Some Perspective on China Bashing

I do not need to tell you that China bashing has become all the vogue. Especially on the political right. On the left, not so much, given that Joe Biden’s son Hunter was bought and paid for by China.

This does not mean that China is the new evil empire. It does not mean that trashing China is going to lead to any good outcome for America. Niall Ferguson has warned against starting another Cold War, and he is certainly correct.

Most observers believe that Republicans are engaging in China bashing because they need to defend our data from Communist Party officials, the ones who are using Tik Tok and other apps to spy on us and to collect personal information. On the other hand, God only knows what is happening with the Tik Tok sale.

Other officials seem to believe that the Trump administration is launching attack after attack on China for political advantage. This may be the case. We will see on November 4.

Anyway, with the exception of someone like David Goldman, who quit an administration task force on China, most Republicans believe that they are going to punish China and to make China pay. As noted on this blog, they have not calculated the cost they will incur when China fights back—as they most assuredly will. Ask the residents of Hong Kong. It is a genuinely bad idea to threaten China's face-- by talking to them as though they are children. For that they will always retaliate.

Besides, at a time when American cities are suffering repeated violent insurrectionary riots, it is strange to denounce other countries for failing to tolerate the same.

For your further edification I report on an intriguing article from an academic in Singapore. Kishore Mahbubani wrote about American misperceptions about China in the Financial Times on 9-21-2020.

 It is interesting to see what this all looks like from an Asian perspective—one that is not run by the Chinese government. According to Mahbubani Americans are misreading the situation in China. 

First, he addresses the bogyman, the Chinese Communist Party. I have often suggested that this is not Mao’s Communist Party, but the message seems to have gotten lost.

 In his words:

Yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest most Chinese people do not perceive the CCP to be oppressive. In fact the latest Edelman Trust Barometer report suggests that support for the Chinese government is among the highest in the world. A Chinese-American psychology researcher from Stanford University, Jean Fan, observed after visiting the country in 2019 that “China is changing . . . fast, in a way that is almost incomprehensible without seeing it in person. In contrast to America’s stagnation, China’s culture, self-concept and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace — mostly for the better.”

Anyway, we do not think it matters. We think that China would do much better to switch to liberal democracy, because, look at how well it is working in America.

Mahbubani writes:

Despite all this, few western minds can escape from the second flawed assumption: even if most Chinese people are happy with the Communist party, they and the rest of the world would be better off were they to switch immediately to a democratic system.

Strangely, the Chinese people do not want to go the way of America, and certainly they do not want to follow the failed role model of Russia:

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent implosion of the living standards of the Russian people, some Chinese may have believed in an instant transformation to democracy. Now, many have no doubt that a weak central government will result in massive chaos and suffering for the Chinese people. For evidence, they look to 4,000 years of Chinese history and, particularly, the so-called “century of humiliation” China suffered from 1842 to 1949.

We take it as an article of faith that a weak central government, beholden to the will of the people, would be more peace loving. But, is this really the case. Mahbubani demurs:

Moreover, a democratically elected government is not necessarily a liberal one. The democratically elected Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru seized back the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961, against the protests of then US president John F Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan. A democratic China would probably be even less patient in dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan.

A democratically elected Chinese government would also be loath to be seen as weak in dealing with separatist movements in Xinjiang — look at the Indian government’s crackdown in Kashmir. Indeed none of China’s neighbours, not even the biggest democracies in Asia, are pushing for regime change in Beijing. A stable, predictable China, even as it becomes more assertive, is preferable to the alternative.

Note this, while we are strongly opposed to what is happening to the Uighurs in Xinjiang province, the Chinese consider them to be a separatist movement. While we see concentration camps run by Nazis, not one international Muslim leader has denounced them. Of course, we consider China to be evil so we consider that whatever is happening in those camps is evil. We do not consider that the information we receive might be tainted.

But, isn’t democracy sweeping the world? Isn’t liberal democracy the wave of the future. Francis Fukuyama said so and you do not want to puncture his Hegelian reveries, do you?

As for the possibility of there being a Westernized China, whose politics can be as appalling as ours, Mahbubani demurs:

The third flawed assumption may be the most dangerous: that a democratic China would inevitably accept western norms and practices, and happily become a member of the western-plus club, as Japan has done.

That is not the cultural dynamic that is sweeping through Asia. Both Turkey and India are friends of the west. Yet Turkey has shifted from the secular ideology of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to the Islamic one of Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and India has moved from the Anglophilic Nehru to the Hindu devotee Narendra Modi.

As Asian countries look to Western Europe and America they are increasingly deciding that they do not want liberal democracy. How many of them would want to be ruled by the Squad or by some of the clowns we put into political office?

The movement around the world is running counter to Western liberal democracy:

We must acknowledge that a tsunami of de-westernisation is under way. Even more significantly, when Mr Erdogan announces the conversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque and Mr Modi resurrects a long-lost Hindu temple on a contested religious site, they are signalling a desire to return to pre-western cultural roots.

Napoleon was right when he warned western nations to “let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world”. Even more than in Turkey and India, there is a potential volcano of anti-western sentiment waiting to explode in China. Currently, the only political force strong enough to hold down these forces of Chinese nationalism is the Chinese Communist party.

The successor to the party could well be far less rational. Keep that in mind, instead of proceeding on autopilot with current policies towards China. The time has come for the west to do a complete reboot and reconsider all its fundamental premises on China. Western governments should learn to live and work with the Chinese leadership, instead of wishing for its transformation or early demise.

Considering how little of the conventional wisdom about China has been disputed or challenged in our country, it seems well worth the trouble to consider a different perspective. 

Now you can rant about how bad China is, but, dare I say, ranting is precisely what your foes on the left are doing. How about a little rational thought, from a different perspective?