On Jan. 20 of this year, two political events took place in the United States. In the morning, Trump left the White House early and held a farewell ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base. He did not attend the inauguration of the new administration that day. At noon, Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, a peaceful and orderly transition of power. These two events have two major symbolic meanings. The first symbolizes that the 2020 U.S. election will leave a huge controversy. The latter event symbolizes that after two and a half centuries of storms, American democracy and constitutionalism remain stable and rock-solid.
On January 6, after the world-shaking Capitol Hill clashes in the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held a full-day high-level meeting on the same day (January 7, Beijing Time), called the Politburo Standing Committee to hear reports on the work of various departments, but in fact to study the political situation in the United States. CCTV’s news broadcasts only reported the meeting in text and readout, and did not release any video or photos, proving that it was a secret meeting behind closed doors.
Information from various sources indicates that the top brass of the Communist Party judged that day that the U.S. was in civil unrest and might even be headed toward civil war. For this reason, Xi Jinping and others thought that the strategic opportunity for the CCP had come again, and even that the opportunity to unify Taiwan by force had come. Then, on January 11, Xi Jinping declared in a speech at the Party School, “Today the world is experiencing a great change unprecedented in a century, but the time and momentum are on our side.” Zhongnanhai should not have expected that the Capitol Hill clash would come to an end in just four hours, with Congress resuming at 8 p.m. that night; the U.S. election controversy, too, was largely put to rest by Jan. 20.
Just after the Capitol Hill incident, for several days in a row, Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Huning’s old book “America Against America” suddenly became a hot topic in China, with book prices skyrocketing to 16,666 RMB per copy on the used book website (Confucius Used Books), a jump of more than three thousand times the original book price! Behind this seemingly bizarre phenomenon, it reflected that a considerable number of Chinese people also thought that the United States was thus plunged into civil unrest, or even civil war, and that the United States would be defeated without a fight; and that Wang Huning’s judgment about the United States back then (in the late 1980s) had been fulfilled.
However, two weeks later, on January 20, the US regime transitioned in a peaceful and orderly manner as expected, but it broke the glasses of this part of China and disappointed Zhongnanhai, as evidenced by the contrast of public opinion in the Party media before and after. In fact, it was Wang Huning who misjudged the United States and, by extension, misled Xi Jinping.
Wang Huning visited the United States from 1988 to 1989 for an academic exchange for only six months, observing only a few superficial and superficial aspects of the United States, and then went back and wrote this book, “America Against America,” revealing his disappointment with American democracy and thus criticizing the American system. Wang Huning’s conclusion came to be very simple, simply because he witnessed the phenomenon of personal attacks in the presidential campaign between Bush Sr. and Dukassky back then, he asserted, “Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, but it does not necessarily result in the sublimation of personality.”
Little did he know that the truth is that under a democratic system, the moral level of society and people is generally high, although there are still human flaws; while under an authoritarian system, the moral level of society and people is generally low, even to the point of losing the minimum moral and human bottom line.
In the book, Wang asserted that Japan would surpass the United States on the grounds that Japan practiced “collectivism, forgetfulness and authoritarianism” while the United States practiced “individualism, hedonism and democracy”. However, subsequent developments proved that even at the economic level, Japan failed to reach the heights of the United States, and The Japanese economy fell into a long period of stagnation while the U.S. economy was always full of great dynamism. Wang Huning’s misreading was like Fu Gaoyi’s misjudgment. The latter, a Harvard scholar fluent in Japanese and Chinese, published his 1979 book “Japan First: Implications for the United States”. Fu Gaoyi later publicly admitted his error of judgment, but Wang Huning has never publicly admitted his error of judgment.
Wang Huning predicted the decline of the United States due to domestic conflict from the Perception that “America is against America. In fact, Wang Huning, a contemporary genius from the campus of Communist China, cannot understand or reach the level of America against America, and certainly cannot understand and reach the level of China against China. The vitality of the United States lies in the fact that this part of the United States opposes that part of the United States; and the rigidity of China lies in the fact that this part of China is not allowed to oppose that part of China.
In fact, in the twenty-first century, Wang Huning’s observation of the world is still not beyond the level of the Manchu dynasty’s relics. In the late Manchu period, the Qing court had sent ministers to Europe and the United States to study, some people were surprised at the economic development and political democracy in Europe and the United States, and considered it worthy of emulation. But some people actually reported to The Emperor: the British strikes, the United States demonstrations, so on, these countries will sooner or later collapse; also said: the parliamentarians argued red in the face, such a roar of the public, what decency? (The subsequent fact is: one or two hundred years later, Britain and the United States are still dominant in the world, while the Qing Dynasty has long since gone up in smoke.)
Even the relatively open-minded Northern Minister Li Hongzhang, after a visit to the United States, questioned: “There is only one thing that surprises or disappoints me, and that is the existence of political parties of all kinds in your country, of which I have knowledge of only some. Will other political parties bring chaos to the country? Can your newspapers unite the political parties for the benefit of the country?”
Given that Wang Huning is known as the wise counselor of the three dynasties in Zhongnanhai and the emperor of the three dynasties, Wang Huning’s level, then, represents the highest level of the Chinese Communist Party and is at the high end of Chinese society. Unfortunately, however, Wang Huning’s level, when placed in a normal country, is the lowest level, at the end of the civilized world. To a large extent, Wang Huning’s phenomenon reflects the cold reality that the CCP is not compatible with the civilized world and that China will remain in a political barbarism for a long time.
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