Ying Ma's Blog, page 10
May 24, 2019
China and the U.S.: 1999 vs. 2009
The National Interest, May 24, 2019
In November 1999, the United States and China signed a trade pact that paved the way to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. To secure U.S. support for its WTO accession, China agreed to open its markets and cut tariffs an average of 23 percent.
Some twenty years later today, the United States and China are engaged in a raging trade war.
In 1999, there was notable euphoria on both sides about the possibility of a great future of bilateral cooperation.
[image error]President Donald J. Trump and President Xi Jinping meet children waving Chinese and U.S. flags at welcoming ceremonies outside the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People’s Republic of China. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Today, the euphoria is gone. President Donald Trump, the chief advocate of the trade war, has tweeted that “China has taken so advantage of the U.S. for so many years,” and that China has been “stealing from American businesses, hurting [its] workers, and @realDonaldTrump is right to fight back!”
The year 1999 was a different era in China—culturally, socially and politically. China watchers have noted that the atmosphere was more open, and more politically tolerant. Under then President Jiang Zemin, there was a certain degree of political space for intellectuals and activists. In the intervening years, that space was curtailed by Jiang’s successor Hu Jintao, and then curtailed even further by current Chinese president Xi Jinping.
In Washington today, policymakers on both sides of the aisle—along with pundits who wish to sound smart on China—have been expressing their disappointment that China has not evolved to become more politically liberal as it has amassed economic might.
Of course, China never said it was going to democratize, and the Chinese Communist Party never promised to relinquish political power.
To read the entire article, please click HERE.
May 23, 2019
Democrats attack Ben Carson for stripping illegal immigrants of federal housing assistance
Washington Examiner, May 23, 2019
Tuesday’s congressional hearing for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson featured lots of angry Democrats saying nasty things about him and his department’s plan to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants.
At the hearing, held by the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., told Carson his proposal “would bring nothing but despair to thousands of American families.”
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chairwoman of the committee, called HUD’s plan “cruel.”
Long before Carson showed up in front of a committee of outraged Democrats, the Left lost any common sense or credibility in addressing the question of whether to provide taxpayer subsidies to illegal immigrants. Their answer is almost always a reflexive and sanctimonious yes.
To read the rest of the article, please click HERE.
April 18, 2019
Ilhan Omar and Candace Owens show both sides of the aisle succumb to identity politics
Washington Examiner, April 18, 2019
Recent controversies involving two women of color, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and conservative activist Candace Owens, reveal once again the identity politics in America’s public debate and private discourse. This ideology, along with the intolerance and political correctness it spawns, plagues both the Left and the Right and infects almost everyone — except President Trump.
Read entire column HERE.
March 18, 2019
Not enough nail polish: The scarcity of socialism
Fox News, March 18, 2019
When I was five, my kindergarten instructor in China asked me to stop painting my nails. She explained that none of my classmates had access to nail polish, so I should try not to make them feel bad. I was too young to understand: Socialism had made China too poor to afford basic goods like nail polish.
Today, the Democratic Party’s proud socialists simply choose not to understand: Socialism brings equality, but it is the equality of scarcity.
When I was asked to stop painting my nails, I lived in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. It was the early 1980s. After decades of totalitarian chaos and failed socialist experiments, my native land was finally beginning to open up to the outside world and undertake economic reforms.
One weekend, relatives I had never seen visited from Hong Kong, a nearby British colony. One of them presented me with nail polish.
I looked perplexed. No one I knew owned or used nail polish.
“Don’t worry… I’ll show you.” The woman who presented my gift laughed, grabbed my hand and proceeded to paint my nails. Afterwards, my nails were red for the first time in my life.
That following Monday, I showed off my nails at kindergarten. Children swarmed around me, curious and envious. None of them had seen nail polish before either.
Teacher Lee, our instructor, soon joined the ruckus.
“Your nails look so pretty,” she said.
I smiled, happy to receive the compliment.
My fellow students wanted nail polish too. Instinctively, we all wanted products China did not have that the wealthier, developed world could offer.
As my nail polish began to chip and peel, I started to dole out the chipped and peeled pieces to the class as if I were a pedestrian handing out change to beggars.
My system did not provide for everyone. Those unlucky ones who did not benefit from my handouts walked away empty handed. Those blessed with my favoritism walked away with peels or chips of dried nail polish to carry in their pockets, but no color on their nails.
