Dr. Wordman

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US-China relation is deteriorating daily from trade dispute entering into technology and broad commerce domain even agitated diplomatic battle and military confrontation. US-China affairs not only appear as headlines but also make the stock market flying up and down. Anyone following current events knows that the US-China confrontation not only causes Wall Street uneasy but also threatens the world economy.

The U.S. has been a strong nation over a century, having the strongest military force in the world and an economy peaked at 40% of the world GDP onetime. The U.S. assumed the responsibility of maintaining world security. She often applies economic, military, and legal sanction and punishment to her opponents, quite successfully over the years owing to her economic and military power. For example, there were economic sanctions against North Korea, Iran and Russia and military sanctions against Middle East enemy states, China, Russia, etc. including restrictions of military sales to many countries. There were legal punishment to foreign corporations under the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, FCPA; the French company, Alston, was fined hundreds of million dollars and nearly went into bankruptcy.

For reducing trade deficit, the US President Trump initiated tariff war and started a trade war against China. Not like the neighboring countries of the U.S., China did not yield completely due to her own economic strength. The US economy has been reduced proportionally to 20% of the world economy whereas China has achieved no. 2 position of the world economy threatening the U.S. to become no. 1. The U.S. has extended the trade war to technology war applying punishment and sanction to Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei. ZTE was fined for its deal with Iran and Huawei was banned to do business in the U.S. citing security exposure. Huawei apparently was prepared and succeeded to maintain growth in other parts of the world. With these, China has begun a nation-wide technology innovation plan preparing to compete with the U.S. for a long haul.

Reacting to China’s rise, the U.S. has identified China as a competitor launching an all-front confrontation playing any card available. For example, on the recent Hong Kong (HK) unrest, the U.S. is suspected to be a promoter hidden in the background and the US Congress has just passed a new HK Human Rights and Democracy Act preparing reasons  or excuses to sanction HK. China exercised extreme patience in dealing with the HK riots preparing to fix the management ultimately. Not surprisingly, China has begun to apply counter sanction against the US sanctions, first declaring sanctions on National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), then denied review of US Navy’s request for docking at HK for supply. These are signs showing that China is prepared to offer counter sanction if the U.S. applies sanction to HK and an indication of China feeling necessary and capable of making counter sanctions.

At South China Sea, the U.S. has challenged China’s sovereignty even though she recognized China’s historical sovereignty through the Republic of China (ROC). The U.S. first encouraged the Philippines to challenge China in an arbitration court then raise the Freedom of Navigation issue in SCS. But China had put up strong objections and prepared counter measures. Diplomatically China quieted the Philippines’ arbitration case and surprisingly China built and extended the islands in her possession to have airfields and deep sea ports capable of offering defense and rescue operations in SCS. With China’s naval defense capability, it has made the U.S. hesitating to enter her navy into China’s legal territories.

The U.S. is used to apply sanctions and gain successful results; even the powerful Soviet Union was collapsed under U.S. led sanctions. Now the U.S. is targeting China in all front. “The Commission on the Present Danger: China' has been set up. This type of organization has only been established three times in the past; first one, in 1950 for stopping the spread of communism, the second, in 1976, targeting the Soviet Union and the third, in 2004, for countering terrorism, all essentially successful. This is of course because of the real economic and military power the U.S. possesses. Whether the commission targeted at China would succeed or not is unpredictable, very much depending on each’s economic and military power.

In the power play between the U.S. and China, although the U.S. is superior in military power, but as both sides possessing nuclear warheads, guided missiles and independent communication (including GPS) capabilities, the military power can do no more than detente or facing mutual destruction. The economic power is far more important and all other areas, diplomacy, technology and financial endeavors depend on real economic clout. Today, the economic powers of the U.S. and China are at par. That is why the U.S. can not just freely apply sanctions to China without receiving counter sanctions from China.

