated goals remain vague. Joshua Wong, one of the most well known figures in the movement, has put forward a call for the Chinese government to “retract the proclamation that the protests were riots,” and restated the consensus demand for universal suffrage.
Wong is a bespectacled 22-year-old who has been trumpeted in Western media as a “freedom campaigner,” promoted to the English-speaking world through his own Netflix documentary, and rewarded with the backing of the US government.
But behind telegenic spokespeople like Wong are more extreme elements such as the Hong Kong National Party, whose members have appeared at protests waving the Stars and Stripes and belting out cacophonous renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner. The leadership of this officially banned party helped popularize the call for the full independence of Hong Kong, a radical goal that is music to the ears of hardliners in Washington.
Xenophobic resentment has defined the sensibility of the protesters, who vow to “retake Hong Kong” from Chinese mainlanders they depict as a horde of locusts. The demonstrators have even adopted one of the most widely recognized symbols of the alt-right, emblazoning images of Pepe the Frog on their protest literature. While it’s unclear that Hong Kong residents see Pepe the same way American white nationalists do, members of the US far-right have embraced the protest movement as their own, and even personally joined their ranks.
Among the most central influencers of the demonstrations is a local tycoon named Jimmy Lai. The self-described “head of opposition media,” Lai is widely described as the Rupert Murdoch of Asia. For the masses of protesters, Lai is a transcendent figure. They clamor for photos with him and applaud the oligarch wildly when he walks by their encampments.
Lai established his credentials by pouring millions of dollars into the 2014 Occupy Central protest, which is known popularly as the Umbrella Movement. He has since used his massive fortune to fund local anti-China political movers and shakers while injecting the protests with a virulent brand of Sinophobia through his media empire.
Though Western media has depicted the Hong Kong protesters as the voice of an entire people yearning for freedom, the island is deeply divided. This August, a group of protesters mobilized outside Jimmy Lai’s house, denouncing him as a “running dog” of Washington and accusing him of national betrayal by unleashing chaos on the island.
Days earlier, Lai was in Washington, coordinating with hardline members of Trump’s national security team, including John Bolton. His ties to Washington run deep — and so do those of the front-line protest leaders.
Millions of dollars have flowed from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into civil society and political organizations that form the backbone of the anti-China mobilization. And Lai has supplemented it with his own fortune while instructing protesters on tactics through his various media organs.
With Donald Trump in the White House, Lai is convinced that his moment may be on the horizon. Trump “understands the Chinese like no president understood,” the tycoon told the Wall Street Journal. “I think he’s very good at dealing with gangsters.”
‘Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!’
Born in the mainland in 1948 to wealthy parents, whose fortune was expropriated by the Communist Party during the revolution the following year, Jimmy Lai began working at 9 years old, carrying bags for train travelers during the hard years of the Great Chinese Famine.
Inspired by the taste of a piece of chocolate gifted to him by a wealthy man, he decided to smuggle himself to Hong Kong to discover a future of wealth and luxury. There, Lai worked his way up the ranks of the garment industry, growing enamored with the libertarian theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter of whom became his close friend.
Friedman is famous for developing the neoliberal shock therapy doctrine that the US has imposed on numerous countries, resulting in the excess deaths of millions. For his part, Hayek is the godfather of the Austrian economic school that forms the foundation of libertarian political movements across the West.
Lai built his business empire on Giordano, a garment label that became one of Asia’s most recognizable brands. In 1989, he threw his weight behind the Tiananmen Square protests, hawking t-shirts on the streets of Beijing calling for Deng Xiaoping to “step down.”
Lai’s actions provoked the Chinese government to ban his company from operating on the mainland. A year later, he founded Next Weekly magazine, initiating a process that would revolutionize the mediascape in Hong Kong with a blend of smutty tabloid-style journalism, celebrity gossip and a heavy dose of anti-China spin.
The vociferously anti-communist baron soon became Hong Kong’s media kingpin, worth a whopping $660 million in 2009.
Today, Lai is the founder and majority stakeholder of Next Digital, the largest listed media company in Hong Kong, which he uses to agitate for the end of what he calls the Chinese “dictatorship.”
His flagship outlet is the popular tabloid Apple Daily, employing the trademark mix of raunchy material with a heavy dose of xenophobic, nativist propaganda.