Finally, in the middle of our kindergarten’s—and our country’s—nail polish scarcity, the children of my class found a solution: They started to paint their nails with colored pencils.
This inferior substitute left sloppy marks and scratches on my classmates’ fingernails, and the pigments from the colored pencils washed off easily. As such, my classmates had to recolor repeatedly each day. Soon enough, they spent less and less time running around the playground and more and more time coloring their nails.
One afternoon, Teacher Lee took me aside.
“Will you stop painting your nails, for the good of the class?” she asked with the utmost sincerity.
I did not understand.
“But why?”
“Because none of the other children have nail polish,” Teacher Lee quietly explained. “As you know, nail polish is not widely available in Guangzhou. Look at your classmates. They spend their time ruining their nails with colored pencils. They all feel bad that they don’t have nails like yours.”
Usually, my instructors did not make such requests. They would just tell us what we needed to do. If we did not do as instructed, we were either punished or our parents were advised to punish us.
Something was different this time. I could not tell what it was. Teacher Lee was no longer exuding the confidence and optimism that she exuded when she told us, as she regularly did, that we were the flowers of our country and the future of socialism.
Had I been older, she probably would have explained that China’s economy did not offer the plethora of goods that the outside world, like Hong Kong or the United States, did. Perhaps she would have shared that she had never painted her nails, either. Perhaps I would have asked why China was so impoverished and why it did not have what citizens of other societies took for granted.
Perhaps I would have understood what she did not explain: Our country had emerged only a few years before from our decade-long Cultural Revolution, in which millions perished or were ruined in the midst of political struggles and campaigns; and we had bidden farewell less than a decade before that to the Great Leap Forward, in which millions starved to death following government edicts for production and collectivization. Had I been older, perhaps I would have understood why there was not enough nail polish for everybody.
But I was not older. It was not my fault that Communism had left my country and my city impoverished. My instructor, out of concern for the other children of her class, had decided to ask me to share the burden of our country’s economic backwardness.
She was asking me for a favor, one that I did not have to grant. Yet she somehow appeared to have faith that I would grant it.
I slowly nodded my head. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Later that day, Teacher Lee informed our class that she would be confiscating everyone’s colored pencils. We had been making far too much of a mess, she told us. She would reissue the colored pencils when she believed that we could behave better. She did not mention my name. My classmates grumbled but turned in their colored pencils.
I honored my promise and stopped painting my nails. Once that happened, the other children forgot about painting theirs too. In due time, they returned to the playground.
In the past four decades, China has liberalized its economy and adopted chunks of capitalism. As a result, it is now the second largest economy in the world, and nail polish is no longer a scarcity.
Though it remains one of the most ardent practitioners of socialism, China has roundly rejected the type of scarcity that denied its little girls the chance to paint their nails. As prominent Democrats fantasize about the grandeur of socialism for America, Americans should remember that there is nothing charming about socialism’s equality.
This essay is adapted from Chapter One of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, a story about getting to know freedom from Communist China to inner-city Oakland, California.
March 7, 2019
Ying Ma Talks to CNN About Democratic Overreach
March 4, 2019
Trump at CPAC gets a lot of love, but here are two areas where he must do better
Fox News, March 4, 2019
President Donald Trump showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference(CPAC) on Saturday for his third speech at the conference since entering the White House.
The speech was long (about two hours), rambling (he went off-script numerous times), and wildly entertaining (his audience, consisting mostly of young conservatives, repeatedly leapt to its feet for standing ovations).
Two years into his presidency, Trump’s lovefest with his supporters appears to continue unabated. At one point during his speech, the president even said, “You know what I like about this? I’m in love and you’re in love, and we’re all in love together.”
Trump’s speech touted notable accomplishments on the economy, judicial nominations, regulatory reform and tax cuts, but it also unwittingly highlighted a couple of areas – border security and personnel – where his administration can and must do better.
On stage, the president promised to “finish” building the border wall, even though no additional wall between the United States and Mexico has been constructed since he assumed office. The day before, Vice President Mike Pence told the CPAC audience, “Before we’re done, we’ll build it all.”
Pardon the Trump supporter who is skeptical. The Trump administration’s recent budget battle with congressional Democrats has resulted in little of the wall funding he originally sought. Since then, the president’s declaration of a national emergency to build the wall has been tied down by litigation and bipartisan opposition in Congress.
