China the Predator
The Washington Post, reporting on the ground work for President Obama’s Asia tour, reports that U.S.-China relations are abysmal. I would say they’re as bad now as they’ve been since at least the EP-3 Incident, and that they’re almost sure to get worse when Xi Jinping takes over as China’s new leader. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that Xi is obnoxious even by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party, but it’s clear that Obama’s early deferential outreach to China has backfired.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told China on Saturday that she expects Beijing to press North Korea not to take “provocative steps” against South Korea. She also appealed to Chinese and Japanese officials Saturday to end their month-long spat. [….]
Clinton’s demands for help dealing with North Korea underscored U.S. concern about reports indicating increased activity at nuclear sites in the reclusive state and worries about possible North Korean mischief in the run-up to the meeting of the Group of 20 major economies scheduled to begin Nov. 11 in Seoul. The United States is also alarmed by the persistence of a dispute between China and Japan over islands in the western Pacific. [Washington Post, John Pomfret]
I wonder if a woman as shrewd as Mrs. Clinton now realizes that feeding China’s ego also feeds its arrogance and its predatory nature. It must have occurred to her that China’s leaders are the product of a zero-sum world view where preying on the weak is just what the strong do, where the ideology of class equality masks a cultural obsession with status, place, and power so deep that not even Mao could exterminate it.
Perhaps Mrs. Clinton is uniquely qualified to understand this. Then again, she has risen in a system of checks and balances, amid the fear of lawsuits and bad press, and constrained by periodic affirmations of the consent of the governed. These things are still mostly alien to Communist Party bureaucrats. Sure, China must have its share of intra-governmental gridlock and negotiations, but those are negotiations conducted within that unaccountable fraction of a percent of the total population that hasn’t been subjugated. The rest of the world is made of lessers you subjugate, and rivals you can’t, so you deal with them for the time being. China’s government, by instinct or by design, seeks to nationalize this zero-sum mentality in the minds of the Chinese people. Why else would it still peddle that old “no dogs or Chinese” fable? Probably for some of the same reasons it fans anti-Japanese hatred every time a dispute arises over some small island or fishing vessel, or permits angry protests at Carrefour stores over political controversies over Tibet, or lashes out at Australia when criticized by its government.
Perhaps by now Mrs. Clinton understands why her early gestures of conciliation were received as signs of weakness and subordination in Beijing, where there is a long institutional memory of foreign kings bringing tribute. Or maybe she’s just not as shrewd as she occasionally seems to be. Thus, the goal of improving relations though concessions to China’s demands goes unmet, except that we’ve been met with more demands. China’s predatory instincts are the direct reason for the rising tension, but the indirect reason is that China feels free to prey on its neighbors.
I’d like to end this post on an even more depressing note. In the case of China, I’d long been willing to entertain the theory that commerce would liberalize and transform its society, and eventually its government. I don’t doubt that commerce has helped liberalize its society, but I don’t see any evidence that its government has made any significant movement toward political liberalization in the last decade. Quite the contrary. China’s reaction to the Nobel for Liu Xiaobo has been, well, reactionary. And if the views of its anointed successor, Xi Jinping, are being quoted accurately, the man sounds like a real thug, a Li Peng for our own times. Consider what Xi says about foreign policy and history, and ask yourself what alternative universe he lives in:
In his address on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC, Xi said that the Chinese movement 60 years ago was “a great and just war for safeguarding peace and resisting aggression.”
“It was also a great victory gained by the united combat forces of China’s and the DPRK’s civilians and soldiers, and a great victory in the pursuit of world peace and human progress,” Xi said. [Xinhua]
Various parties are now denying that Xi called South Korean President Lee Myung Bak a “peace-breaker,” and I’ll let you decide for yourself what you believe. What I believe is that it’s about to become much more difficult to deny that we’re in a Cold War with China.
I generally agree with teh sentiment that what is good for China is not necessarily good for her neighbors, and esp. Korea.
that said, i have to disagree that the CCP is a predator. Or at least more so than the US. It is more accurate to say the CCP is a pragmatist, and an opportunist. From teh CCP’s POV, the ROK is a US military ally, and the DPRK is an unstable time bomb. Thus, why they have their current DPRK policy. The chinese have always been about stability above what is “morally just”, and this is just part of it.
If you are Chinese, all you really see is, “stability -> economic rise -> me getting richer”
And that sucks if you are North Korean, but if you are China, I can see why they play this game.
one more thing about Chinese history education:
sure alot of it is exaggeration or bull, but generally speaking, how much different is it from Korean education? It seems everything is victimization, ie. “we are the victims of colonialism” and this fetishizing of China (or Korea) as the historical victim. In this frame, is the Dokdo stuff really that different from the East China sea dispute? Is Chinese nationalism all that different from the Korean?
I suspect that the Chinese world view is the Asian world view writ large. It is the simple truth that if Europe is some Shangri-la of happily coexisting states and the States is the world’s policeman etc etc and so on, then Asia is a place where life is still nasty, brutish, and short.
