Spite for China is turning toward panic. Australian university campuses feel the pressure of CCP censorship, including death threats against students and pressure on family members back in China. If the CCP wanted to demonstrate its purported benevolence to the world, every week betrays a bigger fail.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth marches through Russian-concerned waters on its rout to Hong Kong. Moscow knows that the Brits have no interest in quibbling over Crimea. The bombs dropped in the aircraft carrier’s path were meant to deter the British from arriving at the Southeast Asian shipping lanes that Russia so conveniently controls through the world’s biggest puppet-in-denial: China.
Taiwan magnificently navigates its own mini COVID crisis, which doesn’t help build kind thoughts among Taiwanese toward the CCP. The American “not Embassy” director is on his way out and was honored by Taiwan’s president with a big, pretty, purple ribbon. Nothing makes the CCP angry like a purple ribbon.
Hong Kong has presented the world with the ethical question of confronting bullies. Say there is a bully at school who quietly eats whosever lunch he wants, stealing anyone’s homework he wants, until one day someone says something and the bully gets violent. In theory, most people agree that the bully started it. But in practice, when it comes time to stand up to the bullies of life, even the biggest Braveheart fans place the blame for the fight on the one who had the conscience to stand up to the bully. So, are Hong Kong protestors to blame for not going along to get along while China quietly violates its treaty with the UK, denies human rights, and refuses to regulate police conduct?
China says restoring social order in Hong Kong is the “most pressing issue”, but obviously not as important as destroying anything that stands in the way of Chinese Communist hegemony.
In a double-standard, Taiwan is having to adjust its laws to deal with Chinese interference. The CCP is paying news outlets to spread its propaganda in Taiwan. It got caught having a fake news site and is now resorting to outsourcing. The Taiwanese don’t think that publishing what China tells someone to publish is “free speech”.
Xi Jinping’s decision to keep Carrie Lam as CEO of Hong Kong only makes sense, notwithstanding it proves interference by pure definition. The Chinese Communist Party would never dispose of such an efficient creator of chaos. Chaos is always the first phase of the CCP taking over a resistant people; the second phase is to send in the military and—well, do what China’s military does so well. While the Western press explains keeping Carrie as a way to avoid opening a can of worms, the Chinese have much more sinister intentions as history proves.
More crud hit the fan this week, over and over, again and again, evermore. A college student not connected with a nearby protest tried to escape a parking lot just after police fired tear gas, then fell to his death. As expected, police denied any wrongdoing.
A woman rumored to be only 16 years old passed a police station Tsuen Wan where she claims to have been ordered inside, then gang raped by four masked men. Meeting some of the criteria of a rape victim, she found she was pregnant a few weeks after the incident, the young woman was reportedly suffering from depression, and had an abortion last Thursday. The investigation is ongoing, but, in the current atmosphere, police have done little elsewhere to stop such stories from being believable.
Over the weekend, police arrested six lawmakers who effectively filibustered Carrie Lam’s annual report back in May. Six reporters wore Chinese letters on hardhats at a police press conference, spelling a Cantonese request to investigate police. This was in response to two reporters having been arrested. The police department sent formal objection letters to the six reporters’ press agencies. Lawmakers and journalists should be immune to such arrests in order to prevent political interference. But, Hong Kong police no longer wear ID tags on their uniforms, and China says the unrest in Hong Kong started because police don’t have enough power.
Western foreigners visiting Hong Kong have started to join protests. It’s arguably bad form, though it indicates that the world feels a sense of solidarity in standing up to China’s bullying anywhere and everywhere it happens. China sees it as proof of interference while the West sees it as successful marketing from the Hong Kong protesters. The problem with China’s “interference proof” argument is that foreign attendees after the fact do not prove any causality before the fact. But, when being a mouthpiece rather than a think tank has been the habit for so long, Chinese wouldn’t understand the difference.
“Careless” Carrie Lam’s effectiveness in Hong Kong is in the red. After banning masks at public gatherings, more people are wearing masks at gatherings than in the past. She bans an assembly, but people assemble anyway. Protests are so bad, police hit some people guarding a mosque with a water cannon and had to apologize to the imam. Lam was heckled by legislators during her annual policy speech and had to leave the chamber twice, finally delivering her speech on television. A government so defied and can’t govern. But, the need for public trust isn’t understood by Confucianism nor Communism nor especially Confucian Communism.
Beyond loss of control, the West gets the message loud and clear: China won’t back down on its forced expansionism. US Congress continues to pass laws favoring freedom in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. The TAIPEI act is largely symbolic, but still meaningful inasmuch as it gauges China’s response. Evaluating Hong Kong’s level of autonomy to be treated as a separate territory from China makes sense. Still, China considers the US formulating its own international policy a form of “interference”. Think about that…
US international policy must be what China wants it to be, otherwise China labels this as “interference”. This can only mean that China considers the US already under Chinese rule. It’s no longer about whether or to what extent China can boss Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now, the question is whether China should be allowed to dictate another country’s foreign policy.
