Oct 31, 2009
I saw a Chinese painting of the Manchurian officers lining up outside the royal palace, but within the Forbidden City, in the morning and waiting for the daily order from the emperor. That was an internal magazine front page cover of Lockheed company long times ago, the title of which was: “Why did the Ming Dynasty fall? Can we avoid that kind of fate?” It doesn’t matter that Lockheed had made a mistake to use a painting in Qing Dynasty instead of Ming, but the point it tried to say was clear. You are a white American, I am a yellow one and others with different colors; I think as long as we are living on this American ship, no body, even he is not a patriot, would like to see the ship sinking down. However history always repeats. My answer is “No way to stop the historical cycle no matter you like to hear or not.” Read the history From Ming, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, Russia, Japan to America and you will find out the cycle was about 300 years for a country to rise up and down. A bad political system had shortened the cycle and a good system had just extended the cycle a little bit longer; but finally had to repeat it again.
The emperor who sent ZHenghe to sail to the west, was not a legal heir chosen by his father. He seized the power with Zhenghe’s assistance by defeating his nephew. He was very open minded and over-ambitious, but not aggressive (not a conqueror). It cost a lot of money to win the friendship from other countries and years later there were no salary for the government officers. The emperor just distributed what Zhenghe brought back from other countries to his officers as their salary. Of course every body disliked it because he had to sell it before he got the real money. After the fifth time when Zhenghe sailed to the west the emperor passed away; in other words his policy would be gone to his tomb as well and his son turned every thing upside down. Every body pointed the finger against Zhenghe and blamed on him about one royal building burnt down by fire in the Forbidden City (just moved the capital city from Nanjing to Beijing). Actually the sixth time of sailing had been canceled by the new emperor, who died later before long. His son supported grandfather’s policy and sent ZHenghe for the seventh journey. After reaching Africa Zhenghe had to return home because of severe illness and he passed away in the mid-way (India?). There was no consistent policy in feudalism and it would be changed by different emperor.
The fleet of two hundred fifty ships and twenty five thousands of people equipped with canons, arms and products workshop etc should have enough power to conquer other countries like what European had done. The time of Zhenghe seven times sailing to the west was more than seventy years earlier than Columbus and the size of each ship was eight times larger than that one of Columbus used, why Chinese did not conquer the world? The writer of the article you sent to me just scratched the surface of the history and did not dig out the root. Chinese at least had two times to conquer the world and did miss the chances: 1) Song Dynasty more than 1000 years ago, the gun powder and canon were invented (like American owned A bomb 65 years ago), however Chinese did not, but let Mongolian Genghis Khan use it to conquer Europe and China (by his grand son).2)Ming Dynasty, technologies to build largest, most advanced vessels and technologies of navigation in the ocean were only used to transmit Chinese culture and do money-losing trading to win friendship. Why? Here is my answer:
1) The minds of most Chinese were molded by “Confucius says”, who suggested not apply anything, to other people, which you do not want other people to apply to yourself. (he did say a lot other stuffs) For more than two thousand years Chinese minds and limbs were tightened up by this damn philosophy, because other people did not treat you in the same way, Dumb Idiot!
2) The system built up by Confucius thinking always chose the first son, (even he was an idiot or he refused to do), not the best one to be the Emperor Heir
3) If the emperor had no interest in the political affairs (some liked to be a playboy, some liked to be a painter, even liked to be a carpenter) the gang of eunuchs would take the advantages of closing to the power to screw up the country (That was the main reason why Manchurian took over Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty and Qing Dynasty repeated the same ending in 1911. While Japanese emperor skipped one meal a day to save money to buy the battle ship from England, the empress of China spent 100 times more money to build the Summer Palace with a huge stony ship in it. How could the battle ships fire without shells? China lost the sea war to Japan because of that----no money to buy shells. “A hen crows for the rooster and it sounds funny”; a country was controlled by a woman for more than 40 years and the country would be fucked up! Unfortunately when the country went to down turn, no body could stop it to the hell.
Learn something from history to avoid repeating the same failure for today’s politics. As the president of USA, he should have knowledge about history, politics, military, science, economy, foreign affairs etc and understand what kind of people are living in this country and what kind of army we have in this country. American people really can fight in only one condition---defending for real justice, freedom and democracy.(not defined by those politicians, but the people of the whole world) Unfortunately we haven’t set up a test system and background check for the candidates who run for the presidency yet. American people have let the IQ=89 person be our president, of course it would turn out wholly shit.
What are the main problems in this country? Economy Recession? That is the result, not the reason. I have lived in this country for so many years and found some root problems with it:
1) Encourage person, family and the government (zero budge policy) to spend the money before they earn.
2) Oversize for the government office. We have passed a lot of bills for education; however our schools still are short of money. Besides of other bills, we have tons of money every three days from the lotto and where did those money go? Someone told me they needed 2000 staff to run a school of 3000 students. No wonder short of money always.
3) Too much arguments before a decision can be made. (That is the price for democracy). Earthquake happened in Kobe in 1995 and I could not find any trace of damage in 1996 when I had a seminar there. We had a quake in 1989 in the Bay area and detour signs still can be seen in some damaged area.
4) No accountability and responsibility when something bad happened. Just point the finger to other people as the scapegoats. “Not me.” has been used since their young ages.
5) Only bonus and no punishment for CEO. Hp was screwed up by the ‘Lady’ and had to pay her 47 millions dollar to let her go. The CEO of Merill Lynch asked 10 millions dollar for his resign because he did not damage the company as severe as Lehman Brother did. Ridiculous.
6) Encourage people to be lazy. Quite a lot of people who get welfare have better lives than some hard working people.
7) Corruption. The governor of Illinois was booked because of selling Obama’ old position in congress and he said: “You arrest me? You got to be joking.” Why he said that? That meant he was not the first one to do the dirty work.
8) Chauvinism. Interfere other countries as an international police and don’t have enough money to solve the problems.(we should solve our own problems first)
9) Media not standing in the neutral position Misleading audience to their own view points.
10) Drug and Racial time bomb. It will explode especially during the recession time.
If we cannot solve these root problems, no matter how we talk about change, we are still in deep trouble. So far no other countries can defeat America, but drug and emotional problem among our young generation will. British men could not make part of China as a colony until a lot of Chinese sucked opium. Only way we can survive in the world trading is innovation and invention, not cheap labor and only way to fulfil that taskl is high level education for the young generation. The government can cut other budgets to solve the deficit problem, but not the fund for education; otherwise we have to pay for it later with 100% interest. Guiding the young boys and girls study in school is much better than letting them wandering in the street. You want the kids to get education in school or to be locked up in jail? That is up to you. If I were the governor I would set up student loan and directly deal with students (by pass those greedy financial agents) with low interest rate so that they have more chances to focus on their study.
