Author Topic: America should view China as a hostile, revolutionary power  (Read 263 times)

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Offline Right_in_Virginia

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America should view China as a hostile, revolutionary power
« on: August 11, 2019, 03:03:58 pm »
America should view China as a hostile, revolutionary power
Spectator USA, Aug 9, 2019, Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han

[...]

But as important as these developments are, there is a greater concern. This is the intellectual framework that China is creating under the guise of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind,’ most recently expressed in the July 2019 defense white paper. Precisely what the Chinese Communist party (CCP) means by this concept is deliberately vague and nebulous. But it is clear enough from the more tangible comments defining peace, stability, and prosperity in China with the collective good of the world, as is the equation of a strong Chinese military as a force for world peace, stability and the building of a shared future for mankind.

This shared future is certain to be dystopian. Any community that the CCP creates will be totalitarian and oppressive by its nature. Any shared future that it seeks to create will be one in which the rest of the world adapts to serve the interests of Beijing. The future will be shared only because China’s power is great enough to trap states into it either by seduction or coercion. It will be like Foxconn on a global scale. Beijing’s conception of global governance is a firm hierarchy with it on top. This shared future will be less free, less diverse, and far more oppressive than the present one.

This phrase should not be dismissed as boilerplate. It matters because China is providing insight into the type of world it seeks to create in place of the liberal international order. In their struggle for power, the Bolsheviks promised ‘Peace, Land, and Bread,’ to win supporters, who lugubriously received civil war, the horrors of collectivization, and famine instead.

China’s ambition is just as revolutionary as Lenin’s. Despite the claims to the contrary, China is not a status quo great power. It is truly a revolutionary great power that seeks fundamental and permanent changes to the contemporary order in international politics. The words it chooses are designed to legitimize its position of dominance. However, Beijing’s effort to provide a palliative phrase to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the world cannot mask its form of neo-imperialism. The effort is likely to fail as more states question its ambition and encounter the truth about its behavior.

Washington needs to counter Beijing in the realm of public diplomacy and global opinion. The US may remind the world of the benefits of a world order based on equanimity and by delineating the reality of Beijing’s ideology and the empirical evidence of its actions with its public diplomacy rhetoric. If we want egalitarianism to remain the dominant ideal in international politics, rather than ceding leadership back to authoritarianism, we need to say so more frequently, forcefully, and with greater acuity.


More:  https://spectator.us/america-china-hostile-revolutionary-power/