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By Victor Davis Hanson NRO
China is anxious for Trump to leave — so it can return
to a global status quo tolerating its myriad abuses that harm the
U.S.
China sounds giddy at the ending of the Trump
presidency. Before COVID-19, it was locked in a likely lose/lose
trade war with the U.S. The American corporate world was finally
starting to complain that its once easy profits in joint-ventures
were now being gobbled up by an increasingly voracious China.
The Left, for all its hatred of Trump, nonetheless
after 2017 grew more vocal over the Chinese gulags, the Tibetization
of Hong Kong, and Beijing’s Orwellian internal police state. Too many
Chinese spies had popped up at the pinnacles of American power,
whether erstwhile chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Senator Dianne Feinstein’s chauffer, or, as we now learn, House
Intelligence Committee member Representative Eric Swalwell’s
something-or-other frequent associate, or among the Biden, Inc.
clique.
With Trump the disrupter apparently gone for now,
China is anxious to return to the
prior global status quo — and its exemptions for
systematic patent and copyright theft, dumping, currency
manipulation, huge trade surpluses, and coerced technology
appropriation.
Or as one prominent Chinese academic, Di Dongsheng,
recently conveyed his post-election confidence in the Biden first
family and the return of the American establishment to power:
I’m going to
throw out something maybe a little bit explosive here. It’s just
because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at
the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.
Dongsheng elaborated, “During the U.S.-China trade
war, [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the
U.S. side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t do much.
But now we’re seeing Biden was elected, the traditional elite, the
political elite, the establishment, they’re very close to Wall
Street, so you see that, right?”
Dongsheng summed up “right” with, “Trump has been
saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you
noticed that? Who helped [Hunter] build the foundations? Got it?
There are a lot of deals inside all these.”
Substitute “Russia” for “China,” “Trump” for “Biden,”
a Russian academic for Dongsheng, and November 2016 for November 2020,
and a president-elect Trump would likely have been indicted by such
admissions.
Currently China is suffering its worst
global-popularity ratings in its modern history. Most countries in
Europe, the U.S., and its immediate Asian neighbors poll anywhere
from 70 to 90 percent disapproval of China. Such negativity is hardly
surprising when over 75 million worldwide have been sickened with
Wuhan COVID-19 — and perhaps another 500 million untested have had
symptoms or at least developed antibodies to it — along with 1.6
million dead.
Many Western countries have vowed never again to
outsource their medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries to
China, given their ensuing exposure in times of a Chinese-spawned
viral global pandemic. The chief rub for an awakening but recently
somnolent Europe and a drowsy U.S. is not whether to reboot with
China, but how — given that for decades America
siphoned off its technology edge, as it trained tens of thousands of
Chinese engineers and scientists, while greenlighting its own
students to rack up $1.6 trillion in student loans to master the arts
of green, race, class, and gender victimization.
Brilliant American engineers design battery-operated
cars and sophisticated solar panels; elite-glut environmental studies
majors fight over how best to bankrupt the American consumer and
raise prohibitive power costs for businesses. China prefers to
emulate the former, not the latter.
China tactically wages war against the U.S. all the
time, from on-campus espionage to cyber assault to stealing
technology and blueprints of institutions it can replicate. But more
important, it counts on a sophisticated strategy to subordinate the
United States, and thereby remake the entire international order to
enhance its own agendas.
The Parasitic Way
China sends over a third of a million students each
year to enroll in U.S. universities. Again, they are not here for the
most part to focus on gender studies, pursue peace studies, or become
psychology and sociology majors.
Perhaps one percent (e.g., roughly 3,000) are serious
espionage operatives. Far more are the children of Communist Party
elites. All know their way is paid for, on the expectation that they
are to be debriefed at some point on their American careers.
Over the last two decades, through students,
visiting-faculty exchanges, tourism, growing diplomatic billets, and
formal espionage operatives, China has systematically replicated
major American institutions. It copies wholesale American
graduate-research programs, medical and scientific labs, foundations,
and formal government entities, from the Pentagon to the military
academies.
China is parasitic on Western institutions in the
manner that imperial Japan was in the latter 19th and early 20th
centuries, when it sent tens of thousands of engineers, scientists,
industrialists, and military attaches to the United Kingdom to master
military shipbuilding and naval organization, and to Germany to copy
imperial German ground forces and tactics — but without the perceived
accompanying Western pollution of parliamentary government.
Nothing delights China more than hyping climate
change, in hopes that the U.S. will emulate Europe in general and in
particular Germany. That is, America should junk its nuclear plants,
stop hydroelectric construction, shut down coal plants, phase out
natural gas, and focus on “wind and solar” and other “green”
technologies.
