Bully of Asia

Why China's Dream is the New Threat to World Order

Steven W. Mosher

• Editorial: Regnery
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781621577058
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Asian Politics

The Once and Future Hegemon In a world bristling with dangers, only one enemy poses a truly mortal challenge to the United States and the peaceful and prosperous world that America guarantees. That enemy is China, a country -that invented totalitarianism thousands of years ago -whose economic power rivals our own -that believes its superior race and culture give it the right to universal deference -that teaches its people to hate America for standing in the way of achieving its narcissistic "dream" of world domination -that believes in its manifest destiny to usher in the World of Great Harmony -which publishes maps showing the exact extent of the nuclear destruction it could rain down on the United States Steven Mosher exposes the resurgent aspirations of the would-be hegemon—and the roots of China's will to domination in its five-thousand-year history of ruthless conquest and assimilation of other nations, brutal repression of its own people, and belligerence toward any civilization that challenges its claim to superiority. The naïve idealism of our "China hands" has lulled America into a fool's dream of "engagement" with the People's Republic of China and its "peaceful evolution" toward democracy and freedom. Wishful thinking, says Mosher, has blinded us to the danger we face and left the world vulnerable to China's overweening ambitions. Mosher knows China as few Westerners do. Having exposed as a visiting graduate student the monstrous practice of forced abortions, he became the target of the regime's crushing retaliation. His encyclopedic grasp of China's history and its present-day politics, his astute insights, and his bracing realism are the perfect antidote for our dangerous confusion about the Bully of Asia.

1

A DISEASE OF THE HEART

“The Japanese are like a disease of the skin, but the Communists are like a disease of the heart.”

—CHIANG KAI-SHEK¹

“There is only one challenge that today represents a clear and existential threat to America’s national interests. . . . The rise of the People’s Republic of China.”

—HARRY J. KAZIANIS²

“China had a very high opinion of its own achievements and had nothing but disdain for other countries. This became a habit and was considered quite natural.”

—SUN YAT-SEN³

The political leader with the most experience fighting the Chinese Communist Party—first successfully and later much less so—was Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chiang was under enormous pressure to declare war on the Empire of the Rising Sun. He refused, arguing that before the Japanese could be driven out of China, the Communist rebellion must first be put down. “First internal pacification, then external resistance,” he insisted. Even when the Japanese launched a major offensive in Shanghai in 1932, he threw his best divisions into the fray but in the end refused to be drawn into an all-out conflict.

“The Japanese are like a disease of the skin,” Chiang later explained to his restless army commanders, “but the Communists are like a disease of the heart.” By this he meant that the Japanese, with their powerful navy, could seize China’s coastal cities almost at will, but they simply did not have the manpower or resources to take and hold the vast and heavily populated interior of China over time. He knew they would eventually be forced by time or circumstances to leave, although he could not have known that China’s liberation would not be accomplished until 1945, only after the blood of nearly a half million Americans, and many times that number of Chinese, had been spilled.

The Communists, on the other hand, already controlled vast stretches of the Chinese heartland. And Chiang was familiar enough with their fanaticism to know that, unless their red armies were completely annihilated, they would continue their struggle until they were victorious. It was to be a battle to the death—“you die, I live,” as the Chinese say—for the very heart of China. In the end the “disease of the heart” that Chiang had warned about did indeed prove fatal to his own Nationalist government, and with its retreat to the island of Taiwan died the dream of a free and democratic China.

Chiang Kai-shek’s remarkable metaphor can be used to illustrate the severity of the threats that America faces today. There are, as it turns out, a range of dangers that qualify as diseases of the skin. The radical Islamists clearly fall into this category. They will indeed fight to the death, but with their failing caliphates and their limited appeal even within the Muslim world itself, it is they who will die. Terror attacks—however much fear they may sporadically generate among the population—are a sign of weakness, not of strength. (Any tactic that results in the death of your most committed followers is ultimately self-defeating.) At the end of the day such attacks, however deadly they prove to innocent bystanders, pose no real danger to the world order America and the West have built.

