Early last
year, I wrote an essay here at Twilight Patriot entitled “Why I Don’t
Fear Chinese Hegemony.” My basic premise was that (1) China has zero chance of
militarily occupying any part of the United States, and (2) China’s environmental
and demographic decline will prevent its coming period of economic dominance
from lasting as long as the era of American dominance that is winding down
right now.
Now, I still
think those premises are true, but I’ve also come to believe that the
conclusion I drew from them – that US citizens like myself shouldn’t worry
about Chinese hegemony – is incorrect. Granted, I still don’t think the Chinese
Communist Party is the biggest threat to American liberties – our country’s
internal problems are, for the time being, more serious.
But I do fault
my past self for not anticipating the ways that (1) economic power can be
turned into political power, and (2) Chinese corporate oligopolies, when properly
coordinated by the CCP, can be used for global plunder. (One of my wakeup calls
on the second point was hearing from a friend who works in global supply chain
management that shipping containers have become way more expensive than usual
this year due to what’s probably a deliberate squeeze by the three Chinese
companies that make almost the whole supply. Multiply this by a thousand and
you might start seeing how the new economic system that’s rising around us is
going to work).
As for turning
economic heft into political power, a few stories will be instructive. Perhaps
you saw the news last week about how Boston Celtics games have been removed from Chinese
media after Celtics forward Enes Kantor made a video about the oppression of
Tibet? As China is the NBA’s biggest emerging market, it would be naïve to think
that Kantor isn’t in for an unpleasant word from the Celtics’ owner and/or
manager.
Or perhaps you
remember back in May how the actor and WWE wrestler John Cena was cajoled into telling his Chinese
fans that he was “very sorry” for calling Taiwan a country? “I made a mistake,”
he said, “It’s so so so so so so important, I love and respect Chinese people….”
When China is
the world’s dominant commercial power, and also cares deeply about the
ideological purity of those it does business with, it is only natural that the
tendrils of the Chinese Communist Party will reach across the ocean and
strangle freedom of speech in distant lands.
Despite the
minor embarrassment of Covid-19, Chinese power and prestige are rising steeply.
And let’s be honest here, even Covid isn’t as wholly-Chinese a problem as some
naïve Americans like to think.
Were the
Chinese scientists in the lab from which the virus probably escaped doing
things that would have been illegal in the United States? You bet. But you’ve
also got to remember that the experiments were funded by American
government money, while American virologists like Antony Fauci were talking up
the need for “gain of function” research and downplaying its hazards.
Basically, what
we are looking at is a joint Sino-American snafu. It is definitely not a case
of the innocent USA being bitten without reason by the Chinese Communist Party.
But such is the
changing of empires. The bumbling incompetence of the declining empire paves
the way for a new empire to arise. The Chinese have always known this.
Also, when you
look at its history and culture, you’ll see that domination is China’s destiny
– in the past, regional domination, and in an increasingly-likely future,
global domination.
In name, the
People’s Republic of China is a socialist/communist country. But the slogan
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” makes more sense if you read it the
other way around: Traditional Chinese statecraft, with a thin veneer of
socialism painted on the outside.
Communist rule
in the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed when their economies failed,
and the mismatch between the utopian promises of communism and its dreary
reality led their governing elites to lose faith in the communist worldview.
But this is a
poor model for China’s future, because China has been headed away from
that situation since the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s reforms restored China’s
traditional form of political economy: a semicontrolled market economy led by authoritarian
nationalist scholar-bureaucrats.
The fact that, for
nearly two millennia, this system made China the wealthiest and most technologically
advanced civilization in the world (with Europe’s recent period of dominance being
brief in comparison) should clue us in to its durability.
I put little
stock in Western dreams that China’s populace will someday rebel in pursuit of
the Euro-American ideal of personal freedom. While China’s history includes a
long tradition of insurrections against governments that have failed to govern
well (or that have lost the Mandate of Heaven, as the Chinese say), China’s
concept of what a government should be doing in the first place is
different from the Western version.
