Cold War with China? Yes

by Richard Schulman

There’s a debate underway in Washington as to whether the Trump administration is provoking a new Cold War with China and whether this is a good idea. One hundred China experts, many closely associated with the Democratic Party, think that the administration is indeed doing so and that this is a bad idea. John Pomfret, former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, has written a cogent response to their letter:

[S]cores of prominent experts on China…deny agency to the Chinese Communist Party by placing the bulk of the blame for the current crisis in U.S.-China relations at the feet of the Trump administration. The letter nods to China’s misbehavior but focuses far more attention on what it calls the “many U.S. actions” that “are contributing directly to the downward spiral in relations.”
…
The CCP is far more responsible for what happens in China — and for the current crisis with the United States — than any American. Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of President Xi Jinping, China has stopped market-oriented economic reforms, launched a massive crackdown that has resulted in the incarceration of more than 1 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, ramped up efforts to steal Western technology, broken a promise made to a U.S. president not to militarize the South China Sea and tried to export its system abroad. It has squeezed aspirations for democracy in Hong Kong and launched a campaign to undermine the democratic system in Taiwan.

The main fruit of a generally cooperative policy from Washington, at least during the Obama years, has been an emboldened China eager to reach for more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/09/why-united-states-doesnt-need-return-gentler-china-policy/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f861c36225be

The wishful thinking of the Obama administration and the one hundred China experts — many of whom, like Strobe Talbott, served in or advised that administration — replicates a similar debate that occurred at the onset of the original Cold War with the Soviet Union. In that case, the wishful thinkers attacked Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri and the follow-on 1947 Truman Doctrine and Foreign Affairs article by “Mr. X” (George Kennan) — rather than Soviet actions on the ground in Eastern Europe and elsewhere:

Truman might have understood the dark intentions of the Soviet Union, but many leading American liberals, such as FDR’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, and his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, still affectionately referred to the Communist dictator Stalin as “good old Uncle Joe.” It was difficult for Americans, in the space of a few months, to go from regarding the Soviet Union as our ally in war to a potentially lethal enemy. Much of the liberal press was trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Britain, while rightwing isolationists opposed any long-term American alliance with European nations.

https://www.historyonthenet.com/winston-churchills-iron-curtain-speech-predicting-the-cold-war

“Character is destiny”

One of the famous sayings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is that “Character is destiny” (ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων — fragment 119). But ethos also refers to the customs, nature — the political culture — of a people or nation. The political culture of Russia under the czars and the Soviet communists was despotism — hard authoritarianism. Gorbachev tried to change that political culture to soft authoritarian. Now, under Putin, Russia is reverting to hard-authoritarian type.

This brings us back to China. China’s ethos — its historically dominant, difficult-to-overcome elite culture — is hard despotism. The superb study, The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power by Fei-Ling Wang (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), explains how a despotic political culture — the “China Order” — grew out of the fusion in the late 3rd century BC through 2nd century AD of two Chinese schools of political philosophy — the totalitarian school of Legalism and the soft-authoritarian school of Confucianism. He notes the tendency of China’s hard-authoritarian regimes to obsessively rewrite history 1984 style (“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”) and seek out and destroy all past literature and its exponents, as did Qin Shih Huangdi (221-210 B.C.), China’s first emperor. This totalitarianism of thought continued even into the modern era, Professor Wang writes:

[D]uring the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1735-95), the Qing government organized a decades-long ‘worldwide’ effort to collect, purchase, and confiscate (with bloody means when necessary) all books and written materials ‘under the sun,’ then finally edit…all of them into only eight imperially controlled copies…Worse, the imperial ruler used this opportunity to ban and literally burn…as many as 100,000 kinds of books…and countless printing plates.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution had much the same tendency as his Qin and Qianlong predecessors — to destroy all Chinese culture that didn’t square with Mao Zedong thought. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) achieves a similar thought-control through pervasive censorship and imprisoning of dissidents or executing them and harvesting their organs.

Still, there are ironies in Beijing’s attempts to define patriotic thought. It is so wedded to the despotic China Order that it celebrates as two of its “own” model dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911). During the Yuan dynasty, the native (Han) Chinese were conquered and enslaved by the Mongols. During the Qing dynasty, they were conquered and enslaved by the Manchus.

China’s present ruler and Communist party leader, Xi Jinping, is using modern technologies (pervasive cameras, facial recognition, secret police, indoctrination camps, censorship, and electronic eavesdropping) to revive Qin Shih Huang’s totalitarian rule and that of Xi’s more immediate role model, Mao Zedong — but ostensibly now with better engineering and less lunacy.

Political culture is destiny but not deterministically so. Professor Wang in The Chinese Order overturns the usual view prevailing in history books that the weak, “bad” periods of Chinese history were when China lacked a strong authoritarian central government. To the contrary, he writes, those were the occasional periods when China was creative and somewhat free: the Warring States period (475-221 BC), the Song dynasty (960-1279), and the Republic of China (1912-1949). The ROC, for example, freed China of the worst of the unfavorable treaties imposed on it by foreign powers.

This reader’s takeaway from The China Order is that China’s default hard-despotic culture and imperial wish to unite the whole known world under the China Order must be defeated by the containment provided by a second Cold War. What worked with the USSR can work with Xi Jinping’s China. Only the weakening of the central Chinese state by external pressure will provide space for internal reformers and the breakaway of China’s captive nations (Tibet, Xinjiang) and other threatened peoples (Chinese religious groups, Taiwan). Without effective containment, China and the China Order will come to dominate much of the world, and a planet-ending world war waged against the remnant will become much more likely.

The US can’t match China demographically, so it needs close allies in this endeavor. The Trump administration has been far superior to the Obama administration in recognizing the danger from Xi Jinping’s China and taking counter-steps, but it has fallen short in the required alliance-building. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ wishful thinking regarding China needs to become a salient issue in the forthcoming presidential and congressional elections.