THE SOURCE OF XI JINPING'S INNER PEACE

7/26/2020

The source of Xi Jinping’s inner peace

Vince Dhimos answered a question at Quora.

https://www.quora.com/As-the-US-and-China-are-becoming-more-and-more-hostile-to-each-other-it-seems-that-all-countries-have-to-pick-a-side-of-either-the-US-or-China-Which-side-will-or-should-your-country-pick/answer/Vince-Dhimos

As the US and China are becoming more and more hostile to each other, it seems that all countries have to pick a side of either the US or China. Which side will or should your country pick?

Vince Dhimos certificate from Mandarin Chinese (language) & Chinese Culture, History, National Taiwan Normal University (Graduated 1990)

It is inaccurate to say that the US and China are “hostile to each other.” Only the US is hostile. China waxes neither hot nor cold. It is not led by its emotions. China is imbued with the ancient Confucian ideal of harmony and also with a certain ideal of equanimity and calm, as exemplified by a traditional Chinese folk tale titled 塞翁失馬 (Sāi Wēng Shī Mǎ), which tells a story as recited at a web site

Sai Weng Shi Ma 塞翁失馬 • Eve Out of the Garden

as follows

Sai Weng lived in the northern frontier of China. One day one of his horses disappeared. His neighbours came out to console him, “poor Sai Weng, he has lost a horse.”

But the old man was not sad, “Hmmmm…..this may not be a bad thing….”

Days later his horse returned of its own accord, bringing with it another, even better horse. Once again his neighbours came out, this time to congratulate him on his good fortune.

But he was not quick to gloat. “Hmmmm….this is not something worth celebrating. Obtaining a horse may be a stroke of bad luck.”

Sai Weng’s son loved the new horse, and he was good at taming the wild horses. But one day, he fell from the horse, breaking his leg. Once again Sai Weng’s neighbors came out to console him after hearing the bad news.

But the old man replied, “Hmmmmm…..it is still hard to say if this broken leg is calamity or good fortune.”

Sometime later China went to war with the northern barbarians, and all the young men were commanded to go to war. The war went on for years, and many young men were killed, but Sai Weng’s son was not drafted into the war because of his broken leg, and so he remained living a peaceful life.

As this Chinese story illustrates, sometimes bad luck turns out to be good, and sometimes good luck turns out to be bad.

END STORY

This ancient wisdom is something very few Westerners understand, political ideologists least of all.

And here is the Chinese wisdom in response to your question:

It doesn’t matter which side your country comes down on. The Chinese will always be the Chinese and will always remain unmoved by whatever the winds of fortune may bring their way. 800 million workers will rise at dawn and set their noses to the grindstone every day to solve their problems with common sense and calm, ignoring the fierce US and its satellites as they beat their breasts and knock themselves out trying to defeat them. For they are neither friend nor foe, they are and forever will remain the Chinese

China’s is a winning strategy whether you are for it or against it. But if you are for it, you win. If you are against it, you lose.

9 Comments

John E McClain

7/26/2020 04:12:07 pm

I've been to China as a Marine, ports of call and all that, not as an official or anything, but found the attitude of the people I met, very much as the story and statement of Vince describe. I would also like to say, China has moved "a leap forward" in truth, in the last two decades, achieving incredible literacy outcomes, around the Nation, and raising the vast majority out of poverty, and into a middle class, as they see it, culture being the issue that determines what we want, or how we get it so often.
I always felt welcome, no feeling of "eyes behind me, staring", wandered around, I'm a mechanic, and like to see what things look like in other countries, never was hassled, always polite, friendly, I believe the U.S. made a great error in ignoring the welcome to the BRI, it is inevitable for us to fail, one can't print money forever, without backing, "there is no free lunch", and we are far too close, to be back-biting other People's, for any reason, much less "politics here at home". If you and your wife bicker, can't make up, you don't have the right to go to your neighbors, or better yet, some stranger's house, way across town, sucker punch him answering his door bell, and leaving before anyone sees you clearly, and claim the "right to relieve your anger or frustration", and that's essentially how our politicians work. Me, myself, when I'm in bad shape, needing help, I walk softly, am polite, and am open to reasonable offers, even if I don't get to "drive the boat or toot the horn".
Semper Fidelis,
John McClain
GySgt, USMC, ret.
Vanceboro, NC, USA

Sharon Tennison link

7/26/2020 04:18:06 pm

Beautifully told truth!
Your messages are so honest and meaningful
Sharon

William Bissell

7/26/2020 06:36:26 pm

China thinks in terms of thousands of years. They have 100 year plans while the US thinks in terms of 5 to 10 years at best. India is the same. Both are ancient and survivors. We are annoying flees that will kill ourselves in few short yrs. .
They could throw 200 Million men at us and still have enough people to populate the county. We are temporary.

