Last Saturday, at a Christmas party of my Chinese church, I happened to be chatting with two young men in their late thirties or early forties, who migrated to Australia from China some twenty years ago and were both working as IT professionals. The conversation somehow veered into the Ukraine war, and I was stunned to hear that they were both staunch supporters of Russia.
They kept repeating the lines of CCP propaganda: that the US was a robber who went everywhere to commit robberies, that it deliberately provoked Russia, who had every right to invade Ukraine in self-defence, and that the US wanted the war so it could sell its weapons. I kept using facts to prove these accusations wrong and kept asking them to provide facts to back their claims. Every time I responded to one accusation, they immediately moved on to another. It was like guerrilla warfare — every time they attacked one target, I committed to the battle, only to find them disappearing to attack another.
It was clear to me that the reason they could not defend any of their accusations, yet kept accusing, was that deep down they had one fundamental conviction, which they knew was indefensible, but they believed strongly:
If they were stronger than you, you must submit; otherwise, they had every right to invade and slaughter you.
These two young men are the nicest in our cell group apart from the group leader couple. They show up an hour earlier every Sunday to get everything ready for the worship and operate the slides during the service. They do the dishwashing and clean up after the service. They are very gentle and humble, always eager to help others. They had helped me many times, whenever I ask, they are always there. They are absolutely the nicest kind of human beings by the standard of every culture. If they rank ten in nicety, I don’t even reach five.
And yet, they support Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, and they will undoubtedly support China’s invasion of Taiwan, and, if the Taiwanese resist, any brutal act by the invasion force on them.
Even the nicest mainland Chinese have the same conviction— the Rule Of The Jungle. That was all they could absorb, when they grew up in China, from the soil deliberately and completely poisoned by the Chinese Communist Party.
If the nicest well-educated young Chinese who have lived in a democratic country for twenty years are like that, what can we expect of the 1.4 billion Chinese living in China?
The headwind we the West are facing does not come from CCP alone. It comes from the 1.4 billion Chinese.
做个明白人 