Chinks - How China Rules the World

Chinks in our Armour?

Who Flung Dung?

I very much regret if I get into trouble for racist comments, as I now know and have known many fine people of Chinese nationality or descent. This is not my intention, and if I run for President in the future; this post will, no doubt, come back to bite me on the bum. (Entirely unlikely!)

China much more deserves the quotation usually assigned to Russia and attributed to Churchill – a riddle wrapped up in an enigma ( 'A riddle wrapped up in an enigma'? A form of Winston Churchill's quotation, made in a radio broadcast in October 1939: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.)

Partly this is to do with the particular fascination in the West for all things oriental.

Partly, this is to do with the sheer number of Chinese on the planet. (The Han are an East Asian ethnic group and nation native to China. They constitute the world's largest ethnic group, making up about 18% of the global population. The estimated 1.3 billion Han Chinese people are mostly concentrated in mainland China, where they make up about 92 percent of the total population. In Taiwan they make about 95% of the population. People of Han Chinese descent also make up around 75% of the total population of Singapore.)

Many Chinese believe that the Han people had a separate, distinct origin of creation from other Homo Sapiens. They believe a “Han-first belief” is central to the idea of being Chinese. (For example, a historian of the 3rd century Han Dynasty in the territory of present-day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling "the monkeys from which they are descended". - enough said?

Personally, my knowledge and understanding of China and the Chinese began in the late 1950’s when I read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck ( Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973; also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu; Chinese: 赛珍珠) was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces".[1] She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The key point here is that before reading the Good Earth, I had almost no understanding of Chinese culture and civilisation. Don’t forget that in the late 50’s America viewed China not as the ally against the Japanese in WWII, but rather as a horde of fanatics descending on Pork Chop Hill ( The Battle of Pork Chop Hill comprises a pair of related Korean War infantry battles during April and July 1953. These were fought while the United Nations Command (UN) and the Chinese and North Koreans negotiated the Korean Armistice Agreement. In the U.S., they were controversial because of the many soldiers killed for terrain of no strategic or tactical value, although the Chinese lost many times the number of US soldiers killed and wounded. The first battle was described in the eponymous history Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring 1953, by S.L.A. Marshall, from which the film Pork Chop Hill was drawn. The UN won the first battle but the Chinese won the second battle.

The UN, primarily supported by the United States, won the first battle when the Chinese broke contact and withdrew after two days of fighting. The second battle involved many more troops on both sides and was bitterly contested for five days before UN forces conceded the hill to the Chinese forces by withdrawing behind the main battle line. ) Happy Days!

Certainly, at that time, most, if not all Americans – if not all Westerners – viewed the Chinese as primitive fanatics - and as ridiculously brain-washed morons with funny eyes that when ordered to order to charge a machine guns as their Japanese Bonzai-screaming counterparts had done in WWII; went cheerfully and obediently to their death. In other words – idiots!

Reading the Good Earth changed all that for me. Whilst there is no substitute for actually reading the book, you can find a good synopsis at: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/goodearth/summary/ .

In Buck’s skilful hands, China becomes a real place with real people. Although their lives are completely dissimilar to those in 1950’s America – where the post-war boom brought new found prosperity to the masses - some of Wang Lung’s concerns about family, wealth and power are universal. But, and this is the crucial point, the China The Good Earth describes is a poor, backward, agrarian society structured by centuries of custom and bound by an ancestor-worshipping cult which most Americans find oddly alien and entirely unattractive even today.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid ) subject of a 1944 film Thirty Second over Tokyo. It is interesting to note that while the story makes the Chinese into some sort of heroes for helping the brave American flyers to survive the presentation is still one of primarily agrarian and backward in science, technology, customs and mores.

Films like The Sand Pebbles a 1966 American war film directed by Robert Wise and The Yangtze Incident (1957) simply managed to reinforce the idea of Chinese backwardness, duplicity and lacking in Western values. ( In 1926, the USS San Pablo patrols the Yangtze River during the clashes between Chiang Kai-Shek's communists and Chinese warlords. Eight-year veteran machinist Jake Holman (Steve McQueen), new to the self-named "sand pebbles" crew, immediately draws deep suspicion due to his independent streak. Ordered to protect Americans, including schoolteacher Shirley Eckhart (Candice Bergen), Jake and the gunboat crew are unwittingly drawn into a bitter nationalistic feud that holds grim consequences.)