The typical
Chinese man wants his family to be well-fed. He wants to have a fair chance at
prospering in his trade. He wants his country to be free of bandits and
marauding barbarians (i.e. Huns, Mongols, British). He wants to avoid being
robbed by nakedly corrupt officials. Deprive him of those things for long
enough, and insurrections will boil up – this is what happened over and over again
during the period from 1839 to 1949 which Maoists call the Century of
Humiliations.
Starvation was common.
Peasants were frequently robbed of everything they owned by landlords and other
corrupt authorities. Barbarians were trashing the country.
The underclass
responded in a variety of desperate ways. Some left everything behind to become
“coolies” and work at low wage jobs in places like Singapore and California. Others
climbed out of poverty by making their daughters become prostitutes, or turning
their sons into court eunuchs (and since they often couldn’t afford a
professional castration, they would do the job at home, with
household tools – i.e. a father would say to his eight-year-old son: “take your
clothes off and lay on the bed while I get my razor.”)
And from time
to time, the peasants grew angry enough to launch rebellions – also an act of
desperation, especially when you realize that, apart from World War II, the two
bloodiest wars in recorded history were the successful uprising against the
Ming dynasty in 1644, and the failed Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864.
The Chinese
will rebel when things like what happened during those awful years are allowed
to go on for too long, and they have the Confucian Classics to teach them that
they are right to do so. But in ordinary times, they are conformists, and they care
little for democratic government, freedom of speech, racial equality, or the
right of minorities to practice eccentric religions.
Right now, by all
historical standards, China is prospering. Life for most Chinese is good and
getting better. Wages are up, social mobility is up, China is dominating the
barbarians, and so forth. Most Westerners believe the Chinese are wrong to be
content with this, but most Chinese do not care.
Now, one of the
tragedies of China is that the Han Chinese majority aren’t the only people who
have to live in a country shaped by Chinese values. The Chinese system of
government, at its high points, is strong, efficient, and ruthless. And when
the Chinese are able to, they expand their civilization as far out into their
surroundings as they can.
The Miao, Tibetans,
Mongols, and Uighars are just a few of the ethnic minorities who have had the
misfortune of being caught under the treads of the expanding Chinese
civilization. And unlike the Han, these people have little recourse to
insurrection, so long as the ordinary Chinese, who vastly outnumber them, are
content. Because while the Mandate of Heaven may be lost, it can never
be split.
Hence China’s
intensely negative attitude toward Uighar and Tibetan separatists, or its
willingness to go to great lengths to make sure that other countries do not
treat Taiwan as a full sovereign. This attitude toward “breakaway provinces” can
be seen all over Chinese history, when the establishment of multiple kingdoms
after a dynasty fell was never followed by lasting peace between them, but by near-constant
warfare, which could continue for more than a century if that’s what it took to
reunite the realm.
So what does
this have to say about the future?
Well, since
China’s power is rising, and the United States is rapidly losing the ability to
keep the Chinese at bay, we can expect them to go on a conquering spree.
Taiwan will be
an early target, and for a variety of reasons, I’m not
optimistic about its chances of survival. Then will come a century or so of
Chinese hegemony. I do not think China is interested in directly conquering
most of the world, anymore than the United States was during the “American
Century.” But the global dominance of American culture will end.
Washington’s
habit of fomenting regime change in distant countries will likely be taken over
by Beijing (leading to different kinds of regimes being changed) and China will
also be free to instigate wars over oil and other natural resources. The
continued expansion of the “One Belt One Road” program will lead to more and
more infrastructure throughout the world being owned by China – and thus to
more and more profits flowing back to the motherland.
This is the
future that the collective West is heading towards, unless we work up the
courage to oppose Chinese hegemony, and work it up fast.
This essay was
adapted from an article published in American
Thinker.