At present, no one can predict the outcome of the US-China confrontation. The U.S. has dominated the world stage for a century, her experience in strategic power play is respectable. Recently, the U.S. sanctioned five Chinese citizens and six Chinese corporations over transferring oil from Iran. China just won from a WTO case permitting her to apply sanction on 3.6 billion American goods. China also declared trade sanctions on several US corporations for selling military gear to Taiwan. The two countries each now has established ‘entity’ and ‘black’ lists on not-welcomed companies and people.

The above measures are simply sanctions happening which will lead to counter sanctions with outcomes unpredictable. We must use some logic to analyze this confrontation to fend off serious disasters:

First, we must recognize that the US-China confrontation has unnecessarily broadened from trade to multi-front, economy, military, technology, diplomacy and all hard and soft domains. On the U.S. side, she has plenty of experiences and many alliances in the world to tackle this confrontation. The two political parties in the U.S. seem to have already taken a united position against China with no debate. The US government is trying to unite its alliances to confront China. However, the US elites and citizens do not have an unified view on China, in fact, only a small faction taking a hardline position against China with the majority opposing confrontation and preferring to seek a solution. Some openly endorse peaceful competition and some even take a pro-China position wanting the U.S. to reflect on her own missteps in managing her economy.

On the China side, through her non-interference and win-win economic co-development policies, she has earned many friends, especially in the developing world. In the Chinese government, there does not seem to have an unified hardline position confronting the U.S. Although, this may be interpreted as a strategy of ‘maintaining a low-key position avoiding flaring the confrontational relationship, but the Chinese, like the American, elites and citizens are obviously divided in opinion, only a small population expressing hardline views towards the other. The majority seems to desire to take a pro-US peaceful relationship. So based on the above analyses, it is logical to expect the two great nations to take a peaceful competition path.

The development of international affairs is hardly rational and logical. In the future, the probability of sanctions and counter sanctions between the U.S and China is likely to increase. If the U.S. government maintains a firm anti-China position and the Chinese government holds an wavering position, then with the US experience in targeting her enemy, China may be very vulnerable despite of the people of desire peace. As we know sanctions and counter sanctions can only escalate the confrontation to war if situation mismanaged. Since the majority of the people on both sides do not want war, then the sanctions and counter sanctions must stop! It is wise for both countries to cultivate a united position accepting  peaceful competition with people’s support. All people should urge their governments to define such a policy, since any hostile alternative will only lead the two nations to mutual destruction. The history of two World War tells us that no government should push its people to war; win or lose, people will be hurt badly. If a nuclear war was triggered, the world would be destroyed! 
 
 
 

 
When Wuhan first discovered corona-virus, first speculation linking it to bats (SARS example), was understandable. That the government was cautious not to cause panic was also understandable. (Allegedly, the local government enforced early censorship to suppress information about the corona-virus, and the dangers it poses to public health.) The West media’s critic and condemnation on the Chinese government out of habit was also understandable. But it was absolutely wrong from facts and hindsight: The Chinese government did so correctly in containing the disease and buying time for the rest of the world. In contrast, the West media had influenced their governments in reacting too slowly to the pandemic. The government leaders and their officials ought to make the right and fast decisions to protect their citizens no matter what the media said. Here, we assume that the governments did not coerce or feed the media what the governments want the media to say. If they did, it would be not only wrong but also a sin!
 
Everyone is now affected by the COVID-19 corona-virus and many people have followed the news on a daily basis. However, not everyone has noticed that some media and their governments (certain politicians) have politicized the COVID-19. That is absolutely wrong! COVID-19 caused a pandemic disease against the human race. Every human must unite to work together to fight the spreading virus, not blaming each other. In human history, we have endured many pandemic diseases, such as plague, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, SARS, etc. When a child or family member contracted an infectious disease and brought it home, would the family blame the child or should they immediately seek the cure? I would think the family would immediately focus on finding a cure! So, it is obviously wrong for any politician to politicize the current pandemic virus, isn’t it?!
 
