Wherefore China Policy?

I am hardly an expert in foreign policy, but I do know mass hysteria and group paranoia when I see it. I have over the years been trying to shed some rationality on the debate about China policy, often quoting one David Goldman, who is hardly a member of the vast leftist conspiracy.

Goldman has suggested that our belligerent aggressiveness toward China is causing us to sleepwalk into a war. His view seems hardly an exaggeration. 

We are up in arms about the evils that China is visiting on the world, but we are less aware and certainly less concerned with American efforts to cripple Chinese business with tariffs and sanctions. If you imagine that these unilateral tough guy actions were not going to provoke a response, you have been smoking the wrong cigarettes.

And let us mention, because no one else seems to care about it, that we have been engaged in a long running assault on China’s reputation. We denounce China for being genocidal, for having cheated on everything, for never having accomplished anything on its own.

Last week’s revelations of the Chinese advantage in tech research should have silenced some of that opposition, but it has not.

As for the Fentanyl crisis, we ought to sit down with the Chinese and make a deal. We made a deal with Mexico, so we ought to make one with China. But that would require us to stop calling China genocidal, and one suspects that most American politicians are not up to that challenge. One recalls that back in the day, during the time of Chairman Mao-- obviously a much more murderous tyrant than Xi-- Richard Nixon committed diplomacy with China.

As for the war against China’s reputation, against “face,” as it were, people over there take it very, very seriously. Do not for an instant imagine that they are going to shrug it off.

Today, what with the general hysteria about China, with sane and sober Republican senators sounding like shrieky schoolgirls recoiling in horror over the CCP, we are heading toward a conflict.

Fareed Zakaria makes an effort to indulge in some rational thought about China in the Washington Post:

But on the most important foreign policy issue confronting policymakers, the problem is closer to the opposite. Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.

He continues, sensibly:

China is a serious strategic competitor, the most significant great-power challenger the United States has faced in many decades. That is all the more reason for Washington to shape a rational and considered foreign policy toward it — rather than one forged out of paranoia, hysteria and, above all, fears of being branded as soft. 

Of course, like it or not, and despite all of our efforts to disparage its work, China has grown its economy rapidly and significantly over the past decades:

China has grown in power mightily since 2000. Back then, it accounted for almost 4 percent of global gross domestic product; today, that figure is about 18 percent. Its military expenditures have grown even faster. Xi Jinping is a far more aggressive leader than his predecessors.

Xi Jinping is more aggressive. Similarly, American administrations have been far more aggressive toward China. On the chessboard of foreign policy, the one cannot be detached from the other.

Zakaria continues:

But it is also true that U.S. policy has changed. Today, we have a strong bipartisan view of the allegedly existential danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party, which implies that regime change would be the only solution to this problem. But has this comfortable consensus created a more secure world for Americans (and others)? Or are we moving down a path that takes us toward decades of arms races, crises, perhaps even war?

As noted above, David Goldman has been offering the same warnings and the same call for a rational policy. For now, all of it seems to be falling on deaf ears.