Opinion | Red Scare, Yellow Peril, White Supremacy and Boris Blues
By Philip Yeung, a university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
What a colorful world we live in! And what a bloody mess too. In the US, gun violence has engulfed its people. In the first six months of 2022, there has been a tsunami of over 300 mass shootings. This once-friendly immigrant haven is now a country hostile to non-white settlement. The Trump-dominated Republican Party is a cabal of win-at-all-costs thugs spewing a stream of disinformation, without domestic accountability, as the January 6 Congress hearings vividly demonstrate. Across the pond, Britain is led by that notorious playboy of politics, dedicated solely to his own survival, not to the larger interests of his country, where millions have to choose between shivering and starving, as skyrocketing fuel and food cost makes life barely livable.
And yet, both America and Britain have the gall to point an accusing finger at China, corralling vassal states like Korea, Japan, Australia and Canada into an anti-China coalition. This is done under the guise of protecting a rule-based global order, in which China has been a steadfast upholder. These gullible tribal leaders have been cajoled into a dangerous game of encirclement, with the US playing up the red scare, painting China as the evil communist empire. The former prime minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama, a cool-headed leader who knows better, has warned against this insane strategy that upends the global order.
At a time when the earth is dangerously overheating, a food and fuel crisis is looming across continents. Instead of joining hands with the world's second largest economy to tackle humanity's common problems, the white tribal leaders whip their flunkies into one act of unprovoked hostility after another.
The reasons are not hard to fathom. As domestic problems mount and multiply, inept white leaders like Johnson are cleverly using China as a whipping boy, a deflection or distraction from his country's internal turmoil. Increasingly, he retreats into the long-lost glories of the colonial age. As a faux-Churchillian he dreams of winning a halo as a war hero. Is that why he has dispatched the new multi-billion-dollar aircraft HMS Queen Elizabeth to the choppy waters of the South China Sea? But he forgets that the British navy no longer rules the waves. Wars are often waged to boost the political fortunes of failing third-rate leaders.
It has been pointed out that every time Johnson is stung by a domestic scandal, he either picks up the phone and calls Zelensky, the president of Ukraine or visits him in his war-torn country. Cynical British journalists have described these Ukrainian outings as the world's most expensive therapy sessions.
In Hong Kong Boris sees another therapeutic opportunity. When the British public show signs of Ukraine-fatigue, Johnson turns to this previously British-occupied territory, lecturing China, vowing to make it pay for allegedly breaking the promise to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy. The truth is, Boris has nothing up his sleeve to tame the Asian tiger as he pokes his nose into its internal affairs. These are empty words intended chiefly for domestic consumption and distraction.
Dogged by lies, deceits, law-breaking conduct, unethical donor solicitations, unseemly resignations of senior advisors and a flood of sexual scandals among Conservative MP's, Boris is in no position to preach from the pulpit. Britain now resembles a banana republic, except it still has a queen. He should first cater to the hordes of the hungry and the homeless in a declining Britain. If he is not careful, he might be staring at a much smaller country, with Scotland and Northern Ireland itching for a marital breakup.
White is losing its luster as a premium political color, and whiteness in America, in particular, is descending into violent and ignoble chaos.
Johnson once traded his disheveled toddler hairstyle as the mop of a wild genius. These days, every day is a bad hair day for the wobbly country he supposedly leads. If I were Johnson, I would be too embarrassed to put Britain and China in the same sentence. The former is a shambles, adrift in a sea of shifting optics, the latter, far from being the Yellow Peril, is a model for good governance and human progress.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Philip Yeung:
Opinion | The golden rules of good government for Hong Kong's new administration
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