Love(less) In China: Why Aren’t Young Chinese Getting Married? | Insight...

She met over 100 guys but didn’t find love. In China, marriage is pie in the sky for many more

With the country’s marriage rate at an all-time low, the programme Insight explores the factors in play, from the changing attitudes of young Chinese to the cost of housing, and how authorities and parents are trying to reverse the trend.

Last year, as her career took off following her move to Shanghai, China’s financial capital, finance executive Zhao Miaomiao felt it was time to look for a significant other.

So she went on a series of blind dates. Using a dating app, she met “quite a lot” of guys in person — more than 100 — within three to four months.

After they all struck out with her, she “realised that finding a partner is a really difficult task”.

“The first thing (guys) look at is whether the woman is attractive. And then they proceed to understand her personality and family background,” said the 28-year-old.

“However, … (women) prioritise the sincerity of the man. For example, they hope that the man who pursues them demonstrates effort and sincerity.”

Over in Beijing, media executive Liu Shutong has a boyfriend, but “it doesn’t matter” to her whether she gets married or not in future.

“First of all, what I want is to live in the present,” she declared. And that is a general attitude she sees among her peers.

“Nowadays, young people prioritise their current happiness, embracing a hedonistic lifestyle,” said the 24-year-old, who herself takes pleasure in ballet, yoga and shopping with friends. “We feel that … whether you choose marriage or not, you’re still happy.”

Whether by choice or otherwise, more young Chinese clearly are not getting married. In the past decade, the number of marriages has halved. Last year, 6.83 million couples tied the knot — an all-time low since records began in 1986.

Compared with Singapore, where 6.5 marriages per 1,000 residents were registered in 2021, the corresponding figure in China was 5.4 marriages per 1,000 people.

Among the urban youth, 44 per cent of Chinese women do not plan to marry, compared with nearly a quarter of the men, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the Communist Youth League.

While a decline in marriage has become a global phenomenon — almost 90 per cent of the world’s population live in countries with falling marriage rates — and the reasons can be complex, there are also particular factors in play in China.

The programme Insight finds out what is getting in the way of young Chinese finding love, and the different ways the authorities — and parents — are trying to reverse the trend.

A GROWING MISMATCH

One person who can offer an insight into why young Chinese are not coupling up is professional matchmaker Qian Lei, 27.

“In general, if a man tries to find a partner in the matchmaking market, he may say he doesn’t need a rich or beautiful woman, but he’s actually picky,” she said.

“He’s looking for someone who gives him a good first impression, and this is when he becomes more selective.”

As to why girls may reject a guy, it may be “because he doesn’t meet their height requirements”, said Qian. “Girls tend to value height a lot, and they often prefer guys who are at least 1.7 metres tall.”

Such eligibility “criteria” may seem superficial but are one aspect of the changing views on love and marriage in China.

The country’s rapid development has also created a mismatch between what men and women want in marriage, with China’s social conservatism at odds with decades of female empowerment.

“China’s transition from traditional to modern values has been very short. Other countries and regions may have taken 50 or 100 years, but we’ve experienced this phenomenon in just 20 to 30 years,” said sociologist Zhu Hong at Nanjing University.

Prior to 1999, when the government decided to expand the higher education system, women made up as little as 20 per cent of university admissions.

Female enrolment has since overtaken male enrolment at universities, hovering at 52 per cent for some years now. Accordingly, women’s economic independence has increased, and Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, “women hold up half the sky”, has become a reality.

But gender roles have not kept up with women’s socio-economic status — “all the housework” and the responsibility for child-rearing will fall mainly to them after marriage, said Jean Yeung, a Provost-Chair Professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore.

“The opportunity cost of getting married is really, really high for a woman these days. And so, since marriage is no longer a necessity, a lot of women hesitate to go in (on it).”

The difference between what men and women want is especially clear in the cities, added Hang Seng Bank (China) chief economist Wang Dan. “Most women are looking for love, and most men are looking for a wife.

“The difference in their purpose also causes a very different attitude. And we’ve seen a lot of frustration when it comes to closing the deal, on both sides, on whether they want to get married.”

More time spent at school and the focus on careers also mean a delay in marriage, which is common as countries develop.

But in China, this has led to the term “sheng nu” (leftover women), used to describe single women in their late 20s and 30s. They are deemed undesirable owing to fertility concerns over their age.

THE ONE-CHILD POLICY

China’s falling marriage rate could also be partly due to the one-child policy, which was implemented nationwide in 1980 and ended on Jan 1, 2016.

A whole generation of only children “grew up on their own”, noted Wang. “Naturally, they’re more individualistic than the previous generations.”

And according to one study by the Ohio State University, only children are less likely to get married, compared to those with siblings. Each additional sibling is associated with a 3 per cent increase in the odds of getting married.

The argument is that siblings provide children with opportunities to negotiate conflict at home, which could help in navigating friendships and romantic relationships later in life.

Only children are also likely to be more independent and value their alone time.

“To establish a marriage, they have to give up a bit of their individuality, a bit of their freedom. They also need to pay attention to the needs of their partner,” said Zhu.

But she doubts their ability to do so. “Being an only child is truly special. … Grandparents and other relatives revolve around the child. That’s why we call them ‘little sun,’” she said.

“In this generation, when it comes to responsibility, selflessness and compromise, they may lack these social skills.”

They may find a partner “too bothersome” instead. “That’s why there are so many young people nowadays who have cats and dogs as pets,” she added.

THE "MOONLIGHT CLAN"

As they chase individual desires, a growing number of Chinese youths are now calling themselves the “Moonlight clan”, or “yue guang zu”. “It usually refers to young people (who’ll) spend everything they earn every month,” said Wang.

“Some of them are also deeply in debt because they now have access to online borrowing, (with) platforms like Alipay (and) JD Finance.”

One of the youths who identify as part of the Moonlight clan is Liu. She told Insight: “People who spend all their money each month consider it normal not to have savings. And they don’t save.”

Their live-for-today attitude leaves them ambivalent about the future. And as they delay financial security, they end up delaying marriage.

“If you’re someone who lives a ‘pay cheque to pay cheque’ lifestyle, your potential partner might realise it isn’t a good fit,” said Qian.

“In a way, it can be (a challenge) for a Moonlight clan person to find a partner. After all, building a life together involves managing finances.”

According to a China Central Television report in 2021, two in five singles in China’s first-tier cities belong to the Moonlight clan. In fourth- and fifth-tier cities, 76 per cent of single young people blow their pay cheque every month.

This adds up to a sizeable number, given that China had 220 million singles that year.

THE ECONOMIC IMPACT

China’s economic slowdown, coming hard on the heels of the pandemic, has compounded the situation. “Every time there are financial difficulties, the marriage rates are going to go down because people will usually delay these major life events,” said Yeung.

Unemployment among Chinese urbanites aged 16 to 24 stands at more than 20 per cent, which is a record and higher than in most European countries.

With the gloomy economic outlook, some men may be especially pessimistic about their marriage prospects.

“They may think, as a man, they need to take responsibility for their wife and … their children. Suddenly, they realise they don’t have the budget,” said Yeung.

In this regard, the cost of housing is “a big issue these days”. Studies have shown that when home prices go up, the number of marriages falls.

Even for Chinese youths who are “serious about their financial stability” and still thinking of marriage, “the ability to save up for a house, for their children’s education and all of that … isn’t there”, added Yeung.

China’s hustle culture known as “996” — which refers to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week — has left young working adults, meanwhile, with hardly any time for themselves, much less the energy for a relationship.

“You do have to feel a bit more sympathetic (about) their status now,” said Wang. “The economic cost and the pressure to maintain a balanced life are just so high.”

"SWIPE LEFT, SWIPE RIGHT"

Still, most Chinese youths have not given up on love. And many who are time-starved hope to get hitched with the help of dating apps.

The three most popular platforms, Momo, Soul and Tantan, have over 150 million monthly active users in total as at last year.

In a 2021 survey conducted by a Chinese research institute, 89 per cent of respondents said they had used a dating app before.

“You’ll see and hear examples of success. People do find long-term partners or even husbands and wives,” said Wang. “But most of the time, it’s more like a social app. People get together, become friends or establish some short-term relationships.”

There is also an argument that dating apps promote a hook-up culture, where users are interested in flings rather than something long-term. This has been Zhao’s experience, which led her to lament that guys “primarily consider” the sexual aspect.

She had thought using a dating app would be an efficient process because of the “large user base”. But the platform is not quite a godsend to the loveless in China.

“Dating apps give … the illusion that you’ll always have the next choice. Just swipe left, swipe right, then you’ll always have more choices down the line,” said Wang.

“It doesn’t necessarily create more happiness among couples or among the young generation. But I guess it’s one of these new realities that China as a whole has to (become) accustomed to.”

MATCHMAKING CORNERS

Even as dating apps have increased in popularity, there is a reason that traditional methods remain important in China.

“When you look at different surveys, the ways people meet a potential mate isn’t that different from 20 years ago. They still meet new people at work, through friends (and) through family,” cited Wang.

Parental matchmaking in particular has seen a revival since the mid-2000s, when worried parents with dreams of becoming grandparents began organising matchmaking corners in city parks.

Just like in a flea market, they advertised their children’s virtues, hoping to attract prospective takers.

“This trend still continues … because for many of the urban young generation, they don’t have enough time to really get into the dating market (through) trial and error, basically,” said Wang.

Matchmaking corners can be found in major Chinese cities, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai. In Beijing, one famous spot is Zhongshan Park, which artist Hao Wenxi, 35, knows well because his father used to frequent its matchmaking corner.

Hao shared that he had been looking for Miss Right since his early 20s but was unlucky in love for almost eight years. “I met a lot of different people, but the chances of success were relatively low,” he said.

“I didn’t know how to date. I didn’t know how to (be) charming and be emotionally present. I might’ve only known that I earn more than you. I own property.