When the COVID-19 virus was first discovered in Wuhan city in China, the Chinese government was caught off guard. The local government may have delayed a swift action because of 'lack of precise information', 'concern for causing citizens to panic' or 'incapable of determining a correct action', however, the delay was only a few days. The central government made swift decision to close down the entire Wuhan City, a city of 14 million people as a center of commerce, transportation and manufacturing. We can be certain that the decision was hard to make, judging on the very different reactions expressed and opposite decisions made today by government leaders in many other countries regarding the COVID-19 attack. In the United States, there are governors who want to quarantine their cities and some reject such an idea.
 
What was horrible was that some U.S. media had kept harsh criticism on China when she was struggling in dealing with the COVID-19. The flag of Human Rights was immediately raised: “Closing down Wuhan city is violating human rights!”- When China was rushed to construct thousand-bed hospitals to anticipate the rapid increase of corona-virus patients. We also heard: “this is forced labor, putting workers' lives in danger.” “The new hospitals look like concentration camp.” “Are they really volunteer medical professionals coming to aid Wuhan?” China had no time nor energy to worry about these smears based on human rights accusations, she quickly built a few large hospitals within ten days. China organized thousands of medical doctors and nurses to support Wuhan, not only working there but working 7/24 having only one break a day to get out of their protective garment suit equipped with diapers. How could the external media without eye-witnessing reporters there write such horrible smearing remarks?!
 
Wall Street Journal published an article, headlined, “China is Asian sick man”. Secretary of State, Pompeo, defended it as freedom of speech. Do we Americans cherish such discriminatory speech?! Calling COVID-19 Chinese virus is so obvious an intent to politicize the corona-virus pandemic. (At least eight strains of the corona-virus are creating a trail of death and disease around the world that scientists are diligently tracking their genetic identifiers.) President Trump had later made effort to clarify his statements, but the damage was done. The anti-Asian crime and discriminatory acts skyrocketed. Congress began to speak out against discrimination towards Asian Americans. When China was struggling with COVID-19 in January and warned the world, what did our government do? Congress was focused on impeachment, the entire Senate was locked up weeks not for potential pandemic prevention but on impeachment resolution. The Administration would let the precious month or many weeks passing by doing nothing to prepare ‘testing’ (essential for accounting and control of number of patients) and ‘strengthening hospital facilities’ (essential to deal with pandemic explosion).
 
On ‘Human Rights’, despite of the improvements that are observable over the past seven decades, the West has always been targeting against China. China claims that the most important human right is to live above poverty with dignity. She has been focused on lifting her hundreds of millions of citizens above poverty. Tibetans, Xinjiang Uyghurs and millions of western Chinese now live better lives than ever before. Do they worry about infiltration of extreme Islamism and illegal immigrants crossing their borders? Sure they do, just think about the wall we built along the Mexican border! China offers job and skill training centers in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Qinghai provinces, our media call them concentration camps in the name of Human Rights. What are our real purposes?
 
COVID-19 is a human disaster but together we will overcome it. China was lucky with her swift and decisive actions to have contained the pandemic disease. The whole world should be humble to learn from China’s experience, to collaborate to develop the vaccine and to share information to prevent future pandemics. COVID-19 has given us a learning lesson on Human Rights. We need to recognize human rights as a first person subject not a third person topic. Chinese medical professionals from all over the country went to Wuhan to fight the COVID-19   was their right to do so and their right to complain about human rights violation if any, not for our media to judge without evidence. Evidence is not from political defectors invited by ambitious American politicians to testify. Evidence is from investigative reporters who live there among the Chinese.
 
At present, COVID-19 is still spreading. When Rhode Island police hunts New Yorkers who rush into Rhode Island (the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine.), who is violating who’s human rights or constitutional rights? When liberal Democrats (Jerry Nadler, D-NY and Karen Bass, D-CA) demand Department of Justice to release as many as possible prisoners (because of COVID-19’s threat), whose human rights they are trying to protect and whose human rights they are trying to destroy? Closing all restaurants not permitting sit-down diners, aren’t we violating human rights as well as protecting human rights?
Now schools, sports events and many big events are closed or turning to online activities, why aren’t stock markets not closed? The wild crushing of stock markets are causing more panic perhaps than the virus itself, why didn’t government shut it down? Whose rights are we protecting?
 
