Why is the US reeking the smell of fear

A follow up to "the US is reeking the smell of fear"

I recently published a short opinion piece titled “the US is reeking the smell of fear” on Substack and Unz Review. https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/the-us-is-reeking-the-smell-of-fear

I received many comments and feedback. Most comments are positive and many readers shared thoughtful observations.

Predictably, some trolls, loonies and racist crazies climb out from under the rock and started to make the routine noises about the virtues of US vs. communist China, of course in their usual fact free fashion. As expected, there was no dispute about the facts and data – venom seems the best the trolls can do.

On any social media, such sour losers abound. China clearly lives rent free in the minds of Washington elite and the many clueless defenders of the plutocracy. These defenders of the realm are never the plutocrats themselves but the slaves who don’t even know they are slaves. The plutocrats are generally smart and let the slaves get worked up.

These comments always give me a tickle. Some wise man once said, everyone has an opinion like they all have an asshole. Unlike anuses, brains are not evenly distributed. Dumb people make me feel superior. I love to push their buttons and blow the dog whistle. Rubbing some salt into these sour losers’ open wound seems a fun way to spend a Sunday hour.

In that spirit, here is a follow up piece to the US is Reeking the Smell of Fear – Why is the US reeking of fear?

Fear comes in many different forms but the biggest cause for fear is the challenge to one’s fundamental beliefs – the beliefs on which a person’s world view and frame of reference is built, however insane, bigoted and moronic they may be.

Try to reason with an evangelical Christian about the sins of Zionism and “god’s chosen people”. Or try to tell a Yank the Baseball World Series is just a national ball game, not a world event. You get my drift.

The rise of China, more accurately the return of China, is such a challenge to several deeply held core beliefs of many in the west –

- The Chinese cannot innovate

- The US is exceptional

- The US can defeat China as it is stronger economically, technologically and militarily

- The neoliberal capitalist system in the US is inherently superior to the Chinese communist system (though few can define communism)

- China is an interloper in a world of “the end of history” that should be rightfully dominated by the US and its vassals

- White people are superior to other races

None of the above is true. Here are some uncomfortable facts for the brainwashed. Consider this as free education to inform your public school educated mind –

- The Chinese can innovate. When Europe was still living in the Dark Ages, China gave the world a few modest innovations – paper, printing press, gunpowder, compass, silk, and its namesake china.

The Chinese invented PAPER in the 2^nd century during Han Dynasty. The Europeans didn’t get the technology until 12 centuries later through the Arabians. The Chinese invented gunpowder (known as black powder) in the 9^th century during Tang Dynasty. Europeans learned about this technology from the Mongols in the 13^th century – at the receiving end of it.

The Chinese sailed to Africa and the Abria Peninsula in 1405 on ships ten times bigger than the Portuguese who started the Age of Discovery a century later. Columbia didn’t arrive in the Americas until 1492.

The Chinese built the Great Wall and the Grand Canal before the Europeans had the concept of public works. No European capital could carry water for Dadu (called Beijing today) when Marco Polo visited in the 13^th century.

In 2014, the vaulted Harvard Business Review published a cover story titled Why China Can’t Innovate. In 2021, it ate its own words and published another one titled China’s New Innovation Advantage. From cannot innovate to innovation advantage in 7 years. Pretty funny for a prestigious publication to say water is not wet and then say water is wet after all a few days later.

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a lengthy study on Chinese innovation in Sept 2024 titled China Is Rapidly Becoming the Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries. Written from a US perspective, it nevertheless presents an honest review of the history and performance of Chinese technological and industrial innovations. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-becoming-a-leading-innovator-in-advanced-industries/

In the field of AI, the Paulson Institute in Chicago reported 47% global AI talents are in China. Among the top AI research institutes in the US, Chinese researchers account for 38%, more than any other nationalities including Americans. If you find it hard to believe, just walk into any PhD programs in top tier US universities and check out the percentage of Chinese ethnicities.

Here is a kicker. China is not only the only country that operates its own space station but also can send astronauts to the station and return them to earth, pretty much on schedule.