In 2012, Apple Daily carried a full page advertisement depicting mainland Chinese citizens as invading locusts draining Hong Kong’s resources. The advertisement called for a stop to the “unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women in Hong Kong.” (This was a crude reference to the Chinese citizens who had flocked to the island while pregnant to ensure that their children could earn Hong Kong residency, and resembled the resentment among the US right-wing of immigrant “anchor babies.”)
Ad in Lai’s Apple Daily: “That’s enough! Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!”
The transformation of Hong Kong’s economy has provided fertile soil for Lai’s brand of demagoguery. As the country’s manufacturing base moved to mainland China after the golden years of the 1980s and ‘90s, the economy was rapidly financialized, enriching oligarchs like Lai. Left with rising debt and dimming career prospects, Hong Kong’s youth became easy prey to the demagogic politics of nativism.
Many protesters have been seen waving British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally experienced.
In July, protesters vandalized the Hong Kong Liaison Office, spray-painting the word, “Shina” on its facade. This term is a xenophobic slur some in Hong Kong and Taiwan use to refer to mainland China. The anti-Chinese phenomenon was visible during the 2014 Umbrella movement protests as well, with signs plastered around the city reading, “Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.”
支那(Shina) is Japanese word for China that became derogatory during Sino-Japanese War. Post-War Japan gov ban its use in Kanji form (Chinese characters) in official document. Yet some people in Hong Kong and Taiwan use it to insult people from Chinese mainland. It=“Chink” in Eng https://t.co/Oe8LCXgak8
This month, protesters turned their fury on the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, spray-painting “rioters” on its office. The attack represented resentment of the left-wing group’s role in a violent 1967 uprising against the British colonial authorities, who are now seen as heroes among many of the anti-Chinese demonstrators.
Besides Lai, a large part of the credit for mobilizing latent xenophobia goes to the right-wing Hong Kong Indigenous party leader Edward Leung. Under the direction of the 28-year-old Leung, his pro-independence party has brandished British colonial flags and publicly harassed Chinese mainland tourists. In 2016, Leung was exposed for meeting with US diplomatic officials at a local restaurant.
Though he is currently in jail for leading a 2016 riot where police were bombarded with bricks and pavement – and where he admitted to attacking an officer – Leung’s rightist politics and his slogan, “Retake Hong Kong,” have helped define the ongoing protests.
A local legislator and protest leader described Leung to the New York Times as “the Che Guevara of Hong Kong’s revolution,” referring without a hint of irony to the Latin American communist revolutionary killed in a CIA-backed operation. According to the Times, Leung is “the closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a guiding light.”
The xenophobic sensibility of the protesters has provided fertile soil for Hong Kong National Party to recruit. Founded by the pro-independence activist Andy Chan, the officially banned party combines anti-Chinese resentment with calls for the US to intervene. Images and videos have surfaced of HKNP members waving the flags of the US and UK, singing the Star Spangled Banner, and carrying flags emblazoned with images of Pepe the Frog, the most recognizable symbol of the US alt-right.
While the party lacks a wide base of popular support, it is perhaps the most outspoken within the protest ranks, and has attracted disproportionate international attention as a result. Chan has called for Trump to escalate the trade war and accused China of carrying out a “national cleansing” against Hong Kong. “We were once colonised by the Brits, and now we are by the Chinese,” he declared.
Protesters in Hong Kong waving the American flag and singing the American National anthem as they advocate for democracy. Wow! pic.twitter.com/CKyFstud22
Displays of pro-American jingoism in the streets of Hong Kong have been like catnip for the international far-right.
Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson recently appeared at an anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong, livestreaming the event to his tens of thousands of followers. A month earlier, Gibson was seen roughing up antifa activists alongside ranks of club wielding fascists. In Hong Kong, the alt-right organizer marveled at the crowds.
“They love our flag here more than they do in America!” Gibson exclaimed as marchers passed by, flashing him a thumbs up sign while he waved the Stars and Stripes.
‘British colonial past gave us the instinct to revolt’
Such xenophobic propaganda is consistent with the clash of civilizations theory that Jimmy Lai has promulgated through his media empire.
“You have to understand the Hong Kong people – a very tiny 7 million or 0.5 percent of the Chinese population – are very different from the rest of Chinese in China, because we grow up in the Western values, which was the legacy of the British colonial past, which gave us the instinct to revolt once this extradition law was threatening our freedom,” Lai told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “Even America has to look at the world 20 years from now, whether you want the Chinese dictatorial values to dominate this world, or you want the values that you treasure [to] continue.”
