The Year of Obullma

By Chip Tsao | published Jan 29, 2009

Nobody’s seeing the big picture here. And no wonder: the following key paragraph in Obama’s inauguration speech was struck off from all news portals in China:

“To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflicts, or blame their society’s ills on the West: Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

The bit about people blaming society’s ills on the West? Let’s be fair. That’s yes and no. It was Lehman Brothers and a small bunch of greedy first-class-flying Wall Street CEOs who sowed the seeds of our current financial chaos. Although some economists argue that the flood of cheap made-in-China products is one of the causes, attributing these ills to the “West“ can hardly be called a bias. It was these bankers and salesmen with an MBA degree who duped Hong Kong people into investing their savings into American mini-bonds. But for the Chinese people, this is not the first disaster brought over from the “West”. Second-rate Western demagogues, like Marx and Lenin, did the same by exporting their ideologies to the East and ended up inflicting grave social ills on a much more catastrophic scale, although the blame ultimately falls on the virus spread by Chairman Mao together with his group of ignorant Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s.

Then comes the yes-argument. The fact that prostitution had rapidly spread around massage parlors and nightclubs in economically booming Guangdong was in the 1980s blamed on the “bad influence” and “spiritual pollution” brought in with the capitalism of the “West.” But as more and more Chinese became aware that prostitution is good fun, combined with the fact that sex had actually been on sale in ancient China 3,000 years ago, the “West” was quickly forgiven for that sin. Neither is corruption imported from the “West” either, as Chinese eunuchs were notorious for taking bribes. Read any school history textbook.

Can you blame the business failure of Hong Kong Disneyland on the “West“? Shanghai is embracing the plan for a new Disneyland theme park as joyfully as Madame Butterfly setting a warm bed for the return of Captain Perry. We in Hong Kong have adopted a system with an independent judiciary and the ICAC, designed and once successfully operated by the former British colonial government, a.k.a. the “West.“ Our chief executive and all senior government officials here were educated in or by the West, awarded with university degrees in business, law or medicine, and have ample knowledge of golf and red wine. We Chinamen got rid of the pigtail and helped our fellow countrywomen to unbind their feet at the turn of the last century, because the “West” told us that we looked stupid.

I also wouldn’t blame the “West“ for the overcrowded 1.3 billion-strong Chinese population either, which is the root of China’s big problems of poverty and pollution. We haven’t stopped breeding like mad, and certainly not under President Truman or Reagan’s order. Aids is from Africa. Donald Tsang is a Sir, so he can’t be worse than Tung, etc, etc... I’ll stop the long, boring list here, and wish you all a prosperous shit-free Year of the Bull.