“It was really no different to dating 100 years ago — saying that you have cows and land.”

But he wanted to find love, so he was game to try different dating options. He met around 20 to 30 people over a period of two to three years.

Dating apps yielded a mixed bag of results. Eventually, it was his father’s efforts in Zhongshan Park that paid off, and he met his current wife, a doctor. They dated for a year before tying the knot.

They now have a four-year-old son and are thinking of having another child, perhaps in the next three or four years.

EXTRA LEAVE AND OTHER NUDGES

Hao’s happy ever after highlights one particular dimension to China’s concern over its falling marriage rate: If people do not get married, they do not have children.

“The correlation between marriage and birth rates isn’t as strong (in Western society),” noted Wang. “People can still have children even if they aren’t married. … But in China, the correlation is almost 100 per cent.”

Besides conservatism, the Hukou system — the household registration system that allows citizens to access healthcare and education — is one big reason why. Until recently, only married women were allowed to register their children.

But last year, China’s population declined for the first time in six decades. And the falling marriage rate combined with an ageing population has the government fretting even more.

So authorities are trying various means to encourage marriage and childbirth, including efforts to control house prices.

By May last year, at least 13 Chinese cities were providing housing subsidies for families with multiple children. Local governments have also given one-time coupons to families for home purchases.

More subsidies and incentives, said Yeung, would help young people to think they could settle down. Zhu has some ideas, such as “marriage housing” specifically for young people, which she believes the government may introduce “in the near future”.

“If you’re willing to get married, then this house will be rented to you at a very low cost. If you’re willing to have children, perhaps this house will be sold to you at a very affordable price,” Zhu elaborated.

As for falling in love in the first place, some schools have given students extra vacation time to socialise, while some companies have offered single female employees extra days of annual leave, for them to “go home and date”.

Still, employees of enterprises in China are working, on average, 48.7 hours a week this year, even with the “996” work culture officially outlawed.

While China’s labour laws now require companies to pay extra for hours worked beyond an eight-hour working day, “when it comes to the execution stage, … the 996 culture is still quite prevalent”, said Wang.

“As a result, I think we’re now in this sort of … stalemate when it comes to the reality in dating.”

Many other Asian countries have tried ways to improve marriage rates, with more failures than successes. It remains to be seen whether China will buck the trend.

Zhao thinks it is “worth encouraging” youths who still believe in love. But for her part, she is having a break from the dating scene after using a matchmaker’s services on top of her use of dating apps.

“I want a high-quality marriage. But the people I currently know can’t meet my expectations. So even though they want to be with me, I still reject them,” she said.

“Being single is a good state for me right now. I enjoy my current single status, and I feel happy.”

US should drop pursuit of ‘American primacy’ in Southeast Asia

• Asia Society report says US should acknowledge it is ‘one of many regional actors’ and reduce ‘rules-based order’ rhetoric that Southeast Asians regard as hypocritical
• US should consider joining CPTPP, RCEP trade alliances and explain what Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework offers to region, report adds

Khushboo Razdan

The US should abandon the idea of “American primacy” if it hopes to counter China’s sway in the “multi-actor” Southeast Asia region, the Asia Society has urged in a new report.

Observing that the region is now “genuinely multipolar, and China may, in fact, be the region’s primary power”, the report, titled Prioritizing Southeast Asia in American China Strategy and released on Tuesday, concluded that “America is only one of many regional actors”.

The report, a product of the society’s Centre on US-China Relations and the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California at San Diego, also advised Washington to “tone down rhetoric” about the international “rules-based order”.

“Southeast Asians see hypocrisy in such American protestations and view these as Western rules imposed on non-Western countries,” it noted.

Sitting on geographic chokepoints vital for global trade and transportation, Southeast Asia finds itself at the centre of competition for influence between Beijing and Washington.

And with US concerns over China’s expanding influence, preserving the rules-based order in favour of a free and open Indo-Pacific remains a key element of the strategy for the region developed by US President Joe Biden and his administration.

But in its recommendations, the report called on Washington to regard the region as more than a geopolitical arena.

“Southeast Asia should be seen and respected on its own intrinsic merits – and not viewed solely through the prism of Sino-American competition,” the report suggested, asking the US to “play to its strengths, be confident and proactive, and adopt a comprehensive and positive approach to the region – not just reactive to China”.

Walking a diplomatic tightrope, Southeast Asian nations have responded to the US-China rivalry with ambiguity and flexibility to avoid picking a side.

To ease the pressure of choosing one of the competing global powers, the report advised the US to be “a more dependable and benign partner”, involving itself in the regional economic architecture.

That architecture now involves two trade alliances that the US is not party to: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

“The US should join CPTPP and consider joining RCEP,” the report said.

The CPTPP rose from the ashes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-member alliance Donald Trump withdrew the US from on his first day as president in 2017.

Biden, who took office in 2021, has ruled out joining the group. However, China has applied for membership.

Charlene Barshefsky, a former US trade representative who contributed to the report, said that withdrawal from the TPP was “certainly” a factor in Washington’s declining economic influence in the region.

Barshefsky said that China’s growing economic dominance “exerts extraordinary impact on these countries, making them reluctant to speak out, oftentimes, making them reluctant to push back in ways that might engender Chinese retaliation or Chinese coercion”, adding that the US “really has not mustered a response to it”.

China is also a member of RCEP, a free-trade agreement whose ranks include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Other members are Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

As an alternative to both groups, the Biden administration last year launched an economic initiative called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).

Unlike CPTPP and RCEP, though, IPEF is not a free-trade agreement. Instead, it focuses on “four pillars” of economics – fair and resilient trade, supply chains resilience, clean energy and anti-corruption.

Fourteen countries, including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, have participated in IPEF meetings and ministerials.

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai characterised the framework in May as “not a traditional trade deal”, saying “we’re not just trying to maximise efficiencies and liberalisation”.

“We’re trying to promote sustainability, resilience and inclusiveness,” she added.

Naomi Wilson, vice-president for Asia policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based global trade association, observed that countries in the Asia-Pacific were “no longer willing to bend to US demands without getting something in return”.

Thus, US policymakers “cannot afford to close the door on trade deals when the policy objectives of competing with China require greater market access elsewhere”, she said, contending that such goals were “too important to rest on the hope” that frameworks like IPEF would “accomplish the same ends”.

Indeed, the report advised the US to make IPEF “more economically concrete and credible” and to “explain in clear terms what it offers to regional states”.

The report also said that regional views of IPEF were “largely dismissive”.

David Shambaugh, director of the China policy programme at George Washington University and the leader of the report, said that the US faced a “public diplomacy problem” in the region.

Describing IPEF as a “rather complex initiative” which does not just involve trade deals, Shambaugh said that “the economics of IPEF are kind of buried and they aren’t very clear”.

“The US government and the Commerce Department have some real public policy work to do to try and spell out in much clearer and rather simplified terms,” he said, and just “give the bottom lines about what it can do economically for the partner countries”.

The report also recommended that Washington “dramatically increase” US diplomacy across the region since it was “underperforming and becoming a liability”.

Daniel Russel, a former assistant secretary of state and an Asia Society vice-president who worked on the report, said that the story of what the US was “doing for the region in the region” was not getting told, “certainly not well enough to penetrate widely and to have adequate impact”.

He attributed this lacking to multiple factors, adding that American diplomats are “not present or visible, at least not enough”.

Finally, the report suggested, the US should also “carefully consider commencing negotiations for a Reciprocal Trade Agreement with Asean or a subset of Asean states, with mutual market access”.

China has had a free-trade agreement with Asean since 2010. The report also noted that despite significantly trailing China in trade with Asean, the US is still a leading investor in the group – a fact the report said remained unrecognised.

The total stock of US foreign direct investment in the region “totals US$328.5 billion (2020) – greater than China, Japan, and South Korea combined. Annual US investments in the region average around US$25 billion per year (greater than China’s),” it noted.

Shambaugh called this “another unappreciated fact that Southeast Asians don’t know”.

“So you can’t just look at the economic realm through trade numbers or even the regional architecture,” he said, adding that the US was “definitely hurting itself” by not getting more deeply involved in the entire economic domain.

US-controlled ‘empire of hackers’ attacking China, other countries

• Investigators accuse CIA of advanced spy tactics against governments, infrastructure, research institutions, and tech and oil companies since 2011
• China’s foreign ministry calls on US to stop using cyberweapons for global espionage

Zhang Tong

The CIA has used powerful cyberweapons to attack other countries including China, according to a report released on Thursday in China.

The report, jointly released by China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre (CVERC) and cybersecurity company 360, accused the US Central Intelligence Agency of secretly orchestrating “peaceful evolution” and “colour revolutions” around the world with the use of superior technology.

According to the report, which was focused on numerous cyberattacks within China, investigators captured and extracted a large number of Trojan programs, functional plug-ins, and attack platform samples that they said were closely associated with the CIA, revealing an “empire of hackers” under US control.

“These cyberweapons have undergone strict, standardised, and professional software engineering management, which is uniquely followed by the CIA in developing cyberattack weapons,” the report said.

The investigators said their analysis revealed that the CIA’s cyberweapons used state-of-the-art espionage technology in attacks that were closely connected and integrated.

“They have now covered almost all internet and IoT [Internet of Things] assets globally, allowing control over foreign networks and theft of important, sensitive data at any time,” the report said.

“Targets of these attacks include critical information infrastructure, aerospace, research institutions, oil and petrochemical industries, large internet companies, and government agencies in various countries. These attacks can be traced back to 2011 and have continued until now.”

It said the information collected from foreign governments, companies and citizens would be provided to US decision-makers for national security intelligence and security risk assessments. At the request of the US president, the CIA also carried out and supervises secret cross-border activities, the report said.

The report also said that, for decades, the CIA had overthrown or tried to overthrow more than 50 legitimate foreign governments – only seven instances of which are acknowledged by the CIA – causing turmoil in the affected countries.

