In the 1980s, I was still in college. One day an official newspaper in mainland China published an article in which Americans praised China. I don’t remember which newspaper it was, but I do remember the content of the article, and I was impressed by the controversy and discussion it caused among our college classmates.
The article interviewed several Americans who had just visited the Yangtze River Valley, and what caused the controversy was what one of the women said in the interview. I remember her saying that the boat ride down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wuhan was very beautiful, especially when she saw the human scenery on the riverbank, with rural children riding buffaloes, which brought tears to her eyes. She lamented that she hoped China would not be like the United States, where the countryside is full of machine monsters, because this rural beauty and the simple Life form of people in China are priceless.
Several students inside the university came from the Jianghan Plain and also from the rural areas along the Yangtze River in Sichuan. The above statement by the American lady triggered their disgust and even anger. They said that life in the rural areas of Sichuan and Hubei was not good for the locals, the income was very low, probably less than 1,000 RMB per year, as I recall, and people just had enough to eat, but many villages had no roads, no electricity, no running water, and no toilets. Their lives are better than in the mountains, but they are still poor. Inside the villages, the only way to improve their living conditions is to go out to work or to go to college.
So the reason for their unhappiness is simple. The American lady, apparently, took the old and poor life in the Chinese countryside as a landscape painting, distant and full of romance.
I don’t blame the lady. The Three Gorges of the Yangtze River was really, really beautiful before the big dams were built, and after the Three Gorges the river is slow and winding, with clouds and fog, and especially near Dongting Lake, which is vast and endless, all extremely beautiful places. And, as I travel around the world myself, I often have a similar feeling and sentiment that the local natural and human environment will change dramatically once the economy develops. Of course, I would not “hope” that the local area would not develop and remain as it is.
My classmates criticized the woman for being hypocritical, saying that if the American had moved to the local village for two years and still felt the same way, they would think her feelings were true.
In the 1980s, very few Americans traveled to China, and even fewer went to do business there. So the group that was invited to travel to China was probably a number of pro-China American intellectuals, or people related to them. In contemporary parlance, that’s the American left.
So it’s not surprising that they feel that way, and we don’t really have anything to blame them for. Unless, of course, these leftists are in power and can dictate the way we must live our lives, in which case, someone would be miserable. And Mao Zedong was just such a figure. He ruled the country with “idealism” and the results were predictable.
I was raised by my grandmother, called Grandma in the south. Many years ago I told my grandmother that the most common things in America that are rare in China are churches, bars and gyms. She didn’t know what a gym was, and after I explained it, she gave a comment that it was for eating and starving for two days.
When you think about it, that’s pretty accurate.
My grandma’s generation went through all the wars in modern China, and then all the political and social movements after the Chinese Communist Party was established. Most of the Time, the main task of their generation was to find a way to prepare Food so that the whole Family would not go hungry. As you can imagine, they must not have lacked exercise and had a lot of physical work every day. So they couldn’t understand, or couldn’t fully understand, why Americans needed a gym to burn off the excess energy they ate.
Human development is very interesting. In the United States, the standard for a rich person is thin, darker, the tanned kind, and then living in the country, not the city, eating mostly vegetables and fruits, and preferably ORGANIC. in China, there are probably another 600 to 700 million people who meet this standard, all the Chinese migrant workers, or farmers who are still farming in the countryside, are probably of this standard.
If an American told them that they should never go live in the city, not eat more meat, not drive, and walk. They would probably have the same attitude as my grandmother: eat your fill, starve for two days and you’ll be fine.
I tell these two things actually to say that many leftists in America now look at the world with exactly that kind of attitude and go about guiding the world. Interestingly enough, most of the American leftists are white, and most of the young people with money in their families are under little pressure to survive. Their characteristic is that they often sum up a set of theories and concepts from the height of the universe, and then determine it as the truth to promote.
So it’s hard for you to talk to them because they will immediately grab a cosmic level of values high ground. You say, “I support the right to own guns,” and he says, “You’re racist.” You say, “I think schools should admit students based on their ability,” and he says, “You’re racist. I’m against raising taxes, and he says, “You’re racist. They are always looking down at you from that moral high ground.
