Deepak Vohra

What is truth, asked Pontius (Jesting) Pilate, and would not stay for an answer (Gospel of John).

In modern China, the “truth” is what Xi PingPong manufactures.

There is this classic Greek warning possibly from Sophocles in the 7th century that “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.”

Democracies like the USA and India are founded on individual will and collective freedom.

Autocracies like China and North Korea seek unity through uniformity, cohesion through ideological and non-religions conformity.

One system survives the other collapses.

Nations should come to terms with themselves..

Britannia is still struggling with its diminished global role since WW 2.

India assumed leadership of the decolonized world and woke up in 1962.

The USSR saw itself as the ultimate human dream, and awakened in 1991 (Soviet citizens celebrated its collapse as much as anybody else).

The USA believed in its eternal invincibility, till 9/11.

Is it China’s turn now?

Time and history are unforgiving.

If the US Defence Secretary, a professional soldier, asks his military task force to speed up efforts to counter China in every which way, why are we surprised?

Why has a fellow called Xi PingPong,the man whom only a few years ago his country had adored, the world had admired, and rivals at home and abroad had feared, become an international pariah?

Is it hubris or the inescapable march of history or both?

Ozymandias was the self-proclaimed King of Kings and his decapitated statue now lies in the desert – according to Percy Shelley.

Cai Xia, a former Communist Professor was booted out in 2020 for calling the “divine leader” a “mafia boss” and describing the Party as a “political zombie.”

She noted that Mao Zedong and Francisco Franco (of Spain) died within a hear of each other, yet Franco's successors quickly transitioned to a stable democracy while Mao's successors totally stifled political reform.

Nothing like civil liberties or cumbersome constitutional processes should come in the way of the Chinese dream. Dissenters, human rights activists, even their lawyers, end up in jail.

Communist China is the land of the shackled and the home of the scared.

The phantom pain of losing imperial greatness is kept alive in China’s collective memory.

History books, television series and newspaper articles repeatedly evoke the humiliation of the Chinese nation by foreign powers, the decline and misery.

The plans for the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" extend to 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.

The nobler the goals and the farther into the future their fulfillment, the greater the sacrifices one can demand from the people.

Totalitarian regimes remain in power only through perpetual motion mania. Keep creating utopias – attainable in the future for present sacrifices. The Long March is unending.

In late 2019, a pudgy pugilist, a megalomaniac bloated with self-importance, suffering malignant narcissism, wanting to be the master of the universe, intolerant of dissent, unleashed a deadly virus on a complacent world, creating the greatest existential threat in our lifetime.

America was the undisputed economic, military and soft power (Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, MacDonald’s) numero uno for most of the last one hundred years.

It does not like to be numero dos.

It is angry that it fed China with investment and technology, hoping to moderate its behavior.

China absorbed it all and then began to bite the hand that fed it.

For all its verrucae and frailties, America gives generously, China robs shamelessly.

In 2015, when China demanded that its military be treated as equal to that of the United States, a furious Barrack Obama responded that America was the most powerful nation in history.

The USSR collapsed, and the Americans thought it was the end of history – their democratic system would be the world’s choice for ever.

Then in the past decade along came this scoundrel from the East who openly dared to challenge US supremacy.

But has no idea of what the world wants.

A number of studies show how China's leadership, in its sarvagyaani (omniscient) and sarvavyaapi (omnipresent) manifestation, saws off the branch on which it sits.

A British parliamentary report of June 2021 says China tries to undermine, manipulate or even destroy multilateral organizations such as WHO and Interpol that were based on an international system of shared values of peace, prosperity and freedom.

China has hurt itself badly from its 'one child policy' (since 1979) and become a country of little male emperors - privileged, pampered and socially awkward, doted over by six adults - mother and father (both without siblings) and two sets of grandparents.

The Chinese government earned US$314 billion in fines (called Social Maintenance Fees) from those violating the OCP till early 2012, as per the Economist.

With 33 million more men than women in 2020, the 'bride price' has increased 100 times to well over USD 150,000.

The men who cannot find or afford life partners are called “bare branches” and many now turn to Pakistan and North Korea.

The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer found that Chinese themselves are losing trust in their Government.

The “perfect” world with Chinese characteristics now consists of North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran, all paragons of freedom and democracy. Turkey is trying to get in.

The USSR collapsed because its massive military strength could not be supported by its crumbling economy.

Its repressive political system appealed to only a handful of exhausted autocrats.

Xi and his sidekicks seem not to realize that a nation’s influence is not based just on its weapons and troops, or its economic might, or its foreign exchange reserves.

China’s authoritarian political system is the biggest barrier to its role as a global superpower.

Xi’s disease, that induces hallucinations and amnesia, is hurting China.

The highly overrated Henry Kissinger, starry-eyed about Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, considered the Chinese subtle and wise beyond words.

The reality that Kissinger could not see is that when the two chaps departed, China was in a mess.

Deng Xiaoping was lauded around the world for his realism and pragmatism; Xi Jinping aroused a sense of awe.

With such excessive reactions about China, it makes sense to come down to earth and realize how often, and how disastrously, the Chinese have so often been wrong about so many things.

