Former Aussie PM Paul Keating recently said that China's "great problem" is that "it [China] is now a state as large as the United States, and with the potential of being much larger - an unforgivable sin for American triumphalists."
The former Aussie head of state made such a statement when accusing the incumbent Aussie government of wantonly leading Australia-China relations into a strategic dead end. He said that China was not forcibly incorporating countries into a "grand union" or exporting a universal ideology. Nor did China impose nuclear threats, said Keating. But he believed that, "China's rise is simply not in the American playbook - its very existence and at this scale is an affront to America's notion of itself as the exceptional state - the proselytizer of divine providence."
As long as China keeps its development momentum, the US will not "forgive" it whatsoever.
China is encountering strategic containment and suppression from the US at the current stage. No matter how it happened, it’s the collective fate of Chinese people who must overcome it in a collective spirit.
Who pushed forward China's rise? Who provided the fundamental driving force of this trend? This is the dream of several generations with noble aspirations and the Communist Party of China united the Chinese people. The Chinese people as a whole eventually turned the dream into a historic trend.
In the past 2 or 3 decades, Chinese people became aware of their rights and their desire to pursue a better life was fully awakened. Almost all the Chinese people work hard to achieve these goals.
Now there are color TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines in almost every household in China. The country's GDP became the 6th largest in the world by 2000, surpassing Italy. Then the Chinese were able to afford private cars and houses with property rights. And in another decade, China's GDP surpassed Japan's to become the second largest economy in the world. Yet at that time, it was still far from the total GDP of the US.
The Chinese people then began to buy better cars, as well as improve the housing and environments of their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Moreover, they started to strengthen ecological protection, develop tourism, gradually build a social welfare system, and digitize their life. As a result, China's GDP today is more than two-thirds of that of the US.
But are the Chinese satisfied? Not at all. Modernization in China needs to be refined continuously. The serious income disparity between regions and different groups needs to be replaced by common prosperity. Those who get rich first need to bring others along. The welfare system in China needs to be further improved so that the next generation must live better off than the previous one. Food needs to be safer. The difficulty of seeing a doctor needs to be fundamentally solved. Every citizen's retirement needs to be secured. Accidents during production should be further reduced. When Chinese people take all these things up to another level, China's total GDP will surpass that of the US and become the world's No.1.
No one can stop Chinese people from collectively pushing their country to become the world's top economy as history progresses. Even though the Chinese government certainly has not planned the timetable and roadmap to become the world's No.1, this is a "people's war." It will be as vast and mighty as a big river. It will be an unstoppable tide.
Chinese people have already started a national movement for common prosperity with speed and on a grand scale., and have shown their strong ability to turn that pursuit into reality.
This is China's "unforgivable sin" to the US, as Keating put it. Yet China is simply bettering itself.
What can China do? Reason with the US and convince it to chill? Obviously, doing so is useless. The only way that can make the US "forgive" China is for the country to stop developing. This means the Chinese will stay in the No.2 position forever. It means Chinese people will have to stop the effort to further improve their living standards, all deprived of the natural human rights to pursue a better life. Moreover, according to the law of social development, once China stop moving forward, chaos could emerge. If this were to happen, the Chinese could not maintain their current moderately prosperous way of life.
This is the nature of the China-US game. The truth is, even if China's GDP surpasses that of the US one day, Chinese per capita wealth will be far less than that of the US, Europe and the entire Western world. But even so, Washington will not allow it. They believe that being poor is Chinese people's collective fate. The poverty in China is an indispensable prerequisite for the security of the US and the world.
That being said, playing the game and continuing this struggle has become the only choice for all Chinese people. All Chinese are on the same boat in this struggle, not only responding to challenges for the future of their country, but also fighting for the future for themselves and their children. Chinese people must unite and use the powerful reality that will continue to form a force for the US to abandon its ambitions to crush China. This will force them to believe: Accepting the possibility that China, which has a population four times the US population, will exceed it in terms of total economic prowess. They must accept that coexisting with China peacefully will be their best choice.
- Beijing