While helping other nations in inciting unrest, the CIA provided various information and communication technologies and even on-site command help, the investigators said.

For example, a US military-affiliated company developed an untraceable TOR technology to help protesters in some Middle Eastern countries maintain communication and evade tracking and arrest, it said. The servers encrypted all information passing through them, ensuring anonymous internet access for specific users, according to the report.

The Rand Corporation had spent years developing “Stampede” software that helped many young people stay connected during protests, greatly improving the efficiency of on-site command, the report said.

“The CIA has long been collecting intelligence information from foreign governments, companies and citizens, and organising, implementing and supervising cross-border secret activities while engaging in continuous espionage and theft,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Thursday.

“The international community should be highly vigilant of these activities. The large number of real cases disclosed in the report is yet another example of the CIA’s long-term global cyberattack campaign. The US should pay attention and respond to international concerns, and stop using cyberweapons for global espionage and cyberattacks,” she added.

In recent years, Beijing has increasingly accused the United States of cyberattacks. In June 2022, China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University issued a public statement claiming it had been targeted by overseas cyberattacks.

A report by CVERC that followed in September said the US National Security Agency had carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyberattacks against Chinese targets in recent years, controlling countless network devices including servers, terminals, switches, telephone exchanges, routers and firewalls.

Washington has reciprocated with its own accusations. In October 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released an advisory on their website emphasising the cybersecurity threat from China.

After South China Sea setback, Beijing seeks to arm itself with international law – like the West

China is learning from Western powers that it can ignore decisions it doesn’t like and manipulate international law – as long as it cultivates an army of patriotic lawyers

Mark J. Valencia

A recent Chinese government decision to raise the status of international law studies has potentially significant implications for China and its foreign relations.

Its acceptance of the need to upgrade its capacity in international law is not likely to be driven by a new-found desire to abide by it. Rather, it is likely to stem from more practical political motives, such as defending against its use by Western powers, particularly when it comes to the law of the sea, and an intention to emulate them by using international law to protect China’s interests and achieve its goals.

International law is a set of rules, norms and standards governing the conduct of states and their relations with each other. It is guided by treaties and conventions, customs (state practices), general principles of law, and judicial decisions and teachings.

But there is often disagreement over it. When powerful countries cannot manipulate international law in their favour, they often refuse to recognise it or abide by its decisions – as the United States, Russia, Britain, France and now China have all done.

Moreover, there is no universal supranational enforcement mechanism. Indeed, some cynics describe international law as “the arms of politics”: where nations use self-serving interpretations and practices to achieve their political goals.

China has been unmercifully bashed by the West for its transgressions while other states seem to have all but buried theirs. The US has been particularly adept at manipulating international law, especially the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), to which it is not even a party.

During the Cold War, when some developing countries wanted to restrict the entry of foreign navies to their territorial seas, the US and Soviet Union issued a joint statement clarifying and cementing their interpretation of Unclos that they could not do that.

China now recognises the value of “lawfare”, or the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate, hinder, damage or delegitimise an opponent.

In doing so, China is merely following the examples of the West, particularly the US. America even transgresses the UN Charter’s prohibitions on threat or use of force and its duty to respect other states’ sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence.

Recent and ongoing examples include the invasion of Iraq, secret operations to overthrow other governments, and transnational drone strikes. Given this history and context, bashing China for its Unclos violations is outrageously hypocritical.

Unsurprisingly, China views much of the international legal system as being created and manipulated by the West to its detriment and that of developing countries.

In China’s view, the US-led West heavily influenced the content of Unclos and persuaded China and others to agree to compulsory dispute settlement. China was dragged before an international arbitration panel that invalidated its historic claim to much of the South China Sea – and it was a shock to its system. Beijing played legal catch-up, arguing that it had not consented to third-party arbitration. But the reputational damage was done and China has struggled to mitigate it ever since.

China would like to change those aspects used against it or interpret them in its favour. In this, it could borrow from the US playbook, persuading like-minded countries to issue a joint Unclos interpretation that opposes compulsory arbitration or broadens the exceptions.

It could also forge a multinational statement opposing the arbitration panel’s unpopular decision on the South China Sea, which essentially says that only features with a history of a self-sustaining indigenous population are legal islands generating exclusive economic zones. Raising the status of international law studies and its role in international relations may help accomplish this.

China is encouraging its universities and graduate schools to “cultivate a new generation of legal professionals who have both a global outlook and expertise in international and national law, filling the critical shortage of experts in this field”, according to a directive issued by the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council Office.

It decrees that legal education and research must always align with the “correct” political direction, and requires legal education institutions, teachers, students and researchers to take a clear stance on principled issues and major issues, and to formally oppose and reject Western views.

Here, China is only stating a counter bias to that of most Western government lawyers. One just has to think about the public actions and words of many international lawyers, especially those in government service. They are paid to represent the interests of their client – the government they work for, not to be objective or balanced.

I know this first-hand from interacting with US Navy and US State Department lawyers on Unclos, a convention the US has failed to ratify but which its lawyers freely cite and interpret to the US’ advantage.

China has competent Western-educated international lawyers, well-versed in the law of the sea but it needs more and must make better use of them in policymaking. Most are in academia or think tanks, not in important government positions, and in China, there is a general disconnect between academics and government officials.

Like many of their Western counterparts, on issues that concern national interests, Chinese academics know which side their bread is buttered and use international law to support the government position. Of course, like the US, China will still need an unblinkered in-house analysis of the issues to determine the best legal strategy to promote national interests.

In sum, this new decision indicates that China has caught on and intends to catch up. For the West, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Mark J. Valencia is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Huayang Institute for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance

Australia should seek security in Asia with its sovereignty, not ‘rubbish’ defence deals like Aukus: former PM Paul Keating

• The Aukus submarine deal, which could cost up to A$368 billion (US$245 billion), would be ineffective in the event of a war with China, Keating says
• He also says that Canberra is forsaking a proper defence strategy to help the US maintain ‘strategic hegemony’ in Asia

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has issued a blistering criticism of Australian foreign policy and the Aukus submarine pact, saying Canberra was forsaking a proper national defence strategy to help the United States maintain “strategic hegemony” in Asia.

Keating, prime minister from 1991 to 1996 and a former leader of the Labor Party currently in power, said in a National Press Club event that the Aukus pact with the US and the UK was the “worst international decision” by a Labor administration in recent times.

The pact was first agreed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s predecessor from the Liberal Party, and has been fully backed by the current administration.

“China has committed, in the eyes of the United States, the great sin of internationalism. And what is that sin? To develop an economy as big as the United States,” he said.

“The Americans will never condone or accept a state as large as them. That’s what China presents. They would have preferred that [China] - 20 per cent of humanity - remained in poverty forever. But the fact that China is now an industrial economy larger than the United States … it is not in the playbook.”

“This is what [Aukus] is about, the maintenance of the US strategic hegemony in Asia.”

Keating urged Australia to seek its security in Asia utilising its sovereignty, and not with defence deals with the likes of the US, which he said hoped to be the “primary strategic power in Asia” despite having “no land in the metropolitan zone of Asia” and is 10,000 kilometres away.

He also pointed to a similar move by the UK to edge into Asia, on the premise of putting together a “global Britain”.

“So they’re looking around for suckers and they found all here,” he said.

“So here we are, 230 years after we left Britain .. we are returning to Cornwall [G7 meeting] and now Rishi Sunak, to find our security in Asia. How deeply pathetic is that?” he said.

While the Albanese government had promoted the potentially A$368 billion (US$245 billion) Aukus submarine deal as necessary to protect Australia’s national security, it would be ineffective in the event of a war with China, Keating said.

The war in Ukraine has showcased how invasions would involve Chinese land troops and troop ships coming to Australia, with their advance taken down by Australian planes and missiles long before they get to the shores of Australia. There was also the problem of the long stretch of ocean between the two countries, he added.

“The idea that we need American submarines to protect us – three [submarines] are going to protect us from the might of China. The rubbish of it, the rubbish,” he said.

The submarines – which would not arrive until 2030s – are also large and detectable from space unlike Australia’s traditional Collins-class submarines that were designed to sit on Australia’s continental shelves and repel invasions, Keating said.

The Collins-class submarines were ageing and were due to be replaced by an original order of diesel-powered submarines from France, until that contract was torn up by the former Scott Morrison government in favour of Aukus.

It sent Australia’s diplomatic relations with France into a tailspin.

Keating also said the Australian government failed to tell the Australian public that the Aukus submarines – designed to sit off the coast of China to take down Chinese threats – could also be spotted quickly on the shallower Chinese ocean shelves.

On Australia’s response when China acts aggressively in the South China Sea over territorial disputes, Keating said it was important to know that it was not a problem until Chinese activity interfered with US presence in the sea.

“The US Defense department’s annual report to Congress in late 2022 said ‘the PRC aims to restrict the United States from having a presence on China’s periphery’. In other words, China aims to keep US navy ships off its coast. Shocking. Imagine how the US would react if China’s blue water navy did its sightseeing off the coast of California,” he said.

It was also wrong to categorise China’s recent trade restrictions as threats that warranted military retaliation or defence, he added.

“You can’t impute that a tax or a tariff on wine or barley is equivalent to an invasion of the country. China does not threaten Australia, has not threatened Australia, does not intend to threaten Australia,” he said, pointing out that commercial rows between countries are common.

China had restricted imports of Australian lobsters, timber and coal among others, after the two countries fell out in 2020 when Australia pushed for an international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus just as the pandemic was raging in Wuhan, while asking for weapons inspectors to visit the city.

China also imposed anti-dumping duties on Australian barley and wine for unfair dominance in the Chinese market. These have reduced Australian exports to near zero.

Against Beijing’s two wine and barley complaints at the World Trade Organization, Australia in turn brought 87 anti-dumping cases against the world’s second largest economy.