In the strategic sense, China will continue to use
traditional cheaper carbon and nuclear fuels. It will stress that the
West should not do the same and instead focus on “climate change.”
China will then seek advantage with greater energy reliability and
cheaper costs — while waiting to see when or whether Western
investment and research in alternative energy should be cheaply
harvested.
Divide and Impera
Europe has been apologizing for its 19th- and
early-20th-century imperialism and neo-colonialism for 75 years. Yet
China proudly boasts of its new brand of exploitation, the Belt and
Road Initiative, to develop abroad infrastructure, harbors, ports,
rails, industry, power grids, and highways.
The aims of such a vast $8 trillion project are
multifarious. Beijing seeks to establish control over the world’s
commercial choke points (from Suez to the Panama Canal) that will
offer advantage in times of tensions and war.
It wants to interconnect a vast, Chinese-dominated
predatory mercantile system, one, in naked ambition and racialist
imperialism, analogous perhaps to the former Japanese “Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
It lends promiscuously to cash-strapped aspiring
countries and ossified developed nations, with the aim of leveraging
them into “debt traps,” as uncollected loans can be paid back by ever
longer and greater Chinese contractual control over infrastructure.
Divide and conquer is the subtext of the New Silk
Road. Israel or Greece will bicker with its American ally over the
degree to which billions of dollars in Chinese investment in their
ports warps their strategic autonomy. Russia, as another beneficiary
of Belt and Road, is no longer a triangular agent to check Chinese
power. And it is hard for the EU cohesively to address Chinese
asymmetrical trade when Beijing is increasingly controlling the
harbor traffic of Antwerp, Genoa, Marseille, and Piraeus.
China’s once-grand talk of a “Polar Silk Road” to
connect with Canada might help to explain why Justin Trudeau invited
the Chinese military to conduct winter training in Ontario —
apparently against the wishes of its NATO ally next door. The U.S.
also includes non-nuclear and mostly disarmed Canada under its
nuclear umbrella, which in nightmarish scenarios of nuclear
deterrence, assumes Portland or San Diego are exposed to protect
Montreal or Toronto.
The logic of the new Silk Road is that of the drug
dealer: He accommodates his naïve user, who seeks ever more product,
goes more deeply into debt and dependency to his smiling supplier,
and is only dropped — or worse — for newer junkies when the
strung-out’s debts reach unpayable proportions.
Identity and Race
China is essentially a monoracial nation, with a
terrible record of exploiting those it deems racial inferiors,
whether Tibetans or Muslim Uyghurs. Chinese in Africa make the old
Cold War-stereotyped Russian brutes abroad seem like saints in
comparison.
Nonetheless, the Chinese strategically piggyback on to
the American race industry. And the result is that Western criticism
of the Beijing’s racism and exploitation is itself deemed “racism.”
China can recite chapter-and-verse canned leftist critiques of
America, in the manner that Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Zawahiri
once wrote that they were radicalized in part by their American
enemies’ failure to embrace U.S. campaign-financing reform and
climate-change remedies.
China encourages the United Nations, and international
organizations such as the World Health Organization, to turn its
megaphones toward the U.S. — and to indict America for its racial
tensions, as if inveterately racist China too were a victim of
historic white oppression.
China likes nothing better than to see our cities
locked down amid riot, arson, and looting, and our country condemned
in international fora. It eggs on authentically illiberal nations to
blast America as illiberal.
The Naifs
When American corporations and capitalists see flat
growth and fear inert future profits, they look for hope in Communist
China. Disney’s post-COVID hopes of revival apparently rest with
China. The NBA’s domestic audience is decreasing — as its lucrative
franchising in China soars. Michael Bloomberg raised billions in
Western capital for Chinese startups. Bill Gates’s Microsoft has had
a 20-year relationship with the Chinese government’s spin-off
concerns.
In that context, is it any surprise that Disney movies
now “thank” their cooperative Chinese Communist officials when they
undertake joint-venture movies in the backyard of Muslim-reeducation
camps? Is it a shock that Bloomberg assures us that China is not an
authoritarian country? On spec, the NBA’s Steve Kerr blasts American
society and offers excuses about Chinese autocracy. Bill Gates unsurprisingly
warns us not to underappreciate the valuable role China has played in
dealing transparently with the virus and its spread.
China believes the current U.S. elite is unlike those
who won World War II or sent a man into space. In their contempt,
they believe instead that our best and brightest have grown naive,
flabby, relativist, globalist, easily guilted, eager for repentance,
decadent, and greedy — and can continue to be, and do, all that,
while still becoming even richer with China.
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