Chinese Leadership

Kishore Mahbubani – who published Has China Won? in 2020 – spoke on YouTube in a recent interview that he agreed with Niall Ferguson that the United States could well be the new Soviet Union. Interestingly, Mahbubani referred to Ferguson as a conservative American thinker, when of course the latter was knighted by King Charles in June 2024 for services in literature and had two degrees from Oxford, that he currently worked for Stanford and Harvard notwithstanding.  Mahbubani referred to the crumbling infrastructure in the US with collapsed bridges in Pittsburg and Baltimore and wondered why the country was racing to build more aircraft carriers and fighting and financing unnecessary wars all over the world. He also noted the declining life expectancies and rising infant mortality rates which were features of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the US was making waves in others areas, including passage rights in the Arctic and responsibilities for waste disposal in space, and indeed anything with participation or involvement of China.

On the other hand, we are witnessing incredible and phenomenal improvements in every front in China, including the living standards and life expectancies, not to mention the economic, technological, cultural, educational, medical, infrastructural and communication advancements throughout the country. China has never been very effective in telling the world their good stories, or maybe the West and the West-led media were never interested, being too tired and pre-occupied with state-fed non-news and institutionally generated fake news designed to paint a backward China with an oppressive political regime and dictatorial leadership.  Any sympathetic voice from non-Chinese would be branded as having been brain-washed, and as I had quoted before from Malcolm Clarke, if one is not anti-China or if one is speaking the truth, one would be branded pro-China and hence an untrusty or untrustworthy source.

But we must keep our faith. We must have faith in China in general and in the Chinese leadership in particular. We owe it to ourselves to keep such faith. No other country in the world would help us if we are not seen to have the strong support and backup of a now strong China. It is common sense that a weak nation has problems making friends, which is the fundamental reason why a few nations in the West are trying their damnedest to gang up against China and speak ill of China and the Chinese. We cannot rely on these once-upon-a time friends anymore. After all, the US is infamous for having betrayed all its allies, almost without exception.

There was a time when I was very small, when China was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist state, and when many people left China for Hong Kong, which was the beginning of the Hong Kong that most of us knew. It was the early Fifties and people then celebrated Double Ten as their National Day, which was shortly changed to the Queen’s Birthday, and so on. Shortly afterwards, we witnessed many of our compatriots left China by swimming to Hong Kong, who in turn, had created so many stories under the Lion Rock. Many of them called themselves political refugees when they should more correctly be known as economic migrants, compared with those boat people who fled to Hong Kong after the fall of Saigon. But that is another story.

Malcolm Clarke has said that China is a socialist rather than a communist state; and successive Chinese leadership have underlined that it is a communist or socialist state with Chinese characteristics. I would say that the qualification of “Chinese characteristics” can never be over-emphasized. To start with, it implies that one needs to take cognizance of the long years – over 5,000 years – of recorded histories, culture, civilization and government which collectively have contributed to the present-day China. It is also a very much Chinese concept or philosophy – albeit somewhat Buddhist – that one can never shake off the past and past karma, good or bad. Looking across the West, whereas our European brethren could claim much longer though sporadic and disjointed histories through the (Holy) Roman Empire, our friends in North America and in the US in particular could relay to less than three hundred years of history, while simultaneously trying very hard to obliterate their gory past by glorifying how they systematically exterminated the history, culture and civilization of the people whose land and properties they had taken over.

In the final analyses, it is for the individual to take a view and to uphold one’s cultural and historical heritage.  Ours is so rich and so interwoven, and it does take time and effort to learn, study and appreciate its depth and intensity. Unfortunately, Hong Kong lost plenty of time after reunification and has only just taken up its role to educate future generations. The lost souls who had chosen to leave Hong Kong and by default China for whatever reasons might not have given themselves the chance to address the question of who they think they are – or what some would loosely call identity crises – for if they had done so, they might realize that they are undeniably and irrefutably Chinese, by blood and heritage. Sadly, they had not been afforded the time and space to realize what they are, through an education under the colonial era ending with Patten at the realm, for if they were, they could have realized and felt the pride that they were Chinese. Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) was a die-hard Soviet dissident. He loved his country all the time and returned to die in his motherland.

I must have been too sober, having deliberately stayed off alcohol for two days to prepare for my medical tomorrow. Besides, I have been exercising in the pool, having been banned by my physiotherapist to workout on the treadmill.  

I hope to talk to you again before I have my “optional” operation.