China wants to be a global leader, but leadership has to be accepted. China is unable to transmit global values that other nations accept and appreciate.
The phrase Hobson’s Choice refers to something that seems to be a choice but isn’t. Democracies like the United States and India are founded on individual will and liberty. Autocracies like China and North Korea seek unity through uniformity. In the mildly centripetal agglutination of people that is India and the US, suppression (of minorities and others) does not work. One system survives, the other collapses. Despite its obnoxious triumphalism and arrogance, the American dream of liberty, the freedom of choice and the choice of freedom is a universal desire, shared by billions.
There is palpable anger against China in the US (and elsewhere) as many believe that it cheated and conned its way to US technology and investment. In a two-hour conversation with his Chinese counterpart in February 2021, Joe Biden expressed concern over China’s coercive and unfair trade practices, its violation of human rights, crackdown in Hong Kong, mistreatment of Muslims, aggressive actions in Asia including Taiwan, and obfuscation over the virus. These are the issues that Beijing wants the world to forget. “There will be repercussions for China and he knows that,” Biden said of Xi at a town hall event. He told a bipartisan group of US senators that “if we don’t get moving, they (China) are going to eat our lunch” and said famously that Xi PingPong does not have a democratic bone in his body.
America’s threshold of pain is very low. It reacts with fury when its vital interests, economic or political or military or informational or technological are threatened. Remember Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Pakistan?
After Trump, the US, realizing that it is too expensive to be the sole Rambo of the world, is reincorporating its friends and allies into a triple C, or “Contain China Coalition”, as the June 2021 G7 summit in London shows. A Defense Department taskforce is working on a plan to counter China. In November 2020, Donald Trump outlawed Americans from investing in firms that are suspected to be owned or controlled by the Chinese military, forcing US exchanges to delist several Chinese companies like China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom. Yet, Chinese companies chase US listings, because it offers greater liquidity, a massive investor base and a streamlined listing process, apart from the willingness of US investors to deal with startups. Although Hong Kong has tried to steal business from New York, Beijing’s stupid elimination of the colony’s autonomy torpedoed its efforts. Just this week, shares of the Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi crashed 20% (it had raised US$4.4 bn in New York) after Chinese authorities opened an investigation suspecting that it had shared its massive database about its Chinese users. It opened similar investigations against truck-hailing Full Truck Alliance and job-listing firm Kanzhun, immediately after the companies raised capital in the United States. Interestingly, China has no compunctions about filching data from wherever it can. Data has become the new gold standard, as enhanced AI, algorithms, machine learning, combines with state-sponsored cyber activities become more pervasive.
Several top US Republican lawmakers have introduced more than a dozen bills in Congress to counter the growing Chinese influence in the country and to protect America’s critical infrastructure. A US Congressman, who introduced five bills earlier this year, said that Communist China’s rise in military and economic power is one of the greatest security threats the US faces today. Another Congressman said that China is our foremost military adversary, which seeks to infiltrate our economy, universities, digital infrastructure and intelligence agencies.
The Intelligence on Nefarious Foreign Leaders Using Education Networks for Corrupt Enrichment (INFLUENCE) Act aims to limit intellectual property theft at colleges and universities since there was evidence that the Chinese government would stop at nothing to steal American secrets and intellectual property. The US and the world have suspended more swords of Damocles over China’s head than you can count.
The flawed Kissengerian framework helped China hype its heft, hugely based on its totalitarian system of non-reciprocity and non-transparency in interaction with the outside world. Time and truth are unforgiving.
In a few years, experts shall be analysing the reasons for the collapse of Communist China, beset with military, financial, demographic, and agricultural challenges while entangled in disputes all along her eastern, southern and south-eastern periphery.
China is a dystopian state. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, its former constituents and East European allies, with a couple of exceptions, rapidly abandoned the sinking ship and rushed to embrace western liberal democracy. None shed a tear for the old system. The biggest gainer from the collapse was not the West, but China. If Communist China were to implode, the world, including the overwhelming majority of Chinese, would applaud. Lee Kuan Yew once said that he thought China would not achieve its goal of surpassing the US as a global power because the US can draw on the talents of the entire world and recombine them in diversity and creativity that is not possible with China’s ethnic nationalism. Over the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of Chinese women have travelled to America to give birth taking advantage of jus soli, birthright citizenship. One of the most prominent Chinese agencies dealing with such expectant mothers is called “Meijiabei”—Good American Baby! Given half a chance, the average Chinese would rush off to live the American life. There is no rush in the opposite direction, to enjoy citizenship in paradise with Chinese characteristics.
Decoupling with China will take a long time, but has started.
