A whole new game

When American ping pong team visited China, Time's cover story titled "a whole new game". 30 years later, the Game officially began. Back then, it was new because of the cold war backdrop and the reversal of a long hostility between the two countries. Now the game is played by the world's two biggest powers who are closely tied in many ways, some even not discernible by their own people. This new game is familiar in some respect. Some episode looks like the old European power politics, some like the somewhat old Japan game, some still have the reminiscence of the cold war game, some even been played 100 years before in the more than 200 years relations. But somewhere in the midst of all these, something is fundamentally "unfit", or unseen. Game maybe the old game, but the players are quite different, consider how "different" China is. Or, players may be the same, the GAME is a whole new one (a super globalized global system).

So here we are, using as much learned theory as we can to try to explain as much phenomena we are experiencing as we can. And yet, no emperor's cloth neatly fit. And we are in fact naked (ignorant). Not only do we not know where China will go, we have no clue as to where America will go neither. Since none of the previous single variable models extrapolates the complicated interactions between the two which in turn enmeshed in a even more sophisticated world system. What modern society hate most is uncertainty and unpredictability, which is exactly what the situation is now.

To make things worse, some "smart" people believe they knew how the game works, or should work. Some also believe that despite the smoke, the game remains the same. Therefore, the players should do what they believe to be the right thing: mostly, act as usual, as nothing has ever changed. The "smart" flock realize that they had to do some so that people would recognize them as smart. But the "postmodern" turn of events constantly blow them, their prediction and prescription away.

So what do we do now? My suggestion: drop the assumptions and rebuild the foundation of the game. New rules, fairer, new partnership, no preconditions, and new strategies based on fresh payoff schemes. In the new game, no past hubris or grudge counts anymore, just a whole new way of looking and thinking for the future.