A Chinaman’s chance

(Lest anyone take quick offense, let me say at the outset that I am not a racist. My use of the term is simply for purposes of this column and for context.)

Before people became overly sensitive about perceived racist remarks, we used to say — when someone had only a remote chance of succeeding at something — "he doesn't have a Chinaman's chance."

I was reminded of that phrase recently when Huawei, one of China's biggest phone companies, released two weeks ago the Mate 60 Pro, its latest flagship phone, without much fanfare. And never had such a quiet launch made so much noise around the globe.

For a bit of context, during the Trump administration, an oppressive trade sanction was put in place by the United States against the selling of advanced microprocessors to Chinese companies, in order to prevent the Chinese from catching up with the US in 5G technology.

Not only was the ban imposed on American manufacturers, but pressure was also brought to bear on chip makers in other countries allied with the US. The first to dutifully comply was Korean electronics giant Samsung, which must have regretted its decision, seeing as how it lost 60 percent of its sales almost overnight.

For a while, Huawei was in a panic, as it halted the production of 5G phones when stockpiles of the banned chips ran out; for a while, it was reduced to selling mobile phones with obsolescent technology.

But the Americans and their cronies did not count on the resilience of the Chinese people, a relentlessness that has helped its civilization survive after more than 2,000 years of foreign intervention. Forced to do without imported chips, Huawei focused all its efforts on developing a substitute.

In a couple of years, its team of hundreds of technology experts, mathematicians, engineers, and metallurgists did the seemingly impossible: They created a 5G chip without any help from anyone. One could, therefore, not fault Huawei for releasing its 5G phone at the very same time that US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was in Beijing on an official visit — as if to say, "In your face, America!"

This Chinese triumph is but one of many instances where US attempts to undermine Chinese trade backfired big time on America. In 2011, China was banned by the US Congress from joining the Space Station program of NASA. China promptly built its own space station, the Tiangong, 10 years later.

Sometime after, when America was developing the Global Positioning System, it also shut out China, which then launched its own satellites to power its own positioning system. The West also demonized China for being the "world's biggest carbon polluter," so its factories started working on lithium-ion batteries (90 percent of whose raw materials are mined in China) and now it dominates the electric car market worldwide.

Using the status of the dollar as a world currency, the West imposed other trade sanctions on China, thus impelling it to put up its own version of the World Bank and organizing the BRICS countries that will no longer use the dollar as a medium of exchange. A total of 721 big Chinese companies were blacklisted from trading with US corporations; the Chinese started trading with most of the emerging economies and became the second largest economy in the world.

It would appear that it still hasn't sunk in with the American leaders that their days of global hegemony are long over. There is a new challenger on the scene whose government is more committed to making it stronger economically, militarily, and diplomatically.

As the new generation of Americans struggles with questions of pronouns, transitioning, decriminalizing robbery and drug use, and legalizing abortion, the young people of China are concentrating on mastering math and technology, becoming part of a disciplined army, building their GDP, and making their society orderly and crime-free.

If this keeps up, it will be America that will, ironically, not have a Chinaman's chance to prevail.