September 2018. An American destroyer was performing a routine maneuver when a Chinese battleship approached at full speed to send him away. 152 meters long and weighing 8,500 tons, the destroyer had to swerve sharply to the right.
By a matter of seconds a collision was avoided. If the ships had collided, they would have been severely damaged, with many dead and wounded. For the Chinese Communist Party, the South Sea belongs to China.
For the United States, it's an international free transit zone. Neither government is willing to make concessions. Since then, with each passing day, the South Sea is becoming one of the most militarized regions in the world.
China and the United States now face each other, waiting for someone to take the first step. Like the South China Sea, perhaps the world has become too small for two superpowers. In 2019, the People's Republic of China celebrated its 70th anniversary.
The Chinese government had the biggest ceremony in Beijing's history, including a grand military parade with more than 100,000 participants. Only 11 years earlier, the opening of the Olympics celebrated Confucius and ignored Mao Zedong. Following the favored tactic of former leader Deng Xiaoping: "Hide your strength, and bide your time.
" Now, China no longer hides its strength. And its time seems to have arrived. THE CHINESE DREAM.
We must double our efforts and continue with a firm will to push forward the cause of socialism with chinese characteristics, and continue to realize the great renaissance of the Chinese Nation and the Chinese Dram. The end of the American dream; the beginning of the Chinese dream. China will shape the 21st century, just as the United States shaped the 20th century.
However, their values are quite different from those that oriented global politics in the previous century. The Chinese government has installed 626 million facial recognition cameras. The Chinese people take for granted that the government collects their data.
In 2020, 468 million personal records were sold to financial institutions. And compulsory cooperation with the Party has been a law since 2017. The security and privacy of foreign citizens and investors seem to have been abandoned.
The new laws reflect a desire for total control, preparing the country for a future of competition, distrust and war. The Chinese giant has been expanding its influence globally, with frictions with the United States becoming more intense and frequent. Xi Jinping, President of China, warned: "Matters in Asia must be addressed by Asians, must be resolved by Asians, and Asians must protect Asia's security.
" His comments come as the United States seeks to increase its military, technological and cultural presence on the continent. Henry Kissinger, a former U. S.
Secretary of State, said that a conflict between the United States and China would be worse than the two Great Wars combined. With this idea in mind, he influenced Americans to finance the largest dictatorship in the world. Now, the destiny of humanity depends on the two countries finding ways to coexist.
THE NEW COLD WAR American ships have already taken ginseng to China in exchange for tea and exotic products. Christian missionaries took Christianity, education, and western technology to China. Chinese immigrants helped build the American West, and there are "Chinatowns" in many major cities.
Americans and Chinese share a rich and profound history. The name China gives to the United States is "Meiguó", which means "the beautiful country". However, with the Communist Revolution and the creation of the People's Republic of China, the two countries became enemies.
When Nixon went to China, he got off the plane to follow a new plan, devised by his secretary, Henry Kissinger. It was a historic visit that allowed China to enter the global market. The result of an old plan.
It all started with the belief that communist dictatorships were a purely economic phenomenon. As prosperity reached these nations, they would gradually adhere to democratic values. In practice, it was about throwing money at China until it became a freer place.
As a result of the new policy, Den Xiaoping announced: the "Open Doors Policy," inviting foreign companies to the country. A few days later, the Coca-Cola bottles arrived. From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, eight American presidents invested heavily in China, believing that it would make the country more inclined to liberal values.
The result was the most massive economic transfer in the world. In 1995, China's economy was smaller than Italy's. Today it is 7 times bigger, second only to the United States.
Most international students at American universities are Chinese, and Xi Jinping's daughter graduated from Harvard. Microsoft's largest laboratory outside the United States is in China. Shenzhen, which 35 years ago was a fishing village, now rivals Silicon Valley in technological innovation.
Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba have the same stature as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. China registered almost half of the patents in the world in 2019. But the expected freedom hasn't arrived.
The Party continued to control the fate and opinions of the people with an iron fist. Millions are tracked by facial recognition cameras, fingerprints, and biometric data. China imprisons more than a million religious dissidents in places called "Vocational Training Centers" Our purpose is to ger rid of their extremist thoughts.
Some provinces already collect DNA from citizens for control purposes. And the country became well known for disrespecting the intellectual property of major brands. The West accepted the Chinese way of doing business, hoping for a change in attitude that didn't come.
My feeling is that you the media need to learn more. You are very familiar woth the Western set of "value" but after all you are "too young" Do you understand what I mean? Gradually tensions returned to levels that hadn't been seen since the Cold War.
In 2013, without direct elections, Xi Jinping was elected president of China. As soon as he took office, he gave a sample of his power and of the efficiency in Chinese politics: Xi Jinping purged opponents from within the Party and indicted more than 100,000 people for corruption. "Where does an 500-pound gorilla sit?
