Dear Mr. Mitt Romney, while you were baffled by an inappropriate leadership in the White House, have you ever wondered maybe the world doesn’t need a leader at all?
Your open letter to the current White House administration seems to have steered some controversies on all sides of American politics. The Donkeys are calling you a hypocrite while the Elephants are hailing traitor. The rest of the world, however, does not seem to have any belief, to say the least, in your shape-shifting attitudes, to paraphrase ABC’s The View host, Meghan McCain.
To someone like me, who grew up in the transitional period of China in the 1990s, the ideology of the U.S. being the leader of the free world has always been far-fetched. We were fed with national propaganda of how capitalism was at the edge of dying and how evil it is according to The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. It may be seemingly easy to have been brainwashed in believing all that. However, after all these years of living and traveling overseas, I have come to realize one simple fact: the U.S is not and has never been the leader of the world.
The West has a tradition of calling itself the World. Factually it only takes up less than half of the world both in geography terms and in anthropology terms. Ever after the industrial revolution when the British Empire started to disseminate “civilization” to the rest of the world, many countries seemed to disappear from the world map, such as China, Korea, Japan, countries in South East Asia and South America. Only very recently after the economic boom of India, China, Brazil, and other countries in these regions, the West started to re-calibrate its comprehension of the idea of the “World” against itself.
The recognition of one's own culture being superior to any others' has never been too familiar to the Chinese. We have always considered our own culture as the "High culture" while the others being "barbaric" in the past 2000 years or so, in spite of the fact that we never went on a pathway of brutal colonization and forcing our own values onto other countries at the time of our peak performance.
The West, however, went on to “conquer” half of the world. Conquering a nation is quite different from colonizing a nation. Most of the times, conquering only involves taking control of a nation by military force. Colonization, on the other hand, is taking a nation by power and then turning the conquered into the conquerors. The most extreme example might be India, where some sort of modernity has been introduced, but it did not turn India into a modern India. Instead, it turned it into a U.K-to-be. And now the U.K is blaming the Indians for pouring into the country to steal the jobs that the Brits are somehow not interested in doing.
This sense of patronization not only shows up when cultural gaps come into play, but it also strikes internally within the White culture. Russia, for example, is the biggest country in the world, however, it has never been the center of the attention except for its authoritarian leaders and leftover missiles from the Cold War period. Nevertheless, its end did not seem to terminate white people’s self-bestowed ego of supremacy. Quite the contrary, it somehow enhanced the sentiment that the West has finally proved itself righteous over other political systems, in spite of just one, and that only white culture could “modernize” human society in the “right” way, thus leading to a more severe and unconscious whitewashing and culture appropriation, up until today. And yet, the U.S. is still referring to itself as the leader of the Free World, a lingo used to indicate non-U.S. allies during Cold War times.
Even the longtime allies of the U.S. have been victims of this type of patronization. If one observes carefully, they should be able to find that the U.S. would always mock other European countries especially the Northern Europeans as been far-left and laughing at their social welfare system without giving any solid grounds. It is no news to the public that the Republicans have been, for quite some time, using higher energy prices in Europe, as an example to argue that greener energy such as wind power, solar power would worse off millions of American households. But many in the U.S. never acknowledge the fact that, being the more developed countries, it comes with more responsibilities to the whole human species. And YES, that comes with higher prices for more sustainable energy, higher taxes to people with higher incomes, regulations on how companies handling people’s private information and so forth. The list goes on.
The world has moved on while the U.S seems to be constantly stuck in the past. This notion of Russia being its enemy, China being its enemy, or how many other countries being its enemy, which by the way did not start with Donald Trump, has been constantly seen on TV, online, and on social media.
Take the recent case where a Canadian has been sentenced to death after a retrial. Many Western media speculated and reported that this is a tit for tat strategy the Chinese government has against the Canadian government after the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, without even studying the cases of how drug dealers had been trialed before this. It is true that the Chinese government has always been merciful to foreigners who have been convicted of serious crimes in China. In spite of that, this merciful act is completely at the discretion of the government. If one ever looks into the Chinese criminal law clauses concerning drug trafficking, they would know that as little as 50 grams of illicit drugs could entitle the criminal to the death sentence.
I am not justifying what Putin has directed towards Crimea in 2014, neither am I trying to defend the deteriorating human rights situation in China under the control of the communist party. But to label two of the biggest countries in the world enemy, does not seem smart either diplomatically or economically, not to mention all the sanctions put on these two countries. If one takes a look at how the Chinese government-run media CCTV reports on the West, they would be surprised to notice that it is always referred to as Competitors or even Friends rather than Threats.
