Presidential Demands

Comments to Today papers 31 May 2003

I refer to the recent discussions on the criteria for presidential candidates in Singapore. As the presidency is an important function that can affect the lives and savings of all Singaporeans, in typical Singapore fashion some one have decided that its selection process deserve some form of control and thus those criteria.

We read with interest a reader's comment that some former Singapore presidents would not have qualified under those demanding criteria. That included a certain Wee Kim Wee who died recently and for whom Singapore witnessed an outpouring of feelings for a simple man who touched so many with his simple ways (the most touching sight I saw was a grown-up Malay man, who regarded Mr Wee like a father, crying publicly and aloud at his funeral). I wonder if any of the 'presidential criteria' can identify such a man.

It also brought us back to Mr Wee's reported request to have a simple funeral and be buried among simple people. When he was given a state funeral some observant Singaporeans noted that another ex-president Mr Ong (the only one who would probably qualify under those presidential criteria) was not accorded the same and wondered what the 'criteria' were for state funerals.

Perhaps Mr Wee's final wishes were tempered by those demanding 'state funeral criteria' and his realization that he would not have qualified under those demanding 'presidential criteria'.

Just like the efficacy of those criteria, who knows.

A Japanese View from Opium War to Yasukuni

A finding from the Opium War to Yasukuni by a Japanese....

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=bbs&order=msg&author=abc2005


I did some research using google.com, and compiled a brief history of historical events between China and Japan.

1. The Sino-Japanese war in 1894-1895 ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki. China had to pay 230 million “liang” of silver to Japan. The amount was the equivalent of 5 years of China’s revenue in 1895. Of which, 200 million were war indemnity (to be paid in 7 years, with 5% interest per year), and 30 million are in exchange for Japan to give up its demand for China to cede Liaodong Peninsula, so as to avoid “encroaching” the sphere of influence of a few other foreign countries. Japan held up the Chinese territory of Shandong (province) as a collateral before the final installment was made. By contrast, the war indemnity paid to England (same to France) in the “second opium war” was 2 million “liang”. See: http:/ / www.answers.com/ topic/ second-opium-war. (Similar amount for the first opium war.) Taiwan, a Chinese territory at the time, was ceded to Japan, and Korea became a Japanese colony and was later annexed by Japan. See: http:/ / www.ibiblio.org/ chinesehistory/ contents/ c10s08.html. The war indemnity was partly financed by interest hungry Western banks. This set a precedent, 4 years afterwards other envious powers swarmed to China to join Japan in this new front of extracting quick money (see next paragraph). Tax burden on Chinese became much, much heavier after 1895 because of the need to make the payment.

2. Japan was among the EIGHT countries (Japan, US and 6 European countries) that won another war in China during 1899-1900. After a year’s bargaining, China agreed to pay 450 million “liang” of silver in war indemnity to NINE countries (protocol of 1901). The ninth country did not participate in the war but was offered a share of the war indemnity to maintain “fairness”. The annual interest rate was 4%. The craziness in the amount is that, the annual interest payment alone was already the equivalent of 1/ 5 of China’s budget in 1901 (not to mention that the tax rate was already much higher than in 1895 because of the need to pay the previous war indemnity to Japan). In 1911, Qing dynasty collapsed, and the Chinese were squeezed to the bones. The US (was the only country that) “returned” (part of full? of) its receipt from the war indemnity, and used it to start today’s Beijing University and Tsinghua University. I should also point out that by ignorance, the Chinese ruler (the Empress Dowager), who was under stronger and stronger pressure from greedy foreign powers, made a fatal misjudgment to rely on Chinese “boxers” to fight the fully armed foreigners. Under strong emotions, she made the irrational decision to declare war on “ALL countries” (but the order was ignored by many Chinese provinces, including these in Southern, Eastern and Central China.) After 1911, China entered 20+ years of political chaos, student movement, the rise of the Nationalists and then communists, and often, civil wars and famine. It is worth mentioning that Japanese conspiracy never stopped in China. The student movement in May 4th 1919 helped Chinese government to refuse the Paris “peace treaty” in which Germany’s “rights” in Liaodong Peninsula be transferred to Japan as a reward for Japan’s fighting Germany, even though China was also considered as an ally.