All the sour-grape “technology theft” talk is a made-up smear tactic and less believable than a second hand car salesman. Ask some first principle questions:

o How do you steal something from someone who don’t even have it? Like 6^th generation fighter, landing a rover on the dark side of the moon (instead of the fake Apollo moon landing).

o How come you are so dumb and suck so badly to let an adversary to steal your top military, high-tech, industrial secrets decade after decade?

o Can you share some specific examples of tech and IP theft? Why is no one in China stealing KFC’s secret fried chicken recipe instead of letting KFC China grow into 50% of Yum Brands global business? The chicken people seem to have better cyber security than NSA.

- The US is not exceptional. No doubt it has done great things and led the world in the second and third industrializations. The US also has done horrible things and great harm to many parts of the world, including the people originally inhabiting the land.

The US empire is not particularly virtuous – its history is filled with genocide, slavery, deceit, racial apartheid, and violence. Ever since its deep state blew off JFK’s head in a public execution and open coup, the US is a de facto mafia rogue state – from unilateral wars of aggression based on lies, 911 false flag attack against its own population, complicity in Israeli genocides, use of outlawed weapons (deleted uranium and white phosphorus bombs), extra-judicial killings, concentration camps that make Nazis look good (Al Ghraib, Guantanamo), legalized torture dubbed as enhanced interrogation, illegal regime changes dubbed as color revolutions, sponsoring of terrorists like ISIS, and proxy wars that have killed millions in Ukraine and Syria.

The US is exceptional only in the sense it acts above international laws and can flaunt the so called rule-based order any time it wants. The US exception means committing crimes with immunity. A good book to read on the subject is Aaron Good’s the American Exception.

Pax Americana is nothing but “the security of the slaves” as JFK put it in his famous peace speech. Just look at Europe. The most truly exceptional thing about the US is the exceptional hypocrisy the regime hides its crimes behind as it promotes its criminality and hegemony under the pretence of human rights, freedom, motherhood and apple pie. Have you noticed how Trump is sanctioning the ICC for prosecuting the live-broadcast genocides by the Israeli jews.

The US regime operates as a mafia don. Trump’s recent extortion of Canada, Panama and the Greenland makes it clear what kind of actor it really is.

The longer the undeserved US sense of superiority last, the further they will fall behind. May their ignorance know no bounds.

- The US cannot defeat China in a war, hot or cold. The economic decoupling the US has pursued in the last 8 years have failed to slow China down. Instead, Chinese trade is booming with largest ever trade surplus in human history ($1 trillion in 2024). It is the largest trading partner with 140+ countries in the world.

China is now leading in more critical industries than ever from cars, high speed trains, ship building, AI, 5G, robotics, drone, critical minerals, green energy, and military technologies. I can go on and on. China accounts for 36% of global manufacturing. 70% of Amazon and Walmart sales come from products sourced from China.

The tech chokehold the US has put on China has failed. China’s semiconductor supply chain has never been stronger. The pace of Chinese tech innovations has accelerated instead of stalled.

o US sanctioned firms such as Huawei, DeepSeek, BYD, DJI, BGI are winning the tech race against their competitors.

o Chinese innovations are broad based beyond the daily headlines: numerous scientific institutions such as Nature Magazine, Lancet, ASPI, and Harvard Belfer Center are acknowledging China’s lead in R&D for critical future technologies. In fact, China now boasts the most number of top research institutes and universities globally and is widening the gap with others. Here are links to my two recent articles on the subject: https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/whose-universities-are-better-china?r=xiqz0; https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/comparing-china-and-us-critical-future?r=xiqz0

o Did I mention that China can send astronauts to the space station and return them to earth, unlike certain other “superpower” whose astronauts didn’t know they bought one way tickets.

o Western media reported with glee when President Xi ordered a crackdown on monopolistic big tech like Alibaba, Tencent and Didi in 2019. The doomsayers solemnly pronounced Chinese tech boom was dead in the water and CCP was revisionist commies that would ruin Chinese economy, to their obvious delight.

Instead of derailing China’s tech progress, the crackdown delivered its objective to break the inertia of monopolies, redirect resources, and release the raw entrepreneurial spirit of smaller businesses. As a result, we are now seeing the emergence of start-ups like DeepSeek, Unitree, Deep Robotics and Game Science.