During a panel discussion at the neoconservative Washington-based think tank, the Foundation For Defense of Democracies, Lai told the pro-Israel lobbyist Jonathan Schanzer, “We need to know that America is behind us. By backing us, America is also sowing to the will of their moral authority because we are the only place in China, a tiny island in China, which is sharing your values, which is fighting the same war you have with China.”
While Lai makes no attempt to conceal his political agenda, his bankrolling of central figures in the 2014 Occupy Central, or Umbrella movement protests, was not always public.
Leaked emails revealed that Lai poured more than $1.2 million to anti-China political parties including $637,000 USD to the Democratic Party and $382,000 USD to the Civic Party. Lai also gave $115,000 USD to the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation and Hong Kong Democratic Development Network, both of which were co-founded by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Lai also spent $446,000 USD on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.
Lai’s US consigliere is a former Navy intelligence analyst who interned with the CIA and leveraged his intelligence connections to build his boss’s business empire. Named Mark Simon, the veteran spook arranged for former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to meet with a group in the anti-China camp during a 2009 visit to Hong Kong. Five years later, Lai paid $75,000 to neoconservative Iraq war author and US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to organize a meeting with top military figures in Myanmar.
This July, as the Hong Kong protests gathered steam, Lai was junketed to Washington, DC for meetings with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Cory Gardner, and Rick Scott. Bloomberg News correspondent Nicholas Wadhams remarked on Lai’s visit, “Very unusual for a [non-government] visitor to get that kind of access.”
Today: Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai met National Security Adviser John Bolton in DC. After meetings with @SecPompeo and @VP, this is meant to send a signal to Beijing. Very unusual for a nongovt visitor to get that kind of access. pic.twitter.com/6rvqsGJzru
One of Lai’s closest allies, Martin Lee, was also granted an audience with Pompeo, and has held court with US leaders including Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joseph Biden.
Among the most prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-US political parties, Lee began collaborating with Lai during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A recipient of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” in 1997, Lee is the founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, now considered part of the pro-US camp’s old guard.
While Martin Lee has long been highly visible on the pro-western Hong Kong scene, a younger generation of activists emerged during the 2014 Occupy Central protests with a new brand of localized politics.
Teenager Vs. Superpower, with help from a bigger superpower
Joshua Wong meets with Sen. Marco Rubio in Washington on May 8, 2017
Joshua Wong was just 17 years old when the Umbrella Movement took form in 2014. After emerging in the protest ranks as one of the more charismatic voices, he was steadily groomed as the pro-West camp’s teenage poster child. Wong received lavish praised in Time magazine, Fortune, and Foreign Policy as a “freedom campaigner,” and became the subject of an award-winning Netflix documentary called “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.”Unsurprisingly, these puff pieces have overlooked Wong’s ties to the United States government’s regime-change apparatus. For instance, National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) maintains a close relationship with Demosistō, the political party Wong founded in 2016 with fellow Umbrella movement alumnus Nathan Law.
In August, a candid photo surfaced of Wong and Law meeting with Julie Eadeh, the political counselor at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, raising questions about the content of the meeting and setting off a diplomatic showdown between Washington and Beijing.
This is very very embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters. pic.twitter.com/JfiU2O2HZq
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on the US “to immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”
The pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao published personal details about Eadeh, including the names of her children and her address. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus lashed out, accusing the Chinese government of being behind the leak but offering no evidence. “I don’t think that leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children, I don’t think that is a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would do,” she said at a State Department briefing.
But the photo underscored the close relationship between Hong Kong’s pro-west movement and the US government. Since the 2014 Occupy Central protests that vaulted Wong into prominence, he and his peers have been assiduously cultivated by the elite Washington institutions to act as the faces and voices of Hong Kong’s burgeoning anti-China movement.
In September 2015, Wong, Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee were honored by Freedom House, a right-wing soft-power organization that is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the US government.
Just days after Trump’s election as president in November 2016, Wong was back in Washington to appeal for more US support. “Being a businessman, I hope Donald Trump could know the dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to maintain the judicial independence and the rule of law,” he said.
