Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, recently met with China’s President Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Diaoyutai state guesthouse. Xi greeted Gates as “an old friend of ours” and said that he welcomed Microsoft and other U.S. businesses to bring their artificial intelligence technology to China.
“China is willing to carry out extensive scientific and technological innovation cooperation with all countries in the world, and actively participate in and promote global challenges such as climate change, epidemic prevention and public health,” Xi stated. (READ MORE: Why Yellen Is Wrong in Opposing Decoupling From China)
Gates said he was “honored” to be meeting again with the Chinese dictator and lauded China for making “significant gains reducing poverty and improving health outcomes within China,” suggested that China “can play an even bigger role in addressing the current challenges,” especially in Africa, and looked forward to working with his Chinese “partners” to address these global challenges.
CNBC noted that Gates’ visit “comes on the heels of visits to China by other prominent tech leaders such as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Apple CEO Tim Cook.” What James Burnham called the “suicidal mania of American businessmen” continues unabated as war clouds gather in the western Pacific.
In his book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, Peter Schweizer identified Gates, Musk, and other Silicon Valley and Wall Street titans (Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, Ray Dalio, Stephen Schwarzman, John Thornton, Larry Fink, and Mark Zuckerberg) whose business dealings with the CCP have made them richer while helping to facilitate China’s apparatus of domestic surveillance and oppression of its own people and improving China’s military capabilities. Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin in Surveillance State recount how Western companies such as Cisco Systems, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Siemens, Nortel Networks, and others partnered with Alibaba, Tencent Holdings, Huawei, and other Chinese companies, effectively “midwifing the [CCP’s] surveillance state since its embryonic beginnings in the late 1990s.”
Gates is merely the latest American supplicant to China’s “tributary system.” Prior to what China’s communist leaders call the “century of humiliation” (1849–1949), Chinese rulers often conducted foreign policy according to a tributary system or tianxia by which they “handled relations with neighboring vassal states.” Chen Shangsheng, a professor of history at Shandong University in China, dates the tributary system back to the Western Han dynasty (202 to 8 BCE). It was particularly evident during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, but suffered a breakdown in the latter part of the Qing dynasty.
China was the “Celestial Empire” and its smaller, less powerful East Asian neighbors referred to China as the “superior domain.” The tributary system involved both economic and political relations between China and its neighbors. “When the Chinese empire received tributes from its neighbors,” Chen writes, “it reciprocated with investitures and tributes. Investitures established a relationship in which the Chinese empire enjoyed superior standing, and tributaries an inferior one.”
The Chinese court bestowed economic rewards upon the tributary states. “Through these investitures and tributes,” Chen explains, “China formed a political relationship with its neighbors, thus achieving regional order in its international relations, as intended.”
“The essence of the tributary relationship,” according to Chen, “lies in its subordinate nature; the tributary state submits to the imperial court.” And Chen notes that China’s tributary system dissolved when “confronted with Western powers.” Thus, the century of humiliation that beginning in 1949 the CCP brought to an end.
Giovanni Andornino of the London School of Economics called China’s tributary system “the most consistent world-system in human history, spanning two millennia despite several systemic breakdowns.” Andornino described China’s foreign policy under the tributary system as “ethnocentric centripetal hegemony.” The tributary system, Andornino explained, “enhanced the ideological legitimacy of the Emperor’s rule ‘All Under Heaven’ [and] strengthened the state’s military credibility.” John Hobson and Shizhi Zhang of the University of Sheffield, U.K., have written about the similarities between imperial China’s tributary system and Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. China’s “economic statecraft” has geopolitical implications.
Xi Jinping has been quite clear about what those geopolitical implications are: Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland; China’s hegemony in the western Pacific; and China’s replacing the United States as the leader of the world order — in essence, a return to China’s tributary system with China once again the “superior domain” and the United States one of many tributary states. Gates and other American and Western businessmen who act as supplicants to Emperor Xi simply reinforce Xi’s belief that the U.S. is a declining world power.
That American businessmen would cozy up to a communist regime is nothing new. One need only read Joseph Finder’s Red Carpet to recall how prominent American businessmen like David Rockefeller, Donald Kendall, Cyrus Eaton, and Armand Hammer were willing to overlook the Soviet Union’s gulags and aggressive foreign policies in search of a profitable relationship with Kremlin leaders. Like those American capitalists of another era, Bill Gates is apparently willing to overlook Xi Jinping’s genocidal policies toward the Uyghurs, China’s conventional and nuclear buildup, Xi’s increasingly repressive surveillance state, and his aggressive foreign policy in the interest of working with his Chinese “partners” to solve global challenges.
In 1975, the exiled Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a speech to the AFL-CIO in Washington noted the “alliance between our communist leaders and your capitalists.”
“For … 50 years,” he said, “we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West for the Soviet Communist leaders.”
“We have Western capital to thank,” Solzhenitsyn noted, for the Soviet Union’s powerful police and military forces, all because of “a burning greed for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money.”
“Why,” he asked, “must we hand over to Communist totalitarianism more and more technology — complex, sophisticated technology which it needs for armaments and for oppressing its own citizens?”
We should ask Bill Gates and his fellow supplicants to China’s tributary system the same question.
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