The Great Helmsman Mao Zedong hated family planning but made the greatest contribution to population control in human history when 50 million people, mostly women and children, starved to death in 1959 – 60 during his Great Leap Forward (10% of the population in 2 years and nobody even found out for twenty years).

His Cultural Revolution eliminated a few million more.

A famous US-based Professor Francis Fukuyama once highlighted the vulnerability of China to the bad-emperor syndrome. There were some golden periods in Chinese history, but many more of terrible emperors – the latest being right now.

Emperor Zhou You Wang (Gongsheng), 8th C BC, to humour his sulky mistress, would repeatedly call out his armies to face a non-existent invader. When the invaders did come, he was slaughtered.

The foolish emperor playing with military matters is an enduring Chinese lesson on responsibility, but the present God does not believe it.

Barbara Tuchman’s seminal 1984 work “The March of Folly” is about how stupid Governments act against their own interests.

Xi Jinping is like the Red Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, egotistic, megalomaniac, narcissistic, with a deep need for excessive adulation, and frequent commands of “off with his head”. I do not know what you mean by your way, the Queen rebukes someone, all the ways about here belong to me.

Pre-2019 were the years of unstoppable China, 2020 was the year of the virus, 2021-2022are the years of China’s implosion.

When Xi Jinping asks the PLA to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice and to be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, and absolutely reliable,” one wonders what worries him.

As India’s Chief of Defence Staff said in June 2021, the PLA consists of temporary conscripts with no experience of high altitude warfare, India’s military fights in any terrain.

Despite all its acquiescence in globalization, its huge inter-linkages with the world, and its stated desire to play the game according to international rules–China nonetheless remains the quintessential global outlier, a near-alien, dice-phalic 'middle kingdom' type.

Take the case of the virus.

There is ever growing evidence that the Wuhan virus is a laboratory creation in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (not produced by Shri and Smt Bat hanging upside down in their caves) meant to be a bioweapon in China’s demented quest for global domination.

If China admits that it was a laboratory leak, it would explode the myth of its self-proclaimed superior system, destroy the Communist Party, shatter God PingPong’s reputation, and even be prosecuted for crimes against humanity since biological warfare is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law and several international treaties.

By early 7 January 2020, the Supreme Leader knew enough about the origin of the outbreak to personally take charge and ordered the Wuhan market to be shut and sanitized several times.

Two weeks later he locked down 11 million people (the largest lockdown ever till then) to prevent the virus from spreading within China, but ordered thousands of Chinese expatriates who had come home for the New Year to rush back, carrying the virus in their bodies.

Take the case of its vaccines.

In April 2021, the Head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control acknowledged the poor efficacy of Chinese vaccines, and promptly recanted!

Ask the Seychelles, now reeling under a second attack despite inoculating its 100,000 people with the Chinese rubbish.

Bahrain, despite being one of the world’s most vaccinated nations (a fifth of its people have been injected with the Chinese garbage) is battling a Covid surge five times as deadly as India’s and wants its citizens to take a Pfizer booster shot.

Ditto UAE and Saudi Arabia, with the former quietly revaccinating fully vaccinated people with Pfizer’s shot.

China wants to do business even in seemingly humanitarian efforts, just as its UN peacekeepers in African nations negotiate with host governments for contracts to Chinese companies.

At a time when the whole world is reeling under the terror of covid-19, China offers Nepal one million doses but insists that Nepal sign non-disclosure agreements because China prefers the darkness of subterfuge.

While China claims that its vaccines have been approved by the greatest virologist in human history (you guessed it, his name is Xi Jinping), global concerns are based on lack of public clinical data, deficiencies in data that is made available, and politicization of vaccines.

After being thrashed in Galwan on 15 June 2020, would China dare to acknowledge that it badly miscalculated?

On the first anniversary of the clash, an editorial in Huan Qiu Shi Bao (Global Times - Chinese) squarely blames India for the clash, says India’s salami slicing tactics backfired, claims to have taught India a lesson, gloats that from being the pharmacy of the world, India is now the hospital ward of the world, and boasts that China has helped India in its oxygen crisis.

The zombies in China must believe this “truth.”

A 1943 party propaganda song declares that:

Without the Party there will be no new China…

It practiced democracy, bringing many advantages.

The confrontation in the South China Sea and the emergence of the Quad is making China quadriplegic.

Four countries that had coordinated the relief efforts of their navies during the 2004 tsunami decided to work closely together in several areas including open sea lanes (80% of global trade goes by sea) and maritime security to stare down China’s naked aggression in the South China Sea.

Created by an act of God, the Quad has been solidified by the aggression of a godless nation.

As Russia and the United States kiss and make up, China’s isolation grows.

Its mask slips and its vile face emerges, so Virus Pong asks his "wolf warriors" to lay down their arms and create a more trustworthy and respectable image of China.

As one of my colleagues had put it so picturesquely, it is like asking a barely tamed animal, made ferocious by its masters, to become entirely and uncharacteristically tame again, as soft and cuddly as a puppy that flops on its back wanting its belly to be scratched.

Realizing that it cannot continue to filch western state of the art technology, China’s present five-year plan posits self-sufficiency in modern technology.

Since global markets may be closing, it appeals to its businesspeople to focus on the domestic market.

Is reality dawning on China?

(Deepak Vohra is a senior diplomat, special Advisor to Prime Minister on Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil)