last answer
..With that said, I proceed to go a little off-topic below for the benefit of rip.
I hate to tell you this. Anyone who describes or would attempt to describe the collective Chinese leadership in China as irrational has a world view that is very, very, very limited...
...Both countries already have a symbiotic relationship. However, there is a gap in communication and understanding between the two countries. And American analysts have noted that the US can be accurately described as a country that often goes to war without understanding the countries they are at war with (Vietnam and Iraq come to mind). The problem is that a significant percentage of China's younger intelligentsia speak English, while very few American policy makers speak Putong Hua. So where is the gulf of understanding?
...
...It's understandable given that Chinese troops have fought US troops in the past, in different conflicts. But it is equally important to remember that when relations between US and China normalised, the two have stood together against the Soviet empire and its puppet/satellite states. In other words, at one time, the two countries stood together and Nixon basked in the glory of splitting the communist, eastern bloc...
This is off-topic but I hope you are aware that the current Japanese school curriculum (an American ally) is equally deceptive about their imperial past. In World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) engaged in human experimentation to develop chemical and biological weapons in Manchukuo. In return for IJA data, the US decided not to prosecute those Japanese involved in war crimes against the Chinese in furtherance of US national interest. Does your education system highlight this particular point?
Most importantly, your above point is not relevant to current discussion for two reasons:
(i) the younger generation of Chinese leadership have studied or gone abroad; and
[Mod Edit: Kindly select the relevant portion of the post you want to comment. I've trimmed your quote of my post, as a sample of how trimming helps readability.]
Mr. OPSSG said that he will not respond to any other comments that might be made and I can respect that. Though I think a continuing correspondence would be highly stimulating this will be my last post on the subject in respect of your wishes. I do not intend to monopolize this board with off topic comments about political conditions and not the military ones it normally pursues but a few things do need further clarification. But in the end, war and the preparations for war, are purely political and that can not be escaped.
Mr. OPSSG made some interesting points many of which I completely agree. Mr. OPSSG I am an old man and have seen many things in my life. I have lived long enough to see things come around again for a second or even third time but people do not seem to get any smarter so if I look sometimes at the worst of possibilities, I am sorry if this upsets you, but it is only so that problems can be avoided by others who don’t see them coming. If prejudices is living life and trying to lean from it, then I admit to this prejudice. But that prejudice is based upon rationalism, if perhaps it is sometimes flawed. A prejudice that is accrued, from second hand sources, based upon easy stereo types or self serving ideas in an irrational one. I try to be a rational human being. I will leave it to you if I have succeeded.
First I did not say that the leadership of china was irrational. If I didn’t say it clearly, what I intended to say was that it comes from a system capable of great irrational actions that cannot rationally be understood by people outside that system.
I will use only two examples of how irrational that system can sometimes be.
After the Parity consolidated its position after the civil war, Charmin Mao went to his brother communist Uncle Jo Stalin, in the then Soviet Union and secretly proposed to him to raze a Chinese Army composed of a thousand army divisions while the Soviet Union provided the arms to equip them. This was to once and for all, bring to a conclusion the great socialist dream of uniting the world under one world government. The Chairman was willing to sacrifice the lives of ten-million Chinese men for a very foreign non-Chinese idea. This is a little know fact that I acquired many years ago through an intelligence source so I am afraid I cannot at this time give a proper open reference though it has been made public several times since but the person who gave me this information was truly impeccable. Uncle Jo said no to this proposal. He said, that now with the existence of nuclear weapons, masses of troops alone, no matter how large a force, could no longer insure victory.
The second example was the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that followed it. The consequences of which, are still today an official state secret in PRC, like many things in China that would be in other places common knowledge and would never be considered a state secret. True the people who made these decisions are long gone but the system that created them is still in place.
I must admit that the internal political process, as it currently exists within China today, is very opaque to me and to many others but as long as it is opaque I will continues to be wary of what it can irrationally produce. Whatever you may think of the system my country chooses operates within, it is visible to all. Which to some is considered a weakness, as to others it is considered a strength.
Yes Mr. OPSSG I am aware of the regional differences between the different languages and geographical groups living within China. I am also aware of the even greater suspicion they have for all overseas Chinese much less for white ghosts. The most unifying cultural element among the Chinese peoples has always been their written language of which they hold in great reverence as you well know.