COVID-19 gave humans an opportunity to learn and to reflect, human rights are not absolute rights. As first person, we can not just think for our own rights, there must be compromises (such as Rhode-Islanders versus New-Yorkers). As third person, we can not so liberally judging others for violating human rights or not (prisoners’ human rights versus citizens’ human rights). One noticed that the Amnesty International recently made a statement (third party comment): “Human Rights Violations hinder responses to health emergency and undercut their efficiency.” I would rather say: “Sacrificing human rights helps health emergency situation and improves efficiency in combating pandemic disease.” This is what COVID-19 has taught us on Human Rights!



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May 4th Revolution or ‘54 Movement’ is being celebrated in China for its 100th anniversary. There is no doubt that after China had toppled the corrupt and ultra conservative Qing Dynasty (Sun Yat Sen’s revolution in 1911), the first largest student uproar in Beijing on May 4th, 1919 marked the peak of Chinese ‘mind revolution’ protesting not just the unstable and weak government but also the Chinese system, its culture, language, literature and most critically its thinking process. Thus the ‘mind revolution’ is a very appropriate term to describe it. The WW I ended in 1919, a peace conference was convened in Paris, China as a victory nation hoped to get the Western powers to remove all the unequal treaties China was forced to sign under the weak Qing Dynasty (through 1842 to 1910), the Western powers flatly refused to do that instead awarded the Chinese territories occupied by Germany (defeated in WW I) to Japan (won the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and looted the Taiwan Island, receiving war reparation equivalent to six years of Japan’s annual budget). Thousands of students from more than ten colleges and schools protested at the Embassy District in Beijing and later burned the house of Tsao Ru Ling, the official who negotiated the unequal treaty with Japan. To the West and Japan, this student uproar did not meant much other than China eventually refused to sign the Paris peace treaty, but to the Chinese, it had cumulated the awakening process started prior to the Chinese Revolution (1911) to a new peak. Some intellects believed that Chinese had to begin a mind revolution to get rid of their ‘old baggage’ and embrace new thinking through education, language, science, democracy and even religion.
 
Today, China is a very different country. She has developed herself into the second if not the largest economy. She has lifted hundreds of millions of people above poverty having the highest number of citizens going abroad as tourists annually. Most Western countries including Russia and Japan, China’s neighbors, are bewildered and caught by surprise: how could China accomplish this in a few decades from the poorest nation in the world suffering from foreign invasion and brutal wars to the second strongest country in the world? Many scholars and historians are wrestling with the above question. This author was puzzled as well until restudied the events happened before and after the ’54 Movement’ carefully. I am happy to report that there is really little mystery; actually one can use a simple logic to explain why China was down so low before and is up now. No, it is not, “Stupid! It’s the Economy!”, the famous quote in politics. Rather, it is, “Stupid! It’s the Education!”. Education has transformed China and the May 4th “Mind Revolution” was the agent that changed China’s education system and availability making her successful today. In the following, I will present arguments to prove this point.
 
First, let’s rewind the time back to Qing Dynasty. The Manchurians who invaded and conquered China had decided to inherit the Chinese systems, the language, the culture, laws and governance. However, out of insecurity, the Qing Emperors did not want a sound education system; in fact, they somewhat deliberately discouraged Chinese citizens, largely peasants, to study or get educated. It was fine until the turn of 19th century when the world has gone through an industrial revolution (1764-1840). Later, Japan changed to learn and copy everything from the West (Meiji Reform 1868-1912), but Qing, once the largest economy in the world, still naively maintained its national education system producing few scholars conditioned by an outdated government exam system, keeping 90% or more of her citizens being illiterate. Back in seventeen century, Taiwan was captured by Dutch sailors who had big canons, a Ming General, Zheng Cheng Gong who was defeated by Qing and retreated to Xiamen across from the Taiwan Strait. He took the suggestion from Taiwan’s resistance force to fight the Dutch. He eventually won the fight not by his smaller gun boats but simply by cutting off food supplies to the Dutch. He then captured the big Dutch gun boats, but he soon died and his son lost the war to Qing. So Qing had captured all the Dutch gun boats. However, Qing Dynasty was not interested in how powerful the bigger gun boats could be and why they could be fired more accurately than Qing’s little boats. This story simply explained Qing’s stupidity.
 