I put it to you, and obviously this doesn’t mean I don’t wish China would change, that the actions of every state in Northeast Asia are driven by much the same thing, pure national interest (or, in North Korea’s case, the interests of its leaders, which is unfortunately synonymous with national interest for the time being).
This is realism, is it not. And realism has been an unsavory creed for a long time. Kissinger, anyone?
I do not like Xi Jinping one bit, and frankly I wasn’t the least bit surprised by his remarks concerning the Korean War. China, the US, and the rest of the world would benefit if extraordinary-popular and forward-thinking Wen Jiabao became the next president. Too bad Chinese politics don’t work that way.
There are indeed many differences. Perhaps the most prominent of these differences is the blood-based, racialist theories that undergrid modern Korean historiography. According to which, Koreans are and always have been a “pure-blooded†and virtuous race and this pure-bloodedness makes Koreans vulnerable to foreign machinations. Koreans (both North and South) view their history through this prism and see Korean history as a “5000 year [sic!]†struggle between the proud Korean race whose only aspiration is live peacefully on their Edenic peninsula and evil foreign baddies who want to smite the utopia in their own self-interest.
Chinese Woe-Is-Me-ism doesn’t start until European colonialists and although this is “shameful†period in Chinese history, the Chinese today aren’t nearly as xenophobic or jingoistic as the Koreans. In general, the average Chinese person is far more tolerant, inviting, and accepting of foreigners than the Koreans are. Also the Han Chinese don’t view themselves in racialist terms. As a multiethnic society, “multiculti†training is a big part of Chinese curriculum. Chinese are nationalists in that their loyalty is to the state; Koreans are ethnonationalists in that their loyalty is to the minjok.
I strongly agree here that China’s leadership practices realist foreign policy. The Chinese leadership makes little attempt to hide this fact.
In my analysis, there are two underlying factors that explain why China’s recent spate of muscle-flexing.
1) Declining American leadership in the region: US foreign policy has been wishy-washy, rudderless, and contradictory since Obama took the reins of power (I’m not anti-Obama, by the way). This is even more so in regards to US commitment to its closest allies in the region: South Korea (the response to the Cheonan sinking in which the US bowed to Chinese demands to tone down military drills) and Japan (the failure to stand behind Japan in its disputes with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands and with Russia over the Kuril/Hoppo Ryodo Islands). In the past 50 years, when the US has not perceived as playing leading, middle and rising powers become more belligerent and aggressive.
2) Wagging the Dog: China’s rapid economic growth has given rise to rapidly growing social problems that are starting to come to a head. I’ve travelled frequently to China over the past ten years and one of the growing trends I’ve noticed has been a growing willingness by average Chinese to criticize the government and complain publically about social issues. I think the CCP is trying to deflect attention away from social issues by beating the drums of nationalist sentiment and invoking the perennial Asian bogeyman: Japan.
Sorry…a technical question: did I get stuck in moderation in the comment above or did my comment disappear into the OFK nether regions? Usually when I get stuck in moderation on this site I can see my comment in the thread, but it doesn’t show up on the recent comments list in the sidebar. However, this time I am not seeing anything…
If I am in moderation, then I reposted the same comment multiple times….
milton, the Soviet Union, which did most of the fighting against our main enemy Nazi Germany, took some islands from Japan as a reward for joining the war against our secondary enemy, which we had been begging them to do. I think it would be pointless and counter-productive for us to support Japan’s claims.
Our exercises with South Korea seem to have gone pretty well. I’m no expert, but I don’t think a defensive plan would work if it’s based on an aircraft carrier sailing close to China, because big ships are too vulnerable to land-based missile attack. And if such a plan wouldn’t work, it shouldn’t be trained for.
Obama’s policy toward North Korea is the best we’ve had in decades. Don’t believe me; ask Joshua.
The rise of the Uber Panda should be a concern worldwide, more so if the next generation of leaders show any proclivity to bare their fangs as they express themselves.
The Soviet Union embarked upon a war of aggression in invading Poland in 1939 with their erstwhile German Allies. And then Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and then Hitler declared war against the US. Who was who’s main enemy? And by what measure(s) does one support such a broad generalization of the Second World War, that the Soviets did most of the fighting against the Nazis, blah, blah, blah. Land, sea, air? Number of battles or campaigns fought? Number of countries conquered or lost? Troops fielded or lost? Tanks, ships or aircraft produced? Capital expended, gross or average per capita? Be sure to factor in all the war material the western Allies sent and the high cost paid to get it to the Soviet Union to help them defeat the Nazis in a war they helped to start.
As for not supporting Japan’s desire to regain the Northern Territories in the Kurils, I wonder how eastern Europeans would feel about a similar statement made towards them during the Cold War?
Obama might have something to show with regard to North Korean policy, as compared to any recent administrations, but in the overall context of a vacuous American foreign policy in Asia it’s almost meaningless.
Thanks for the link.
With the death of Communist Ideology, the CCP bases its legitimacy upon 2 cases:
1) Economic growth
2) “Patriotism”, i.e. stoking up the Chinese people against enemies, real or imagined
That said China’s bullying behavior also reflects the country’s traditional Sinocentric world view