Why America Should Support and Aid Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” Initiative
Living the cognitive-dissonant life — that of combining hard-bitten cynicism with altruistic starry-eyed idealism— is not easy. For my part, Exhibit A is China. I’ve said many times that I’m no fan of the Chinese government, and especially of what it is doing to the Uighur and Tibetan cultures. Chinese nationalists can deny these crimes against humanity all they want, but there’s more than enough evidence available to the objective reader for a guilty verdict.
The key word above, however, is “objective”, for objectivity is a double-edged concept that, properly honed, cuts both ways.
Just as America is more than our systemic racism, that malignant cancer woven into nearly every thread of our own social fabric, there is a great deal more to China than its treatment of the Uighurs and Tibetans. We Americans like to say that people are all equal, and that people all over the world are the same, but how many of us actually show that with our actions? We see what China does wrong, but we have blinded ourselves to their accomplishments and policies that are good and right in every sense of the words.
Despite America’s and China’s respective feet of clay and our many reasons to distrust each other, we should work together with China to ensure the success of their Belt and…
