Sure A Not

In the half-century since Bruce Lee’s early death in July 1973, the image of Chinese in Western culture and business has come full circle, with an added twist of spite.

Prior to the martial arts deity’s explosion on to cinema screens in the 1960s, Chinese men were barely seen except as anonymous hordes reminiscent of the wave warfare that kept America at bay in Korea.

Their ultimate sacrifice was presented in the West as an ant-like lack of humanity rather than the collective courage we recognize from the Allied storming of Normandy beaches.

Chinese characters who emerged from this human soup were instantly vilified as Yellow Peril, attributed with every hateful human trait. This malicious template returns periodically as Fu Manchu, Dr No, Emperor Ming the Merciless and other evil Chinese who step out of line.

It was “balanced” by lovable creatures like Charlie Chan (played by Swedish actor Warner Oland in eye tape); The Pink Panther’s comical Kato (Burt Kwouk, an actual East Asian) as a sidekick even more useless than his boss Inspector Clouseau, the most useless man on the planet; and also another Kato, sidekick this time to The Green Hornet in the TV series, played by an underused Bruce Lee. So much for American original thought and innovation.

The cycle for Chinese cultural representation through the geopolitical eras goes something like this: Opium Wars – bad; gold mining in California – weak; building the Central Pacific Railroad Road for low wages – good; going on strike for better wages and conditions on the CPRR – bad!; 1870s economic downturn in the US – really bad; 1882 Exclusion Act – GTFOH!; Boxer Revolution to the Republic of China – Yellow Peril; Warlord Thirties – well, ding, dong, Anna May Wong!; World War II – welcome, bro; 1949 – Wut?; Cold War Korea – here comes that ant wave; 1960s – the Blessed Bruce be upon us.

The swinging sixties was a great decade in which to be alive if you were a member of the postwar (preferably white) working and middle class in America, Britain or parts of Western Europe. Not so great if you were living in China and trying to rebuild your wrecked country while staring down the barrel of foreign embargoes and a messy Cultural Revolution. 

Bruce Lee was born and raised in San Francisco. He was beautiful and graceful with a body sculpted like Roman marble, but most impressively, instead of submissiveness to the master race, he exuded pride in his Chinese origins. And, true to the cultural aspirations of the time, he stuck up for the little people rather than sticking it to them.  

His divinity was felt keenly in the UK when his Hong Kong-made Kung Fu films came out in the 1970s, Enter the Dragon being their stunning apogee. Even my dad raised his head out of his books for long enough to praise this popular hero.

For the first time, young males in the West wanted to be like Lee, an Asian male, instead of wanting to kick him. Tough working-class lads of every hue sought out martial arts kwoons and dojos and stuck his posters on their walls. He was an inspiration to men of color, and they loved him for it.

If he hadn’t died on the cusp of the Nixon-Kissinger agreement with Mao that would propel China, ever so slowly, into a Golden Age, he’d probably have had his own movie empire on a par with Jackie Chan: JC to Lee’s John the Baptist. 

In the glory years since China proved itself to be the rising superpower, Mandarin has been taught in schools and Beijing represented supreme cool. Ten Cent movies made mega-bucks. Marvel gave us Shang-Chi, the first superhero movie to star an Asian lead, and two Asian main characters in the Agents of Shield TV series, played by Ming-Na Wen and Chloe Bennet.

Benedict Wong and Gemma Chan escaped limited prospects in the UK and built solid careers in the Marvel universe and beyond, while Sandra Oh made the sole reverse journey across the Atlantic and busted out with Killing Eve. Michelle Yeoh was Everything, Everywhere All at Once from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Star Trek. Asians were being normalized.

However, the screech of brakes and smell of burning rubber as the West performs a doughnut spin threatening to send positive images of Chinese crashing through the windshield, means all change.

How do you persuade the public that it’s OK to have a war with people they’ve been encouraged to identify with if you keep humanizing them? Are buddy movies with Chinese as equal partners doomed to history before we’ve finished our popcorn? Is whitewashed Doctor Strange about to morph into Dr Strangelove or be eclipsed by Fu Manchu redux? 

The tension between an industry making bank in the two leading economies and the demand by China hawks to slaughter the Golden Goose has to be resolved somehow.

A promiscuous use of backfiring tariffs and sanctions may provide the very catalyst that transforms the greenback signs in oligarchal eyes into yuan, as dumping the global reserve currency accelerates and everyone stampedes for the exit.

One advantage China will always have in this wholly unnecessary contest is the US’s example of a modern Ozymandias: Behold my works, ye mighty, and de-dollarize. Never has America needed its original Eastern hero as much as now to explain the art of the martial to politicians who keep pristine copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on display but never crack the spine.

You’re supposed to use the weight of your opponent against him, grasshopper. And Be Like Water doesn’t mean running into the berg that sinks the USS Titanic just becuz we can. 

In 2018, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde side-eyed president Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods, loudly announcing that we were finally emerging from a Certain Someone’s Great Crash of 2008 with Another Certain Someone’s help. 

Wall Street had a conniption. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, fumed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain.” 

We watched aghast as, in the words of the British PM whose backbone hadn’t yet crumbled, Trump “let all the air out of the tires of the global economy.” (Including, presumably, Boris Johnson’s own family’s investments. We sincerely hope he was personally reimbursed after ripping out our Huawei 5G infrastructure at the behest of the First Certain Someone with maybe a loan or sumthin’.) 

And now President Joe Biden triples down on the madness.

