CHINA THREAT? WHAT CHINA THREAT?
It is vital and possible for the US and China to avoid conflict and war, but this means westerners facing up to some hard truths
WITHIN the next twenty years the Chinese economy will overtake the United States, surpassing Washington to become the biggest player in the global economy. Perhaps then it is inevitable that as this reality approaches the cross-party consensus in the USA is to denounce Beijing as ‘the China threat’. But if we pause to consider the facts, as adults ignoring the propaganda and fears, the question rises - what China threat?
The Thucydides trap?
In his 5th-century B.C. History of the Peloponnesian War, ancient Athenian historian and military general Thucydides posits, “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Today the general consensus in a sclerotic and dysfunctional US political system is that China poses a mortal threat to the US way of life. Academic realist thinkers such as Professor John Mearsheimer maintain that a national security cold war between the US and China is an inevitability. The idea is that an existing great power will inevitably come into conflict with the rising one.
We call this the Thucydides trap, and if it is true then our future shall prove extremely bleak. Just listen to the sort of rhetoric spilling out of the US military-industrial complex. US Four-Star General Mike Minihan warned his troops of China insisting “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025”.
Even the FBI has got in on the sinophobia hysteria insisting:
“The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China.” - FBI Director Christopher Wray
Now at this point - for the future welfare of all humanity - a few truths need to be posited to counter this dangerous anti-Chinese panic gripping western policy makers.
Reality check
Driving US concerns are twin fears, both of which are largely baseless if we pause for thought. Firstly, that China is seeking through deception, lies and theft to undermine the US (and western) economies. The claim is that Beijing is deploying barriers to trade to gain unfair competitive trade advantages all the while stealing intellectual property - all to bring down the US economy.
The second fear is a rising China aspires to bully other nations, having refused to develop into a liberal political system domestically. To US thinking there is only one way to organise a country and that is their way. Funnily enough however it is lost on the likes of Gen Minihan, Prof Mearsheimer or Mr Wray that China isn’t a country, its a civilisation.
Reading Graham Allison’s book ‘Destined for War’, one can’t help but be led to the depressing conclusion that armed conflict between the two countries is more likely than unlikely. But this is not the case.
To take those twin US fears, the economic and political we quickly realise we’re dealing with irrational western fears.
Is the Peoples Republic of China threatening to invade the US mainland? Are Chinese naval vessels patrolling up and down the Californian coast? Quite the reverse, it’s the US insisting on their ‘freedom of navigation’, involving huge US warships streaming along the coast of China.
Nor is it the case that Beijing is aiming to interfere in US domestic politics. Put simply, the last thing China wants is to get involved in the arthritic and paralysed US political discourse.
Clearly it is possible for the USA and China to figure out a way of managing their relationship without the idiotic nonsense from the likes of General Minihan. But for that to happen Americans need to come to terms with new ways of thinking, and jettison old assumptions.
Hard truths
What is really going on here is not that China poses a threat to the US and western nations, it’s far more simple. Washington is fearing an end of pax Americana. It’s no longer the sole global hegemon, we’re witnessing the beautiful resurgence of Asia, which dominated the global economy for much of human existence. Asia is back baby, and the US no longer enjoys the arrogant privileges of being the unipole.
Westerners need to lose the post-cold war hubris so perfectly encapsulated by Francis Fukuyama. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Europe was liberated from the Soviet jack-boot the euphoria was tangible. For Fukuyama he insisted we were witnessing the very end of history itself, liberal democracy led by the US had won the ideological war for humanity. In his book ‘End of History?’ you can feel the hubris
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
The end of history? It is high time Westerners gave up the false notion that there is only one way to politically organise. Furthermore, American policymakers have been convinced that it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed the Soviet Communist Party into the political grave. That these people ever imagined a 5,000 year old civilisation like China would ever tolerate being lectured to by a republic only a few hundred years old was always ludicrous.
George W. Bush in his 2002 National Security Strategy insisted “In time, China will find that social and political freedom is the only source of that national greatness”
But wait a moment, think of things from the Chinese perspective and this western moralising and sermonising about freedom, democracy and human rights understandably rankles.
When I lived in China you quickly appreciate that this is a civilisation acutely aware of what happened to it when they were weak. They also recall what we did to the mighty middle kingdom when it was vulnerable. In the dying days of the Qing Dynasty we didn’t go to China espousing human rights, freedom and the superiority of a democratic way of socio-political organisation.
No, we went there and fought two wars to force them to buy our drugs. Along the way, not content with peddling opium to the people of China at gunpoint (and siphoning off their silver, thus destroying their economy) we also stole Hong Kong and Kowloon for good measure.
Chinese people will say “wait a minute, when we were weak you didn’t come selling freedom, you came and kicked our teeth in. You ravaged our lands, you didn’t give us human rights you burnt our summer palace”.
The Old Summer Palace of the Qing was known as the "Versailles of the East", but its glory and magnificence ceased in 1860. During the Second Opium War, British and French troops invaded Beijing, ransacked the Old Summer Palace, and looted its treasures, which they stole and placed in foreign (western) museums around the world. The burning of the Versailles of the East remains a stark reminder of western arrogance.