We all knew that the West (Marco Polo 14th Century) had come to China and brought back knowledge and things to Europe, but Qing never was interested in getting her people to learn calculus and Newton’s theory (Issac Newton, 1643-1727) even later when Japan was rising up as an Imperial power through Meiji Reform. Qing had ignored the Industry Revolution entirely. Then Qing Dynasty was bullied with scores of unequal treaties from UK starting 1842, 1843, the U.S. and France, 1844, Sweden and Norway, 1847, Russia, 1858, Portugal, 1887, Japan, 1895, 1931, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungarian, Belgium, Spain and Netherlands, 1901 and extended to 1945 and beyond. Qing’s national illiteracy stood above 90%. When scholars such as Kang Yong Wei (1858-1927) and Liang Qi Chao (1873-1929) pushed for government reform, education reform was minimal. The first batch of Chinese foreign students was sent to the U.S. in 1872 and the program got cancelled. The 1911 ‘54 revolution’ generated a nationwide awareness of the necessity of reform. Some went to the extreme rejecting everything from ancient China; some would blame the culture, some would blame the language and some even blame the Chinese nature (in today’s terms, the genes). However, there were some still defending the old Chinese literature and theorems pointing out that ancient China had embraced science, technology and voting system. The key reform ought to be in education, not only changing the system but also letting people open their minds.
 
As we know that from 1919 to 1949 China was struggling to fend off invaders and colonial powers. The ending of WWII (1945) finally gave China a chance to establish a republic nation without foreign power stationed on her soil. The current division of China into Mainland and Taiwan, although resulted from an unfortunate internal squabble, in fact do land evidence to support my claim: The successful changes in both Mainland China and Taiwan are due to their education reform and Chinese culture valuing education. From 1949 onward, Taiwan government has emphasized education setting a goal to offer six years of compulsory education then extending to nine years. The government also focused on teacher university, land reform and industrialization policies, but it is the education system that propelled Taiwan to become a dragon in Asia economically. Likewise, starting from a very poor state, Mainland China also put emphasis on education. With its one child policy to get out of poverty, the single child received all the attention from not only the parents but also the grandparents in his or her upbringing. China produced 77.6 million college graduates in 2016 compared to 67.4 million in the U.S. Science, technology, engineer and mathematics (known as STEM) graduates have a strong correlation with a nation’s economic performance; 4.7 million STEM graduates were produced in China versus 2.6 m in India and 0.568 m in the U.S. Clearly, the China Rise is no accident but because of her successful education system along with good economic policies. Bringing a country with near 90% illiteracy to her current status of building one university a week to educate her citizens explains a lot about China’s success.
 
All the rhetoric we see or hear in the media about China threat, unfair competition and stealing jobs and technologies from the U.S. are all nonsense. I will repeat, “Stupid, it’s Education!” We must ask the following questions, why do we spend more dollars per student per year and get less graduation rate? Why our students shy away from STEMS while the Chinese students compete fiercely to get into STEMS? Recently, I was asked by a friend, how does one get a drone pilot license in the U.S. Honestly, I don’t know, it never has occurred to me to get a drone pilot license. My friend said he saw a peasant in China operating a drone to fertilize his farm. The farmer told him, there were at least 40,000 drone pilot licenses issued in China. I suspect, they are more used for productivity than pleasure. I used to think delivering baozi (a bun filled with meat or vegetable) by drone was a joke or propaganda, now I believe I could picture pizza or scallion pancake being delivered by drone in China!
 
On the 100th Anniversary of “54 Revolution”, I must say that the 3000 students who protested in Beijing 100 years ago are true Chinese heroes deserving to be honored! Today’s students should know how to tell the significance and impact of the 54 movement!.