Certainly, none of this diminishes the importance of the administration’s continued efforts to strengthen border security. Conservative author and political commentator Michelle Malkin spelled out the stakes for the CPAC audience. “Open borders anarchy, multiplied by endless chain migration, amnesty, and cheap labor pipelines, endangers our general welfare and the blessings of liberty,” she warned. “By every clear measure, the war is not on immigrants but on American sovereignty.”
Yet there is good reason to ask why the Trump administration failed to secure wall funding in its first two years, when Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. Asked exactly that at CPAC earlier in the week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a strong border security supporter, acknowledged that the legislative battle should have been fought and could have been won.
Promising to “finish the wall” is not enough. The president will have to deliver. As Pence reminded CPAC 2019, it is Trump himself who likes to say, “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have country.”
Separately, the president complained in his speech, “Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of positions, and they leave people for a long time that should not be there.”
He was railing against former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, leaving his then-deputy Rod Rosenstein to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the president.
Putting the wrong people in place, however, can be said of many of the Trump administration’s political appointments. While those who signed a “never-Trump” letter during the 2016 campaign have been rightly blocked from appointments, many other “never-Trumpers” who openly or privately opposed and denigrated then-candidate Trump or President Trump have been welcomed with open arms, especially in the foreign policy agencies.
By contrast, many Trump supporters who believe in the president’s vision to disrupt business as usual in Washington and wish to serve in his administration have found themselves stymied by the incoherence of the personnel process or by “never-Trump” appointees who view loyalty to this president as a liability rather than an asset.
In an interview for a senior position at a large federal agency last year, I was pointedly asked by the political appointees doing the hiring if I was too “pro-Trump” to be able to serve effectively. It was a bit shocking, as we were talking about the Trump administration.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried to point out the administration’s staffing problems to the president in an interview in November 2017, asking if there might not be enough “Donald Trump nominees” at the State Department to help push through his agenda. Trump responded, “We don’t need all of the people. You know, it’s called cost-saving.”
Unfortunately, without the right people in place, the president cannot effectively or coherently pursue his policies. Which is why an anonymous senior official gloated in the New York Times last year about undermining the Trump administration from within.
Halfway into the president’s first term, there are many accomplishments worth cheering, but staffing is not one of them.
At the end of his CPAC address, Trump declared, “Now is the time to embrace the promise of our history. Now is the time to defend our American legacy. Now is the time to seize our glorious destiny.”
Bravo. The audience went wild. Let’s not forget, however, that the Trump administration is much more likely to help make all those things happen with a border wall and more Trump supporters working in the executive branch.
February 27, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest climate fix–No children for you
Fox News, February 26, 2019
The Democrats’ lurch toward socialism got even crazier over the weekend.
The party’s brightest star, Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., questioned whether it was moral for young people to have children due to climate change.
In an Instagram Live video, she warned, “Our planet is going to face disaster if we don’t turn this ship around. And so it’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question. You know, should – is it ok to still have children?”
Of course, crazy is part of socialism’s DNA. As it turns out, Communist China, a stalwart practitioner of socialism, has already beat Ocasio-Cortez to pondering the link between childbirth and climate change.
In fact, Zhao Baige, a former vice minister of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, used to tout forced abortions as her country’s contribution to saving the planet.
At a UN climate change conference in 2009, she declared that a strong correlation existed between population growth and climate change, and that China’s implementation of a one-child policy for over 30 years lowered the world’s carbon emissions.
Official Chinese figures indicate that the country’s birth rate declined from more than 1.8 percent in 1978 to around 1.2 percent in 2007. The result of 400 million fewer births, according to Zhao, converted “into a reduction of 1.83 billion tons of carbon dioxide emission in China per annum.”
Most Americans would be horrified by the cruelty and tragedy of government mandated abortions as Zhao described. China’s Communist government, however, does not concern itself with those cumbersome details of basic human dignity.
[image error]While Ocasio-Cortez is in no way advocating that America fight climate change by forcing state violence upon its citizens, other climate warriors have proudly advocated not having children as their way of cutting carbon emissions.
Ocasio-Cortez’s musings over the weekend were somewhat different: Would life on earth be unsuitable or too difficult for children in 10 years? Regardless, her answer was the same: Do not have children.
In her video she further stated, “We need a universal sense of urgency… A lack of urgency is going to kill us.”