Iran and North Korea are greater threats. A nuclear-armed Iran would threaten the Sunni Arab nations and jeopardize the very existence of Israel. In fact, the mullahs openly speak of using nuclear weapons to usher in the reign of the Twelfth Imam. As far as North Korea’s nukes and missiles are concerned, these already constitute a serious threat to our allies in East Asia. That Kim Jong Un is additionally seeking, with help from across his country’s border with China, to acquire the ability to strike at the American homeland should give us all pause. But it would be a mistake to write off the Madman of Pyongyang as criminally insane, since he may be banking on his new weapons systems to intimidate the United States and its allies into trying to buy him off again, a ploy that his father successfully used against both the Clinton and Bush II administrations.⁴ Neither country, however, constitutes an existential threat to the continued existence of the Republic. Both are clearly diseases of the skin, both are able to inflict serious injury on their near neighbors, to be sure, but not to the world as currently constituted.

The question of whether Russia is a disease of the skin or of the heart is considerably more controversial. Obviously, if Putin were to launch his nuclear-tipped missiles against the West they would cause tremendous devastation. Yet the death of tens of millions of Westerners would not mean the end of Western civilization any more than the Holocaust, with its six million victims, meant the end of Jewish civilization. Civilizations are far more difficult to destroy than cities. They exist in the minds of men, in their values and beliefs, in their cultures and institutions. Moreover, Putin knows that Russia would be a smoldering ruin less than an hour after he ordered such an attack. Presumably he is no less afraid of mutually assured destruction than his Soviet predecessors were.

Only an alternative ideology could pose a real danger to the United States and to the civilization of which it is the principal defender. In “scientific” Marxism, the Soviets had just such an ideology—the appeal of communism far transcended their own country’s borders—and they vigorously promoted it for decades. While they were not successful in remaking the world in their own image, they were able to spread their errors to many countries around the globe.

Today’s Russia has little to offer in this regard. The autocratic rule practiced by Putin is neither a system of belief nor a civilizational advance. Rather, it is a retreat into Russia’s Tsarist past.⁵ Today’s Russia conceives of itself, as it has throughout much of its history, not as an alternative to Western civilization, but as its easternmost outpost.⁶ The Russian government may be no friend to free speech and democratic rule but, supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, it fervently promotes the family and traditional values, opposes mass immigration, and mocks multiculturalism.⁷ For this, of course, it is roundly reviled by the secular Left.

While the Soviets dreamed of a world under communism, the current occupants of the Kremlin have far more limited objectives. They have neither the means nor the will to pose a serious threat to the existing world order, much less to undertake to build a new one. Rather, they merely want the country they lead to once again be respected as a great power, as it was in centuries past. More worrisomely, they want to gather scattered Russian minorities—stranded in the various Soviet Republics by the dissolution of the USSR—back into the bosom of Mother Russia. The continual expansion of NATO eastward is greatly resented, since it is seen as encroaching upon Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. The 2004 incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Western alliance was a particular blow to Russian pride, since these countries were once Soviet Republics and each has a sizable Russian minority.

The Russians woke up on December 26, 1991, to find half their country gone. Putin’s goal is to piece back together as much of the Russian Empire as possible, beginning with Russian-speaking territories adjacent to his current borders. The seizure of Crimea and the proxy war in eastern Ukraine are pure irredentism, not a prelude to an invasion of Eastern Europe. This is not to say that the covert war that Russia is conducting in the eastern Ukraine is justifiable. Clearly it is not. Russia should be made to pay a heavy price for violating the territorial integrity of that country to ensure that it does not continue its aggressive, destabilizing behavior. At the same time, we should not lose sight of the larger strategic picture, in which Russia is, at best, a second-tier player.

Outside of its “near abroad” Russia’s foreign policy seems to be simply reductionist: whenever and wherever Putin can thumb his nose at the United States and NATO—by holding joint naval exercises with China in the South China Sea and the Baltic, for example—he will do so. At the same time, Russia has its own worries about China’s rise, a country with which it shares a forty-two-hundred-kilometer-long border, and that now competes for influence in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. Russia does not want to end up as “China’s Canada,” and even less as the junior partner in a reconstituted Sino-Russian bloc.

There is no reason to believe Tsar Vladimir Putin dreams that his own power will one day eclipse America’s, much less that he harbors the secret ambition to remake the world in Russia’s image. Under Putin, Soviet expansionism has given way to a much more parochial project that we might call, for want of a better term, making Russia great again. I grant that even this limited goal constitutes an existential threat to some of the newly independent states of Eastern Europe, whose security we have now guaranteed by treaty. But it is clearly not fatal to the United States itself, nor particularly threatening to the world order that America has created.

