Writes Jack D. Douglas:
5:05 pm on October 28, 2015American gunboats patrolled Chinese sovereign territory, even up the Yangtze, from 1854 to 1941, to protect U.S. Imperialist interests.
This deeply wounded the pride of the Chinese, especially the government of the Middle Kingdom which lost face by not being able to stop the imperialist invasion of China’s waters.
When I see the U.S. doing these viciously imperialist things to China these days I always remember vividly a talk I had 59 years ago over lunch at Harvard with a good friend of mine who was a very American Chinese who hated the Communist regime of China at that time. We were talking about China in general, probably because I was studying Chinese and Asian history. He suddenly got very serious, looked at me intently and said, “I have to admit that when I see there are no American gunboats up the Yangtze these days it fills me with pride.” I understood because I knew the deep wound to China’s ancient pride of having U.S. gunboats force their way up China’s rivers and along its vast coastline.
Americans are almost totally ignorant of the vast history of China, even of the long century of American imperialism in China along with the imperialism of their European allies, most notably the U.K. They have no idea how enraged the billion and a half Chinese are by these U.S. gunboats once again invading China’s waters, specifically the waters within 12 miles of the small islands of China in the S. China sea where China is building up the islands for ports, on a tiny scale compared to the vast oil rigs the U.S. builds into the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. asserts it has a right to enter the waters within 12 miles of the Chinese islands. That is not in dispute. If the U.S. merely officially filed requests to pass by the islands within 12 miles of them, the Chinese would likely agree to let them IF the U.S. allows the Chinese to do the same within 12 miles of U.S. territory. That’s diplomacy. But the U.S. asserts these small ancient islands of China are not really Chinese territory. Implicitly, the U.S. Empire is asserting that its assertions are all that is needed.
The American analysts at State and DOD and the CIA, etc., are not ignorant of Chinese history. They know how this poses a direct threat of losing face to the government of China, so that is obviously its intent.
Right now President Xi of China has more passionate support from all real Chinese than he did before the U.S. slapped him in the face on world tv with its gunboats.
But XI must be ready to defend China’s sovereignty or he will eventually lose face and that will threaten the government of China and the people. He knows the U.S. will see any weakness as an invitation to move from slapping Xi in the face to spitting on him and then….That’s what vicious imperialists do. They only understand force and violence.
The U.S. is assuming China will have to kowtow to the imperialist Americans once again and will thence obey American commands to stop developing a hard currency and on and on, ever deeper into servile submission once again.
Maybe so, but I doubt it.
If you don’t have a nuclear bomb shelter, you might want to get one very quickly.
I doubt you’ll need it, but when vicious imperialists start invading a huge, nuclear nation, you can never be sure. Hitler thought the U.K. and French would swallow their pride and roll over once again as his Wehrmacht invaded Poland under the pretense that Poland had attacked first, as all imperialists say.
You will remember that the little dictator was wrong about that.
America’s little dictators just might be wrong about the Chinese.