Moving into the sixties did little to change the picture. Chairman Mao’s plans did not really work out (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward) By the end of the sixties, when the US was heavily involved in Vietnam and the perceived threat of another Chinese intervention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War) caused tensions between the US and Chinese governments, little had practically changed in the public’s perception of China as just another Communist menace to be resisted by the U.S.

it is important to note that up to this time there was no sense of China ever becoming an economic rival or threat to the U.S. domination of the world economy; indeed had anyone suggested this they would have soon been consigned to the nearest psychiatric institution – forthwith.

In September 1976, after Chairman Mao Zedong's death, the People's Republic of China was left with no central authority figure, either symbolically or administratively. The Gang of Four was dismantled, but new Chairman Hua Guofeng continued to persist on Mao-era policies. After a bloodless power struggle, Deng Xiaoping came to the helm to reform the Chinese economy and government institutions in their entirety. Deng, however, was conservative with regard to wide-ranging political reform, and along with the combination of unforeseen problems that resulted from the economic reform policies, the country underwent another political crisis with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests )

Now, we are approaching modern times. Notice that in terms of the march of historical time China at the start of the nineties is still undergoing not only political upheaval, but also social change (http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/funda/sidebar/chinapop.html ). Still we have yet to change the Westerners view that China is a primarily agrarian based economy with little or no impact on the economic global stage – and we are almost to the year 2000. By now, hopefully you beginning t see where this is going.

Declaring some self interest, or, at lease some self-introspection: It was my privilege to teach many Chinese students and get to know them both scholastically and individually. Two things stood out. They were invariably polite and they loved to gamble! Racial stereotypes are almost always incorrect and often simply the result of misunderstanding or cultural differences. All the students I knew were from Hong Kong – some pre-1997 – and came from families who could be described as middle class. They were excellent students and excellent young people, but they would play cards for money until the cows came home.

The equally, and perhaps, poorly-judged character attributes of the English are just as non-scientifically and judgmentally known and ascribed by me. The English are a nation of “fiddlers”. Here “fiddlers” means one who relishes putting one over on the authorities or ones fellow man – usually for some monetary reward. And always by some nefarious means, The “fiddles” are definitely nothing to do with playing the violin whist Rome burns.

My difficulty can be encapsulated by a phrase from an article in the Sunday Times: “I have said, tine and time again, that (the next financial crisis ) will come not from America but from China, now the second-largest economy in the world”.

I really want someone to explain how this came to be? None of my analysis above seems to be a pre-cursor to the Chinese over-taking most of the Western world. How did it happen? Did we all sleep-walk into the last 25 years? Are we all victims of our own laziness? Did our governments simply out-source our economies because it was electorally popular – in so far and cheap manufactured goods are popular to the unwitting consumer, The Covid 19 virus, (which apparently started because Chinese methods to ensure food standards are still essentially third-world) reinforces my prejudice that the Chinese are still an agrarian people with poor, at best, hygiene standards, so, how are they now the second largest economy in the world? In response to the virus the Chinese built a hospital in about 5 days and essentially quarantined an entire province. If this virus continues to slow the economy, we will all suffer! President Trump may have the moxie on all his Democrat opponents, but what happens if Americans start to die - essentially because the U.S. (and indeed the rest of the world) are entirely dependent on China to produce just about everything. We have out-sourced the planet to the Chinese! How and why did this start?

We in the West now no longer make anything. Everything is either made in China or dependent on Chinese money and investments to function adequately. This includes our First World health care systems. We may need them more than ever, but now we find that much of the equipment needed and the supplies of even the most basic items like syringes and gausses are made in China. Trumpie makes great play of America First – but he and his types( First World financiers and mega-millionaires ) are complicit in the abrogation to the Chinese of those very consumer items that made America what it is today.

The Chinese are not to blame for our own greed and stupidity.

They have simply exploited the chinks in our armour which we presented them with.

And, they may have the last laugh.