John M Stassi

7/27/2020 11:53:51 am

Setting aside the fact that this is yet another stupid Quora question, it seems obvious to me that if Xi Jinping really enjoys "inner peace" then it has little or nothing to do with the moral of that lovely Chinese fable -- and there are so many like it, part of a rich folk literature tradition -- and much more to do with his (and the Chinese Communist Party's) winning strategy, which has been from the very birth of that regime up to the present to establish and maintain absolute control over the Chinese people.

For Xi Jinping and his fellow members of the CCP elite, inner peace is easy:

>> when you control what can be posted on the Internet and published or broadcast in the media;

>>when you have implemented advanced surveillance technology that can follow the movements of large numbers of ordinary people and warn you when they engage in anti-regime activities;

>> when you are free of having to go to the people to elect you to the position of power that you hold, for life if that's what you want.

And in exchange for this "inner peace" consider the decades of inner turmoil that the CCP has inflicted upon:

>> the indigenous peoples of Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan and Tibet, whose countries have been overrun with Han Chinese immigrants and who have been reduced to a level similar to that enjoyed by African-Americans in the USA during the Jim Crow era;

>> labor union organizers who are working for safer and fairer working conditions for those 800 million workers and who mostly end up in jail for their efforts.

I am on the side of the Chinese people, which means that I cannot take the side of the ruling CCP.

You are right about American indignation about Chinese Party activities; it is steeped in hypocrisy, but what else can you expect from corporate prostitutes of the Two-Party Tyranny?

Vince

7/27/2020 12:28:27 pm

If you take a personal poll of people you meet in China, I think you will find that they are pro-CCP. In other words, you can't be for the Chinese people and against the party.
I know that wherever I go I find Chinese communities and I always start talking to them -- in Mandarin -- about their country and their economy, and quite honestly, John, I have not yet met a Chinese who was against the CCP. I have been in Panama for 11 years now and the Chinese I meet are tremendously ebthusiastic about what is happening in their country. Who can argue with 6-7% economic growth year on year? I strongly urge you to actually speak with real Chinese and rely less on the US msm. I understand you have travelled in China, so I guess you also speak Mandarin, right?

7/27/2020 01:07:41 pm

The reason I stress Mandarin is that when you speak in English to a Chinese, you bring out a different kind of person than when you speak Mandarin. If you speak English, the Chinese is very cautious because he knows how Westerners feel about the CCP, But when you speak Mandarin, he or she expects you to understand the Chinese viewpoint. You bring out the REAL Chinese person. Again, I have NEVER spoken to a Chinese in Mandarin who had a negative attitude toward his government. I useually open up by asking "how is the economy in China these days?" And I say it with a big smile because I know the economy is GOOD there. Here in Panama, almost every Chinese family I know is planning on retiring in China. Another big clue for me is the response I get to my pro-Chinese posts. I get maybe a dozen upvotes on a good day and also very positive comments. When a commenter has a Chinese name, I don't worry that the response will be negative. Now compare this with the response you would get if you traveled abroad and met an American. Would you dare lead off by saying something positive about Trump? No, you would realize America is divided. You need to ask yourself: Why is America divded and China is not? I am not referring to Hong Kong, where US NGOs are running around bad mouthing the PRC, of course. The reason America is divided is that the US government is failing on both sides of the aisle, and since the performance of government is bad on both sides, people cling to hope that the failing is due to the OTHER party, but that is false. It is due to the colossal failing of BOTH parties, which are nearly indistinguishable from each other. Thus division is BUILT IN to the US system, and this will not get better, BTW, thanks to the latest rounds of quantitative easing, the dollar is losing its value, and this is just the beginning. The Fed will be printing more trillions as the pandemic progresses,

7/27/2020 01:09:50 pm

Excuse me, when I wrote about my pro-Chinese posts, I was referring to Quora.

