LINCOLN AND CHINA'S "ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS" 林肯与“一国两制”

LINCOLN AND CHINA'S "ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS" 林肯与“一国两制”

Repost on the Bicentennial Anniversary of Lincoln's Birthday

By Kai Chen 作者: 陈凯

2005-07-03 09:55:44

China's communist party turned 84 and more and more young people are joining in as the government media claims. Does anyone believe that? If it is true, what do you think it is behind their motive to join the communist party? Do they truly believe in Communist ideology whose only purpose is to destroy Capitalism? Or do they join only to advance their career in making more money or gaining more power in climbing the political and social ladder? If the communist party's policy of "one country, two systems" stands, do you see the contradiction? Who is the "one country"? What are the "two systems"?

President Abraham Lincoln was an idiot, according to today's wise and smart Chinese communist party elite. Deng was smarter than Lincoln in his calling for "one country, two systems". Why fight a bloody war to preserve the Union if Lincoln was smart enough as the Chinese today. We can just compromise to have a big happy family and everybody can just go on with their own business, slavery or not, the Chinese will assert. And indeed China was the main sponsor of the first pure modern slave state — Pol Pot's communist Cambodia in the late 1970s. In that communist state, there was no money, no capitalism, no free movement of people. There was only unabated pure slavery of individuals for the benefit of the state. There was only murder and bloodshed as millions were slaughtered. As far as exploitation of labor goes, I have not seen any capitalist states taking more than half of an individual's income as tax as in the case of Yao Ming with the non-exploitative, good hearted socialist China.

Should Lincoln adopt a policy like China's, there would have been no American Civil War. Then again, there would not be an America as we know today for the American Constitution with its fundamental moral values of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" for every citizen of the country would cease to exist. We would end up with a meaningless entity no one knows how to define, as today's China is.

Yet, the "one country, two systems" can only be adopted and proposed by those morally invalid and rationally inadequate. I bet the southern slave holders would have no trouble in accepting such a proposal if President Lincoln initiated it. The purpose of the southern slave holders would be happy to have accepted "one country, two systems" as a doctrain for coexistence. It would be to win them more time to survive and regroup till they would be strong again. This is exactly what motivated Deng and the Chinese communist regime to propose "one country, two system", for they never believed that such a scheme would ever work. But by deceiving the Chinese masses with their already weak sense of rationality through thousands of years of moral and intellectual degradation, the communists think they can get away with it and indeed for a large part they did get away with it. So now the Chinese communist party is successfully postponing its own demise, though they know somehow they will never prevent it. Sooner of later, they will be history. That is why they are hoarding money in overseas banks for themselves and sending their kids abroad just in case one day China collapses.

Many leftist thinkers in America and in the West in general also have proposed such a scheme of "one world, two systems" with free countries coexisting with despotic regimes. "Appeasement" during W.W.II and "detente" during the cold war are only two examples. Yet, it only led to disaster, war and human misery. 9/11 showed us that Clinton administration's detente with the world despotism, culminated by the rise of Islamic Fundamentalists, would only lead to unprecedented tragedies. I applaud President Bush's foreign policy of "spreading freedom around the world", for at least some of us have learned something from that tragic morning in September, 2001. There should be no compromise with communism and world despotism in mankind's search for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. If you don't actively attack the dark forces fostered by human evils in their thirst for power and domination regardless of universal human values, the evil dark forces, like cancer cells or AIDS virus, will advance and swallow the world. There will never be "one country, two systems", nor will there be "one world, two kinds of values". Mankind can only advance with "one world with one value and one direction" that is human freedom.

To accommodate evil is to postpone the demise of evil. In China today it is the evil that is dictating the terms and formulating vocabulary for the Chinese masses. Sadly the Chinese masses are not wise enough and alert enough to reject such a scheme. The anemic world opinion and Western leftists are of no help either. They are deceiving themselves into thinking good and evil can coexist together peacefully, freedom and slavery can coexist without conflict, law and order can coexist with chaos and irrationality without creating confusion and misery, democracy can coexist with tyranny without human suffering and bloodshed... Wake up, people! Take your action and make your choice. Action or inaction will always have consequences even if you don't admit it.

President Lincoln was not wrong in attacking evil to preserve good. People of the world should learn from his courage and wisdom in advancing human freedom and pushing history forward. We are all in debt with him and we all owe him our gratitude. America indeed is "one country, one system, one value and one direction". The world's future will not diverge from the American experience and example.

－－原载：《America Online》, July 03, 2005