Though I consider myself more of a Li Po type of guy than a follower of Sun Tzu, most of classic Chinese literature, other than its fairytales and philosophic and religious texts, is very dark and filled with plots and schemes designed only to get and to hold power over other men. Perhaps my reading list is limited since most Chinese classical works are hard to find in translation form where I live. But the ones I have read so far, is not what I would hope would be as a unifying theme to guide a great people.
As to understating China I and many others are trying. In fact I have a young friend that is in collage right now and plans to study both Chinese and Japanese as her major. I think it is for the most part a great place and a great people with great things ahead of it. I cannot speak for others, but I was born with a medical condition called dyslexia, languages are very difficult for me and my lack of acquiring another one is not a sigh of western arrogance on my part.
Just look at all my spellings mistakes in the only language that I do know. English will be the language of the world in the future that is a fact. More people speak English as a second language than speak it as their first. Since language belongs to the people who speak it, it is no longer under our control if it ever was.
As to you statement (that CCP governance may be internally weak), that is a surprise to me but I will defer to your superior knowledge in the matter. But it is untimely unimportant, it is what it dose or dose not do, that my country must be deal with. Though if an election were to be held today, even a fare and honest one as rare as they are in the world, the current government would I believe get a resounding endorsement. At least as long as it still produces the rate of economic progress it has in the past.
There are three different kinds of freedom Mr. OPSSG that most people cherish, economic, spiritual, and political. Of these three, economic is by far the most important, then spiritual, and finally political. China has only one and it is as tenuous as all economic progress always is.
There were various references to communications and misunderstanding between our cultures laced within your comments. In my travels about the world it is not uncommon for me to meet people who know more about my country than I know about theirs. Yet when I talk to them about a country next to their own they know less about it than I do? It is a fact of modern communications that everybody thinks they know more about my country than they actually do. When they then talk about how their country is depicted in the international media, they say that the picture they see presented is distorted and unfair and I cannot disagree. The assumption on their part is it is only unfair to them, but they think they are still getting a correct picture of what is going on in other people’s countries when the truth is, the media trades in spectacular events not in clear understating. As in the simple fact that my country has some crazy people in it, and that is for sure. Not all that many are crazy out of a population of over three-hundred million people but you can bet that each one gets his moment on TV and that TV is then broadcast to all over the world. This is not true when operating in reverse.
You mentioned the history of America’s dealings with emigrants, specifically oriental emigrants. Well you make a point I grant you but it an incomplete point. America is still an evolving country, racism is a product of a nature response all life has to life unlike itself and its preference to the like. This is universal to all life forms as the study of
Sociobiology will tell you. It is only through the process of education and with the adoption, of guiding moral principles to embrace what we can’t see with just our eye’s that all of us can overcome this barrier to human understanding.
Your assumption is that I have never felt the experience of being discriminated against in my travels in the orient and thus I do not know what it feels like, if so, you would be wrong. But a better question to ask about those immigrants that concern you is after facing their challenges, did they eventual succeed and then join our societies as full productive and equal members? Did their children fulfill the dreams of their parents? And do you think that experience was all that much different from the emigrants coming from other parts of the world? What would be the experience of an emigrant going to China, if it would even be allowed?
As to how I can say that the USA was on Chinas people’s side through most of the history of my country,
I take no responsibility before what happened before we took control of our own destiny in 1776, we were the revolutionary in the world then. You think that because we were on the wrong side of the civil war as you put it, you concluded we were not on the Chinese people’s side Well let us see, the KMT was the only recognized government in China at the time to support, as imperfect as it was what choice did we have, if we were to help the Chinese people in anyway. And as mentioned before, did we not make the correct judgment that the revolutionaries was in fact an extension of the International Communist Movement and would pursue the same programs in China that they were famous for. It was not as an indigenous political movement but a very alien un-Chinese idea, this socialism.
Think about it. Why would the USA think that Parity was anything else but an extension of that movement international if you remember what their publicly stated goals were? And was it best for the people of China that the communist’s eventually won over the corrupt KMT? I can not say in the end if it was or if it wasn’t, I am not wise enough to know. But was our policy meant to be in the best interests of the Chinese propel? I think it was. If it was not for the fact that twenty-million Russians died to secure the glorious conclusion of that socialist revolution, I think we have some real reasons to believe it might not be in the best interest of the Chinese people to go follow the same rout. You may say that the internal political decision of the Chinese people was non of our business even after all the time and money we put in to trying to help the Chinese people before and during World War Two and perhaps you would even be right but the nature of the cold war gave us no choice. For it didn’t stop the Soviet Union from picking a side and supplying the Parity. We were not the aggressor in the cold war. I do not think my use of history is as selective as you state.
