As a Chinese, I feel like I’m witnessing the end of an era. For my entire life, America has been the most dominant power. Everyone in China, since the 1980s when China first started to reform and open up, had been enamored with everything American. American movies. American culture. Hollywood. McDonalds. Technology. Freedom. Democracy. Rule of law. The American way of life. 

Every woman in China dreams of going to America and marrying a white American man. 

Every mom in China tells her daughter to marry a foreigner (a white American man) so she can brag to her neighbors that her daughter is now living in Heaven. For most Chinese, for as long as I can remember, America has always been synonymous with Heaven, where everything is plentiful, where people eat meat everyday and drink sizzling elixirs of pure joy and live in mansions with multiple bedrooms and where the water is fresh to drink from the tap and where people only work five days a week and where the sky is always blue and it’s like you are living in an idyllic picture of a poet’s imagination. 

I’m no longer so sure now, however, given what’s going on in America right now …

And for a very long time, I’ve been resentful of China, the Chinese government, and the Chinese people. I have always felt that China could have done better. China could have become Japan had it just adopted the western ways more thoroughly; become a democracy, have free and fair elections, have a free press, and not be a dictatorship, not be so authoritarian, and not alienate Americans and Europeans–the civilized world–so much. 

I was so naive. I really thought that America had the best interest of the people living under oppressive regimes and I really thought that the American government wanted to give freedom to non-white, non-western people. I once really believed the lies America told when CIA backed coups tried to overthrow authoritarian governments. 

So in this regard, I think I really have to thank your president Mr. Donald Trump for opening my eyes. I realize now that, despite of all its failings–and there are many–the Chinese government is actually not so bad in comparison and genuinely works to make the lives of Chinese people better. 

But let’s not be mealymouthed about its failings. Sure, there are no human rights in China. The Chinese government will kidnap people off the streets and disappear them if you criticize the government, but America is doing the same with ICE, and if given the opportunity, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio will do more than what ICE is doing. In fact, they are now doing it with foreign students who criticize Israel, which is actually so weird because you can criticize Israel in China. In fact, the Chinese government encourages Chinese people to criticize the government of Israel and you can be openly antisemitic in China and nobody will bat an eye.

Sure in China you don’t have elections and you can’t elect your leaders. But America elected Donald Trump, a dictator-wannabee who is hellbent on destroying America, twice. Most people in China are not very smart. It’s widely-agreed upon among educated Chinese that if China were truly a democracy and had elections, it’s guaranteed that the Chinese people will elect someone like Mao Zedong who will wreck absolute havoc to the country. So … so what China does not have elections? As long as China continues to focus on economy and the Chinese government continues to bring more prosperity to the Chinese people, maybe it’s okay. And if someday the Chinese government fail to do so, the Chinese people will revolt and have a revolution and we will have another dynasty. It’s been the same cycle throughout China for thousands of years and it’s not going to change, even if we had elections.

Sure, there are so much atrocities going on in China. There are Chinese women forced into prostitution, dismembered, their kidneys sold in black markets, and there are hundreds of thousands of them being trafficked everyday. There are slave labor camps where people are kidnapped, forced to work seven days a week, 15 hours a day. There are concentration camps in Xinjiang and Tibet, and there are secret torture sites to interrogate people and they are called Liuzhi 留置 under Xi Jinping, or Shuanggui 雙規 under Hu Jintao, all throughout China. But look at America now. America is literally murdering people in ICE detention facilities, or sending them to foreign torture prisons in third countries, and sometimes even murdering people in broad daylight and video footage of their atrocities is all over social media. There is even a story of some Chinese dissident by the name of Guan Heng who escaped China, applied for political asylum in America, for having filmed and revealed the secret detention facilities in Xinjiang where China had forced millions of Chinese Muslims to be re-educated; and instead of lauding him as a hero, a champion of freedom, the American government is now trying to deport him to Uganda where he will most definitely be tortured and sent back to China for imprisonment, because Uganda is a member country of China’s belt and road initiative.

The way I see it, if ICE can be so cruel to even a white American woman (who is a member of their own race), imagine what they will do or are doing right now to non-white people or non-American citizens.

And sure, if we were to continue down the list, China does not have good relationships with its neighbors and constantly calls on attacks to Taiwan, the South China sea, and Japan. But so does America! America is now considering invading Greenland, of all places. And America is by default worse because while China bellows out threatening rhetoric against other countries, China has neither the political will nor the military capacity to carry out those attacks. America, on the other hand, has proven to be crazy and powerful enough to do it. 

I’m not a political person, but you can’t avoid it because they are all over the news, not just from American news media, but from Chinese media, Japanese media, Taiwanese media, and European media. Everybody in the world sees it. Maybe Americans are the only people who don’t see it. 

So, as a non-political person, I see that under the Chinese Communist dictatorship, the well being of the average Chinese populace has improved significantly, and, from the perspective of an average Chinese person, the Chinese government is fighting tooth and nail to secure the existence, the well being and a future of its own people. The Chinese government truly has the best interest of the Chinese people in mind. The same cannot be said about America. The American government seems to only care about Trump and his cronies. And let’s not forget that China is the only country who refused to back down during the tariff war with the USA and I’m fully convinced that if America had tried to encroach upon the sovereignty of China the way America did to Venezuela, stealing our natural resources, China will retaliate with its nuclear-warhead. 

America just appears to be such a bully. And America only bullies countries who don’t have nuclear weapons. Why doesn’t America try regime change in North Korea?

China may not have done everything right, but America is doing everything wrong. Even though everybody in the world is scared of America and its military prowess, the trust in America as a global leader has been irreparably damaged. Everybody sees America the same way we see Nazi Germany in the 1930s now. Even though Germany under Hitler had been a military superpower, it eventually collapsed as it overreached. The same thing, I fear, is happening to America. America as a country will not be able to last for more than a year at the rate things are going. On the domestic side, civil war is brewing and it’s only a matter of time before full-scale assault starts. On the international front, NATO is breaking up, and other non-NATO countries are looking to Beijing for stable, calm, and consistent leadership. 

It’s not really about what China is doing, because China is doing nothing differently. It’s categorically about what America is doing to itself.