7/28/2020 02:47:42 pm

I do not doubt your testimony, Vince, about the support for the CCP government that you've found among the Chinese people you've spoken with in their language. I can only conclude that the China of today is radically different than the China I knew back in 1988-89.

It's been that long since I visited that country and spoke Mandarin -- never fluently but pretty much well enough to deal with the usual topics of conversation that a visiting wàiguórén travelling solo encountered -- with the people I met along the way.

I arrived in Beijing in May of 1988, travelled throughout the west and south of the country ending up in Lhasa on China's National Day. After a tour of several Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, I left for Nepal by bus a few weeks later, on October 24.

During the following 11 months that I spent in Nepal, India and Pakistan, the Beijing spring happened and was violently crushed.

That spring and summer of 1989, I met many western travellers in India who had been in Beijing during the Tiananmen occupation. It was THE place to be, they all told me, chatting with the students and others and witnessing the almost universal outpouring of community support for what they were doing. People were friendly and courteous to one another throughout the city, I was told, and everywhere there was a sense of hope and optimism in the air.

The Beijing of 1989 that they described was completely different than the one I knew just a year earlier, which was an "every man for himself" kind of place. Common courtesy was almost never seen in public in my experience. For example, upon boarding a city bus, young men would routinely push past the aged, infirm and women with children to claim what seats there were to be had.

At my hotel, I ran into several members of an English Rugby team there for a cultural exchange. Like me, they were disgusted by this, so when they encountered it, they formed kind of a scrum and blocked out the rude guys and so that the oldsters and mothers could board first. They were quite proud of that tactic.

In late September of 1989, I crossed back into China from Pakistan via the Khunjerab pass and spent a few days in a hotel at the foot of Muztagh Ata beside Karakul Lake. Also staying there was an American biochemist who had come to Beijing on a Fulbright grant to install an amino acid sequencing machine at one of the universities and train the scientists there to use it.

He confirmed what I had heard about the miraculous and wonderful social transformation of the population of Beijing during the Tiananmen occupation, and then told me about the terrible depression that infected that same population, and especially the folks he worked with, in the aftermath of the violence that ended it. It was impossible for him to continue his work because none of the scientists were coming into work and all were so depressed that it was pointless to try to proceed. So he booked a journey to a place as far as he could get from Beijing to get away from this sad situation and wait for it to get better.

Do you remember the videos showing the tens of thousands of Beijing residents who blocked the movement of PLA troops into the city? Thirty years later, what happened to all of those people and the hopes and dreams they all had? I’m reminded of Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?”

These are the Chinese people I am still rooting for. I can only guess that you have never met any of them because there is so much fear of being prosecuted for anti-regime behavior and so many ways that the CCP government uses to track that sort of thing, that no one dares to be heard, by anyone, speaking critically of the CCP government. Or maybe that whole generation’s wonderful dreams of a just and free China have all dried up, just like a raisin in the sun.

7/28/2020 04:27:44 pm

Thanks for that detailed response, John. I like details. I can only infer that in the late 80s you were either at the right place, wrong time or the wrogn place, right time. A Greek philosopher said that life is like a river and we can never enter the same river twice because it is not the same water today as it was yesterday. I used to read the Taiwanese site Epoch Times and read all these really horrible things about Mao and the commie Chinese. I never thought I would ever say a good thing about them. But it was the ever-optimistic Chinese people that gradually changed my mind. Yes, I know the rudeness. People in the stores seemed to deliberately brush you aside to go where they wanted to go. Awful! But that is not the aspect that preoccupies me now. I see the 6-7% economic growth and I see a stagnant US economy and a dollar that is slowly dying with every freshly minted unbacked trillion rolling off the fed's printing press, and I see the US government sticking its ugly face into every corner of the globe. Now the current generation of Americans look to me the way the Chinese did back in the early 90s. Neither side is the same. The river has flowed on. Who knows what it will look like tomorrow?

Culture.

THE SOURCE OF XI JINPING'S INNER PEACE

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