Socialism always comes with grand aspirations and demands tremendous sacrifice.
A sense of urgency certainly runs through the “Green New Deal” – her proposal for ridding America of the consumption of fossil fuels.
Among other things, it calls for the upgrade or replacement of every building in the country “for state-of-the-art energy efficiency,” “high-quality” health care, “healthy food,” adequate housing, clean air and water, “access to nature,” and economic security even for those “unwilling” to work. Furthermore, the plan wants to make farting cows and air travel obsolete.
The entire plan requires a massive government takeover of the economy, but that appears to be just cumbersome quibbling to the socialist representative from New York imbued with a sense of urgency.
For everyone else, it is worth remembering that China’s one-child policy came with a great deal of urgency as well, and was implemented to thwart a population explosion in the 1970s. Yet after more than three decades, the disastrous effects of the policy were plain for all to see.
Aside from having inflicted grave human suffering, the forcible limitation of population growth also created a demographic crisis for the second largest economy in the world. As a result, China began easing its one-child policy in 2013 to allow two children per family.
Yet it does not matter if the urgent goal is climate change or population control. Socialism always comes with grand aspirations and demands tremendous sacrifice.
Ocasio-Cortez’s musings that young people should not have children offer a timely reminder that a modern socialist regime has already forcibly prevented its citizens from having the number of children they wished to have, and touted such brutality as a contribution to the fight against climate change.
As President Trump rightly said in a speech last week:
“Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class. And the more power they get, the more they crave. They want to run health care, run transportation and finance, run energy, education – run everything. They want the power to decide who wins and who loses, who’s up and who’s down, what’s true and what’s false, and even who lives and who dies.”
In the name of climate change, the Democratic Party’s unofficial leader seems eager to help everyone else decide who lives and who dies. She might not be interested, but history is littered with catastrophes and injustices created by socialist policies and their diktats.
Photo: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caricature; posted by DonkeyHotey, cc-by-2.0
February 17, 2019
Ying Ma talks to Fox News about the misery of “equality” under socialism
February 10, 2019
Plenty of “Equality” to Go Around: Socialism’s Scarcity, Poverty, and Misery
Fox News, February 10, 2019
The Democratic Party’s lurch to socialism led to a presidential rebuke at the State of the Union on Tuesday night. From Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call for “Medicare-for-all,” to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal of a “Green New Deal,” to Democratic presidential hopefuls’ hankering for stiff tax hikes, prominent members of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to miss any opportunity to advocate for greater government control of the economy.
Yet as Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of us who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony. After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.
My family left post-Mao Communist China in the mid-1980s precisely because there was so much equality to go around. As a child, I lived in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. Everyone in my city was equal in having no running hot water, no modern toilet facilities, no refrigerator, no washer, no dryer, and no color television.
Imagine a world without Whole Foods, Safeway and Walmart, or the plethora of products stocked on their shelves. Imagine no Vitamin Water, no Gatorade, no Starbucks, no Panera Bread, no candy bars and no sea salt potato chips. Now imagine instead being allotted food stamps from the government, indicating how much your family can eat.
There was abundant equality in the dearth of economic opportunities as well. The state told us where to live, where to work, what to buy, and for how much. Worse yet, my fellow citizens who lived in the countryside were even more impoverished.
After decades of totalitarian rule and grand socialist experiments, China had a meager per capita GDP of less than $200 in 1980. By comparison, America’s was $12,500 that year.
Around that time, China decided enough misery was enough. It embarked on historic economic reforms and opened up the country to the world. Liberalization introduced market prices, allowed for the return to household farming from collectivization, created Special Economic Zones in coastal areas that attracted foreign investment and promoted exports, exposed state-owned factory production to profit incentives, and opened up the market to private firms and entities.
When the state runs the economy and its citizens’ lives, there will be plenty of equality in scarcity, poverty and hopelessness.
As China began to dismantle bits and pieces of its command economy, Chinese citizens came face to face with the liberating effects of what the market made possible. There were many firsts.
For the first time, we could buy goods on the open market rather than using food stamps. For the first time, we could open up businesses instead of being confined to lifetime, government-assigned employment.
For the first time, we could have possessions that we had not seen before – clothing that was not gray and drab, electronics that exposed us to brand new images and music, goods that we coveted without even knowing it.
