Jan 15, 2021, 16:08
Editor's note: CGTN's First Voice provides instant commentary on breaking news. The daily column clarifies emerging issues and better defines the news agenda, offering a Chinese perspective on the latest global events.
The United States government thrives with an enemy to unite its people and distract them from domestic issues such as glaring racial and economic disparity, unsafe streets, an unaffordable and failing health care system and a falling standard of living.
That enemy for decades was Russia, shifted to Islam for a couple of decades, and is now becoming China.
Is China really a threat to the people of the United States and their way of life?
For decades China was a partner and a competitor — until the Trump administration brewed a mixture of racism, lies and misdirection into a toxic potion of fear and hatred.
Trump first blamed China for stealing American jobs, even though offshoring is a result of U.S. policy decisions. Factions of the Trump administration have accused China of deliberately causing the spread of a deadly pandemic, even as they ignored warnings from Beijing and the WHO and made far more serious public health mistakes than any other country.
Now Trump's administration, in its final days, has released a report that it hopes will seal the perception of China as "the most consequential challenge to the interests of the United States."
This is a final hammer blow in efforts to decouple the economies of the two nations, and cast China as the sinister villain in a Cold War action movie.
The document "United States Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific" provides "overarching strategic guidance" to "prevent Chinese acquisition of military and strategic capabilities" and "counter Chinese predatory economic practices that freeze out foreign competition, undermine U.S. economic competitiveness, and abet the Chinese Communist Party's aspiration to dominate the 21st century economy."
The problem with this document is it does not jive with reality. Alternative facts are not surprising from the Trump administration, but China's neighbors and the rest of the world knows better.
Throughout history, China has defended its borders but avoided foreign military adventures. It seeks stability, harmony and trade. Chinese want to work hard and have a prosperous, stable life. China does not have a record of foreign military adventures, whether you go back decades or centuries.
This is reflected in the China of today. People are growing wealthier by the decade. This year, China's long battle against poverty succeeded, completely eliminating absolute poverty throughout the country. Chinese people are far more satisfied with their government than Americans.
Have Chinese made trade-offs that go against U.S. values to achieve these goals? Of course. Wild rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation are regulated. Firearms are tightly controlled. Administration is focused on hitting long term performance goals that help the public rather than wild swings in policy to ensure another term in power.
Do these trade-offs mean Chinese people are a "threat," they are not "free" or their government is somehow "illegitimate"?
To the United States, yes.
The Chinese government talks about a common destiny of mankind, and the need for people from all nations to work together to solve these common problems.
The U.S. has twisted this, with Trump National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien saying on Tuesday, "Beijing is increasingly pressuring Indo-Pacific nations to subordinate their freedom and sovereignty to a 'common destiny' envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party."
People around the world know and can compare the U.S. and Chinese record on issues like addressing climate change, cooperating internationally on battling COVID-19, and cooperating with developing nations.
China's rise is based on the hard work and diligence of its people. It is beyond the U.S. imagination that another country could economically or technologically best them, so they blame it on cheating.
China is finishing a long transformation from a state of constant war among feudalistic warlords a century ago to a modern state where everyone shares a moderate level of prosperity. The U.S. imagines it can use high tech weapons, technology embargoes, and trade barriers to prevent China's rise.
This is a fantasy. Within decades, China's economy will dwarf America's, and China's technological know-how will surpass the United States.
Mankind faces many pressing challenges. The most productive approach would be for the U.S. to seek a positive relationship with China that seeks common ground and mutual benefit. Demonizing the Chinese government and dehumanizing Chinese people may help win an electoral advantage in the short term, but will only hurt Americans in the long run.
The U.S. faces real problems, including political violence, deadly online disinformation, a health crisis, and racial and economic disparities.
The country could benefit learning from China. But before it can hope to do that, it must drop its Orwellian insistence on having a constant enemy and try to see the Chinese as real people conducting their own bold and admirable experiment on how best to organize their society to live in harmony and prosperity. The Chinese people have their own proud history and values, and have chosen a different road than Americans, but the two sides need not be enemies.
The US thought that by labelling China an enemy, it can recruit other countries to act the same way towards her. But they have already established their own relationships with her and have seen for themselves how her progress and prosperity have peacefully benefited them as well, furthermore without any negative impact on their own beliefs, domestic affairs and relationship with others.
Maybe it is because the incoming US Democrats administration is still adamant in not wanting to acknowledge that fact which may explain why Biden is appointing Kurt Campbell to be his Asia point-man. He was the architect of the US pivot policy under Obama that had targeted China immediately after Bush had wiped out Iraq. The shift in focus from the Middle East to the Far East was very swift, one recalls, as if the US had a timetable to meet, an agenda to fulfill, an axe to grind.
Now, it seems the same US pivot is being expanded from the Far East to include the Indo-Pacific, basically the world's entire eastern hemisphere, with its nucleus geographically at Diego Garcia, an island right smack in the center of the Indian Ocean where the US has a joint naval base with the UK which had annexed the island and expelled its Mauritian denizens. Twinned for bomber range with Diego Garcia to anywhere in Asia is the US airbase in Guam as if such a military strategy of extended muscling will stop the very asymmetric response which will inevitably engulf the entire region to no one's ultimate gain.
It is going to be a tragedy of epic proportions that the US has chosen to go down the road of self-invented acrimony towards China because what has emanated from the US governments, whether Republican or Democrat, has only been political posturing to serve their personal aggrandizement disguised as championing national security and international order.
