Chung Kuo — Doug Casey

This article is entitled Chung Kuo, which means Middle Kingdom.
The Chinese have long seen themselves as superior to every other race (like almost every race does) and the center of the world. It’s because they were so confident of this that they never ventured out as Europeans did, with a brief exception in the 15th century when a gigantic Chinese fleet, composed of ships vastly superior to those of Europe, ventured as far as Africa. Since dropping the ball on world conquest back then, or at least exporting their culture wholesale, they’ve been in stasis, and on the receiving end of what Europe had to dish out.
The Chinese resent the ‘gweilo’, or ‘laowai’ (loosely translated in Cantonese and Mandarin respectively as “foreign devil”) for appropriating places like Hong Kong, Macau, Shanghai, and numerous other enclaves. They resent episodes like the Opium Wars, which resolved whether they were to be used as a market for narcotics. They never learned to appreciate lots of foreign soldiers running around their countryside, even though Westerners felt it was a birthright.
The Chinese absolutely resent the U.S. government parading its aircraft carriers off the China coast as if it owned the place. The U.S. government is not showing strength, it’s displaying arrogance and stupidity by antagonizing a sleeping dragon. And the thought of American politicians – which is to say an assortment of insular lawyers, egg-headed wannabe social engineers, and refugees from Arkansas trailer parks – negotiating with people who’ve been through what the Chinese have, is just scary. The U.S. government may feel like it can call the shots now because it has a dozen aircraft carriers and a couple thousand fighter planes. But it’s making a serious enemy while it’s going to bankrupt America in a counterproductive projection of force to the other side of the planet. And that’s not all. Because the day will go to the people with the most wealth, not the ones that have the most expensive military hardware.

This post was published at International Man