“What Does China Want?” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
The hope was that exposure to the West would cause China to develop free market economies and more freedom for its people. Yet, as Kevin Rudd and Daniel Rosen wrote in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, “China’s economic norms are diverging from, rather than converging with, the West’s. Long promised changes detailed at the beginning of the Xi era haven’t materialized.” China’s defense spending has risen ten-fold in the past two decades, while the U.S.’ slightly more than doubled. The U.S. still spends more than three times what China spends, but the gap is narrowing. China has built at least seven artificial islands in the South China Sea and has conducted war games in that area, through which an estimated one-third of global trade passes. In consolidating power, Xi Jinping has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
In 2013, on visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Xi unveiled his “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a center piece of China’s foreign policy. The “belt” refers to the old “Silk Road,” which extended from Xi’an in Central China to the Mediterranean Sea, just west of Aleppo. The “road” refers to 21st Century sea routes. Today, according to Wikipedia, 138 countries in Asia, Africa the Middle East, the Caribbean, South America and Europe have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s BRI. The stated purpose is to connect Asia with the Middle East, Africa and Europe to improve regional integration, increase trade and stimulate economic growth. This has been done through loans to countries and direct investments in ports, roads, rail lines, airports, “…one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived” is the way the Council on Foreign Relations put it in January of this year.
China’s reach extends beyond those countries that have signed on to BRI. They have seduced the United States through technology, sports and the entertainment world. Apps allow the Chinese government to read and influence young American minds. Last October, when Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets issued a Tweet supporting democracy in Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party started pulling NBA games off television and merchandise off shelves. With billions of dollars at stake, the NBA bowed to Chinese demands. China has invested millions of dollars in Hollywood-made movies; scripts have been written with China’s censors in mind. According to Tim Doescher of the Heritage Foundation, “China is on track to overtake the U.S. as the largest consumer of movies in the world.”
What does China want, besides the amenable Hunter Biden’s father as the next U.S. President? Does she want dominion over the region, the hemisphere or the world, as Senator Cruz suggested? What about her Pacific neighbors: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia? What about India, Australia and New Zealand? Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services in London sees in China a desire to return to predominance in Asia, to re-establish control over territories like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet, and to command the respect of other great powers. Gordon Chang, a lawyer and columnist who lived and worked in Hong Kong and mainland China for two decades, sees China as more vulnerable and therefore more dangerous – countering a “closing window of opportunity, because of problems in the economy, in the environment and demography.” Caveat Emptor, in my opinion, applies to those nations that have signed MoU’s with China’s BRI.
Unlike the Cold War, which arose in the aftermath of the Second World War when the U.S. emerged as the preeminent power with hegemonic responsibilities for the West, the faceoff between China and the United States is more subtle and dangerous. For one, the United States is no longer revered as she was seventy-five years ago. Wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan diminished her image and undid her self-confidence. The United States no longer has the unquestioned love of her people, as can be seen in the partisanship of our politics and media, and the riots that course through city streets. Multiculturalism has replaced patriotism. Identity politics and victimization have removed the Unum from e Pluribus Unum. Our founding principles are no longer seen as having descended from the Enlightenment but as tarnished by slavery.
History did not end in 1989. The threat China represents is different from the Mutually Assured Destruction threat that governed behavior between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and it is different from non-state enemies like al Qaeda and ISIS. “What is at stake,” as Simon Hunt recently wrote, “is a clash of civilizations.” – an emerging autocratic China challenges an aging 250-year-old democratic United States. The differences are stark – authoritarianism versus democracy, dependency versus independence, subjection versus freedom, nightmares versus dreams. While the United States is not perfect, it is the only nation based on the idea that government is established to protect individual rights, rights that stem from nature, not granted by man. “American history,” as Stanley Kurtz recently wrote in National Review, “is, in part, the chronicle of our attempts to more perfectly realize the principles of liberty and equality that inspired our founding.” Can the same be said for China?
As a nation we encourage self-criticism; we believe in the separation of powers and in the rule of law. China, in contrast, is governed by a Communist dictatorship, where the alleged goal is the establishment of a socioeconomic order structured on common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state – high-sounding ideals, but which are lies that camouflage a brutish reality: less than ten percent of the population are members of the Communist Party; where Xi Jinping has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, while median annual household income is $3,650; where a million Muslim-minority Uighurs are held in government re-education detention centers; when BBC estimated that 10,000 protesters were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Claimed ideals but lies, as those who live in Hong Kong and Taiwan know full well.
The United States is the most powerful democracy in the world and serves as exemplar to other nations. It has a moral obligation to safeguard freedom among liberty loving people. If you think socialism is insidious in the way it infiltrates society, try communism – Xi Jinping and China style. The free world cannot ignore the threat China poses.
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