Wong’s visit provided occasion for the Senate’s two most aggressively neoconservative members, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, to introduce the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,” which would “identify those responsible for abduction, surveillance, detention and forced confessions, and the perpetrators will have their US assets, if any… frozen and their entry to the country denied.”
Wong was then taken on a junket of elite US institutions including the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and the newsrooms of the New York Times and Financial Times. He then held court with Rubio, Cotton, Pelosi, and Sen. Ben Sasse.
In September 2017, Rubio, Ben Cardin, Tom Cotton, Sherrod Brown, and Cory Gardner signed off on a letter to Wong, Law and fellow anti-China activist Alex Chow, praising them for their “efforts to build a genuinely autonomous Hong Kong.” The bipartisan cast of senators proclaimed that “the United States cannot stand idly by.”
A year later, Rubio and his colleagues nominated the trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
Honored to have met Joshua Wong, a student leader who led a big protest demanding universal suffrage in Hong Kong. pic.twitter.com/sSb46j7zIX
Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplement with untold sums of money from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to civil society, media and political groups.
As journalist Alex Rubinstein reported, the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a key member of the coalition that organized against the now-defunct extradition law, has received more than $2 million in NED funds since 1995. And other groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.
While US lawmakers nominate Hong Kong protest leaders for peace prizes and pump their organizations with money to “promote democracy,” the demonstrations have begun to spiral out of control.
From the “Marginal Violence Theory” to the mob violence reality
After the extradition law was scrapped, the protests moved into a more aggressive phase, launching “hit and run attacks” against government targets, erecting roadblocks, besieging police stations, and generally embracing the extreme modalities put on display during US-backed regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Nicaragua.
AJE in position to cover HK protesters' "hit and run strategy."
The techniques clearly reflected the training many activists have received from Western soft-power outfits. But they also bore the mark of Jimmy Lai’s media operation.
In addition to the vast sums Lai spent on political parties directly involved in the protests, his media group created an animated video “showing how to resist police in case force was used to disperse people in a mass protest.”
While dumping money into the Hong Kong’s pro-US political camp in 2013, Lai traveled to Taiwan for a secret roundtable consultation with Shih Ming-teh, a key figure in Taiwan’s social movement that forced then-president Chen Shui-bian to resign in 2008. Shih reportedly instructed Lai on non-violent tactics to bring the government to heel, emphasizing the importance of a commitment to go to jail.
According to journalist Peter Lee, “Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order to attract the support of the international community and press, and to sustain the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and fresh.” Lai reportedly turned off his recording device during multiple sections of Shih’s tutorial.
One protester explained to the New York Times how the movement attempted to embrace a strategy called, “Marginal Violence Theory”: By using “mild force” to provoke security services into attacking the protesters, the protesters aimed to shift international sympathy away from the state.
The charged atmosphere has provided a shot in the arm to Lai’s media empire, which had been suffering heavy losses since the last round of national protests in 2014. After the mass marches against the extradition bill on June 9, which Lai’s Apple Daily aggressively promoted, his Next Digital doubled in value, according to Eji Insight.
Meanwhile, the protest leaders show no sign of backing down. Nathan Law, the youth activist celebrated in Washington and photographed meeting with US officials in Hong Kong, took to Twitter to urge his peers to soldier on: “We have to persist and keep the faith no matter how devastated the reality seems to be,” he wrote.
Law was tweeting from New Haven, Connecticut, where he was enrolled with a full scholarship at Yale University. While the young activist basked in the adulation of his US patrons thousands of miles from the chaos he helped spark, a movement that defined itself as a “leaderless resistance” forged ahead back home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico border and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.
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Upside down or right side up? Comparing Chinese vs. Western civilizational hierarchies.
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
Jeff J. Brown
Pictured above: no wonder Chinese and Westerners don’t understand each other. They look at the world and their societies with diametrically opposed points of view. It’s like two peoples staring at each other through the opposite ends of a telescope. Everything is distorted. To paraphrase the great American poet Robert Frost, “And that my friends, makes all the difference”.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]esterners can live and work in China for years and not see the obvious. I should know, since I was one of them. We occidentals are so brainwashed from birth, at home, in school, by government, media and advertising of our moral superiority over all those “other” dark skinned kinda-sorta people, that it’s easy to not see the trees in the proverbial forest of life. This is how I was, when living here from 1990-1997. Even after living and working for 21 years outside the US, mostly in Africa, Middle East and China, I was still blinded by my racism of Western cultural and moral superiority, a liberaloid do-gooder, wrapped up in identity politics, thinking I was better than most of my less cosmopolitan countrymen – sad to say – and I wasn’t much better. It was not until we came back to China in 2010 that the scales of racism finally fell from my eyes. This painful and humbling, but ultimately liberating, experience is tracked through the three books of The China Trilogy (see below).
Looking at the above comparative chart and going back to the times of the Ancient Greeks, the quintessential Marlboro Man has been the fixture of Western civilization. Me, myself and I, free and unfettered, independent and on one’s own, to decide one’s destiny. Being an adventurer and warrior/gunslinger also fits the bill. Greek tales like Jason and the Argonauts, Iliad and the Odyssey and the swashbuckling myths of the deities slaughtering monsters (today’s inferior Dreaded Others) all extol the virtues of Solo Man.
Family comes next and even that is often contested and dysfunctional in the West. Help out a family member? Maybe, maybe not. It seems like every Western family I’ve ever gotten to know well, starting with mine, is rife with communication and contact between members cut off. Individual peeves and grudges trump trying to keep the family intact.
Working our way down this civilizational hierarchy, support for the neighborhood, city, province and country can happen, but frequently on “my terms” and “not in my backyard”. How dare you encroach on my freedoms! This, while citizens can be easily brainwashed with God and the flag, to fight in endless wars for rape, resources and plunder, with the price over the long term eventually being societal collapse.
For millennia, at the bottom of the Western shit heap is the government and leaders. You can’t blame Euranglolanders for not trusting or respecting their governments, since they usually act like gangsters stealing from the 99%, while sending the latter to die likes dogs in wars of expansion, exploitation and extraction, all to enrich their elite 1% masters. Organized criminals posing as leaders and governments masking cartels is standard operating procedure. It’s happening while I write.
Yet, in spite of all the pitfalls, it’s easy to see why the Western hierarchy of Solo Man is so intoxicating and flattering. What could be more important than… ME! One’s horizon in life is simplified. Me, myself and I concentrate on the need and take complexity and nuance out of the equation. Life becomes linear, point A to point B. I’ll do whatever the hell I want, Bubba. Get back Jojo, it’s my space. Get outta of my way, this is MY lane! A friend in need is fucked indeed. What’s in it for me? The world is my oyster. Of course, I should be able to carry a gun around town to protect myself. I’ve got individual rights. Ayn Rand’s “rational self-interest” (a moral oxymoron). Gordon Gekko’s greed is not just good, greed is God. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, so you’re screwed. Might and treachery make right. Finders keepers losers weepers. Laissez-faire, bay-bee. Dog eat dog, the big dominate the little, the rich steal from the poor. Being entertained and amused becomes paramount. Mass production and super-consumption are in. More, more, more. Making personal sacrifices is decidedly uncool, as is delayed gratification. It is easy to see why the Western paradigm of Marlboro Man dovetails so perfectly with capitalism, neoliberalism and colonialism.
Now, in China, flip the West’s social hierarchy upside down. Suddenly, you are no longer Mr. and Mrs. Me. Welcome to being at the very bottom of civilization’s needs. Look up and your life is no longer simple and linear, but complex and elliptical – a tapestry of interconnections and expectations. Just in the family alone, Mom’s, Dad’s and Grandparents’ needs trump yours. Older relatives too. What’s mine is also my family’s. If you slack off, then how is the family supposed to help take care of the neighborhood? We all want to live in a nice town/city, don’t we, and you’re the start. Daily life becomes very intricate, cyclical and circular, giving and taking. This is not my lane, but everyone else’s too. Since life is so interwoven and interdependent, solidarity in helping others becomes the ideal. Suddenly, social harmony and peaceful coexistence are everything. You mean I have to share? I have many responsibilities to my community and country? You mean I should help the government and our leaders to work effectively, and keep the nation intact and prosperous? You bet your stinky tofu, you do.
It’s easy to see that being a Chinese citizen is a much bigger daily responsibility and the expectations of the many over the wants of the individual are so much greater than in Western civilization. Euranglolanders often feel superior over Chinese families, when they see young children here being loud, boisterous and spoiled rotten. They are for a few years. It’s the one time in their lives when they get to enjoy some of that Solo Man Me, Myself and I, because by the time they get first grade in school, China’s civilizational hierarchy starts to kick in and the expectations of everyone around them begin to weigh on their societal shoulders. For five or six years, they get to run wild a little bit, now it’s time to knuckle down and take their place on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Since you are on the hook for family, the country’s leaders and government, attributes like frugality and delayed gratification become the ideal. No wonder the Chinese have the highest savings rate of any large economy in the world. Even though buying personal gizmos and luxuries has never been higher, and Baba Beijing is exhorting the masses to consume more, to counteract the US’s tariff trade war, China’s savings rate is still 46% (https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/gross-savings-rate). This compares to Americans’ 17% (https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/gross-savings-rate).
All in the family. Since everybody collectively is more important than you, is it any wonder that China is a communist-socialist civilization and always has been?
It goes without saying that the two above portrayed hierarchies are meant to be painted black and white, to show the overarching contrast. Of course, there are generous, giving Westerners who believe in social solidarity and economic justice. As well, there are Chinese who are selfish, greedy and heartless. Yes, there are family feuds and estranged relatives. That’s not the point. The point is the diametrically opposed societal expectations and ideals that are held up for inspiration and guidance. In the West, it’s all about individualism and personal freedom. In China, it’s all about Mom, Dad, the mayor, governor, prime minister and president who come first.
And that, my friends, makes all the difference. The imperial West shattered China’s civilizational hierarchy for 110 years, when it flooded the country with opium, morphine and heroin, 1839-1949, and was able to rape and plunder the people with lustful abandon. Since communist liberation in 1949, China’s social hierarchy has been restored. Look at the comparative table at the beginning of this article one more time and ask yourself, Which country is going to succeed and prosper on the world stage, into the 22nd century?
I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
Key words:
China, Racism, Culture, Ancient Greece, Marlboro Man, Individualism, Solidarity, Brainwash, Me Myself and I, 99%, 1%, Eurangloland, War, Ayn Rand, Gordon Gekko
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Why are Western leaders gawd awful bad and China’s so darn competent？(Part II)
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
Jeff J. Brown
Why are Western leaders gawd awful bad and China’s so darn competent？Part II. China Rising Radio Sinoland 190807
PREFATORY NOTE
Iconic Mao Zedong silhouette badge. Below his bust is his famous mantra, “Serve the People”, written in his very recognizable calligraphic style. Many people do not notice, but on the back is the millennial governance motto, “Preserve the Peace”. Walking around the streets and in buildings here, you can see Mao’s famous calligraphic chant all over the place. Nothing has changed about governance in China for 5,000 years.
Live from the streets of China, Jeff
Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), YouTube video, as well as being syndicated on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, RUvid and Ivoox (links below),
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class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> [dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the first part of this essay, I showed why Western leaders are generally so bad. The one sentence answer is they are almost always suborned to serve the interests of the 1% at the expense of the 99%. (The "1%"—meaning by that the ruling class billionaires— represents actually a lot more concentrated wealth, in the US and much of the "West" approximately 0.00001%).
There is a corollary explanation for this. European cultures and their spinoffs in the rest of Eurangloland, including Israel are founded on violence and theft. If you don’t believe this goes back to the Jewish Torah/Christian Old Testament, here is a quick review of Westerners’ predilection for killing, destroying, plundering first and asking questions later (http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html and http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=21).
I created a comparative Excel table using Wikipedia’s pages on Conflicts in Europe, United States and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Asia#Mainland_China_(People’s_Republic_of_China). Europe’s list has 760 entries, the US’s 250 and China’s 315. Europe’s long list really starts in 1,100BC and does not include all of the genocidal horrors in the Torah/Old Testament before that. The US’s only starts in 1775, which is wishful propaganda. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz clearly proves in her book, A Native Peoples’ History of the United States, genocidal wars to exterminate the many millions of First Nations’ peoples started Day One with the colonial landing at Jamestown in 1607. and the killing has never stopped. China’s goes back to 2,500BC, so is over twice as long as Europe’s and compared to the US, almost ten times longer.
To sum up, Europe’s list of conflicts dates back 3,100 years and lists 760, the US’s starts 230 years ago, with 250 conflicts and China’s starts over 4,500 years ago and has 315. Interestingly, one-third of all China’s conflicts happened during its century of humiliation, 1839-1949, when the West terrorized and plundered the country, while addicting one-fourth of the people to opium, morphine and heroin.
Thus, while the West’s numbers are probably grossly understated, since over the centuries, it has committed thousands of government overthrows, invasions and occupations to protect colonial businesses around the world.
The above statistics speak for themselves. Eurangloland, including Israel conducts its business and trade using violence and expropriation. China, no. This contrast is even more remarkable, when looking at landmass and populations. When the Roman Empire was at its greatest expansion, 200AD, China had six times as much land and nine times as many people, but clearly was experiencing much less conflict, not nine times as much.
As the above chart shows, China has always had many more people than Europe, yet has lived with much less violence and plunder. This is because European cultures are founded on genocide, slavery and the violent plunder of other peoples’ natural resources. For 5,000 years, Chinese civilization has been based on agriculture, animal husbandry and mutually profitable cross border trade.
Proof of this is ample. The Chinese Asian land and African maritime Silk Roads predate Jesus Christ and they did not send out armies to rape and plunder their neighbors, like Alexander the Great, the Christian Crusades and onto modern colonialism and robber baron capitalism. The Chinese conducted state diplomacy, traded goods and technology.
If the Chinese had the same DNA for violence and theft that Westerners do, we’d all be speaking Mandarin today. The Chinese were sailing the high seas many centuries before the rest of the world and had Star Wars weapons compared to Europe and elsewhere, with advanced guns, powerful cannons, rocket propelled grenades, flame throwers, sea and land mines, not to mention chemical and biological bombs.
If the Chinese had the same DNA for violence and theft that Westerners do, we’d all be speaking Mandarin today. The Chinese were sailing the high seas many centuries before the rest of the world and had Star Wars weapons compared to Europe and elsewhere, with advanced guns, powerful cannons, rocket propelled grenades, flame throwers, sea and land mines, not to mention chemical and biological bombs. They were so far ahead of the rest of the world in military and other technologies, that they could have easily crushed every city and people they came into contact with, like defenseless bugs. Yet, they fanned out across the planet and no one was ever attacked, unless the Chinese visitors were attacked first, which happened very rarely, given what they arrived with. They just wanted to do win-win business and exchange technology.
Westerners and Israelis can only think about other peoples in terms of war and exploitation. Since that is their world vision, they cannot assimilate the Chinese’s millennia of external non-violence and, Let’s do some business ethos. Cognitive dissonance overwhelms Euranglolanders when this is shown them and they sink into denial and self-serving mythology. They fall back on moral equivalence, Well, everybody else does it too. Not true, American Natives, Africans, and Asians (excepting the Christianized Genghis Khan family and Japan adopting the Western imperial playbook during its Meiji Restoration) have not blanketed the planet like killer locusts, devouring everything within their reach. Only Euranglolanders have done this and continue to do so.
Great governments in China are the ones that have (and continue to) work for the 99%, first, second and third, maintaining social harmony, economic prosperity, securing the country’s borders and avoiding war at all cost. Avoiding war and running a lean administration meant being able to keep taxes low, in the form of grain sent to government storehouses for redistribution during droughts, so the masses had enough eat well and sell their surplus themselves to buy household goods.
In China’s pre-liberation era, this system was feudal, meaning wealthy land owners and bourgeois gentry had to be reigned in, to not demand too much grain for land use. Thus, China’s leaders were also expected to protect the 99% from local exploitation. This of course did not always happen. There were many regional conflicts and if national or local government authority weakened or was corrupt, the landlords could plunder the peasants, as well as become warlords in their areas.
Warlords on the loose were often a harbinger of a Chinese government that had lost its Heavenly Mandate. Democracy in Chinese is very responsive to the 99%’s needs. If the leaders can’t keep the peace, harmony and maintain the territorial integrity of the nation, then the masses have the right to “grab bamboo spears”, attack government centers and demand a new administration. This happened countless times over thousands of years at the local, provincial, regional and national level.
Maybe now you can have a little appreciation for why Chinese civilization has always had “big government”, from the dynastic center down to the local villages. No leaders can hope to govern effectively for the benefit of the 99% otherwise. This is why Western elites love “small government” neoliberalism, since it gives them a license to kill and plunder at will. What is important to understand, when comparing Chinese governance to Eurangloland’s is what the expectations were and are to this day. In China, it’s taking care of the little guy. In the West, it’s serving the wealthy elites, for them to accumulate more and more money property, possessions and power.