If anything, their security issues are domestic and self-inflicted and they have disrupted world peace and order as well, causing untold deaths and destruction onto other nations whose peoples were just trying to survive and get some just peace; at the same time, the US has been breaking the very rules of international conduct that it portrayed itself as championing.
After all, if what the US has been doing is not political posturing against China, they would have insisted all 320 million Americans and their organizations have nothing to do at all with all 1.4 Billion Chinese citizens and their organizations.
Yet they have not made that demand so what they have been spewing are just politically-motivated rhetoric which so far, at least under Trump, has however disrupted world trade, created investment uncertainty, upended technology cooperation, increased costs of doing business and research, and wasted time and resources - all without a single good thing coming out of it for the US.
Moreover, the most damaging result has been to create mistrust by Americans against China even when the same Americans do everyday business with her citizens regardless of ideological considerations and without mutual animosity.
As for the US' Atlantic allies, they have found out the US has been slyly practising double-standards to win China market share at their expense through Trump's technology entity-list sanctions.
Logically, if Biden wants to pally up again with the US' old allies, he should therefore cancel all the mercantilist conditions of that trade deal and the technology sanctions imposed on China, and start afresh with her.
But that would mean he will have to reckon with bipartisan objection in his US Senate whose members have been spoonfed propaganda drivel by Trump and his ilk against an enemy of their own febrile imagination embellished by a troop of analysts more right out of Breitbart, Fox News and the Republican (GOP's) WSJ than out of any immeasurably more rational and factual piece from a Kishore Mahbubani or a Chris Kanthan. Which may also explain why today Bannon, Barr, Navarro, Pompeo, Rubio, Cruz, Schumer, Haley, Pottinger, Ross, O'Brien and so many others are fast vanishing dumptruck footnotes in the short history of US hubris.
Will Biden have the courage to cut the Gordian knot outcome of such Trumpian invidiousness that has bedevilled US-China relations? A modicum of common sense suffices to tell him that today the US has no international credentials to try and sell its brand of human rights or democratic freedom anymore. If anything, the storming of his US Capitol is fundamentally rooted in US tribal angst that erupted to the streets from the innermost subterranean depths of the US' heterogenous society.
For over 74 million Americans to vote for and many to march to Trump's trumpet despite his lies, innuendos and incitement to insurrect must mean that angst has been festering for a long time. It remains a causation of existential division.
The prolonged and widening US income disparity has led to a domestic class war.
The fundamental social pillars of healthcare and education have become ruinously expensive and thus unaffordable to most even if both have been portrayed as worldclass.
The changing demographics has reduced the anglo-saxon white segment of US society in disproportion to the growth in numbers of non-whites who are thereby perceived as threatening the very nature of the neighborhoods and thus the notion of individual identity that is fundamental to democracy which is the antithesis of community above self first that is required to socialize the fight against the pandemic.
Violence has erupted, and exhibiting individual freedom under neo-nationalistic fervor has become some carte blanche license to exhibit violence against detractors which may also explain why on the day the US Capitol was stormed, the share price of Smith & Wesson went up 16%.
Yet the same personal independence believed as fundamental to national success has been assaulted by the pandemic crisis which mandates state intervention that in turn requires community cooperation.
Caught between the rock of individual freedom and the hard place of self-erasure, the average joe has rebelled against the forked tongue polemics of their leadership, the same US leadership which had taken to villifying the success of China's state interventions.
Under such circumstances, the US may literally be desribed as an oxymoron. Except there's already even a shortage of oxygen for their swarmed ICU ventilators. One can only hope that the Pfizer vaccine which has apparently killed 23 Norwegians in the 80-year cohort will nevertheless work to save the millions who have already been so inoculated but then again, the virus might already have mutated now that it appears the new covid-positive symptom could be body aches without any symptomatic fever or respiratory distress.
Meanwhile, everyone knows there's no elixir of life. Likewise, no free lunch. It would insult the intelligence of every decent, hardworking person on the planet that a person can just print money to create wealth without working hard and making sacrifices.
Yet the US has been doing that on the basis of a global distortion of the world's financial system by making its dollar as reserve currency on threat of sanctions and punitive charges against others.
Biden has just proposed another round of free cash to every American which would magnify the size of the US debt into the stratospheric trillionsphere. The US won't be able to even pay off its interest charges on which interest will be charged as well, for all that its federal reserve bank is doing to push down the US interest rate, furthermore on the assumption of keeping inflation at bay - while inflating assetization.
If just printing money can create wealth without productivity and savings, the roulette table must have been loaded sideways. Another type of roulette has six chambers. No one should bet that one is not loaded.
Let's therefore now Σ (sigma). If Kurt Campbell flies into Asia after Biden's inauguration on January 20th, will he therefore be taking exception if people ask him what are his US credentials for trying to sell from his suitcase another US pivot product, given all the abovementioned US inanities and infamies?
Will they be about democracy, freedom of speech, individual rights, non-violence, respect for other national and currency sovereignties?
Will he have a ready answer on Iraq's WMD, the US' Guantanamo concentration camp, even the real reason why the US is castigating SouthEast Asian countries on trumped-up charges of currency manipulation?
Will he express contrition for the Bhopal disaster, let alone the Jakarta Method?
Will he signify sympathy for China citizens, 250,000 of whose grandparents were executed and poisoned by Imperial Japan in retaliation for trying to save US airmen of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor?
ren/
Community login
Add a comment