Try to recall something recent the U.S. mainstream media reported positive about Russia or China as a country without apparent political bias. Everything you hear is how dangerous Russia is amid this Donald Trump scandal and how creepy the whole country is regardlessly, or how China steals its state of the art intellectual property or how China wins unfairly in a trade relation.
The funny thing to me is that the American media always report things on the basis of the American system being the right system. This is especially obvious when the media attacks countries that are not following an American kind of political system or any other systematic structure.
I still remember watching Fox News anchor Anna Kooiman asking the infamous question whether using Metric system was the reason for the crashing of AirAsia flight QZ8501, in a manner that the U.S. dominant Imperial system is undoubtedly superior. The level of ignorance is amusing however jaw-dropping, especially giving the situation in which the U.S. is basically the only one of three countries in the world that still mainly uses Imperial System today, yes, the other two being Liberia and Myanmar. Let’s not forget that the U.S. is basically the only country in the world that uses Fahrenheit when it comes to the temperature. Why do we, as the rest of the world, have to adapt to one country, not the other way round?
I could go on for days grudging about how much the U.S. feels like an outdated grandpa who doesn’t even care to catch up with the rest of the world while whining about being left behind by his grandchildren. Yet I know that there are still vibrant and energetic young people like myself in the U.S. that know the problem with the country is from within.
Democracy is like sweeties for the kids when the States criticizes other countries such as Russia, China or its southern neighbor Mexico. It’s funny to me how quickly people forget that democracy per se is a human creation, which, like any other creation, is flawed. I have had quite a few conversations with my friends from the States, it seems that when talking about the three branches of the government, they assume that these so-called checks and balances are innate in democracy, invincible and indestructible. Nevertheless, the U.S. probably never imagined that it had to deal with a president such as Donald Trump until November 2016, hence the gratitude and appreciation of democracy. As Trevor Noah mentioned in one of his Daily Show episodes, by the way, his South African take on American politics is probably what America needs right now, how Donald Trump reminds him of African dictators. And the so-called Checks and Balances so far have been dysfunctional under the reign of Donald Trump.
It is clear to me, from China, a country loathed very often, that the U.S. is just whining about things that are common sense to the rest of the world. It might be a leader in the realm of whining. And that is about it. It is hard to imagine that one of the biggest countries in the world is still fighting about women’s rights for abortion, fighting for universal medical care, fighting for controls on assault weapons. Yet its government endless whine about how Chinese companies are trying to spy its sensitive information while big American companies in China have no problems doing business in China. You never heard of Chinese government complaining about Apple trying to steal critical information from the Chinese government.
It is true that the U.S. used to be the head for innovation, but I would argue that it struggles to keep up with the rest of the World. Even the technology that was once invented by Americans is not thriving in the U.S., such as Apple Pay and other means of mobile payment. In the U.S., statistics show that approximately 78 billion USD were made on mobile, while in China, it is roughly 9 times of that. Even in Europe, mobile payment is much more widely accepted in the U.S. where people are still stuck with swipe magnetic credit card. Companies such as Tencent and Alipay has completely changed the way customers interact with different businesses. Companies such as Facebook is trying to copy this business model and integrate similar mobile payment method in its Messenger and WhatsApp.
Companies, such as Huawei and ZTE with leading roles in 5G development, are facing a much stricter and harsher probe from the government for the so-called national security reasons, which to me is the easiest way to pin down an individual or an institution with an unspeakable excuse.
I am nowhere near the point to say that China or any other countries under totalitarian reign have a democratic system that needs no fix. Quite the contrary, I acknowledge the fact that there is still a long way from a real democracy. But I don’t see why, China, for instance, has to adopt a Western democracy system.
I can give you tens of thousands of examples of how the West is targeting certain countries simply because of the difference in political systems. The point is, the West never seems to try to understand why the non-West has become how it is. Look what your “perfect” system has done to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt. 8 years after the overthrown of Mubarak, Egypt is still in the shadow of its political turmoil. Iraq and Afghanistan have turned into complete war zones. The West came, overthrew the old system and left. A utopian idea has been laid out to them. But no one even cared about elaborate the actual situation of the country or culture that this system was thrown into. What was done was no less than pushing these countries over the cliff edge.
Take a look around you, America! The world is beyond what you think it is.