There are also significant indicators that Russia might re-pivot to the West, seeking a way out of its increasing dependency on China. For his constituents, Joe Biden called Putin a killer without a soul in March 2021. Putin, aware that he needs the West, said that “we will work with them…on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves”. At their meeting in May 2021, the American Secretary of State told his Russian counterpart that they were prepared to cooperate but would defend their interests. The two Presidents met in Geneva in June 2021. “We do not want face masks made from used Chinee underwear”, a senior Russian academic told me, in what has now become a metaphor for China’s greed and unreliability. China’s economic packages via the BRI were creating influences in Russia’s backyard (worrying Moscow). If Russia looks again westwards, China’s dying Bilk and Rob Initiative (BRI) will be decapitated. China choked over the 2020 commemoration of the 160th anniversary of Vladivostok, annexed by Russia in 1860 after China lost the Second Opium War.
ASEAN is uncomfortable with China’s aggression, the African Union is beginning to feel cheated on the vaccine promise, and big Latin American nations are hopping mad. But of course, China has steadfast friends, on the moon, the sun, Venus, Mars, Mercury etc. So, it is becoming even more belligerent. May I recall the classical Greek phrase: Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat—whom the gods would destroy they first make mad? Someone please tell Xi PingPong that.
China’s actions in Hong Kong in 2020 were inspired by its fear that democracy was dangerous and disruptive. In Tiananmen (1989) the young demonstrators erected a Styrofoam Statue of Liberty, and over 5,000 got slaughtered. China tries to fool its people into believing that America is declining and that it is superior in every which way, with “the wheel of history” turning faster toward American decay. After the spectacular Beijing Olympics of 2008, China said they did not need to learn from the West anymore. In 2009, a starry-eyed Barack Obama, visiting China, described US-China relations as the “most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century”. Encouraged, the Chinese went about their “peaceful rise” nonsense. Since Xi’s ascent, China’s ever more authoritarian and domineering turn has alarmed governments around the world.
China’s pride in its economic development has metastasized into arrogance. Addressing his rubber stamp Parliament in 2018, Xi said that China was now able to offer “a new type of political system” to the world. China wants to be a global leader, but leadership has to be accepted. China is unable to transmit global values that other nations accept and appreciate. China’s perspective does not resonate with other nations, so its rise becomes threatening. The US is respected, China is suspected. Ping Pong has succumbed to the Gaius Caligula (the name means little boot) Trap of trying to rule through fear and terror (let them hate me as long as they fear me).
In living memory, an American President resigned over confirmation that he had authorized a break-in into the other party’s headquarters, another was forced to acknowledge his sexual dalliance with an intern, a third came clean on selling weapons to Iran prohibited by law. In contrast, has any divine Communist leader in China (beginning with Mao Zedong) ever come even close to acknowledging that he made an error of judgement?
There is racism and prejudice and hatred in the United States, a shameful blot on its fair name, with sporadic mass shootings (over 600 in 2020), but there is also compassion and empathy. China wallows in delusions of Han superiority, and persecutes and ethnically cleanses its minorities. America has this amazing ability to self-correct, China speeds up its march of folly. When China began flexing its military muscles in the last decade, and claiming parity with the US, an angry Obama reminded the world that US was the most powerful nation on earth. Period.
The phantom pain of losing imperial greatness is kept alive in the Chinese collective memory. History books, television series and newspaper articles repeatedly evoke the humiliation of China by foreign powers. The plans for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” extend to 2049, the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The nobler the goals and the farther into the future their fulfilment, the greater the sacrifices one can demand from the people, who must be on an unending Long March. Nothing like civil liberties or cumbersome constitutional processes should come in the way. Dissenters, human rights activists, even their lawyers end up in jail.
The Chinese do not have an indomitable work ethic—they work hard under duress. The Chinese military is not invincible. If it were, they would have taken Taiwan and parts of Vietnam long ago. India exposed it as a stuffed, bloated dragon. When China needed western technology and money, the “foreign devil” became the “foreign friend”, but now that he has been milked, he is back to being the devil.
Rather than regret the deaths of over 3 million people and several hundred million infected (and counting) by its virus, the CPC forced Wuhan, ground zero, whose 11 million residents endured a 76-day lockdown, to have a massive, faked pool party to celebrate the end of the virus and reopen schools in September 2020. Is it a surprise then that the Pew Research Centre says that ¾ of people in industrialized countries have a negative view of China?
Truth is eternal. Perfidy has a limited shelf life. Communist China is past its expiry date.
I read again “They Thought They Were Free”, the 1955 classic by American journalist Milton Mayer that analyses why Germans did not stand up for their rights, even as one mesmerizing demon drove them to their destruction. A system slowly emerged in which hate and fear supplanted sanity and reason, and ordinary people were willing to kill and to die.
The US has very little history, but is a seductive paradigm.
If China could resolve its identity crisis and once again become an attractive civilisation rather than just an enviable development model, it would be much better placed to get the respect and influence it craves. It is easy to self-declare oneself to be a leader. The uncomfortable truth is that leadership has to be accepted by the led.
Give me America any day.
Ambassador Dr Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau; and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil.