Opinion | Cold War 2.0 is heating up—only bullets and bombs are missing
By Philip Yeung, university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
Elon Musk may be wacky in his ways, but he is right about one thing. He considers the Chinese innately unaggressive and that, strangely, they are only aggressive towards their own people. Unlike Americans or Russians, the Chinese are biologically aggression-averse. But America has a China complex. Its politicians have spitefully lumped China together with three other US-designated "pariah" states, i.e., Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Ironically, America itself, the self-appointed policeman of the world, is becoming a pariah state in the eyes of many in the Global South. It plays both the poacher and the gamekeeper, both the judge and the accused. It is hopelessly trapped in a geopolitical dilemma.
By all appearances, the Cold War is heating up again. America now sees China as "the long-term threat". By this, it must mean that US politicians believe that Russia is on its way out as a military power. Now dangerously polarized, America is united only in its lunatic animosity towards China. Its politicians are pushing decoupling with China as the default mode.
In the latest outburst of Sinophobia, US legislators are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at China, unprovoked. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are greedily feeding off the anti-China trough, in acts of calculated political expediency. Unfortunately, China seems powerless to reclaim its narrative of being a major power on a peaceful rise.
This time, in what is proudly called "The China Week", the US Congress has passed 25 anti-China laws with overwhelming bipartisan support. Practically nothing is left off the table—from earmarking US$1.63 billion over five years to fund anti-China propaganda around the world, to banning Chinese electric vehicles, though they account for only 2% of US imports, to targeting Chinese drones and drugs, batteries, and biotechnology. Even Confucius Institutes do not escape the US lawmakers' wrath. Any American university that hosts these mostly shuttered institutes faces the withholding of funding.
It has never occurred to ethnocentric US politicians that, love it or loathe it, the Chinese system works well for China. Patriotism is bred into the bones of its people. American political players may find the communist model ideologically distasteful, but they are blind to the magnificent feat that China has reinvented itself over the last four decades. Its glorious achievements keep them from a different league of nations America considers odious. America itself doesn't exactly smell like roses. One look at the unhinged Trump is enough to turn people against the holier-than-thou brand of democracy. Its politicians have a tenuous relationship with the truth. Few of them have the guts to be truth-tellers. They lie to win and lie even more if they lose, Trump-style. A Trump-win is an unmitigated disaster. A Trump-loss may see America descend into its second civil war. The bad news is that Trump is not an aberration. Trumpism is now greater than Trump. He commands the loyalty of 40% of the American voters and is 100% of American madness. Imagine a pathological liar, entangled in lawsuits and criminally convicted on 34 counts, still enjoying this level of support. What does this say about American politics or people? These hypocrites turn a blind eye to the merciless genocidal killings in Gaza and Lebanon, while displaying manufactured anger against imaginary abuses in Xinjiang.
China's only sin is being a rising major power, a victim of its own success. Never a troublemaker, it is more comfortable in the peace-maker role. Granted, the US-China relationship normally spirals through its cycles—from near-romance to near-divorce. But this time, we smell gunpowder in our nostrils. War with China is now considered by pundits as not just possible, but probable. The moment the Ukraine conflict is concluded, American hostility will be directed toward the Pacific. War-mongering is an inevitable part of American world domination. Elon Musk's next mega-project should be to genetically reengineer the Americans to turn them into more like the peace-loving Chinese. That is indeed rocket science.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Philip Yeung:
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