Pots calling the kettle black

Pots calling the kettle black is an expression that is said when one accuses another person of that which they are equally guilty of ( lươn ngắn chê trạch dài). In the text, you can see that the USA and its allies  accused China of bullying weaker nations but they also forgot that it is America bomed or threatened countries that defied them. For example, in the 1960s, the U.S. and its allies invaded VN to prevent communist expansion by lying to the American people that communist controlled North VN fired on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin ( Vịnh Bắc Bộ). 

Why Mao Zhe Dong stated  that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” ?( sức mạnh chính trị phát triển từ nòng súng). Because after the painful experience in 1919, the league of nations treaty ( hội Quốc Liên) gave Japan all of Germany’s Chinese possessions without consulting China and the failure of  Opium war ( chiến tranh nha phiến) in the 19th century had weakened the Quing Dynasty and forced China to trade with the other parts of the world.

Things didn’t stop yet. In 2012, US president Obama announced his” pivot to Asia” policy ( chiến lược xoay trục Châu Á) to try to establish military, economic, diplomatic ties with countries adjacent to China’s border. Japanese government  decided to buy the Diaoyu or Senkaku island ( đảo Điếu Ngư). The Senkaku islands are a group of uninhabited islands in the East China sea ( biển Đông). In 1944, Cairo declaration demanded that Japan returned all Chinese territories it had annexed be returned to China. However, the US reneged on its commitment and turned the Senkaku over to Japan in 1972. In 2012, Japanese government paid the Kurikaru family that owned 3 of the 5 islands in the East China sea off Japan’s Okinawa prefecture but are claimed by  both China and Taiwan. Therefore, these two consecutive events of the USA and Japan opened a can of worms. A can of worms is a situation that causes a lot of problems for people to deal with it. Therefore, China retaliated against the USA and Japna by establishing the Air Defense identification zone ( ADIZ) ( vùng nhận dạng phòng không). The meaning of this establishment is to require foreign planes to identify themselves when flying over the region. To counter Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy, China built islands and installed weapons systems on them within the “Nine Dash Line” ( đường 9 đoạn). China is determined to prevent the US and its allies from mounting a naval blockade in the South China Sea. Most of the trade transiting the waters belongs to China.Therefore,  the US and its allies vehemently protested against China’s decision. Afterward retaliations of Japan and the USA had increased tensions in the triangle- relationship between the USA- Japan and China. 

Conclusion:Whether China is what its critics accuse it of depends on whom one talks to. But China has a point when it accuses the Western and Japanese anti-China crowds of hypocrisy and prejudice.

Feeding the public with subjective information can be dangerous and costly, as the Vietnam and Iraq wars demonstrated. The US and its allies lost tens of thousands of their young men and women in Vietnam for nothing. Instead of blocking communist expansion, the US and its allies might have ended up hastening it in the region. Instead of making Iraq a “democracy”, the US and its allies turned it into a dysfunctional state wrought with sectarian fighting, which in turn created massive refugee issues.

China is a much bigger and stronger country than Vietnam or Iraq, and creating conflicts with the rising superpower will far costlier. The  Chinese idiom “Face the future with history as the mirror” might be wise advice.