Do You Really Want China to Run the World?

China is a ruthless meritocracy. 10 million high-school students take the gaokao (college entrance exam) each year, with math questions a lot tougher than our Graduate Record Examination. The average Chinese family spends the equivalent of a year’s income on tutoring. A third of Chinese undergraduates major in engineering, and China graduates six times as many STEM BA’s as the US each year–more than the US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Europe combined. A lot of their teachers hold doctorates from top US universities, where we trained up a world-class faculty for Chinese universities (which now rank amon the world’s best in STEM according to all the Western ratings).

Meanwhile the University of California is “phasing out” standardized exam (SAT and ACT) scores as a criteria for admission, in order to build a Potemkin village of equality. China is building up its universities and we are destroying ours. Who do you think will run the world a couple of decades from now?

China is the most racist country in the world. It put between 1 and 2 million members of the Turkic Muslim Uyghur minority through “re-education camps” in its Western Xinjiang Province to crush resistance to cultural absorption. Every Chinese I have spoken with about this, from government officials to office workers, says matter-of-factly, “We’re going to kill them all.” That is how China has been handling “unruly barbarians” for thousands of years.

Chinese television runs overtly racist advertisements, like this laundry ad showing a black man dumped into a washing machine and coming out as a light-skinned Chinese.

China’s treatment of African students and workers legally resident in China, moreover, is execrable. Foreign Policy reported last April:

Over the past week, hundreds of African migrant workers, traders, and students in the southern city of Guangzhou, home to Asia’s largest African diaspora, were tossed out onto the street—some by their landlords, some by hotel managers, and some by local officials. Those evicted, mostly Igbo Nigerians, insisted that they had paid their rent, had valid visas and the right paperwork, and had no contact with anybody infected with COVID-19. Meanwhile, many others were forced into a 14-day quarantine and random testing without getting their test results. Tony Mathias, an Ugandan exchange student, told Agence France-Presse: “I’ve been sleeping under the bridge for four days with no food to eat. … I cannot buy food anywhere. No shops or restaurants will serve me.”

…Anti-African feelings in China go back decades, including riots aimed at Africans in 1988-1989 in Nanjing. In Chinese media, Africans are often characterized as backward or primitive and blackness as unattractive. Virulent racism common on social media is largely unchecked by censors, including claims that Africans are rapists, drug dealers, or AIDS carriers.

Never in its 5,000-year-history has China arrived at the Judeo-Christian belief that every human being is a living image of God. China has no constraints against sacrificing the individual for the interests of the collective (or what its rulers think are the interests of the collective) and absolutely no compunction about crushing people they think of as foreign barbarians.

African-Americans whose ancestors were brought here in chains, and whose female ancestors were systematically raped on slave plantations, and who were subjected to a century of Jim Crow after the  end of slavery, have every reason for rancor against the West. But there are two possible outcomes for the 21st century. Either world leadership remains with the United States–which forced the liquidation of the great Euorpean empires and stood godfather to the independence of former colonies–or it passes to Imperial China. To China, black lives don’t matter. Not at all. The West was founded on the principle of universal human dignity. Whatever its sins, lapses and hypocrisy, this principle is the core DNA of the West. Think about it, BLM. You won’t like the alternataive.