3. Japan “entered” Manchuria (without any treaty) soon after 1895. China had no power to stop it. Japan in 1931 expelled the Chinese troops after they raised the flag of the new Chinese Nationalists’ government and declared themselves as followers of Sun Yat-sen. Japan then made Manchuria an “independent country” (ironically, using the fallen Qing emperor as Manchuria’s new “emperor”). Then they went on to conspire on the “autonomy” for Northern China, but were met with resistance by the Chinese from both North and South. Japan eventually expanded its “ventures” to a full-scale war against China in summer of 1937 (first shot fired near Beijing – in Northern China). The under equipped Chinese had to face the Japanese military alone for five and half years, until they were joined by the US and other allies in December 1941 (due to Pearl Harbor). In this war, more than 20 million Chinese were killed (estimates by Westerners). Japanese did all crimes possible in China during this time, including free shooting of Chinese prisoners for training purpose, live human testing of bio-chemical weapons (these war criminals were never prosecuted due to a couple of foreign countries’ hunger for the data after the war, but decades later some Japanese soldiers in its infamous “chemical unit” started telling some of the real stories).

4. The Chinese communists dwindled to a couple of ten thousand in mid 1930s, and the Nationalists (followers of Sun Yat-Sen) were about to unite the country, but Japanese invasion revived the communists. They grew to millions strong at the end of the war in 1945. The communists took all China in 1949 and committed crimes in some years of their rule. Chinese need not blame Japan for this, but it is clear that without Japanese invasion, China would never become a communist country. (It is a relief that China today in essence is no longer a communist country although it will probably take many more years for it to move to democracy.)

5. In 60 years after the war, Japan refused any hint of war reparations and turned down the lawsuits filed by numerous victims. Instead, elected Japanese leaders have in recent years started to pay annual visits to the war shrine that hosts all the 14 class A war criminals, the fanatics responsible for murdering millions and millions of Chinese (and victimizing many innocent people from the other parts of Asia and the rest of the world). These criminals are now hailed as “heroes” in Japan. It has refused to fully clean up the chemical weapons that were still left in China and instead made its resolution as a bargaining chip. They blame the Chinese (and the Koreans) for playing the “victims’ role”. (Southern Korea’s president recently said publicly, “It is unfortunate to have Japan as a neighbor”. But this did nothing to change Japan’s attitude.)

6. Elected Japanese officials keep blaming China for every little thing, although China has done nothing that really hurt Japan in substance. It is a popular game to blame the Chinese -- whether communists or ordinary Chinese. The Chinese military spending today is still less than half of Japan’s (contrary to the misconception fanned by Japan and the US right wing). Chinese military does not even have an aircraft carrier while all 3 big neighbors (Japan, Russia, India) do. In the same spirit, Japanese blame China’s backwardness SOLELY on Chinese “themselves”, and insist that Japanese fighting and pirating on China for a half century had NOTHING to do with China’s backwardness. It is true that many European countries and Japan were ruined in the World War 2 and they recovered fairly quickly after the war. However, the economic rise of the post war Europe or Japan was never reproduced in ANY country that was already poor before the World War 2. That is because it takes much less to repair than to build from nothing. This can be said for infrastructure such as highways or railway, or mines or factories, or human skills that go with industry, etc, etc. After wars ended in China in 1949, China’s DGP grew by close to 10% in an average year, but China is still a developing country because it started from half century’s destruction and economic stalemate directly or indirectly caused by Japan.

A few notes: Contrary to common Chinese and Western misconceptions, China’s average GDP growth rate was no less during 1949-1970s than from 1970s to present (even there were temporary setbacks caused by policy mistakes during 1958-1962, “great leap forward movement”). During the Cultural Revolution, China’s growth averaged 10+ % per year. I am not saying Cultural Revolution was good to Chinese (quite the contrary). I am just stating a fact. Did the Chinese annual statistics exaggerate China’s GDP growth? Indeed, the Chinese government makes up numbers from time to time (same way as the Western historians who made up China’s history during years they were allied with Japan against red China). However, it is mathematically impossible to consistently overstate China’s GDP growth rates for so many years. If it overstates the growth rate by a couple of percentage a year for 50+ years (since 1949), then the official GDP figure in 2004 would be several times bigger than the actual GDP (simple arithmetic). Quite the contrary, some Western economists believe that the official Chinese GDP figures in recent years understated the true size of the Chinese economy. So, in average, China did not overstate its growth rate. It may have in fact understated its growth, but the average size of understatement is not big, for the same mathematical reason.