" "Anywhere it wants to. " THE 500-POUND GORILLA This English expression refers to those who can do whatever they want without having to fear the consequences. China has started a global infrastructure project to create trade corridors and bring together more than 100 countries.
The works are already multiplying in Asia, Africa, and Europe, forming the ambitious backbone of the Chinese agenda. Xi Jinping wants a new globalization that ignores old Western rules. In the past, Southeast Asian nations looked to the United States for infrastructure funding.
In return, they were forced to maintain a facade of democracy. Now, the financier doesn't care for democracy, and dictatorship is not a problem. Through Chinese funding, Cambodia shut down radio stations and newspapers, expelled US-funded democracy advocates, jailed human rights defenders and journalists, and much more.
Countries like Malaysia, Burma, the Maldives, Pakistan, and many others, are following suit. China provides loans to developing countries, knowing that they can't repay them. These countries are forced to give in to the Communist Party's geopolitical interests.
Gradually, all of these countries become "friends" with China, just as they did with the Soviet Union in the 20th century. However, there's an important difference: during the Cold War, the United States had no commercial ties with the Soviet Union. More than 70,000 American companies do business in China, generating more than US$100 billion in revenue annually.
General Motors already sells more cars in China than in the United States. And companies like Apple depend on the country to manufacture their products. A consequence of the American economic opening that enriched China and fostered the greatest dictatorship in the world.
In a complicated and tense relationship made of broken promises and frustrated expectations. IN LOVE AND IN WAR In 2007, Chinese agents hacked Lockheed Martin and got the plans for the F-35 fighter. Shortly after, the J-31, a very similar Chinese fighter made its public debut.
Many countries practice industrial espionage. But what makes the Chinese case special is its ambition and scale. In 2014, Chinese hackers stole records of 22 million U.
S. government employees. Four years later, a Chinese espionage campaign stole information from 45 American technology companies, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Universities, military centers, individuals, and companies in the public and private sector: China uses know-how at all levels to set up cyber-attack groups. Chinese aggressiveness resulted in the banning of many companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix, which are not available in the country. But the United States now depends on Chinese-made computers, networks, and equipment.
And the new 5G Internet technology, is produced by Huawei. This company receives hundreds of billions of dollars from the Communist Party. The charge: its 5G components were developed to allow spying and hacking.
BACK TO THE COLD WAR China is Donald Trump's primary target. Unfair trade deals were one of the main points of his campaign. During trade negotiations earlier this year, Trump tried to make positive statements about China.
But Americans were hit hard by the COVID crisis, and the speech has changed. In March 2019, a milestone: the war committee formed 50 years ago to fight Stalin's Soviet Union, was reopened to fight Xi Jinping's China. And the Washington government has stopped all attempts to deal diplomatically with China.
The United States still spends twice as much as China on national defense. And they remain the greatest military force the world has ever known. But every day, China becomes a stronger opponent.
It has the largest Navy. More soldiers. Its own satellite geolocation system.
And an army of hackers. In the Pentagon war games, China beats the United States in a simulated Taiwan War. Both countries have nuclear weapons kept under state secrecy.
The formula for victory is pretty simple: whoever remains standing wins. The plan to finance China by believing in its future freedom was not new. The fact that China now lords over proxy countries may not be a coincidence.
Financing new adversaries to defeat old enemies has become a habit of the American government. That communism would be a natural enemy of capitalism was no surprise. But how communism managed to develop to the point of igniting a Cold War with the greatest power in the world remains a mystery to many people.
In 1917, in the First World War, the German Empire tried to achieve hegemony over Europe, when the United States discovered a telegram that revealed the true German intentions: to expand the war to the Americas and dominate the whole West. To stop the Germans, President Woodrow Wilson sent thousands of young Americans to the battlefield, joining the fight on behalf of the Allies and ending the war with one of the harshest peace agreements in history: The Treaty of Versailles. Germany had its Army reduced, and its war industry controlled.
It lost important territories and was forced to pay economic reparations for the winning countries. The population felt humiliated. The severe conditions imposed were the social glue for the rise of a new totalitarian proposal: the Nazi Empire.
Twenty-five years later, the same Army went to war with the same country. On battlefields worldwide, in the air, on land, and sea, Americans have fought relentlessly against the second greatest threat of the 20th century. They allied with Stalin's Soviet Union to defeat Hitler, providing significant funding to the communist dictatorship.
In the "Lend-Lease Act" alone, Americans sent more than 100 billion dollars in updated currency to the Russians. The USSR also received 18,700 aircrafts, two thousand locomotives, 11 thousand train cars, hundreds of thousands of American trucks, besides aluminum, telephone cables, and canned food. The United States supplied more than two-thirds of the Red Army cars.
THE END OF USSR SEPTEMBER 28, 1991 When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the late 1990s, local communist chiefs took advantage of the authority to do business on their own. Russia's commodity industries were sold for a bargain. And an oligarchy took financial control of a real empire.