As to the Japanese school curriculum and the fact of them now being our allies. You are absolutely right about the Japanese unwillingness to confront their past. They wish to cling to the idea that since the USA nuked them at the end of the war, that it then made them the great victims of World War Two and they hold on to that belief even to day and no number of official state apologies to China or to their other victims can make up for not confront their own demons as the Germans did.
Why? Because they do not want to believe that they could become monsters, but if we are honest those capacities lie with all of us, until it is confronted and beaten. For the younger people on this board who are not aware of the facts I will give the numbers, (Between the Mukden Incident in 1931 to Japanese surrender in 1945 one-hundred million Chinese people died because of Japanese aggression). More than the rest of the world suffered collectively in World War Two. Of that one-hundred million people, twenty-six million civilians did not die in the normal consequences of war but died directly by ether over work and starvation in Japanese labor camps, by direct execution (sometimes turned into game) by Japanese troops, and then there was the deliberately introduced diseases in to the civilian population. This statement would be labeled as racist remark by any Japanese readers to this board but it is in fact true. I wish they had the courage to confront their past. It is very well documented past but I am not Japanese and the only way they will confront it is when they are able.
As to the Japanese being our allies? Japan is no longer and never will again be in the business of conquest. After its last experience with it, they have decided to take a different road to prosperity. But they are very afraid of the Chinese people and only slightly less afraid of the Koreans and we all know why, revenge. My country is not very big on revenge. Sometimes we do it, we are just people after a, but we try to put it behind us as soon as we can.
It would seem that at least some of the Chinese people think they didn’t get enough revenge. Look at it from this perspective, we conquered and occupied them totally, striped them of their empire, bombed their cities, destroyed the factories, killed a million and half of them within their home islands, tried 1,800 of them for war crimes and hanged two thirds of those, and made them as poor as mice for a while, what more do you want? And as for turning former enemies into allies, my country is fairly good at that trick. You should try it sometime.
As to your comment “metaphorically, when China takes out a revolver from their pocket, they are willing to use it”. I think that you are confused. I think that statement is a distortion of a very old Vietnamese proverb that goes and I quite, “Give a Chinese man a spear for his birthday and the next day he marches south” unquote. I think you need to take that up with a Vietnamese person maybe he can answer your question.
Now we come to the last factor I will remark upon, Chinese paranoia about the outside world and its own security. It is perfectly understandable why China needs the ability to defend its self. Because it knows what the consequences are if it fails to do so. It needs I think the increased confidence of not needing to depend on ether the morality or the good will of others to secure its own well being. This is a lesion burned into the soul of every Chinese I have met. And it is not very dissimilar to the lesion America learned from Pearl Harbor, to never again to be unprepared for any possible dangers. Dangers perhaps from people, as you put it, “we fully do not understand”. We can see how these two different, yet strangely similar lessons coming from the first half of the last century, are playing out together today in American and Chinese relations.
If the following questions could be answered I would at least feel more at ease. Does the PRC expect to have the ability and thus right to bully its neighbors sometime in the future? I say this because of my experiences in the orient with oriental people while observing their ideas of the acceptable ways of the use of power. If not, they are not communicating that change of approach to its neighbor’s very well and not just to the USA.
Believe it or not everybody wants to be China’s best friend. There are many advantages in being Chinas friend if it dose not come with price of supplication. So what exactly dose China need in the way of military power to feel secure within its own borders, what exactly are those boarders, what arrangements does it need to feel that it can take its proper place in the world? What dose China see as its place in the world when it fulfills its considerable potential? Dose it acknowledges that with increased power comes increased responsibility? The answers to these questions would go along way to making the situation more rational to me.
May God be with you Mr. OPSSG.
[Mod Edit: Everybody participating in this thread should take note of these 4 general points when taking part in discussions:
1. Please try to stay on-topic and avoid interjecting one's subjective personal political and moral beliefs (this include the bringing in of one's religious and quasi-religious beliefs and salutations) into a technical discussion.
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3. Extreme selectivity in the presentation of facts (to the point of distortion) is also not preferred and continued insistence in going off-topic despite gentle reminders reflects upon one's approach to discussions and the level of respect one has for fellow forum participants.
4. Do not personalize countries as if they were individuals. When one takes that approach, the level of discussion can easily take a turn to the more emotional rather than rational. For those that have not, take a look at the Forum Rules before posting future replies in this and other threads.
With that said, guys, have fun taking part in discussions and many thanks for taking note of the Forum Rules.]