Ironic that the Kung Fu concept of your own actions rebounding and hurting you when you point a loaded finger and find three fingers pointing back has taken place in real-time in front of our eyes. Every poisonous character assassination, every fusillade of hurt ends up damaging the perp as the target slips further out of reach. 

My Blu-ray of The Great Wall, perhaps the last of the Hollywood/China blockbuster lash-ups, arrived in 2018, two years after its 2016 release. Tainted by all the ensuing unpleasantness, it sits forlornly on a shelf, still in its shrink wrapper.  

I may never find out how Matt Damon saved Chinese civilization. But we’ll always have Beijing. 

Continue Reading

China has developed a new cooling system that allows high-energy lasers to operate infinitely without overheating, an innovation that could point a laser-sharp threat at US space dominance.  

South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that scientists from China’s National University of Defense Technology at Changsha, Hunan province, developed a new cooling system that eliminates the harmful heat generated by high-powered lasers, reportedly solving the overheating problem that has limited their operating time and performance.

SCMP notes that a laser weapon generates a high-energy beam using stimulated emission, which involves exciting atoms or molecules in a crystal or gas gain medium to a higher energy state.

When those excited atoms or molecules return to their ground state, they emit photons amplified by optical feedback to create a high-power laser beam, with a highly-precise beam control system directing and controlling the laser typically using mirrors and lenses.

As the beam passes through the air, it heats the gas in its path, causing it to expand and create a turbulent flow, making the beam scatter and distort, reducing its effectiveness and accuracy.

The heated gas can contaminate the mirrors and lenses in the system, degrading its performance and lifespan. In addition, larger pollutant particles burning on the mirrors can result in cracking or damage, reducing the practicability of high-energy laser weapons.

The Chinese science team claimed to have developed an internal beam conditioner that cools down the weapon and improves gas cleanliness.

According to the SCMP report, the system utilizes an air source to provide cool, dry air that flows through a heat exchanger, with gas at the optimum temperature regulated by a gas flow control system and injected into the laser beam path before being removed.

SCMP also noted some design challenges the research team encountered, such as ensuring that the gas flow achieved the desired cooling and cleaning effects, making the device compact and efficient enough for practical applications, and properly building the device to prevent turbulence and vibration from affecting beam quality.

Beijing Times noted the invention has several implications for the battlefield, which include extended engagement durations, amplified range and damage, and reduced maintenance and repair costs. The report also touts other advantages of laser weapons, such as instantaneous hits, negligible cost per shot and possible anti-satellite applications.

The Beijing Times report claims that previous US attempts to make high-power lasers into practical weapons, such as the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL), Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) and Airborne Laser (ABL), were eventually scrapped due to their unwieldy size and weight, unsatisfactory destructive power and relatively short range.

China’s internal beam conditioner may be a game-changer for its laser weapons program, especially for ground-based anti-satellite weaponry. For one, ground-based lasers have size, coverage and power advantages over airborne and satellite-mounted weapons.

They can destroy satellites with scalability and plausible deniability, as it is difficult to attribute a blinding laser attack on a satellite orbiting hundreds of kilometers above Earth at thousands of meters per second, as the temporary outage of a satellite could be accidental or the result of hard-to-detect aggression.

In May 2023, Asia Times reported that China may have built ground-based anti-satellite weaponry at its secretive Korla facility in Western Xinjiang, with such weapons intended to conceal sensitive military areas from spy satellites.

Satellite imagery of the Korla facility by US geospatial company BlackSky shows two laser gimbals mounted in hangars with retractable roofs that open around solar noon when foreign imaging satellites are most active.

The satellite imagery also shows huge anti-satellite lasers close to the size of ship-mounted weapons alongside domed structures, likely containing tanks for the gas required to operate the lasers.

Apart from the Korla site, China may have another such facility at Bohu in Xinjiang, with satellite imagery of the Bohu site showing fixed lasers for satellite ranging and mobile truck-mounted lasers for dazzling.

Apart from ground-based weapons, China may already have developed space-based laser weapons. Space-based weapons have several advantages over ground-based systems, such as the shorter distances between orbiting satellites and the lack of atmospheric distortion that degrades laser range and power.

Asia Times reported in March 2022 that China had developed a satellite-mountable solid-state pulse laser capable of generating a megawatt laser light and firing 100 times per second for half an hour without overheating in space.

It is reportedly capable of blinding satellite cameras or permanently blinding satellites. Upon testing, the device reportedly generated a five-nanosecond beam, but it was powerful enough to blind human beings or vaporize target surfaces permanently.

Recent advances in laser cooling technology, including a new cooling device made of copper and indium to absorb excess heat, reportedly made the weapon possible.

Despite those developments, China may still lag the US in other laser weapon areas. Asia Times noted in April 2023 that while China is adept at making smaller laser weapons, such as one possibly used in a February 2023 blinding laser attack against a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship in the South China Sea, it lacks larger models that can intercept bigger targets such as missiles.

Both ground- and space-based laser weapons have drawbacks. Ground-based lasers require vast amounts of power to affect targets high in orbit and have atmospheric beam distortion and accuracy issues at great distances.

Space-based laser weapons face the challenge of developing a power source that is compact and powerful enough to be mounted on a satellite.

As such, China’s laser weapons program may be an asymmetric response to US space dominance, wherein the US exploits the space domain for strategic-level missile defense, intelligence and command and control, with its military and commercial satellites acting as early warning systems, eyes in the sky, or nerve centers for modern military operations.

The ongoing Ukraine war has vividly shown the decisive edge the US maintains in space dominance, with China possibly taking note for its Taiwan contingency plans.

Continue Reading