Loud and insistent voices continue to demand that we declare eternal enmity towards Moscow. They tell us that the clumsy Russian bear is our most dangerous adversary, and that it must be beaten down and brought to heel. There are many problems with this overblown analysis, not least of which is that Russia’s economy is less than one-tenth the size of our own. Moreover, whatever else Russia is, she remains a part of Western civilization, within whose ambit she lives, thinks, and has her spiritual roots. It is not unlikely that democratic rule may one day be restored in Russia, which means that she has the potential to be our friend. But even while she remains under the dictatorial rule of the thuggish Vladimir Putin, we can surely find an amicable resolution to our differences. And this we must do. The present fixation with Russia, which does not pose a deadly threat to America and the West, unnecessarily distracts us from the one country that does.

In all the world there is only one threat to the United States that must be classified as a disease of the heart. This is a country

• That long ago invented totalitarianism—the total subjugation of the individual to the state—and that still practices a modified form of this all-embracing political tyranny today

• That produced its own high civilization, which it imagines surpasses anything the West, or the rest of the world, has to offer

• That is persuaded that, by reason of this superior culture, it is owed universal deference

• Whose leaders govern an ethnic-based empire and tout the racial superiority of their race over all others

• That concludes from its long centuries of regional hegemony that it has a natural right to once again bestride the region

• Whose humiliation, real or imagined, at the hands of the West has been used to foster a deep desire for revenge in everyone from the top leaders on down to ordinary workers

• That narcissistically “dreams” of a world under its hegemony

• That teaches its children to hate the reigning hegemon for standing in the way of achieving this “dream”

• That dismisses the current world order as unjust, and thus thinks itself not only justified, but actually clever and sophisticated, for deceiving its way to dominance by, for example, signing agreements it has no intention of honoring

• That not only has the potential to visit nuclear annihilation on the United States, but also actually publishes maps showing the exact extent of the destruction it could rain down on our country—complete with projected casualties

• That believes, above all, that its manifest destiny is to usher in a new world order, which it calls the World of Great Harmony

• That even imagines, in its hubris, that this new world order will be greeted with joy by the peoples of the world

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

The PRC is under the control of the same Chinese Communist Party that proved to be Chiang Kai-shek’s undoing. But in the decades since driving Chiang from the Mainland it has metastasized from a rag-tag army of rebels to the largest—and arguably the most disciplined—political organization on the planet, with some eighty-nine million members. High-ranking Party members comprise the backbone of the Chinese party-state, and through it control the second largest economy and one of the most powerful military forces the world has ever seen. Core Leader Xi Jinping envisions a Sinocentric world, with China’s borders expanding outward, near neighbors reduced to de facto vassals, and countries further afield humbly serving as markets for Chinese products and sources of raw materials. Most of all, it seems, he fantasizes about a day when the current hegemon, the United States of America, will be reduced to impotence.

The role of the hegemon is firmly embedded in China’s national dreamwork, intrinsic to its national identity, and profoundly implicated in its sense of national destiny. China’s long imperial history as the dominant power of East and Southeast Asia has left no doubt in the minds of the Chinese elite that they are the cultural and intellectual superiors of every other people on the planet. They see their country’s century-long humiliation at the hands of the West as a temporary aberration and take chauvinistic pride in the conviction that China’s Long March back to hegemony is well underway.

The concept of hegemony was, fittingly enough, introduced into modern diplomatic discourse by the Chinese themselves. During Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in 1971, the Chinese translator’s use of this unfamiliar English word sent Kissinger fumbling for his dictionary. There he found definitions of “hegemony” as “a single pole or axis of power,” and as “leadership or predominant influence exercised by one state over others.”

None of these definitions fully captures the rich and sometimes sinister nuances of the concept of the ba in Chinese.

The ba is a political order invented by ancient Chinese strategists twenty-eight hundred years ago that is based exclusively on naked power. Under the ba, as it evolved over the next six centuries, total control of a state’s population and resources was to be concentrated in the hands of the state’s hegemon, or bawang (literally “hegemon-king”), who would employ this power to establish his hegemony, or baquan (literally “hegemon-power”), over all the states in the known world.

What Chinese strategists of old may be said to have invented, then, is an early form of totalitarianism. Not only did the ba predate the Western variety of totalitarian rule by almost three thousand years, it was self-consciously designed to be an instrument of international aggrandizement. Bureaucratic totalitarianism is often thought to be an invention of the twentieth century, an evil alchemy of nineteenth-century Marxist ideology and twentieth-century Leninist bureaucracy capable of transmuting precious fr...