Rise and Fall of China

In a recent play of events not entirely dissimilar to the events described in the previous article, Chinese netizens and Chinese in general have banded together as a race to protect what they wrongly perceive as an attack on their race or nation or mother China or whatever. (In my opinion, racism and historical animosity are working in the subconscious background, but are no means the primary reasons for protests as perceived, I think, by the Chinese).

We should be terrified that China is coming to power if a majority of Chinese perceive things this way. My toes are shaking in my army boots. (Its skin is slowly peeling like rotten kum quats sweating over a flame). Bacterial fear swell screeching through the agonized folds of my trapped brain.

It is an obvious truism that without a grounding in rational evaluation of ideas, people would necessarily turn to more instinctive means: support the group you belong to, ideology, race, religion. And perceive the attack to come from "the West" as well.

And, the modern Chinese only have backgrounds in two things: starvation and communism. Anything else is roped in; the ancient identification is very much an artificial thing. See what the youth of China did in the Cultural Revolution? The ideas did not matter to them; communism was enough. Now, the glorious past is too distant. Modern China takes its modernity from the West, but it does not digest its ideas. And it failed to claim or make its own in that stead.

And it uses the knowledge of the great past as a source of pride, not a source of wisdom. No; race replaces thought, or any re-evaluation of ideas. Recollections (a manipulated one) of the past will be more dangerous than beneficial. It will remind them of lost greatness, and greatness only.

As an overseas Chinese, I do not join the others in predicting greatness for China. Power unguided leads to madness. Greater power leads to greater freedom from economic constraints and considerations that bound the globalised world. And I wouldn't put too much faith in any sense of global community on the part of the Chinese young.