This situation is by no means unfamiliar to anyone who comes from China under Communist rule. In China, such people are “political counselors” in universities, “party secretaries” in companies and institutions, “political commissars” in the military, and at the national level, they are called At the national level, they are called “general secretaries” or “leaders”. In the early days of the Communist revolution, a group of young people from wealthy families, with a certain idealism and romanticism, also led the party. Now these secretaries and commissars have become social groups with vested interests whose only goal is to maintain power and eliminate dissent.
A Chinese friend said the other day, “Wow, how come there are so many political commissars in the United States all of a sudden,” and we laughed.
But I think the emergence of so many “political commissars” in the U.S. is not spontaneous or accidental, but the result of an organized drive.
Yesterday, I saw a show on the tube, a talk show about a black police officer in Portland, Oregon who was interviewed. The officer’s Last Name was Jackson, first name unknown. He was on the front lines of duty last year when Antifa was at its worst in Portland, keeping the peace, and he was called a goon, pelted with water bottles and stoned by Antifa protesters. He told a story of a time when he was on duty and blacks, Latinos and Asians approached, hoping to engage him in conversation, but each time a white man immediately came over and blocked it saying, “Don’t talk to the police.”
Then a black girl approached, preached to Jackson, and then asked him, “Why don’t you talk to me?” Jackson said, “I would talk to you, but someone would come in the way.” Before the words were out of his mouth, a white girl came up to him and asked the black girl to leave and not talk to the police. The black girl asked why, and Jackson asked, “You’re protesting and expressing yourselves, so why not let her (meaning the black girl) express her opinion to me?” The white girl couldn’t answer and just said, “They told me to do it,” meaning they told me to do it.
The question is, who are they? Why don’t they let people talk to the officers? Especially not colored people talking to black officers? Why?
Is there racism in America? Of course there is, for sure, but is there systemic, institutionalized racism? I’m not 100 percent sure, because I’m not at the heart of the system, but from my own experience, from my own feelings, I think, no.
As a journalist, I have been to many countries, including many in Asia and Europe. I would venture to say that the United States, while it may not be the best in the world in dealing with racial equality, the current situation is definitely one of the best in the world.
I have been on a bus in England and personally heard white British people shouting at black people in terms so unpleasant that if they were in America, it would have caused a riot. I was on a British street and saw four Africans with knives surrounding another black man arguing. I suggested that the black man next to me call the police, and the black man said, “It’s no use, they won’t come. I didn’t believe it and called the police myself. The officer who answered asked me about the situation, and after learning that it was a black man fighting, asked me if anyone was hurt, and I said not yet, but there might be. The officer finally said that we would take care of it. I ended up waiting there for fifty minutes without a police officer arriving. The black guy next to me said, I Told You!
That was in London, the very area where the great riots broke out in London in 2011.
The English police are known worldwide and are said to be very professional. In the United States, this kind of thing is hard to imagine.
In France and Italy, although there are many, many immigrants and foreigners, the problem of discrimination is also quite superficial. Many European countries used to be mono-racial countries, and racial discrimination, previously, did not constitute a society-wide problem, but the situation has changed significantly in recent years, and there are more and more race-related riots. European countries are experiencing the problems of the 60s and 70s in the U.S., and are facing changes in Culture and policy, and they need to learn from the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
But now the left in America, is teaching America’s children to hate America because America is racist, economically oppressive and a criminal country in the world.
At this point, we already know who the “they” are that are teaching children to hate America, that are preventing people from talking to police officers. They are communists, they are communists. Their goal is to subvert capitalism by dividing society into various categories, opposing each other, creating divisions, creating chaos.
Is there a problem in America? Of course there are, there are many. But the solution is not socialism, not communism, of that I have no doubt. In fact, I don’t believe that the left in America, especially the extreme left, can be sustained for long. Because the United States is an open society with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, all kinds of opinions and views can be expressed, but also because the extreme left in the United States actually has different goals, policies to promote up, the interests can not be coordinated, and finally must fall apart. The time is probably within two years.
Because the real ideology above those on the left, according to my grandma’s words, are fed up, can not sustain for long, starve two days on the good.
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