Opinion | Capitalism has changed China for the better, but has made America and Britain worse
By Philip Yeung, university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
Marco Rubio, America's China-hawk senator fumed that capitalism has failed to "democratize" China, and that China's integration into the global economy has yielded no political benefits. He is wrong. Capitalism now comes with Chinese characteristics.
China has changed. It has progressed. It is America that has regressed. You only have to see Trump's tight grip on the far-right to know that it is no longer the country where the rule of law runs supreme.
Fear of Trump's violent mobs has forced a New York prosecutor to postpone his expected arrest of the unhinged ex-president. America is now run by bullies, including bullies in Congress where Republicans are out to castrate the state judiciary by forcing its prosecutor to testify before Congress on Trump's case. This is naked tampering of the judicial process.
Across the pond, Britain's leader Sunak has parroted American propaganda, calling China a "systemic threat". This is the stupid and empty language of a politician who is totally at sea in geopolitics. Remember the Golden Age of UK-China relations a few years ago during the sweeter times of Cameron and May? There was no systemic threat then, and there is no systemic threat now. The threat is in Sunak's mouth and America's head. What has China done since then to earn this label? How has it threatened Britain or the world, "systemically" or otherwise? Where is the smoking gun, unless you consider the angry words of its diplomats as a threat when the facts are twisted by the West?
When mentally challenged politicians want to fudge their argument, they resort to vague and phony words.
Go and see China for yourself. There, progress is the national priority and infrastructure projects run riot across the country. Its only distractions have been the violent anarchy in Hong Kong. The fight is never about freedom. It is about doing America's bidding. For 23 years, the activists had more freedom than they could handle. Ten months went by without a single police-related fatality. But a one-day insurrection at the US Capitol took nine lives, with thousands arrested, hundreds charged and hundreds more convicted. American and Hong Kong's American-inspired rioters both behaved like gangsters.
In the Trump era, anytime you disagree with an outcome, electoral or judicial, just call out your mobs and take over the streets. If this is not mob rule, what is?
As for Taiwan, the recent visit of its former leader Ma Ying Jeou to the mainland is a nostalgic reminder of better times before the US threw a monkey wrench into the cross-strait relationship. UK MP's are mimicking Nancy Pelosi by descending on the island and agitating for more weapons to be brought into Taiwan. They want war to weaken and wobble China.
Haven't America and Britain done enough damage to Iraq, an illegal war that snuffed out more than a million civilian lives twenty years ago? What about their war crimes and horrendous crimes against humanity with the whole world watching? Where is the International Court of Justice then? This is the smoking gun for America being a systemic threat, aided and abetted by a brain-damaged UK leadership that followed the Americans into an unjust and illegal war.
How many more wars do politicians need to glorify their political careers or sustain America's overlord status? What happens to your independent thinking? Why are you a US mouthpiece, a geopolitical pawn, and your soldiers just cannon fodder? Where is the scintilla of good that has come out of this terrible war? And now, you are clamoring for an encore? With idiotic and "democratic" leaders like these, who needs monsters?
China is not our enemy. America is, and by being a US sycophant, so is Britain. In pleasing America, Blair has irredeemably turned himself into a pariah for all eternity. Hasn't the Blair blunder taught UK leaders any lesson?
Western politicians are too busy demonizing China to see that the Chinese are overwhelmingly in love with their country. Any foreign business that bad-mouths China faces instant karma with customer boycotts, and being drummed out by angry Chinese patriots. If you demonize China, you disparage its people.
But these days, western reporters will not allow Chinese citizens to call themselves patriots, as Americans often do. They ridicule and disbelieve them. Their wishful thinking is for Chinese people to be China-haters too.
But for ordinary Chinese folks, American hostility has livelihood consequences. American encirclement is an existential threat that shrinks their trade and technology. The wanton use of sanctions and technology embargo is the peacetime equivalent of indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in war.
Sunak's mouth now becomes the "weapon of mass destruction" and "systemic threat" that the Chinese people detest.
Where is Britain's voice of reason? Where are the checks and balances against visually impaired and accident-prone leaders on a needless collision course with China? How dare you talk about alleged abuses in Xinjiang, when mistreatments are being visited on the vulnerable right here on your own doorstep, with your Home Secretary gung-ho about deporting asylum-seekers to Africa?
So, before you point your fingers at China again, check whether your hands are clean or still splattered with the blood you spilled in the last war.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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