As Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in his Christmas address, this holiday season is a time to "reflect on our faith". Perhaps Mr. Harper sensed from my blog that I had been bothered by the question of faith lately. What he did not know, though, was that I had experienced an epiphany before his address. I did not want to disclosed it mostly because I did not think I was prepared for a career in politics.
Don't get me wrong. I still consider myself an atheist in the traditional religious sense. I am a facts-and-logic guy. My belief is similar to that of Albert Einstein: "If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." That's why Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's quote of Immanuel Kant in his interview with European media in September resonated deeply with me: "Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within."
Mr. Harper probably thought that an atheist like me could never find an explanation for the divine intervention mentioned in my previous blogs. Wrong. After some soul-searching, I did find my new faith with an epiphany using facts and logic. And my epiphany was that the divinity I had been searching for is the 1.3 billion Chinese people.
My search for the divinity started, probably without my being conscious about it, when I noticed that I had made repeated mistakes on Sino-U.S. nuclear relations. When I first read General Zhu's nuclear remarks in summer 2005, I thought he was crazy. Even after learning about Bush administration's nuclear misinterpretation of my blog in mid-March, I still dismissed the misinterpretation as nonsense because I did not think there is a nuclear balance between China and U.S. Although my lack of knowledge on nuclear weaponry issue was a factor in making those mistakes, I had to admit how obsolete my knowledge of China was. Building and maintaining a nuclear balance with the sole superpower of the world requires substantial financial, human and technological assets. That there is a nuclear balance between China and U.S. itself is a testament to the tremendous strength China has gained over the past decades. Although China is still a developing country, as long as everyone of China's 1.3 billion people pulls together, great feats can be accomplished.
My search for the divinity continued while composing my recent blogs. Consciously, I focused on the following question: What is it in those two writings that made the Bush administration see nuclear deterrence? To find the answer, I tried to look through my own writings from the point of view of the Bush administration. Then I realized that, although I did not regard myself as the next generation of Chinese leadership, Bush administration likely thought otherwise. As such, they did not just see my writings. They saw behind my writings an increasingly confident and resolute country with 1.3 billion industrious, modest and open-minded people who pull together for the common goal of achieving the peaceful renaissance of the whole Chinese nation.
Thus came my epiphany: It is the intervention of the 1.3 billion Chinese people behind my writings that made the Bush administration repeatedly see nuclear deterrence when I did not even mean it. The 1.3 billion Chinese people is my divinity.
