Happy 60th National Day

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

On October 1, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) celebrates their National Day, when the current form of government was founded in 1949. This year, 2009, marked the 60th anniversary, which is very auspicious in China. Most of you know of the cycle of 12 animals (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and pig), as in “I was born in the year of the rat.”. What you may not know about is the cycle of 5 elements (wood, fire, earth, water, and metal) which act in concert to form a 60 year cycle (12 x 5 = 60, so a “metal rat” only happens once every 60 years).

That was a long introduction to say that this year the celebration would be the grandest yet. Here is where I want to say something different, and you may notice this tone throughout my blog. The United States media and government always find ways to put other countries down and never seem to have a positive thing to say about China. I would like to offer a little history that may put things in a different perspective and let you see that there is more than one way of looking at things…

The United States news concentrated solely on the weapons display at the anniversary parade and they and the US government always seems to treat China as a military threat. If you look at the last 150 years, though, it is really the US that is a threat to China!

Can you imagine if what we would do if China put hundreds of thousands of troops in Mexico, under the guise that the people of Mexico preferred a government that was more like the Chinese government? Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? We would immediately act as if our homeland was under direct attack! The reason I use Mexico as an example is because it is in the same land mass as the US.

So, imagine how the Chinese must have felt when the US launched a full-scale military invasion in Korea in the early 1950′s, after having just gotten over the trauma of a Japanese occupation, followed by a civil war? Especially given the rhetoric that was being used by General MacArthur at the time, that the US should take care of the Communist threat. That ended up with the peninsula of Korea being filled with US military troops — and we are still there! Now, I’m no fan of the North Korean government, but I can completely understand China’s desire to support them simply as a buffer to the bellicose Americans.

Soon after Korea finished, in 1954, another Western power, France, was in Indochina (Viet Nam), fighting a war. Twelve years later, in 1964, the US began sending “military advisors” there. Then, very similar to the Iraq War’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction”, the US government lied about an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin and used this lie to get further involved in the Vietnamese Civil War. Soon, we were sending hundreds of thousands of troops and masive amounts of military equipment very close to the China homeland, even though Congress never declared war (which only it is empowered to do in the Constitution, by the way). The US did this, ostensibly, to “stop the spread of Communism”.

Many Americans even argued at the time that human life means nothing to the Asians, as if they were subhuman savages. The strange thing about that “war that was never declared” is that every American knows what the number 58,000 means. Yes, that’s the number of US servicemen that were killed in Vietnam. Very few know that we killed over 1,000,000 Vietnamese, including untold numbers of civilians that just had the bad fortune to be born at that time in that place. It seems to me that it was the Americans who didn’t value life, except for American life. This is true even today. Everyone here knows the approximate number of American troops that have died in the Gulf War and the Iraq War and Afghanistan, but we have no idea of the number of people that our government has killed there.

The irony, of course, is that we were defending a completely corrupt regime in South Vietnam (headed by President Thieu) and now, many years later, Vietnam is blossoming under — Communist rule…

All this is just to say that, if I were China and had to deal with the US, I would want to develop a strong military, too. Not as a threat to go to other parts of the world and try to take over democracies and make them Communist, as the US propaganda machine has constantly spewed since the Cold War (the USSR was much different than China, but the shallow American conception lumped them all together with the name “Communist”). Rather, if I were China, I would develop a strong military to protect the homeland against the constant threats posed by the United States!

If you think I’m being unpatriotic, I think you are brainwashed. I was in the US Air Force for six years and believe that we should protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I just disagree with the government about who those enemies are. I think that if the American people were allowed to learn more about China and Chinese culture, we would respect them much more and treat them more as friends. Instead, our news media is complicit in a propaganda war that has been unceasing since the end of World War 2. I will include posts from time to time that will fill in an alternative view of China that I really don’t hear in the US. I developed this view by studying and making friends with many Chinese people where I live.

I would like to say to my Chinese friends – Happy 60th Birthday to China!