On Japan’s ODA (official development aid) to China
Total cumulative Japanese ODA to China (from its inception in 1979 to the end of 2004) were 3333.5 billion Japanese yen, 3133.1 billion of which are long-term government loans in yen. That is equivalent of $30.9 billion using the exchange rate of May 27th, 2005, “107.88 yen = 1 US dollar” (in fact, Japanese yen has appreciated since 1979, making it more valuable today in dollar terms than in most years of the past). By comparison, China’s foreign reserve at the end of 2004 was $609.9 billion.

Japan basically has made $0.95 ODA ($0.89 in loan and $0.06 in gift) to each Chinese (1.3 billion total) in an average year since 1979, even if we use today’s exchange rate. Japan’s ODA on one hand was helpful to China and China is grateful for it; on the other hand, it was helpful to make Japanese goods enter China (but Japanese do not mention such benefit at all). Although China is grateful for any helps, big or small, it is such a shame for the Japanese prime minister to say that China “graduated” from Japanese aid.

Japanese ODA loan to China in year 2004 was already reduced to $796 million (85.9 billion yen). By the way, China now is offering billions (US dollars) of low cost government loans to SE Asian countries. Did Chinese press insist that the SE countries should be grateful to China for the ODA? The truth is that, most Chinese are even unaware of these Chinese loans to SE Asia. After all, such ODA is common in international commerce, and it serves the interest of both parties. Not to mention that such ODA is only an unsubstantial part of the commerce.

Elected Japanese officials and Japanese press talk as if China’s fast growth was not possible without Japan’s ODA, and thus intentionally mislead the public (this is proven by the misconceptions shown by a handful of Americans on many message boards). They also confuse it with war reparations. They intentionally make the Chinese look ungrateful.

The Hallucinating Powers of Opium and Enlightenment

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-drugs29may29.story

About 180 years ago, the immense trade between China and the British was running into problems.

The huge British appetite for Chinese tea, porcelain etc. was not matched by the Chinese who had little need for British goods (the Industrial Revolution had not yet started so there was no ‘great’ entrepreneurial skills for some present day Asians to ‘fall heads over’).

As a result, the 'greatest empire' of the time found its silver and gold flowing one way, and decided to reverse that flow. They found it in opium, a British 'discovery' from Afghanistan and India after they whacked the Portugese and the Moghul Empire to create what they proudly called the ‘jewel of the British crown’ (just one sign that the immense returns from colonization was getting to their head).

At that time, this super-power of the time (for whose empire the sun never sets) found nothing wrong with selling opium, and sought to perpetuate that through the Opium Wars (their banning of its sale in Britain and ‘passionate appeals’ by certain British politicians claiming that ‘the war was unjust’ notwithstanding).

Even Adam Smith, the Scottish writer of The Wealth of Nations, supported the opium trade and the British for it 'expands free trade'. Perhaps this was the 'unseen hand' he had been talking about - what other better way is there to make money?

After the Opium Wars ended in mid-1800s, the Chinese were made (or rather whacked) to accept continued opium trade in the name of 'free trade', reparations of 50 million ounzes of silver, and concessions for Kowloon and the Hong Kong island which the British used as ‘safe haven’ for their opium supplies.

Before the wars, the Chinese had applied a ban on British trade because the latter refused to stop the opium trade. As a result, the British ‘exported tea with the help of the US’ (known commonly to some present day fools as ‘the most benevolent superpower in history’). During the wars, when the British armada was attacking various coastal towns, the Americans went along as a sort of ‘deputy sheriff’ (a role not unlike what Mahathir used to describe present-day Australia). One American naval commander was reported to have cried ‘blood is thicker than water’ in one of those attacks (blood thirsty frenzy aside, that is also more than a sign of Anglo-Saxon bravado).

Today, the Afghans doing the same represents ‘an enormous threat to world stability’, says the ‘nice’ Americans. Or perhaps the Americans are looking for a reason to whack those Afghans some more (see attached report).

At about the same time as the Opium Wars, a bunch of Chinamen plotting to change a weak China by ‘learning from the west’ was drawing inspiration from some certain ‘commandments’. Claiming variously to be the ‘brother' of some godly fella, and speaking for some 'holy ghost’ et cetera, they were leading a revolution known as the Taiping Revolution.