China’s lead in science and technology will only widen in the coming years as the country graduates 4 times STEM students as the US annually, roughly the same as the rest of the world combined. The average age of the teams behind DeepSeek and China’s lunar mission is around 30. They are worlds apart from the stereotypical western depiction of Chinese youth. The west is well advised to be afraid of the daring and entrepreneurship of China’s next generation.

On the military front, there is no chance the US can defeat China in a war near Chinese shores whether in the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. War game after war game by the US DoD in the last decade has shown the US will suffer a debilitating defeat against China. The only variables seem to be the speed of the defeat, the amount of casualty, and how many planes and ships will be lost.

For those armchair warriors who claim US superiority, I encourage you to enlist in the US Navy or USAF west pacific theatre and we’ll find out what is the probability you will return in a plastic body bag.

Even the US nuclear brinkmanship will not work after China has shown its ability to retaliate against continental US with its test firing of the DF-31AG nuclear ICBM missile in September 2024 (the second or third most powerful ICBM in its arsenal). Here is my recent article on the prospect of a China US military showdown. https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/comparing-war-readiness-between-china

Finally, the psyops the US regime has tried to turn the Chinese population against the Chinese state and the communist party, a central part of the hegemon’s usual playbook, has completely backfired.

The Chinese government is enjoying the highest popular endorsement in its history with approval ratings over 90% compared with the pedestrian 30-40% in “western democracies”. Most Chinese youth are now looking at the US as a belligerent, arrogant, bad-faith, and declining opponent today instead of a benign, inspirational power to identify and learn from a generation ago.

For the average Chinese, you don’t have to agree with CCP on everything to realize the US regime has no good intentions with the Chinese people and Chinese state. It’s a life and death fight.

- The US system is not superior. When Trump called the US a failed state in his election campaigns, few people inside or outside the country disagreed. The much touted “beacon of democracy” is nothing but an oligarchy window-dressed as a “democracy”. With 13 billionaires in senior government positions, Trump leads a verifiable plutocracy bar none.

It will take millions of words to discuss the state of affairs in the US and much better-informed authors have written volumes on the empire’s polarization, inequality, disfunction and decline. I wouldn’t spill too much ink here.

While China’s political and economic systems have many flaws, I challenge anyone to do an apple-to-apple comparison of the two systems on factual basis. Deng Xiaoping liked to say “black cat or white cat, the cat that catches the mice is the good cat”. Which system is delivering for its population?

Here is my short piece comparing China US corruption, an area most westerners think the US is superior no doubt. But really? https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/corruption-in-the-us-and-china-a?r=xiqz0

- China is not a historical interloper. China is the constant in the history of human civilization. It is the world’s oldest continuing civilization for 5 millenniums. The Chinese state formed centuries before the Roman empire and millenniums before the Westphalian concept of nation states appeared in the west. China led the world in science, technology, arts and literature, and was the largest economy for most of human history.

China’s rise is a return to normality as history normalizes after an aberration of 300 years of western colonial domination. The US came out of this aberration in human history, and it is the interloper, not China. The US is not some “chosen country” just like the jews are not some “chosen people”. Your god is not our god. Your destiny is not our destiny.

For those court scholars proclaiming “end of history”, what ends is merely their credibility. History will continue and all empires fall.

- White people are not superior. As with any race, there are smart and compassionate people and there are stupid and malicious ones. Generalizing makes no sense.

That said, white people don’t have a higher-than-average IQ score, do better in schools, and they don’t run faster or jump higher. Chinese students in the west on average perform better than the white students and work harder. Obama seems smarter than W. Black people jump higher and run faster in general. In Paris Olympics, a Chinese swam faster than everybody else. White colonialism, a specialty unique to the race, seems to indicate below average morality and ethnics.

It is worthwhile to highlight again a point made by the neocon scholar Samuel Huntington - “the west is not superior in values or ideas or religion…but rather in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-westerners never do.” Confession must feel good. Even in organized violence, the west is losing its edge – check out Ukraine.

In summary, as China continues its economic and technological rise, the US will simply be more scared. The causes of its fears will not lessen but proliferate. I really don’t feel bad for the trolls.