It’s very important to appreciate that it really isn’t for us westerners to insist on how China organises its internal affairs. We’ve been there before, and it was hardly noble.
The reality is, since 1978, China has lifted 800 million people out of the tyrannical grip of absolute poverty and along the way created the largest middle class in the world.
As Graham Allison wrote in an op-ed for China Daily,, “it could be argued that 40 years of miracle growth have created a greater increase in human well-being for more individuals than occurred in the previous more than 4,000 years of China’s history.”
All of this has been achieved under the CCP, a fact not lost on your average Chinese citizen. While they and the Chinese state are not interested in spreading a Marxist system abroad, nor do they want what we’re selling either. It is surely possible for us all to coexist and respect each other’s different systems of socio-political organisation?
Additionally, it isn’t lost on my Chinese friends or former students that the collape of the Soviet Communist party ushered in not so much democracy and liberalism but oligarchy, corruption and a mafia state. Russian infant morality is rising and incomes plummeting in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Communist party. And for China history matters, this is a society that thinks in terms of centuries, not the short-termism currently undermining the west.
NONE of this is to say there is nothing China needs to fix, of course there are problems. The human rights violations ongoing against the Uyghur peoples is intolerable, and the anti-gay media legislation is an embarrassment to the Chinese people.
But China will develop its own political, social and economic systems at its own pace - and it’s essential we criticise where we must, but cooperate were we can. If we wish to solve global warming, continue to fight against global poverty and protect the international rules based order, cooperation with China is unavoidable. That means we need to learn from history, respect differences east and west; insist on human rights but in the correct manner. Shutting the door on Beijing, pushing the idiocy of ‘decoupling’ - undermining global trade and commerce in the process, and arming the Asia-pacific to the teeth in preparation for a dooms-day scenario war is palpably unacceptable.
As the great man once said, we need jaw-jaw, not war-war.
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I am surprised that there are some common misconceptions in this article, so I guess I will write a brief reply on this matter.
First of all, it is clear that the PLA will invade ROC soon despite the ROC refuse to be ruled by the CCP, which will trigger a military response from Japan and the US, and I expect this will happen in April 2024 under normal circumstances as Xi has implied he wish to have another purge within the CCP again.
Two, Major General Chenghu Zhu has said before that if the US intervenes the in the Taiwan invasion, the PLA should deploy nuclear weapons to the west cost of the US.
Three, history has told us the America has be a long supporter of the modernisation of China. From grant US citizenship for Dr. Yat-sen Sun to shelter him to using the Boxer Indemnities on education in China. America has a long history to assist the country to develop itself, no to mention the CCP has self-sabotaged its chances by implementing the one child policy that doom its demographic structure.
Four, I am surprised that you adapt a very CCP nationalistic view on the Yuanmingyuan. Have you asked yourself why the join expedition force decided not to ransack the Forbidden City instead? Surely once they entered Peking, with the emperor fled, it is possible for them do so. The issue was the POWs were subjected to inhumane treatment by Qing government, and the ransack of the Yuanmingyuan was used as the warning to the Qing government. Also, I am glad majority of the treasures were shipped overseas as I can’ti magine what could have happened during the Cultural Revolution.
Throughout the last four decades, the strategy of Henry Kissinger has be tried and failed, and we have let down not only the ROC, The British Chinese in Hong Kong, and now towards our own people and system. I have no problem in engagement policy , but we shouldn’t sell our soul and let our own people down as.
My initial Chinese experience in 1986 included being berated ,sino-style,by a senior,MIT educated,CNOC official on the inherent superiority of the 6000 year old ‘Chinese’ culture.What I felt then was similar to how I feel on home territory,whenever I experience over zealous ,emotional accounts of Scottish or Irish history.Namely, that this is history in the service of political justification rather than truth.For example,’Kingdom of Characters’ by Jing Tsu recounts and highlights the salience of the fact that the Qing empire did not begin to establish a standard language until after the 1911 rebellion.Elsewhere I have read that after establishment of PRC only the intervention of no less a character than Uncle Joe curtailed Mao’s intention to ditch Chinese characters altogether.This tale in particular,at the very least, suggests caution in the wholesale consumption of the 6000 yrs coherent polity myth preferred by the voice of Chinese nationalism.
Your article contains much of interest.However,I feel you do a disservice to the nature of Western concerns.Very few people now believe that the West’s concerns are nested primarily in human rights or the delusion that an economically successful China inevitably thirsts to fall in line philosophically or politically with the west. The infiltration of the West’s academic & scientific institutions enabled by projects and deals brokered by naïve University Chancellors without benefit or referral to our Intelligence services has been careless in the extreme .See,for example,Ian William’s account of interference & intellectual theft in ‘Every Breath You Take’.Xi’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric ,concerns arising over maritime appropriation and imperial expansionism in the South China Seas are appropriate.The threat to western trade presented by joint Sino-Russian monopoly of sea routes (Pacific+Antarctic) are real .The Belt and Road Initiative with it’s concommitant financial deals have caused pain and detriment to many countries and deserve comparison with wrongs arising from our Imperialist era.Xi’s relentlessly aggressive attempts to usurp and dominate our global supranational institutions such as UN ,WHO etc have to be met with efforts compatible with our will to preserve our own civilisation and direct the political form of our own future?