When asked how he was so sure that China did not pose a military threat, Keating said: “What would be the point? They get the iron ore, the coal or wheat? What would be the point of China wanting to occupy Sydney and Melbourne militarily?”

US, West ‘uncomfortable’ with changing world, view China as a threat: Singapore’s George Yeo

• George Yeo said the US and the West are ‘uncomfortable’ with the idea of a multipolar world given their long dominance
• The ex-foreign minister of Singapore also said the rise of China has prompted countries to increasingly view Beijing as a challenge and even a threat

Dewey Sim in Singapore

The United States and other Western nations are “uncomfortable” with the idea of a multipolar world given their long dominance but they should not resist it, Singapore’s ex-foreign minister has said.

George Yeo, who was the country’s top diplomat from 2004 to 2011, said the West had been used to the “dominance of their values being universal [and] of judging others against their own standards”.

“But it’s changing,” he told a forum on Tuesday organised by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

While the rise of China has been the starkest – which has prompted countries to increasingly view Beijing as a challenge and even a threat – recent developments including the war in Ukraine has shown that other powers, like India, were a “satellite of nobody”.

"The US doesn’t like multipolarity and is fighting it. My fear is it will exhaust itself fighting because it will fail,” he said.

China, on the other hand, has always dealt with multiple influences due to the fact that it borders so many nations.

Yeo also spoke about the inevitability of a multipolar world, pointing to some estimates which suggested that by 2050, one in two babies born would be Muslim.

“Whether we like it or not, the world is going to change and the multipolar world, to me, is on the cards. It’s already been born. It’s growing up,” he said.

Instead of resisting, Yeo said it would be better for the US to help crystallise a multipolar world because Washington would naturally be the first among equals for various reasons including its existing power and the wide use of the English language.

“The quicker the US and maybe the collective West grasp this and work to shape it, the better they are to preserve their position,” he added.

In the slow shift towards a multipolar world, Yeo said Southeast Asia would play an important role. His rationale was how countries have shown the ability to intricately handle geopolitical tensions. At November’s G20 summit in Bali, host country Indonesia had to deal with a “complicated field”, such as how the US wanted to exclude Russia from the forum.

To a greater degree, Southeast Asia has a rich history and diverse cultures that have connected with the wider world. Yeo cited how all forms of Christianity, Buddhism and Islam can be found in the region.

“It’s not just the balmy atmosphere … It is the acceptance of those who are not like ourselves. This gives us a special position as the world enters into a troubled phase,” he said.

Why criticism of a third term for China’s Xi Jinping is rich coming from the US

•  Despite its clandestine interventions in China and elsewhere, America remains convinced of its exceptionalism and blind to how others perceive it
• In a similar vein, Western commentary on Xi’s reappointment can sound foolish, given that America set term limits for presidents not that long ago

Tom Plate

Maybe the lady intel officer who sought to recruit me for a CIA operation involving Chinese espionage on the US West Coast didn’t look the part – though, then again, perhaps she did. Modest in dress, controlled in comportment, she sat with me in the back of a large steak restaurant in Los Angeles without once raising her voice.

She told me she was proud to be “working for the President of the United States, that’s what we do”, and I believed her. She paid for everything (as she had for two prior dinners) with cash, not credit card, leaving no written record behind. But I left her visibly disappointed – mission unaccomplished: I just couldn’t go CIA-ing while remaining a proper American journalist and that was what I wound up telling her.

This rendezvous took place a half-dozen years ago but popped into mind while I was drinking in Agents of Subversion, an urgently needed book by Yonsei University professor John Delury.

Just as it unintentionally reminded me of how I could have added the Central Intelligence Agency to my resume, the book also added to my annoyance with those fellow Americans who hold that we don’t do dirty to China, as sometimes the Chinese (not to mention the Russians) do to us. DeLury will have none of that.

His book is about the CIA’s covert war in China. Did American undercover agents and forces try to influence the Chinese civil war? Yes. Did the US have assets working within Hong Kong after the 1997 handover that helped stir the anti-China hotpot? You bet. Even today? Please, let’s not be naive.

The security services of China are scarcely covert. Their assets and agents are all over the place. In fact, in the late 1990s, a report by the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China made extraordinary claims about Chinese espionage, especially systemic technology theft, that the American media replayed to Americans with abandon.

Lost in the anti-Communist frenzy and paranoia was the commonsensical notion that almost all nations execute deep dives into the dirty pool of espionage – and sometimes much worse. Contextualisation, rather than demonisation, is what even our enemies deserve if we are to understand them properly. Over time, demonisation leads to fragmentation of the possibility of a global community – of a better global order to cope with global challenges.

Delury offers another key dimension that echoes the spirit of Plato’s philosophical legacy of the unity of ethics: a city or – by extension any integrated entity – cannot be half virtuous. A contemporary example of this notion can be found in America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, for example.

It holds that a US corporation operating overseas that’s bribing foreign officials must be brought to account by the headquarters in the States. It cannot look the other way, ignoring the illegality, just because it’s an ocean away. To its credit, the US Department of Justice has enforced the act against American companies abroad.

Delury takes this principle further and shows how a nation’s civic norms can be corroded domestically when it practises clandestine and illicit intervention in the internal affairs of others. “The pathologies of secrecy, like the violence of war, could not be contained overseas forever,” he concludes in the book.

In America, the blowback into the backyard of domestic politics can come with hurricane force. Clandestine anti-China crusades lead to poisonous politics such as McCarthyism. Hans Morgenthau, a legendary proponent of hard-nosed realism in foreign policy, famously characterised the infection of domestic norms with overseas malfeasance as a kind of “surreptitious totalitarianism”.

Despite the continuing cascade of clandestine interventions abroad, America remains convinced of its comparative ethical exceptionalism in international relations, especially compared to China. Such self-deception is a narcotic. It prevents one from feeling others’ pain and blinds us to how others see us; for the American public, it eases the pain of recognition.

Foolishly self-regarding Western commentary on Xi Jinping’s spectacular appointment to a third term as party general secretary makes the point. In America, term limits are relatively recent – and limited – efforts to bracket power. In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered his fourth four-year term (which led, of course, to the Twenty-second Amendment to limit presidents to two terms).

In reality, American politicians could be seen to make Xi look like a freshman. Obscured in the fog of the spotty term-limit law is the fact that US Congress itself has no term limits (and US Supreme Court justices get lifetime appointments).

Near-eternal incumbent US legislators include Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, first elected in 1974, more than 47 years ago; Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, since 1981; Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, since 1985. Also note that in 1987, back in the heyday of China’s Deng Xiaoping, California’s Nancy Pelosi was first elected to the House. Today she is House Speaker, at 82.

By contrast, the comparatively sprightly Xi, at 69, faces a long march before matching the runs of McConnell and Pelosi. Perhaps America might offer the world a long overdue diminishment of pretensions.

Author and journalist Tom Plate, distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at LMU, is vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute

Singapore’s George Yeo hopes China will stay out of ‘long, dark tunnel’ as Russia and the West wade into nuclear talk

• The ex-foreign minister is hopeful China will ‘have the wisdom and the statecraft to avoid entering’ the Ukraine war as it would put the world ‘in jeopardy’
• He characterised the Ukraine conflict as a ‘proxy war’ that typically occurs before world powers edge towards ‘Armageddon’

Bhavan Jaipragas

Russia and the West are walking into a “long, dark tunnel” with their rising rhetoric about a nuclear confrontation, and China should exercise wisdom and statecraft to avoid going down the same path, Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo has said.

Characterising the conflict in Ukraine – following Russia’s February invasion of its smaller neighbour – as a “proxy war”, Yeo said China’s entry into the fray would put the world in jeopardy.

“With the incorporation of the four [Ukrainian] oblasts to the Russian federation, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, I fear that Russia and the US and Europe are walking into a long, dark tunnel from which they cannot easily reverse,” Yeo said in an interview on Talking Post with the Post’s chief news editor Yonden Lhatoo.

Yeo comments came amid remarks by high-profile figures about the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

In the latest salvo, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell last week said Russian forces would be “annihilated” if President Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Putin in September warned that he was not “bluffing” when he said he would use “all available means” to protect Russia if its territorial integrity was threatened.

“This lighthearted talk of nuclear exchange is madness,” said Yeo, who has remained one of Singapore’s most followed public intellectuals since his retirement from politics in 2011. “Once you begin that exchange, there’s no stopping point, because the side that feels itself losing will become even more desperate. And then little by little, it will ratchet upwards.”

Yeo, who has remained a prolific commentator on China affairs since his 2011 retirement from politics, said he hoped the Asian superpower would “have the wisdom and the statecraft to avoid entering that tunnel”.

He added: “Because if it does, then the whole world would be in jeopardy. But I think the Chinese will find a way to stay out of this.”

Yeo, a military general-turned-politician, said before world powers dangerously edged towards “Armageddon”, there would be proxy or hybrid wars, such as the conflict taking place in Ukraine.

In such scenarios, countries “jostle for advantage, using the threat of war as leverage but not really wanting it to be made use of ultimately”.

However, when “we act dynamically against one another, we may end up in a position which we did not intend t0 be when we first started”, Yeo said. “I think this is what has happened in Europe. All parties have ended up in a position they did not wish for originally.”

In his new three-part book series Musings, Yeo shared his views on great power rivalry and Singapore’s place in the more contested geopolitical landscape.

Asked during the interview if the ongoing US-China tensions would eventually lead to “doom”, Yeo said he was not as optimistic as Singapore’s late independence leader Lee Kuan Yew.

The elder statesman had said that both the US and China were ultimately “rational”, but Yeo said he was unsure whether this was still the case, noting that ex-US president Donald Trump was brought into power by “mass emotions”.

