The journal Foreign Affairs currently features an essay by three college professors that portrays China under the leadership of Xi Jinping as a normal great power and identifies the “real threat” as America’s military buildup in the Pacific and its policies aimed at diplomatically and economically isolating China. The professors are David Kang from the University of Southern California, Jackie Wong from the American University of Sharjah, and Zenobia Chan from Georgetown University. “China,” they write, “is a status quo power with limited global aims, not a revisionist state seeking to dramatically expand its power and reshape the world order.” America should engage China, not provoke it, while conducting “healthy competition” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). (RELATED: How To Beat China in the Great Power Competition)
The United States, they write, should deemphasize military deterrence and preparing for war because this approach “risks creating exactly the type of military confrontation where none need exist and threatens to isolate the United States from East Asia.” China, according to the professors, is not a “dangerous threat.” The U.S. simply “needs to understand China’s core interests,” and presumably accommodate those core interests, though they believe that as we deemphasize our military preparations and maintain strategic ambiguity, China will not seek to seize Taiwan. To say that the professors view China through rose-colored glasses would be an understatement. (RELATED: How Deep Is China in America’s Ballot Box?)
The professors base their policy recommendations mostly on what China’s leaders, journals, and media outlets say about China’s goals. They dismiss notions that those are nothing more than CCP propaganda, but write that even if they are propaganda, they provide “valuable clues” to what the CCP leaders are thinking. And nowhere in those “valuable clues” do China’s leaders mention “any grandiose ambition to be a global or even regional leader.”
Perhaps the professors should remember the old saying that actions speak louder than words.
The CCP’s long game … is to displace the American order.
But then what is entirely missing from the professors’ essay is any scrutiny of China’s actions: the massive naval buildup, the massive nuclear buildup, the “strategic partnership” with Russia, China’s claim that it is a “near-Arctic” power, its aggressive moves in the South China Sea vis-à-vis Taiwan and the Philippines, the geopolitical aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese espionage, China’s role in fentanyl trafficking, and China’s responsibility for unleashing the latest global pandemic. (RELATED: Competing With China in the Gray Zone)
What is also entirely missing from the professors’ analysis is the role of communist ideology in China’s approach to the world. The professors don’t just downplay communism; they barely mention it. Yet, if, as the professors urge, we take Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders at their word, then the CCP’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism continues. (RELATED: Anti-Communists Mark Eight Years Since Chinese Human Rights Attorney Gao Zhisheng Forcefully Disappeared)
A few years ago, in Foreign Affairs, the former prime minister and foreign minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, noted that “Under Xi, ideology drives policy.” Xi, Rudd wrote, “is a true believer in Marxism-Leninism; his rise represents the return to the world stage of Ideological Man.” Like the old Soviet Union, China’s foreign policy is rooted in both Marxist-Leninist ideology and Chinese history — both of which promote imperial expansion. Indeed, as CNN reported, “China has a sweeping vision to reshape the world,” and it is a vision inconsistent with America’s world leadership. The CCP’s long game, according to Rush Doshi, is to displace the American order. (RELATED: ‘All Under Heaven’: The CCP’s Distortion of Chinese Philosophy)
Our three professors will have none of this. They write that U.S. policymakers of both parties are approaching China as they “imagine” it, not how it really is. China, they say, is not really a threat to U.S. interests. The accommodationist professors are not unlike those Sovietologists who kept telling us during Cold War I that the Soviet Communist Party was not expansionist and only wanted “peaceful coexistence” with the West, even as the Soviets engaged in an unprecedented nuclear and conventional arms buildup and launched a geopolitical offensive in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world. Fortunately, our policymakers, especially in the Reagan administration, rejected the counsel of those Sovietologists, and we won Cold War I.
Actions speak louder than words. The professors’ policy proposals are a recipe for defeat in Cold War II. Hopefully, our policymakers will ignore their counsel.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
MacArthur Reminisces About Inchon
Charlie Kirk Is a Casualty of the Cultural Counterrevolution