When Admiral Zheng He sailed around the world generations before Columbus and the Europeans, his massive flotilla reportedly had an anthology of China’s great books, totaling 200,000 pages, including the art of good governance. This was to show and tell with all the different governments and peoples they met, going from port to port.
China’s magnum opus for good governance comes from the 6th century AD, during the Tang Dynasty. A young emperor at the time was Taizong. Having gained the throne after his father, and having already learned to be a successful general, he realized that running a country and keeping the 99% safe and prosperous was a huge undertaking. Thus, he decided to collect all the ancient books on good governance and peacekeeping, going back to the beginnings of Chinese literature in 2,600BC and from them, generate an anthology of the best passages. The sources included 14,000 books and 89,000 written scrolls. The result was the Qunshu Zhiyao (群书治要）, which can be translated as the Compilation of Books and Writings on Important Governing Principles. It totals 500,000 words and covers sixty five categories of good governance and peacekeeping.
In the preface of this 1,400 year-old collection, one of Emperor Taizong’s compiling advisors wrote,
When used in the present, (it) allows us to examine and learn from our ancient history; when passed down to our descendants,(it) will help them learn valuable lessons in life.
Taizong himself was ecstatic about the work, saying,
The collection has helped me learn from the ancients. When confronted with issues, I am very certain of knowing what to do. This is all due to your efforts, my advisors.
Above: stylistic rendition of Tang Emperor Taizong, showing his successful military past in the background and thereafter, his forward thinking good governance and peacekeeping in the foreground.
Of course, over five millennia of civilizational history, China has had its fair share of megalomaniacs, psychopaths, corrupted and incompetents in positions of power, both government and military. But, as the Qunshu Zhiyao instructs, the ideals of good governance and peacekeeping are all about social harmony, economic prosperity and avoiding war at all cost, so politicians and leaders of this stripe are the outliers, not the mainstream, as is the case in Eurangloland. Western elites work hard to put megalomaniacs, psychopaths, corrupt and incompetent people in positions of power, since these latter can be manipulated to serve the previous’ interests. Politicians who practice ren and strive for social harmony, economic prosperity and peacekeeping are Eurangloland’s worst enemies. To wit, China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani, DPRK’s Kim Jong-Un and every other socialist/anti-imperialist leader across the globe.
To learn more about why Chinese leaders are often so competent – yesterday, today and tomorrow – you can download below and read a book of excerpts from the Qunshu Zhiyao, put out for free by the Malaysian publishing house, Chung Hua Cultural Education Centre. Just glancing over a few of its 1,400-year-old section titles tells you that the people’s expectations of a Chinese leader are not what the 99% usually gets in the West,
Be careful of military actions
Be frugal and diligent
Be respectful of the Dao
Be sincere and trustworthy
Benevolence and righteousness
Caring about people
Character building
Correcting our own mistakes
Emulate good deeds
Exercising caution from beginning to end
Formation of cliques
Guard against greed
Heeding troubling signs
Human sentiments
Magnanimity
Paramount impartiality
Propriety and Music
Refrain from anger
Talents and virtues
Teach and transform
The livelihood of the people
Uphold integrity
Mao Zedong’s famous mottoes were,
Serve the People!
Preserve the Peace!
Mao did exactly that for one-fourth of the human race and was simply living up to the expectations that the Chinese 99% have had for their leaders, going back 5,000 years. It is still ongoing with Xi Jinping and every leader in between. Euranglolanders cannot count themselves so lucky in the quality of their leaders and integrity of their governance.
The Governing Principles of Ancient China book in downloadable PDF (click the link below):
The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.
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The statements made by Washington on two deals on the sales of American weapons to Taiwan for a total amount of more than $10 billion coincided with the publication of its own plans in the defense area. Of that amount, Taipei will pay $8 billion for the delivery of 66 cutting-edge F-16 fighters (Block 70).Before the author comments on this event, which is extremely important for the situation both in the US-Taiwan-China triangle and in the region as a whole, let us give the floor to the President of the USTBC R. Hammond-Chambers: “Since 2001, this is the most important act of selling American arms to Taiwan.” Listing in this connection various aspects of the sharp increase in the combat readiness of the Taiwanese armed forces, he particularly emphasized the role of the purchase of the latest F-16 modification “as a bridge” to the purchase of 5th generation F-35 fighter planes.
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PREFATORY NOTE