According to an analyst at the New York Foreign Council, it was the biggest plunder of a country ever. It became known as "The Rape of Russia". When Vladimir Putin was called to Boris Yeltsin's office in 1999, he had no idea that he would spend the next 21 years leading the world's largest country.
How could we change radically the situation and the system while preserving our country? That's something that nobody knew at the time, not even Gorbatchov. They brought our country to collapse.
Putin was a former KGB agent. His parents were surviving soldiers of World War II, and his grandfather had been a cook for Lenin and Stalin. He took control of a humiliated and impoverished nation, reached a "grand bargain" with opposing oligarchs, confiscated industries, and embarked on two decades of economic recovery.
Putin inherited the largest territory in the world, the second-best Army and the old dream of the Russian Empire. Now the red giant needs to choose which way to go. Americans see this alliance as a possibility to limit China's expansion.
And the Chinese see Russia as a supplier of commodities and an indispensable military ally. With the hostilities between China and the United States, the alliance with a giant like Russia could be decisive. In a speech at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin said: "You know how I feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It didn't have to happen. This wasn't supposed to happen". What the American government did to China at the end of the century was the same thing it did to the Soviet Union in World War II.
And now the U. S. faces a potential China-Russia alliance.
BACK TO AMERICA Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the love of freedom defies rational analysis. It isn't possible to thoroughly analyze this sublime feeling. It was a love that penetrated noble hearts prepared by God to receive it.
Moreover, he concluded by saying that it wasn't possible to explain it to those who never felt it. These words take on a sinister tone when we remember older countries in distant corners of the world. With nations used to millennia of absolute domination.
For them, the notion of freedom may seem like a curious obsession of nations cursed with material comforts. In two World Wars, Americans died believing that they were fighting to save the freedom of strangers. And it's true: Germany became a democracy, and Europe was pacified.
It's also true that the Americans who died in Iwo Jima liberated Japan. Democracy was called "the American experiment" because it wass new and uncertain. Like any experiment, it brought with it the possibility of success and failure.
The United States, the greatest nation the world has ever seen, displayed the greatest love of freedom that Earth has ever witnessed. Freedom of religion, expression, and work was considered, for the first time, as a non-negotiable value. We all live in a world that, to some extent, was created, circumscribed, and protected by those freedoms.
With all this success, many people have forgotten the difficult journey that made this possible. Two hundred forty-four years have passed since the beginning of this experiment, which is now being tested once more. If words are the weapon of democracy, war is the weapon of totalitarianism.
Today, the Founding Fathers of this country have their statues demolished by groups that forget that the world knows other arrangements besides democracy. Working men, white people, women, people of color, and gays are used as political pawns for the crusade for new rights. The right to protest and to have beliefs doesn't exist on the other side of the world.
The Red Trojan Horse blinds our civilization. Witnessing the crisis in the West, America's antagonists seem to follow the idea of never interrupting an enemy when he is making a mistake. During the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, President Xi Jinping observed the ceremony from a high balcony above Tiananmen Square.
The same square where students demonstrations for democracy were crushed in 1989. Xi Jinping's impenetrable expression and body posture are his two greatest symbols. Of patience.
And stability. Like the Chinese hackers, who wait years for a security breach. .
. Like the Chinese economists, who devalued their currency wait for a better deal. .
. Like Xi Jinping, who suspended the time limit for his presidency. .
. …China isn't going anywhere. And waits.
Armed with the 4,000 year-old Eastern patience, China gets stronger, while the social fabric of the United States. . .
tears itself apart for the whole world to see. During the Cold War, Americans chose to avoid direct conflict with Russia and focus on fighting their influence worldwide. But this strategy requires time, and above all, national unity for the same purpose.
This seems increasingly tricky when we remember the current American climate. The President of the United States should be the strongest man in the world. His Army is better; his country is richer and stronger.
However, the country is split in half in irreconcilable world views. Democrats and Republicans say they work for the same country but disagree about which country it is. China acts as one body, following a clear plan, dictated by a strong man.
Xi Jinping is the country's president, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission The country's three biggest powers - the State, the Party, and the Army - respond to the same man. Meanwhile, in the United States, political leaders are silenced by children, must perform bizarre popular rituals to win public sympathy, and the tools of democracy are instrumentalized in making political opposition. The lack of that purpose that makes all people look in the same direction can be fatal.
It can condemn a nation to defeat before the battle begins. A society divided, in which groups battle each other in constant fight, is a fragile one. And if Sun Tzu said, "Hide your strength and bide your time," he also said: "Know yourself and you won`t have to fear the result of a hundred battles.
" Historical rivals of the United States, such as China and Russia, look at Western indecision, protected by the stability of their empires. At the same time, the Red Trojan Horse makes advances in the rest of the world. Between the spontaneous cooperation of free men in a democracy.
. . .
. . And the authoritarian control established by a leader with an iron grip, China and Russia seem to know who they are.
The United States doesn't. And the city on the hill seen by the whole world was the fate of the United States.