In the end, even Communist China did not want the kind of economic equality that existed during my childhood. Hence, the country opened up its economy, implemented bold reforms, and adopted capitalism, even though it retained many communist characteristics.
Over the past 40 years, China became the second largest economy in the world.
However, don’t for a minute forget the lesson that still applies: When the state runs the economy and its citizens’ lives, there will be plenty of equality in scarcity, poverty and hopelessness.
Today, this is a lesson that prominent Democrats seem eager to forget. Less than 30 years after the former Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged victorious from the Cold War, Americans increasingly find it necessary to debate the shortcomings and evils of socialism all over again.
It was left up to President Trump to declare on Tuesday night: “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence – and not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
It is crazy that the leader of the free world had to state this. It is crazier still that he will have to deliver an even more robust defense of democratic capitalism in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Hopefully, the Democrats’ vision of economic equality will not prevail.
January 27, 2019
Legal immigrants say the American Dream is a privilege, not an entitlement
Fox News, January 27, 2019
The longest government shutdown in U.S. history has come to an end – for now. And through it all, accusations of racism were never far from the mouths of Trump haters.
Two Fridays ago, students from a Kentucky Catholic high school discovered that wearing red Make America Great Again hats in public is a gesture of aggression, not to mention an act of racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry, and oppression.
This is a narrative the mainstream media has eagerly weaved for the past few years. Not surprisingly, they rushed to condemn the teenagers and were quickly proven wrong. A frequent CNN political commentator even said the MAGA hats worn by the Kentucky teenagers are as “maddening and frustrating and triggering” to look at as a KKK hood.
Yet even before the Kentucky teenagers splashed onto the national scene, Trump haters insisted that the president’s call for a southern border wall is a symbol of his racism against brown people.
Few, however, have bothered to pay attention to a core principle the Trump administration has repeatedly emphasized in the immigration debate. It is, as scholar John Fonte points out, “the principle of government by consent of the governed, or democratic sovereignty.”
“Do free peoples have the right to determine their own immigration policy,” Fonte asked on a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute in Washington last summer, “or will this be determined for them, [including]…by the migrants themselves, arriving without the consent of the people?”
This is a fundamental, and existential, question for Americans. And in recent months, it has become an even more urgent one, as caravans of migrants arrived on the southern border demanding entry, with some of them scaling fences, climbing walls, and attacking Border Patrol agents.
[image error]President Donald Trump reviewing U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s wall prototypes on the border in Otay Mesa, California. March 13, 2018.
Trump haters have responded by ramping up their hysteria and obsession with racism. Increasingly, however, legal immigrants are reluctant to let the worshippers of identity politics speak for them. In 2017, a group of legal immigrants from China founded the Maryland Chinese American Network (MD-CAN) to oppose to the sanctuary laws proposed in their state.
Members of the organization spent years navigating the U.S. immigration system, going through cumbersome screening processes, making financial and personal sacrifices, and waiting in line to become citizens of this country. They did not simply walk across the border or overstay their visas.
Zhenya Li, a founding member of MD-CAN, is a Trump supporter who is quick to point out the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. Li and her fellow activists have repeatedly emphasized their respect for this country’s rule of law and the unfairness of selective immigration enforcement. Since its founding, MD-CAN has successfully defeated sanctuary laws proposed on the state and local levels in Maryland.
Legal immigrants are increasingly reluctant to let the worshippers of identity politics speak for them.
Unlike Li, Trump haters often refuse to even ponder the appeal and logic of Trump’s agenda. Instead, they have shamelessly and regularly showered verbal abuse and physical threats against Trump supporters – as we saw most recently with the Catholic high school students from Kentucky.
Meanwhile, Trump critics of the non-violent persuasion have self-righteously flung their political bias and intellectual intolerance far and wide, accusing the president—and those who support his call for building a wall—of racism or enabling it. As CNN’s Don Lemon argued recently, even if a Trump supporter is not a racist, he “certainly had to overlook racism and bigotry.”
These detractors, however, have been willfully blind to what lies at the heart of Trump’s political revolution: an abiding faith in the American Dream, and an unabashed belief that its pursuit is a privilege, not an entitlement.
Further, they are even blinder to what the legal immigrants who make up MD-CAN know so well: the privilege of pursuing the American Dream must be granted by the consent of the governed in this country, not by the aspiring immigrants themselves.
There is nothing racist about that.
