Come to think of it, 2020 is already the tenth year since I started writing this blog. Unfortunately, I have not written anything especially useful. It has also been a long time since I last updated it, so today I will just ramble a bit in a stream-of-consciousness way.
This morning, I kept watching the newly added pneumonia cases in Beijing. This time it really feels like a crisis, because now it is very close to me. In particular, 1,900 people were tested yesterday, and this morning data from more than 500 samples was released, with 45 positive results among them. A rate close to 10% is honestly frightening. Besides, there had already been no local cases in the whole country for quite a while, and in the end the capital was where things went wrong... Of course, if I need to go out, I still have to go out, and I still need to go eat. If you ask whether people seem worried, the street scene does not really look any different, except that some security guards have once again started weakly checking entry permits and body temperatures from time to time. After all, Beijing is very large, and even Chaoyang District is very large. And given the state of the world right now—doing a bit of Ah Q-style self-comfort—if you look at the overseas situation, Beijing's single-digit numbers still seem several orders of magnitude smaller...
Speaking of this pandemic, honestly, its impact on me in the short to medium term has been quite large. For quite a long time recently, I have felt extreme uncertainty about the future, and I have also been somewhat anxious—I do not know where I should go. It is just that I do not really like the Ah Q mentality. The uncertainties I am talking about are only changes in work location and daily life. Compared with many other people, that is really nothing. On the other hand, there is also my anxiety about the terrible state of the world: the global spread of the pandemic, so many people living in hardship; the worsening global political environment, as China and the U.S. move from cooperation toward confrontation, populism runs rampant, and some people mindlessly embrace "accelerationism." The world is in such a terrible state, and yet I can do nothing about it, which only lets that sense of powerlessness run even more wild in my heart...
This afternoon, I watched a Bilibili creator talking about U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea. Later I looked into it in more detail and discovered that the U.S. military is basically stationed all over the world. Then I casually read some articles about U.S. overseas territories, and eventually found this page, 51st state, which I found very interesting. I had no idea that so many places in the world want to become the 51st state of the United States. Of course, the term is also used sarcastically in that article, to mock how heavily Americanized some places have become. But Puerto Rico in particular caught my attention. Its current status is that of an autonomous commonwealth under the United States. If they wanted to become an independent country, they could, but after several referendums, support for joining the U.S. as a state has continued to rise. But the U.S. Congress does not want it to join, because adding one more state would dilute the voting power of the others. That gave me a certain feeling—the sense of many nations coming to pay tribute in a truly meaningful way. That is what real national strength looks like. Perhaps this is what China felt like during the Tang dynasty? I do not want to expand here into a discussion of the differences between China and the U.S. in this respect; I just wanted to share today's discovery.
Since graduating, all my jobs have been at wholly owned China subsidiaries of American companies. Over the past two years, during this period of China-U.S. confrontation, my colleagues and I have more or less all asked leaders at headquarters about the impact on our Beijing team. Of course, because our company currently has no business operations inside China and is just an R&D team, and because the company is indeed quite small, the line "We are too small to mater" is usually enough to brush the question aside. I would suggest that we use gentler words in some cases—for example, saying "Beijing" and "Washington" is better than saying "China" and "the United States." Our SFO colleagues are actually always very polite and friendly toward the PEK colleagues. Sometimes I feel that we are all just small people living under two great powers, yet there are still many subtle ways in which we affect things between them, or in other words, we bear some responsibility. As the saying goes, "Discrimination comes from prejudice, and prejudice comes from ignorance." People like us, ordinary small people, actually do have some obligation to help the two sides understand each other better, to communicate, and ultimately to reduce confrontation. Unfortunately, many people are unable to see this. Especially in recent years, as populism has grown, people get hot-headed and immediately turn everything into grand ideological struggle, wolf-warrior diplomacy, great-power rise, and punishing enemies no matter how far away; or they just chase a moment of verbal cleverness and casually mock the other side, creating misunderstanding and confrontation. In times like this, what we really need is: "The more you feel you are about to get emotional, the more you need to stay calm."
Anyway, peace and development are still the ultimate themes of this world. May the world around us recover soon.