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. You should probably take nothing from my own vague unease that Xi’s flamboyant wife really, really reminds me of a younger Imelda Marcos (or, for those of you who are little older, Madame Nhu). I don’t know what disturbs me more — a flamboyant political wife in Asia, or all the state’s efforts to airbrush the flamboyant political wife.

You should, however, take plenty from 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.