Of course, these Chinamen were not the first, nor the last in the world to make such claims. A certain Mohammed, for instance, did something similar and his followers had since been competing with the other fella’s in a ‘my god’s such and such is better than to your god’s such and such’ fight to be 'most god-right' till today as exemplified by my favorite global-idiot, George Bush Jr and his nemesis, Osama.

But and probably ‘surprisingly’ to those that believe in the powers of those books, the British found this set of ‘enlightened’ Chinamen a nuisance, and dispatched its own ‘Ever Victorious Army’ (assisted again by who else, the Americans) to help the Qing government whack them. Apparently, the British preferred a backward China than an enlightened one (always easier to ‘screw’ a greater idiot, perhaps). This army was also recorded to have brought home to London ‘incalculable quantities of loot'. 30 million Chinamen perished in this revolution, a feat to be matched by the Japanese some 50 years later.

Although the British were 'really' peace-loving people that would have preferred others to submit to their nice colonial rule like what the Indians did (reason why India was such a 'jewel'), other means was brought to bear on those less willing to 'toe the line'.

'Learning' from the 'great' British and Americans, other ‘great powers’ realized (faster than many present day histo-ignoramuses) that the strategy of war and loot/reparations was so rewarding that a couple of decades later, a bigger group came together to do the same thing on the back of the Boxer Rebellion.

So, can you see how useful intoxicated and ‘enlightened Chinamen’ can be? In fact, this strategy, no doubt honed from similar ones by the Spaniards, Portugese, and ‘Americans’ in the New World, was so lucrative (who needs hard work?) that it soon inspired the ‘rush for Africa the last continent’ exemplified by our King Leopold II, and, of course, the equally smart Germans and Japanese.

During the Boxer Rebellion, a total of eight nations (Prussia and Japan included) joined in the 'Chinese feast'. In addition to being looted, China had to pay reparations of 500 million ounzes of silver (more countries to feed so bigger amount). This amount represents more than 1 ounze per Chinaman, enlightened and not. Or about 10 years of Chinese government revenue.

After that, Japan separately decided to fatten itself by attacking north China and Korea, and got another 250 million ounzes of silver from China for themselves. Along the way, they whacked the Russians and thereby inflated their egos which led to their famous 'free all Asians by replacing the European colonists with themselves as master of Asia' ambition.

With so much easy money from China, India, Africa etc., these powers went over each other and we had WWI.

The victors of WWI led by the British and Americans tried to do the same 'war reparations trick' on the Germans in a form of 'globalization of reparation revenue', and created 'new jewels' in their crown by carving for themselves all the oil rich territories that belonged to the Ottomans (by then the value of oil known to exist abundantly in the 'near east' for hundreds of years was well apparent). At the same time, they created the new state of Israel to 'fulfill the vision' of their book, and a god-perfect setting for perpetual conflict between the other 2 sets of 'idiots of the book' which served their purposes well to today.

Along the way, they also under-estimated and over-ignored the Japanese who was left feeling short changed because they did not get their 'fair share' of Prussia's Chinese possessions. Thus setting the scene for WWII.

Today, if you swap the British and the Americans around, change opium for a few other commodities, and swap a few place names with the ones above, you can about see the same things happening around us (including recent stories of a certain son of a Thatcher). Of course, one should not leave out the ‘faithful’ Australians that had been living off the spoils of these bigger fellas all the while in their little pirates’ lair down south.

If you are a Chinaman like me, the above may give you reasons to despise your forefathers, and look down on their practices and systems.

Many entranced by the wealth of those 'powers' had obviously wished to reproduce the same for themselves. Some who fail to do so via commonly accepted ways of hard work etc. and do not know the 'value' of the strategies outlined above (can't see the 'unseen hand'), may give in to desperation, and adopt the other's beliefs in a 'monkey see monkey do' act of desperate delusion in the hope that it will somehow get them there (the cost of being second or third class citizens notwithstanding – topic for another day).

But then again, as the Taiping fellas learnt, blind faith does not help, no matter what high deity you claim you represent.

p.s. Mark Twain said that "when one reads the book, one is less impressed with what the deity knows than what he does not". But then, that writer from so many years ago, what does he know? Which writer??