Current US President Joe Biden is “weak”, Yeo said, and American society at large is divided by such mass emotion. “So China may be a rational player, [but] on the US side if something happens in the South China Sea, and the ship is sunk, hundreds of sailors lose their lives, I think the domestic reaction in the US will be so great it would be difficult for the White House to contain it.”

Hong Kong ‘not safe’ in 2019

Yeo, who served as chairman of Hong Kong-based Kerry Logistics Network from 2012 to 2019, also touched on the city’s political situation during the wide-ranging interview.

On the Beijing-imposed national security law (NSL), imposed in 2020 in the aftermath of the political turmoil a year earlier, Yeo said he was “relieved” when it was introduced.

Recalling the 2019 protests, Yeo said he and his wife were splitting their time between Hong Kong and Singapore during that period, spending at least a few days a month in the city state.

“In 2019, we no longer felt safe [in Hong Kong] and we were relieved when we came back to Singapore to be able to talk freely and to be able to eat in a restaurant late into the night”, Yeo said, adding that “Hong Kong was becoming strange to us” during that period.

“I was frankly quite disgusted by the way the Western media were lionising the violence, which they will never give allowance for in their own societies,” he said.

Yeo acknowledged that many Hong Kong residents, including his friends, were “still sullen” about the imposition of the NSL and were waiting to see what the longer term situation would be like.

His assessment was that the law had removed “one important question mark” about Hong Kong’s retention of the “one country, two systems” model beyond 2047.

“Now that the National Security Law is in place, which is entirely reasonable, because all countries have that … this has now ensured that beyond 2047, there will still be one country, two systems [and it’s] likely to continue indefinitely because it’s in China’s interest.”

The American chip industry’s US$1.5t meltdown

Thank the boom-and-bust cycle – and America’s government

In licking County, Ohio, fleets of dump trucks and bulldozers are shifting earth on the future site of chip factories. Intel is building two “fabs” there at a cost of around US$20 billion. In March, President Joe Biden called this expanse of dirt a “field of dreams” in his State of the Union speech. It was “the ground on which America’s future will be built”, he intoned.

In the spring, it was easy to be dreamy about America’s chip industry. The pandemic-induced semiconductor crunch had proved just how crucial chips were to modern life. Demand was still rising for all sorts of chip-powered technology, which these days, is most of it. Investors were less gloomy on chips than on other tech, which were taking a stock market beating. The Chips Act was making its way through Congress, promising to plough subsidies worth US$52 billion into the domestic industry, in order to reduce America’s reliance on foreign fabs and support projects like Intel’s Ohio factory.

Half a year later, the dreams look nightmarish. Demand for silicon appears to be falling as quickly as it had risen during the pandemic. In late September, Micron, an Idaho-based maker of memory chips, reported a 20 per cent year-on-year fall in quarterly sales. A week later, AMD, a Californian chip designer, slashed its sales estimate for the third quarter by 16 per cent. Within days, Bloomberg reported that Intel plans to lay off thousands of staff, following a string of poor results that are likely to continue when it presents its latest quarterly report on Oct 27. Since July, a basket of America’s 30 or so biggest chip firms have cut revenue forecasts for the third quarter from US$99 billion to US$88 billion. So far this year, more than US$1.5 trillion has been wiped from the combined market value of American-listed semiconductor companies.

The chip industry is notoriously cyclical at the best of times: The new capacity built in response to rising demand takes several years to materialise, by which time the demand is no longer white-hot. In America, this cycle is now being turbocharged by the government. The Chips Act, which became law in August to cheers from chip bosses, is stimulating the supply side of the semiconductor business just as the Biden administration is stepping up efforts to stop American-made chips and chipmaking equipment from going to China, dampening demand for American products in the world’s biggest semiconductor market.

Whether or not it makes strategic sense for America to bring more chip production home and to hamstring its geopolitical rival with export bans, the combination of more supply and less demand is a recipe for trouble. And if the American policies speed up China’s efforts to “resolutely win the battle in key core technologies”, as President Xi Jinping affirmed in a speech to the Communist Party congress on Oct 16, they could give rise to powerful Chinese competitors. Field of dreams? It is enough to keep you awake in terror at night.

The cyclical slump has so far been felt most acutely in consumer goods. PCs and smartphones account for almost half the US$600 billion-worth of chips sold annually. Having splurged during the pandemic, inflation-weary shoppers are buying fewer gadgets. Gartner, a research firm, expects smartphone sales to drop by 6 per cent this year, and those of PCs by 10 per cent. Firms like Intel, which in February was telling investors it expected PC demand to grow steadily for the next five years, are revising their outlooks as it becomes clear that many Covid-era purchases were simply brought forward.

Many analysts think that other segments could be next. Panic buying amid last year’s global chip shortage has left many carmakers and manufacturers of business hardware with inventories overflowing with silicon. New Street Research, a firm of analysts, estimates that between April and June, industrial firms’ stocks of chips were about 40 per cent above the historic level relative to sales. Inventories for PC makers and car companies are similarly full. Intel and Micron blamed their recent weak results in part on high inventories.

The supply glut and sputtering demand is already hitting prices. The cost of memory chips is down by two-fifths in the past year, according to Future Horizons, a research firm. The price of logic chips, which process data and are less commoditised than memory chips, is down by 3 per cent in the same period.

Chip buyers will work through their inventories eventually. But after they do, they may buy less than in the past. In August, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell, two big hardware makers, hinted that demand from business customers was beginning to soften. Sales of both PCs and smartphones had started to plateau before the pandemic, and this trend will probably resume in the coming years. Phonemakers cannot stuff ever more chips onto their devices forever. For companies such as Qualcomm, which derives half its sales from smartphone chips, and Intel, which gets a similar share from those for PCs, that is a headache.

The chipmakers’ response has been to bet on fast-growing new markets. AMD, Intel and Nvidia, another big chip designer, are battling over the cloud-computing data centres, where chip demand is still increasing. Qualcomm is diversifying into cars. In September, the firm’s bosses boasted it already had US$30 billion-worth of orders from carmakers. Intel, meanwhile, is expanding into semiconductors for networking gear and devices for the hyperconnected future of the Internet of Things. It is also getting into the contract manufacturing business, hoping to win market share from TSMC of Taiwan, the world’s biggest chipmaker and contract manufacturer of choice for fabless chip designers such as AMD and Nvidia.

These efforts, however, are now running into geopolitics. Like their counterparts in China and Europe, politicians in America want to lessen their countries’ dependence on foreign chipmakers, in particular TSMC, which manufactures 90 per cent of the world’s leading-edge chips. In response, America, China, the EU, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan together plan to subsidise domestic chipmaking to the tune of US$85 billion annually over the next three years, calculates Mark Lipacis of Jefferies, an investment bank. That would buy a fair bit of extra capacity globally.

At the same time, prospects for offloading the resulting chips are darkening, especially for American firms, as a result of America’s tightening controls on exports to China. Many American firms count the Asian giant, which imported US$400 billion-worth of semiconductors last year, as their biggest market. Intel’s Chinese sales made up US$21 billion of its overall revenues of US$79 billion last year. Nvidia said that an earlier round of restrictions, which limited sales of advanced data centre chips to Chinese customers and to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, would cost it US$400 million in third-quarter sales, equivalent to 6 per cent of its total revenues.

The latest restrictions, which target Chinese supercomputing and artificial intelligence efforts, are a particular concern for the companies which manufacture chipmaking tools. Three of the world’s five biggest such firms – Applied Materials, KLA and Lam Research – are American. The share of the trio’s sales that go to China has risen fast in the past few years, to about a third. Toshiya Hari of Goldman Sachs said that the controls are likely to cost the world’s toolmakers US$6 billion in lost revenues this year, equivalent to 9 per cent of their projected sales. After the new American export controls were unveiled, Applied Materials lowered its expected fourth-quarter revenue by 4 per cent to US$6.4 billion. Its share price has fallen by 13 per cent in the past two weeks. Those of KLA and Lam Research have tumbled by a fifth.

American chip bosses now fear that China could retaliate, further restricting their firms’ access to its vast market. It is already redoubling efforts to nurture domestic champions such as SMIC (in logic chips) and YMTC (in memory), as well as domestic toolmakers, that could one day challenge America’s historic silicon supremacy. The result could be a diminished American industry with less global clout and more capacity than it knows what to do with. That is a shaky foundation on which to build America’s future.

©2022 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

中国人劣根性的例子

以下几点为常见例子。

1.自己做不好、幹不来的事，也不希望别人做得来；幹得好，宁愿大家都不做，也不能让别人做得出色；幹得比自己好，你要是做了，他不是釜底抽薪，就是到处捣鼓你、设计你，让你不得安宁。 

2.幸灾乐祸，落井下石。看别人笑话，是不少人的劣根。看到别人有了灾难，不是伸手拉一把、助人于危难之中，而是在一旁偷笑；最糟糕的是，还有很多人喜欢投石下井。 

3.小人不能得志。小人一旦得志，不是专横就是跋扈，几乎到了连自己父母都不认识的地步，危害社会和平；专横的就像霸王般强势，一旦失势，立马就变成了懦弱无能之辈。 

4.损人利己，见利忘义，为了个人的一点利益，不惜伤害别人，颠倒是非黑白，把白的说成了黑，黑的说成了白，把没有的说的像真的一样，那管曾经与之患难与共的朋友。当然有时候就是损了人也不一定就有利自己，目的就是要搞垮人家，搞得别人不如他。 

5.大声嚷嚷，总害怕别人听不到自己吵杂的声音。这种行为常常使得他人心情烦躁、不得安宁，是造成社会动荡的根本原因之一。 

6.缺乏公共意识，到处吐痰，乱丢卫生巾和纸巾，把垃圾丢到别人家门口，纸尿片乱抛，不注意个人卫生，出国乱涂鸦，乱爬他国雕塑，不尊重历史文物等等。 

7.道德观念扭曲。女儿被人强奸，不为女儿出头，还反过来骂女儿，责骂女儿丢家里的脸、让大家都没脸见人。 

8.缺乏文化素养，不分青红皂白，胡乱责骂他人，从而导致他人心灵受创。自己犯错，只怪他人，不愿承认自身的错误，把一切责任都推到他人身上。凡事不为他人设想，只顾眼前利益。 

Why China’s people no longer look up to America

We Chinese once sought to learn from US successes; now we study its mistakes so that we can avoid them.