Another factor is corporate. Gaming companies oust gamers who make “political” statements to defend freedom and human rights, but then Dior gets political by apologizing to China for not putting Taiwan in its map of China. If companies were consistent about being so-called “non-political”, then Dior would have refused to agree or disagree with China. But, this isn’t about being non-political; it’s about agreeing with whatever China demands.
Unlike much of the Western press, Pacific Daily Times does not side with governments, political parties, or socio-economic ideologies. The Times only sides with history, that by learning from history much of the future is foreseeable. Foreseeability, based on history, is the only bias at Pacific Daily Times.
Foreseeability is not preference, hopes, or will—good or ill—toward what will happen, only that the future can, to the extent history repeats, be reasonably anticipated. Too many news outlets seem incapable of understanding that predicting outcomes, within reason, is entirely different from hoping for outcomes. Predicting and hoping are nothing alike. Pacific Daily Times is apathetic and indifferent—uncaring and cold-hearted—for how the future unfolds, except that current events only surprise neglectful history students.
Right now, foreseeability in Asia—not what is hoped-for in Asia—points to the waring parties of China. The KMT-Nationalist party and the Chinese Communist Party seem to have a symbiotic relationship. Their fates seem tied like the villain and hero of some comic series, if the hero kills the villain then both die and vice versa. The KMT-Nationalist party imploded on its home field in Taiwan. It was so distracted with “reunification” with China that it neglected the priorities that kept its power. As a result, Taiwan is run by the de facto pro-independence Democratic People’s Party. The KMT failed to help its CCP friends across the Taiwan Strait because it was overly obsessed with that friendship.
Now, it seems that the CCP is headed in the same direction. Without fear or favor, only calculating predictability based on the past, it seems we could be looking at the beginning of the end of the CCP. Every party that rises too high tumbles, history has executed this with zero exception and will never accept rivals. History demands that history always be the only victor by making all others history.
Since the founding of the current Chinese government in 1912, which the “Chinese year” commemorates, China has confronted its own shame, which it still confronts to this day. The founder, Sun Yat-sen, was a Christian whose Christianity compelled him to the three pillars of Chinese society: nationalism, democracy, and justice for the people. Though the largest nation, China has never been the most powerful nation. Centuries of “leader power distance” touted oppression as “peace-making” virtue. Some say it worked for China, others say it failed for China. Actually, it was the only thing that happened in China, so there is no basis of contrast to prove definably whether that Chinese power distance ethic succeeded or failed except that it brought China to 1911 where Sun defeated it. While the power distance left in the form of a government “empire”, it has neither left the ideology nor the mode of operation in Chinese culture, as repeating history proves once again this month.
Xi Jinping’s thinking remains uncertain. What motivates him? We really don’t know beyond the evidence that his thinking reflects Mao and traditional pre- Sun Yat-sen power distance. He doesn’t want shame for his country and he believes that reclaiming all land from every “old turf war” dispute will make the world think China as worthy of being respected. The rest of the world will decide its own opinion, but Chinese history has its own opinion about Xi.
Xi, as many in China, have loudly declared that they neither import nor export their politics. But, Communism is itself form Europe. Chinese people study English and gladly import Western technology and money while exporting goods to the West. But, most importantly of all, Sun Tzu’s Art of War Ch. 8, ss. 12’s “five dangerous faults” include: 3. a hasty temper provoked by insult and 4. a delicacy of honor sensitive to shame. Whenever Taiwan hints at “independence” or the US sails through UN-international waters which member China disputes, an explosion of rage and demands plume from Chinese press offices. Then we have the insatiable need for respect, the motive behind China’s desire for reunification with many lands, only one of those being Taiwan. Sun Tzu warned against these ideologies nearly a thousand years ago.
China has often misunderstood Christianity. Just as with Confucianism, there is the essential belief and then the government exploitation of it. Most “missionaries” are advancing a government-corporate hybrid, usually known as a “denomination” with an administrative and monetary structure. Jesus did not teach this. Chinese often view Christianity as a religion between God and Man while Confucianism teaches relationship between one Man and another. But, Jesus taught that God and Man is the archetypal relationship guiding the equally important practical application of the relationship between one Man and another. The emphasis on the relationship between God and Man to the exclusion of peer relationships came from European imperial governments misinterpreting the Bible and exploiting people’s ignorance of Jesus’s true teaching.
The great mystery of how the West gained such power and success without the Confucian-preferred version of an “ordered society” remains in the real Jesus. The founders of America, the Pilgrims, studied the Bible to love God as individuals—free from European government misinterpretation and control of the Bible—so they would love each other. All of this Bible study was done as individuals who loved God and had zero government control.
The mess in the West today, interfering with China along with the rest of the world, is an attempt from old oligarchs trying to reassert their power over a free, Bible-reading people. Xi Jinping is fighting against that same old oligarchy as the American people are. Corptocratic chronyism of the West is a problem everywhere. Xi Jinping is trying his best, with good will, to overcome it. But, he owes more to Sun Tzu’s Chinese wisdom and he is trying to overcome ancient evils of the West without first seeking to understand what virtues of the real Bible made the West so strong in the first place. As for whether and how it works out, history will have the last word as it always does.
