' “The Assassin’s Mace” is part of ancient Chinese lore. It is the story of a lone warrior-assassin who uses a hidden weapon to destroy a mighty, overwhelming enemy. Pillsbury says it resembles how China is “militarily engaging” the West.'
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What do we do about China now?' - '..the Chinese manipulated Western politicians and business leaders into thinking China was evolving toward democracy and capitalism.''He said China had to be brought into “the family of nations,” lest it continue to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors” — which sounds a lot like the China the world confronts today, despite four decades of supportive engagement.
What went wrong? The international community failed to heed Nixon’s other cautions on how the West should interact with China. Too generous, unconditional economic and political concessions would only “serve to confirm its rulers in their present course,” he warned.''..almost 40 years of generous, indulgent American policies toward China. Yet, here we are with what they acknowledge as Beijing’s “turn toward greater domestic repression, increased state control over private firms, failure to live up to several of its trade commitments, greater efforts to control foreign opinion and more aggressive foreign policy.”
The writers evidently see no causality between the traditional, softer U.S. policies and Beijing’s increasingly harsh response — though parallel historical experiences with expanding Asian and European powers taught similar painful lessons.
The letter argues: “If the United States presses its allies to treat China as an economic and political enemy, it will weaken its relations with those allies and could end up isolating itself rather than Beijing.”
But, since the time of Mao Zedong, it has been in the Chinese Communist DNA to treat the West as its ultimate enemy, engagement or no engagement. And our allies, partners and other countries have experienced Beijing’s malign intentions and practices for themselves.
Under U.S. leadership, they increasingly are cooperating to resist China’s misbehavior, from trade issues to navigational freedoms in the South China Sea — forming exactly the “enduring coalitions … in support of economic and security objectives” that the writers call for.
Their arguments are not new — in fact, Richard Nixon made them all a half-century ago when he called for new policies toward “Red China.”
He said China had to be brought into “the family of nations,” lest it continue to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors” — which sounds a lot like the China the world confronts today, despite four decades of supportive engagement.
What went wrong? The international community failed to heed Nixon’s other cautions on how the West should interact with China. Too generous, unconditional economic and political concessions would only “serve to confirm its rulers in their present course,” he warned.
Instead, Nixon called for “a policy of firm restraint, of no reward, of a creative counterpressure designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.”
Over the long term, Nixon wrote, “containment without isolation” was necessary, but not sufficient. “Along with it, we need a positive policy of pressure and persuasion, of dynamic detoxification … to draw off the poison from the ‘Thoughts of Mao.’”
Now, Xi Jinping is reviving Mao’s philosophy, which starts with the aphorism, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The China that the letter-writers imagine, one receptive to fair reasoning and gestures of goodwill, does not exist. The international community needs to deal with the real Communist China based on fresh thinking and realism, rather than on vain adherence to a demonstratively discredited approach.
- Joseph Bosco,
The world is taking a stand against China, freedom's enemy, July 15, 2019
Context'China’s Vision of Victory .. is of a world under authoritarian rule .. incompatible with U.S. democracy.''Far too many American multinational corporations have kowtowed to the lure of China’s money and markets by muzzling not only criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, but even affirmative expressions of American values.' - Pence'..the West’s 25-year bet on China has failed.' - How the West got China wrong - '..China uses business to confront its enemies. It seeks to punish firms directly, as when Mercedes-Benz..'