Wang Wen

My generation of Chinese looked up to the United States.

When I was a university student in northwestern China in the late 1990s, my friends and I tuned in to shortwave broadcasts of Voice of America, polishing our English while soaking up American and world news. We flocked to packed lecture halls whenever a visiting American professor was on campus. 

It was a thrilling time. China was emerging from isolationism and poverty, and as we looked to the future we studied democracy, market economics, equality and other ideals that made America great. We couldn’t realistically adopt them all because of China’s conditions, but our lives were transformed as we recalibrated our economy on a US blueprint.

Decades earlier, a reform-minded scholar said that even the moon in the United States was rounder than in China. My schoolmates and I wanted to believe it.

But after years of watching America’s wars overseas, reckless economic policies and destructive partisanship — culminating in last year’s disgraceful assault on the US Capitol ­­— many Chinese, including me, can barely make out that shining beacon anymore.

Yet as relations between our countries deteriorate, the United States blames us. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did so in May, saying that China was “undermining” the rules-based world order and could not be relied upon to “change its trajectory”.

I have misgivings about some of my country’s policies. And I recognise that some criticisms of my government’s policies are justified. But Americans must also recognise that US behaviour is hardly setting a good example.

The shift in Chinese attitudes wasn’t a given. But when US-led NATO forces mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999 during the Kosovo war, our idolising of America began to wane. Three people were killed in that attack, and 20 were wounded. Two years later, a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in the South China Sea, leaving a Chinese pilot dead. These incidents may have seemed relatively minor to Americans, but they shocked us. We had largely avoided foreign wars and were not used to our citizens dying in conflicts involving other countries. The shift in perception gained pace as the 2000s unfolded and more Chinese had televisions. We watched as the carnage of America’s disastrous involvement in Iraq, launched in 2003 on false pretences, was beamed into our homes.

In 2008, China had to defend itself against the consequences of American greed when the US subprime lending fiasco touched off the global financial crisis. China was forced to create a huge stimulus package, but our economy still suffered great damage. Millions of Chinese lost their jobs.

Following his predecessors, President Barack Obama announced a string of weapon sales to Taiwan and embarked on his so-called pivot to Asia, which we regarded as an attempt to rally our Asian neighbours against us. President Donald Trump declared a destructive trade war against us, and Chinese citizens were as shocked as anyone when a pro-Trump mob stormed the citadel of American democracy on Jan 6, 2021. The visit to Taiwan last week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has only further disappointed many Chinese, who saw it as a violation of US commitments on Taiwan.

China’s critics in the United States need to realise that American actions such as these are causing outcomes in China that even the United States doesn’t want.

It’s no accident that China’s military spending — a source of concern in Washington for years — began rising in the early 2000s after the Belgrade bombing and the plane collision. It quickly took off after the war in Iraq showcased how far ahead the US military was compared with ours. China’s past weakness had been calamitous: Western powers attacked and forced China to surrender territory in the 1800s, and Japan’s brutal invasion in the 20th century killed millions.

US officials no doubt want China to follow the American path of liberalism. But in contrast to my university days, the tone of Chinese academic research on the United States has shifted markedly. Chinese government officials used to consult me on the benefits of American capital markets and other economic concepts. Now I am called upon to discuss US cautionary tales, such as the factors that led to the financial crisis. We once sought to learn from US successes; now we study its mistakes so that we can avoid them.

The sense of America as a dangerous force in the world has filtered into Chinese public attitudes as well. In 2020 I remarked on a Chinese television programme that we still have much to learn from the United States — and was attacked on Chinese social media. I stick to my view but am now more careful in talking positively about the United States. When I do, I preface it with a criticism.

Chinese students still want to study at US universities but are acutely fearful of American gun violence, anti-Asian attacks or being labelled a spy. They are sent off with ominous advice: Don’t stray from campus, watch what you say, back away from conflict.

And despite Chinese weariness with our country’s tough zero-Covid policy, America’s dismal record on the pandemic has only strengthened Chinese public support for our government.

To be clear: China needs to change, too. It needs to be more open to dialogue with the United States, refrain from using US problems as an excuse to go slow on reform and respond more calmly and constructively to American criticism on things like trade policy and human rights.

But although we don’t enjoy the same rights as Americans, many in China like where we are right now.

In the late 1970s, China was exhausted and traumatised from the destruction and hardship caused by the Cultural Revolution, which nearly destroyed us. Deng Xiaoping initiated reforms that brought stability and helped lift 800 million people out of poverty. We have achieved spectacular increases in income and life expectancy and stayed out of foreign wars. Tough firearm regulations allow us to walk down any street in the country at night with virtually no fear of harm. When we look at America’s enormous pandemic toll, gun violence, political divisions and the attack on the US Capitol, it only reminds Chinese people of our own chaotic past that we have left behind.

None of this is meant to gloat over America’s troubles; a strong, stable and responsible United States is good for the world. China still has much to learn from America, and we have a lot in common. We drive Chinese-built Fords and Teslas, wash our hair with Procter & Gamble shampoos and sip coffee at Starbucks. Solving some of the planet’s biggest problems requires that we work together.

But that doesn’t mean following America over the cliff.

NYTIMES

Wang Wen (@WangwenR) is the executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank at Renmin University of China. He is the author of “A Great Power’s Long March”, an analysis of China’s re-emergence as a global power. He is a Communist Party member and a former chief opinion editor of The Global Times, an arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, The People’s Daily.

Japan then, China now: the US is resorting to economic rival-bashing tactics again

• The Plaza Accord, signed in New York in 1985, did its job of hobbling Japanese competitiveness and forcing a ‘hollowing out’ of the country’s economy
• While the US has been unable to use a Plaza-like weapon against China, it now seeks to protect ‘economic security’ by intervening in supply chains

Anthony Rowley

On September 22, 1985, finance ministers of the then G5 nations – France, West Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States – signed the Plaza Accord in New York, devaluing the dollar dramatically against the yen and major European currencies. It was a rival-bashing tactic that has since become an American habit.

Thirty-seven years later, almost to the day, Japan is only now getting close to shaking off the massive deflationary impact of the Plaza Accord, and while China has managed to shield itself against such currency attacks, it has come under siege from different economic weapons.

All the noise we are hearing now about the yen plunging to its lowest level in decades, along with calls for currency market interventions, ignores the fact that pre-Plaza the yen/dollar exchange rate was around 260 and that within a couple of years or so the yen almost doubled in value.

Some might argue that the rate of 260 yen to the dollar was just as arbitrary as that of 360 set by occupying powers after World War II. But the fact is that Japanese price structures had adjusted to these levels by the time of the Plaza Accord, and the deflationary shock was thus profound.

No economy can withstand a trauma of Plaza magnitude without having the stuffing knocked out of it. Japan adjusted, but only at the expense of manufacturing sector employment and domestic economic growth. It now faces the need to adjust yet again to keep pace with fresh external shocks.

As a consequence of the 1985 accord, signed in New York’s Plaza Hotel, Japan suffered several “lost decades” of growth thereafter. In fact, what is mistakenly described as yen “weakness” now marks something closer to a return to an equilibrium exchange rate for the yen.

Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda is well aware of this fact. He and former vice finance minister Eisuke Sakakibara helped steer Japan through rough waters after the Plaza Accord and the trauma of deflation. He is unlikely to be in a hurry to return to a strong yen now.

Why has the US not cried foul at Kuroda’s stealth tactic of letting the yen begin a steady decline – if not to anything like pre-Plaza levels then at least to well below the 100 to the dollar or even the levels it touched at times in post-Plaza decades?

The answer is partly that the Plaza Accord did its job of hobbling Japanese competitiveness and forcing a “hollowing out” of the Japanese economy after manufacturers reacted by shifting manufacturing production offshore. And it is partly the fact that the US has bigger fish to fry nowadays.

Washington has been unable to use a Plaza-like weapon against China, which has wisely preserved exchange controls, but US administrations have found other weapons of choice to use against those who, like China, dare to challenge American supremacy.

Under the guise of protecting “economic security” – which is in reality old-fashioned protectionism by another name – the US and some of its allies have begun talking about and acting upon the idea of bringing US production back onshore where it is supposedly safe from competitors.

This is disastrously backward-looking. It implies that for the sake of political expediency, many of the evolutions that Asian and other economies have been forced to go through in order to adapt to overseas-initiated currency and trade wars will need to be reworked.

Trade links and manufacturing supply chains that have evolved in line with the requirements of efficient international production and distribution have survived arbitrary currency interventions and tariff impositions. But they are unlikely to survive security-minded interventions.

Inflation will inevitably become a more entrenched and long-lasting phenomenon as a result because from now on supply chain interruptions will reflect changes in underlying trade and economic structures rather than temporary hiccups caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

All this exposes the fallacy that currency manipulation, tariffs and other trade barriers, plus specious arguments now about the need to preserve national economic security, can substitute for international cooperation on how the global economy and production should be structured.

It also highlights the fact that, in an age of globalisation, the idea that one major currency (the dollar) whose value is controlled by a single power (the US) can successfully facilitate trade and investment among multiple players without regard to their individual economic circumstances is wrong.

It is tragic that there is a refusal in Washington and other Western capitals to accept the fact that the world economic order has changed even if the political order is reluctant to adapt. There are bigger battles, such as climate change, to be fought than currency, trade and economic security wars.

Anthony Rowley is a veteran journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial affairs

Has the Pentagon been caught using Twitter for pro-West disinformation?

