Foolishness of 'China Rising, America Diminishing'
In a private meeting, a highly intellectual friend was preaching to us about the characteristics and transformations of nations, and he concluded that the Euro-American era was over and that China was emerging as the official major and sole player on the international stage. Our friend’s enthusiasm for this new replacement was unfathomable to me. China had and has gray records in human rights, repression and cultural exclusion. I read tens of articles about promising Chinese individuals rising to lead of the world, but from my perspective, they all ignore the most problematic issue that makes it impossible for China to lead the international community — the closed ethnicity, or one race. History proves that a nation with such social and cultural problems cannot dominate and expand. The United States was able to lead the world and has become the lonely pole because different nations have seen in America a great mix from all peoples and nations. Every nation sees itself in the American mix or at least having representation in it.
Even for Arabs, statistics show that there are more than 10 million Arabs living in the U.S. That figure is more than the populations of five Arab countries combined. From history, we learn that Greeks and Romans dominated the old world when they were part of a mix of nations and peoples and that they diminished when they became enclave ethnicities in Athens and Rome. Similarly, later on, the Arab civilization dominated when Arabs accommodated the Copts, Berbers, Persians, Indians, natives of Central Asia and Andalus — the Iberian Peninsula — in their ethnic mix, and the same civilization was doomed to fail when the last Abbasid Caliphate ignorantly displaced those nations from the formational structure of the Arabic-Islamic civilization. By the same token, the Ottoman Empire’s fall occurred when the Ottoman race was allowed to crush the rest of the empire’s peoples and displace them either by exclusion or torture, then the enclave Ottoman ethnicity became a colonial power and diminished. The problem for China is that it starts with this inherited blight, which led to the collapse of other great empires. China can be the factory of the world and the leading economic power, but it absolutely cannot be the political and cultural leader of the international community. This is simply due to the fact that people of the world don’t accept the prevalence and leadership of a closed ethnicity or one race.
Even for Arabs, statistics show that there are more than 10 million Arabs living in the U.S. That figure is more than the populations of five Arab countries combined. From history, we learn that Greeks and Romans dominated the old world when they were part of a mix of nations and peoples and that they diminished when they became enclave ethnicities in Athens and Rome. Similarly, later on, the Arab civilization dominated when Arabs accommodated the Copts, Berbers, Persians, Indians, natives of Central Asia and Andalus — the Iberian Peninsula — in their ethnic mix, and the same civilization was doomed to fail when the last Abbasid Caliphate ignorantly displaced those nations from the formational structure of the Arabic-Islamic civilization. By the same token, the Ottoman Empire’s fall occurred when the Ottoman race was allowed to crush the rest of the empire’s peoples and displace them either by exclusion or torture, then the enclave Ottoman ethnicity became a colonial power and diminished. The problem for China is that it starts with this inherited blight, which led to the collapse of other great empires. China can be the factory of the world and the leading economic power, but it absolutely cannot be the political and cultural leader of the international community. This is simply due to the fact that people of the world don’t accept the prevalence and leadership of a closed ethnicity or one race.