• Facebook and Twitter have shut down dozens of fake accounts, suspecting they were created by the US military
• The Pentagon refuses to confirm or deny the US military was behind the accounts, but launches ‘review’

Agence France-Presse

The US Department of Defence has launched a review of its psychological warfare operations after the discovery of fake accounts on social media promoting pro-West disinformation, an official confirmed.

Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder confirmed the review after a Washington Post report said social media giants Facebook and Twitter had shut down a number of fake accounts suspecting they were created by the US military.

Ryder did not say confirm or deny that the military was behind fake accounts, and said the information still needed to be reviewed.

He cautioned against assuming that the Defence Department was behind the accounts, leaving it possible that another government agency was involved.

He said the review is “an opportunity for us to assess the current work that’s being done in this arena”.

The Washington Post noted a report last month by Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory on pro-Western covert influence operations.

The report said Twitter and Facebook parent Meta had removed nearly 150 US and Britain-origin accounts in July and August engaging in “inauthentic behaviour”.

The Graphika-Stanford investigation said that, after analysing the accounts they discovered an interconnected web of accounts on eight social media platforms that had been using “deceptive tactics” to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and in Central Asia.

The accounts came from a series of campaigns over five years rather than one single effort, the report said.

The accounts “consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China and Iran,” it said.

Citing unnamed government sources, The Washington Post tied at least some of the activity to the Pentagon, and said that officials of the US Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, were “facing scrutiny”.

Ryder said the military’s psychological operations, or “military information support operations”, are structured and legal, and are to support activities in the field.

“These are not public affairs operations,” he said.

“It’s an aspect of warfare as old as warfare itself, and we conduct those operations in support of national security priorities,” he told reporters.

He noted that military deception operations were crucial in World War II, and are an integral part of the warfighting toolkit.

“There are opportunities in conducting operations against adversaries where you may want to use information in a way that is going to help them think a certain way - not truthful information,” he said.

“What I would highlight is that they must be undertaken in compliance with US law and Defence Department policy and we have safeguards in place and are committed to observing those safeguards,” he said.

China ‘not to blame’ for African debt crisis, it’s the West: study

• High-interest loans from private Western lenders account for most of the burden on countries in Africa, Britain’s Debt Justice charity finds
• Campaigners are calling on the G7 to stop using Chinese loans as ‘distraction’ while letting their own banks, asset managers and oil traders off the hook

Jevans Nyabiage

African countries owe three times more debt to Western banks, asset managers and oil traders than to China, and are charged double the interest, according to a study released on Monday by British campaign charity Debt Justice.

This is despite the growing accusations by the US and other Western countries that China’s lending is behind the debt troubles faced by some African countries.

The study said just 12 per cent of the continent’s external debt was owed to Chinese lenders, compared to 35 per cent owed to Western private creditors, according to calculations based on World Bank data.

Interest rates charged on private loans were almost double those on Chinese loans, while the most indebted countries were less likely to have their debt dominated by China, the study found. The average interest rate on private sector loans is 5 per cent, compared to 2.7 per cent on loans from Chinese public and private lenders.

The study was released ahead of the G20 finance ministers meeting from July 15-16 in Indonesia. Campaigners are calling on Western countries, particularly Britain and the US, to compel private lenders to take part in the Common Framework – the G20’s latest debt relief scheme.

The study found a dozen of the 22 African countries with the highest debts were paying more than 30 per cent of their total external repayments to private lenders. These included Cabo Verde, Chad, Egypt, Gabon, Malawi, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia and Zambia.

South Sudan is one of the hardest hit in this category, with 81 per cent of its debt repayments going to private creditors, and just 11 per cent to China. Ghana is also paying more than half of its external debt obligations to the private sector, with 11 per cent going to China and the rest to multilateral lenders and other governments.

Chinese lenders accounted for more than 30 per cent of loan payments in six of the 22 most indebted countries – Angola, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Zambia.

The study calculations showed 59 per cent of Angola’s foreign debt payments serviced Chinese lenders. And Djibouti – where China has poured billions of dollars into building ports and free trade zones, and also set up its first overseas military base – makes 64 per cent of its external debt payments to Beijing.

Debt Justice policy head Tim Jones said Western leaders blamed China for debt crises in Africa, “but this is a distraction”.

“The truth is their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible but the G7 are letting them off the hook.”

Jones said China had taken part in the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative during the pandemic, while private lenders did not. “There can be no effective debt solution without the involvement of private lenders. The UK and US should introduce legislation to compel private lenders to take part in debt relief,” he said.

The G20 initiative, unveiled in May 2020, provided 48 economies with temporary cash-flow relief, delivering about US$12.9 billion in debt service payments by the end of December when it ended.

But the exclusion of private and multilateral lenders meant countries that applied to take part in the initiative saw just 23 per cent of their external repayments suspended.

In 2020, Zambia became the first African country to default – on US$3 billion in dollar-denominated bonds – in the pandemic era. It is now in the process of restructuring about US$17 billion in external debt as a precondition to securing IMF loans of US$1.4 billion.

Lusaka owes Chinese lenders about US$6 billion, which has gone into building mega projects including airports, highways and power dams.

The initiative’s replacement, the G20 Common Framework, allows participating countries to agree to restructure debt with bilateral lenders and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The nations are then supposed to seek similar debt treatment from private sector creditors.

Only Chad, Zambia and Ethiopia have so far applied for help through the Common Framework, but all are still waiting for debt relief.

The G7 countries have blamed China for the failure of the debt relief programme to help heavily indebted countries avoid default, doubling down in May with a statement from the finance ministers of the world’s seven most advanced economies.

“With regards to the implementation of the Common Framework, it remains essential that all relevant creditor countries – including non-Paris Club countries, such as those like China, with large outstanding claims on low-income countries facing debt sustainability challenges – contribute constructively to the necessary debt treatments as requested,” they said.

Yungong Theo Jong, head of programmes at the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (Afrodad), said multilateral and private lenders remained the biggest creditors to African governments.

“Loans from China have increased Africa’s indebtedness, but by far less than Western lenders. All lenders must participate in debt relief. Western governments must lead the way by making private lenders cancel debts,” he said.

In the eyes of others, the US is not the benign power it thinks it is

Dani Rodrik

• America’s foreign policy goals are often self-serving, while its designs for a rules-based international order primarily reflect the interests of its business and policy elites
• What’s good for the US may not be good for the world. The sooner Washington recognises that, the better

When I started teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was the dominant preoccupation of US economic policy. The book Japan as Number One by Harvard’s premier Japan expert at the time, Ezra Vogel, set the tone of the debate.

I remember being struck back then by the degree to which the discussion, even among academics, was tinged by a certain sense of American entitlement to international pre-eminence. The United States could not let Japan dominate key industries and had to respond with its own industrial and trade policies – not just because these might help the US economy, but also because the US simply could not be No 2.

Until then, I had thought that aggressive nationalism was a feature of the Old World – insecure societies ill at ease with their international standing and reeling from real or perceived historical injustices. American elites, rich and secure, may have valued patriotism, but their global outlook tended towards cosmopolitanism.

But zero-sum nationalism was not far from the surface, which became clear once America’s place atop the global economic totem pole was threatened.

After three decades of US triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a similar process is now playing out on a vastly greater scale. It is driven both by China’s rise – which represents a more significant economic challenge to America than Japan did in the 1980s and is also a geopolitical risk – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US has responded to these developments by seeking to reassert its global primacy – a goal American policymakers readily conflate with that of establishing a more secure and prosperous world. They regard US leadership as central to the promotion of democracy, open markets and a rules-based international order.

What could be more conducive to peace and prosperity than that? The view that US foreign policy goals are fundamentally benign underpins the myth of American exceptionalism: what is good for the US is good for the world.

While this is undoubtedly true at times, the myth too often blinds American policymakers to the reality of how they exercise power. The US undermines other democracies when it suits its interests and has a long record of meddling in sovereign countries’ domestic politics. Its 2003 invasion of Iraq was as clear a violation of the United Nations Charter as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.

US designs for “open markets” and a “rules-based international order” often primarily reflect the interests of US business and policy elites rather than smaller countries’ aspirations. And when international rules diverge from those interests, the US simply stays away (as with the International Criminal Court, or most of the core International Labour Organization conventions).

Many of these tensions were evident in a recent speech by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on America’s approach to China. Blinken described China as “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”, arguing that “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress”.

Blinken is correct that many of the elements of the post-World-War-II order, such as the UN Charter, are not purely American or Western. But it is far from certain that China poses a greater threat to those truly universal constructs than the US does. For example, much of the trouble that US policymakers have with Chinese economic practices relates to domains – especially trade, investment and technology – where universal rules hardly prevail.

According to Blinken, the US “will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system”. Again, who could possibly oppose such a vision?

But China and many others worry that US intentions are much less benign. To them, Blinken’s statement sounds like a threat to contain China and limit its options, while bullying other countries into siding with America.

None of this is to claim an equivalence between current US actions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s gross human rights violations in Xinjiang and land grabs in the Himalayas and South China Sea.

For all its faults, the US is a democracy where critics can openly criticise and oppose the government’s foreign policy. But that makes little difference to countries treated as pawns in America’s geopolitical competition with China, which often struggle to distinguish between the global actions of major powers.

Blinken drew a clear link between China’s authoritarian practices and the country’s presumed threat to global order. This is a mirror-image projection of America’s belief in its own benign exceptionalism. But just as democracy at home does not imply goodwill abroad, domestic repression need not inevitably lead to external aggression. China also claims to be interested in a stable, prosperous global order – just not one arranged exclusively on US terms.

The irony is that the more the US treats China as a threat and attempts to isolate it, the more China’s responses will seem to validate America’s fears.

With the US seeking to convene a club of democracies openly opposing China, it is not surprising that President Xi Jinping cosied up to Putin just as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. As the journalist Robert Wright notes, countries excluded from such groupings will band together.

To those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, US foreign policy elites respond with a rhetorical question: would you rather live in a world dominated by the US or by China?

In truth, other countries would rather live in a world without domination, where smaller states retain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with all others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not become collateral damage when major powers fight it out.

The sooner US leaders recognise that others do not view America’s global ambitions through the same rose-tinted glasses, the better it will be for everyone.

Dani Rodrik is professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Copyright: Project Syndicate

American aggression needs to be reined in for the good of Asia and the world

 Chandran Nair

• Decades of exceptionalism, ideological obsessions and a deep-rooted sense of superiority is catching up with the United States
• The world needs to appreciate the rapid shifts in the global order arising from the US’ toxic domestic situation, and how its political elite distracts people from its decline with an aggressive foreign policy anchored in outdated doctrines

US President Joe Biden visited Asia last week and triggered panic across the region when he spoke out of turn and unproductively about war with China.

At a time when the world is reeling from the effects of the war in Ukraine and when so much of the region is still trying to recover from the pandemic, including the economic fallout, Biden chose not to speak about peace and collaboration but instead deliberately fuelled tensions. This is unconscionable.

It is high time for leaders of the region to no longer remain passive to such bullying and reckless behaviour, or worse, exude subservience in the presence of Western leaders by outsourcing the management of regional issues and differences to them, including bilateral tensions.

Biden’s comments brought into clear focus Washington’s fearful obsession over the rise of China, which is an unprecedented challenge to its assumed role as global leader. This challenge is made much more uncomfortable for the US and its Western allies by the fact China is a non-Caucasian civilisation, and its rise upturns 400 years of Western dominance of world affairs, often referred to as the “rules-based” global order.

But the truth is that decades of exceptionalism, ideological obsessions and a deep-rooted sense of superiority is catching up with the US. There exists a major frontline within the nation that is tearing it apart but about which its leaders remain in full denial.

As soon as Biden returned to the US after his warmongering mission to Asia, he was greeted by the latest in an ongoing tragedy at home – 21 people, including 19 children, killed by a domestic terrorist armed by America’s home-grown merchants of death, the gun industry.

Biden’s response was to scold the nation, by lamenting, “When are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” A plea of a helpless man, coming from supposedly the world’s most powerful leader.

What, therefore, gives Biden the right to posture as the leader of the so-called free world? His statements are primarily based on an outdated reliance on projecting America’s military might and apparent willingness to go to war to defend the world against the US version of the “bad guys”. This is despite its defeat in all the major wars it has triggered over the last half a century, from Vietnam and Iraq to Afghanistan. All examples of people seeking to be free of foreign occupation.

The long-held fear across Asia of a reckless militaristic empire starting a war here is quickly being replaced by a new realisation and awakening: that all of these machinations are the desperate throes of a nation that is entirely unwilling to share power with others, and is internally wracked by conflict and social decline.

The US thus desperately seeks refuge or even reassurance in its self-appointed role as leader of the “free world”, driven by a desperate desire to retain its privileges by projecting aggression across the world.

Much of this hinges on the leveraging of fig leaves, such as leading the fight against authoritarian states, defending democracy or standing up for universal values and providing security guarantees for the nations of the world.

But in reality, the US is seemingly incapable of protecting even its children. So, Biden came to Asia, spoke and war mongered but he did not conquer. People across the world have begun to see through the veneer of American exceptionalism, as the bullying and intimidation has persisted for too long.

The hypocrisy is far too obvious to explain away. This is a tipping point, as formerly colonised populations around the world – subservient through centuries of indoctrination – are now beginning to see the emperor with no clothes on.

To understand the implications of the decline of the US on the rest of the world, one has to understand the true nature of the broken state of affairs. This means looking well beyond the supposed might of the American economy.

The reliance on economic performance indicators to assess the strength of the US and amplify its power, glosses over deep-rooted structural failings, and this is a grave mistake – and even a form of denial. These are wholly superficial and inappropriate indicators of a society’s well-being and resilience.

A true reflection of the realities in the US would include the following indicators:

• The unabated gun violence and the killing of its children, to which a corrupt political system has been unresponsive. A nation that cannot protect its children from such wanton slaughter is immoral and has no right lecturing the world about values, human rights or democracy.

• The continuing large-scale systemic discrimination of black people, including killings such as the one in Buffalo.

• An entrenched industrial military complex (IMC) that thrives on selling and exporting guns, weapons and war.

• A growing right-wing white supremacist movement now led by the former President who only last week sharing a post speaking about an impending civil war – incitement?

• Extreme and growing inequalities, yet a completely detached belief among the majority that a “thriving economy”, which in reality serves the very rich, represents success and progress. This is worsened by the degree of idolisation in American media.

• The widespread and slow death being inflicted on millions of Americans by the nature of their consumption habits, abetted by the structure of the US’ unfettered capitalist economy – in particular the stranglehold of the junk food and pharmaceutical industry. The Covid-19 pandemic further exposed the severity of this underlying health crisis.

• A public that is inured to foreign conflict and has scant regard for the death and destruction inflicted on non-Americans by the country’s never-ending wars.

This is not to say other countries do not have some of these issues. But none exist on this scale. Most importantly, no other country with these large scale internal challenges borne out of political failure and societal fissures seeks to relentlessly occupy the higher moral ground and impose upon or dictate to others in order to maintain economic dominance; not even China.

The world, and especially a fast-growing Asia, needs to appreciate the rapid and fundamental shifts in the global order arising from the US’ toxic domestic situation, and how its political elite distracts the world and Americans from its decline (and obvious lack of moral authority) with an aggressive foreign policy anchored in outdated doctrines. Their recklessness threatens all of us. This dangerous trend will reach a potentially catastrophic tipping point far more significant than those expressed at the World Economic Forum last week in response to the war in Ukraine.

It is time for the world, perhaps led by the large nations of Asia, to demilitarise the world of the American Military Industrial Complex (AMIC) by developing a 21st century doctrine of security and peace that is not tethered to the war machine that is the AMIC.

It is an oxymoron to talk about peace and security guarantees and expect to be led by a nation that has been at war for 93 per cent of the time since its independence and has the world’s largest defence spend – more than the next nine countries combined. With so much capital, the door is wide open for vested interests, and the defence industry has dangerously become a significant player in the US economy.

Europe is only beginning to understand, albeit rather late in the day, the consequences of outsourcing its security to a war industry with such interests, given that the AMIC now appears to have seen an opportunity to prolong the conflict in Ukraine and serve its interests.

The AMIC poses an existential threat to world peace because it has partially captured the political economy of the most powerful country on the planet.

Five of the nation’s biggest defence contractors spent a combined US$60 million to lobby the US government in 2020. The media worships military people – who have investments in defence stocks – and have them on their payroll. Many politicians have stakes in the military industrial complex, and the tech and finance industries are embedded in it.

For this reason, the US is believed to be one of the biggest threats to world peace. The military industrial complex has become so large that it does not care about winnable wars. It simply needs wars, period.

Overcoming the challenge presented by the AMIC can be compared with the task of decarbonising the world through a move towards more non-fossil fuel energy sources. It will be a long march, but the world did not start by asking the fossil fuel industry to come up with solutions, and nor does the world ever expect the sector to be fully supportive.

Instead, new frameworks and doctrines have been created for a new major transformation of our energy future. We need the same to tackle the AMIC and its natural penchant for war.

This is a massive industry with tentacles everywhere in the US, including among lawmakers, media groups and the tech and financial industry. Overseas it is omnipresent, with an unknown number of subsidiaries around the world, aided by corrupt governments who are clients.

It is no secret that defence budgets in most developing countries are where large-scale corruption is most prevalent. It is a money spinner just like the fossil fuel industry, and taming it will require bold new approaches about shaping the future of the world.

It will need to start with a revolution of the mind among Asian leaders, including the complete rejection of their subservience to the US and its Western alliance. Asian leaders should recognise that by curbing their need to emulate or seek guidance or legitimacy from America in foreign policy affairs, they will reduce opportunities to feed the AMIC and thereby sow the seeds for a less risky future based on regional self-determination.

This is the first step towards rebuffing the confrontational ideologies of the USA and it Western allies and for building a new framework that will once and for all toss the tensions of the past into the dustbin of history, which have been so expertly used by Western powers to continue to divide the nations of Asia.

This will allow for regional heavyweights like China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia to come together and map a new future for the region rather than continue to be actors in a divide and rule, neocolonial geopolitical theatre marshalled by the US.

It will compel a rising power like China to honour its commitment to a peaceful rise as the demilitarisation of the AMIC becomes an enabling doctrine for a new regional peace and security pact. This outcome is not a far-fetched undertaking, as the example of Asean has proven.

While far from perfect, Asean has slowly and surely built a doctrine of its own that has allowed for peaceful coexistence in a way that also works to improve the livelihoods of its people. It has, most importantly, avoided war despite the presence of the AMIC.

The behaviour of the Korean and Japanese leaders during the visit of the US president was awkward to watch and not befitting of these two great nations and their cultures and seemed to belong to a bygone era. Imagine a peace and security treaty involving China, Japan and Korea that does not involve current day security guarantees by the US and its Western allies, which to date have only served to divide and heighten tensions.

Asian leaders need to realise that a post-Western world is being born, and that means drawing new lines of alliances and steering a new course, which will be a departure from the highly dangerous drivers of US and Western intentions in the region, rooted in preserving an old archaic and even imperial order.

Ideally, Europe will be a willing partner, but it now seems unlikely as the war in Ukraine and the billions of dollars of US military aid flowing in is only going to make Europe behave like client states of the US, Nato and the AMIC.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and ExCom member of the Club of Rome. He is also the author of ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World’ and ‘The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society’.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and ExCom member of the Club of Rome. He is also the author of ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World’ and ‘The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society’.