The United States is an imperfect, sometimes unpredictable international partner. Too many Americans know and care to know too little about the rest of the world. But the U.S. is the first great power in human history to put the advance of human freedom before the extraction of wealth from other nations. Its flaws aside, America nonetheless provides at least a modicum of humility alongside its sustaining offer of rule-of-law-based trade and political engagement.
In contrast, America’s great competitor for international influence insists that it offers a simpler but more beneficial strategy of engagement with the rest of the world — namely, an offer of “win-win cooperation.” The problem for China is that where America’s offer of trade and cooperation has made billions of people wealthier (the Chinese, thanks to global capitalist export opportunities, foremost among them) and hundreds of millions safer, Beijing’s own offer is a blatant lie.
It’s a lie proven by China’s not-so-“win-win” repression of its own people from Xinjiang to cyberspace to Hong Kong to everywhere the Chinese Communist Party flag can reach. It’s a lie proven by Chinese attacks on vessels in the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. It’s a lie proven by China’s military support for Russia’s war machine in Ukraine and the associated destabilization of Europe. It’s a lie proven by China’s extortion of debt-ridden poorer economies. It’s a lie proven by China’s vast campaign of intellectual property theft. It’s a lie proven by China’s annihilation of global fish populations and thus also the impoverishment of local fishermen. It’s a lie proven by China’s screeching splurge of falsehoods any time Beijing is ever criticized for its injustices.
In the end, the only true “win-win” foreign friends China has are like-minded anti-American imperialists, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, bought-off political prostitutes such as Viktor Orban and Manasseh Sogavare, and bought-off nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Pakistan.
The latest evidence for China’s “win-win” lie came on Monday via Beijing’s reaction to Venezuela’s presidential election. While dictator Nicolas Maduro trailed badly against his challenger Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia in all credible preelection polls and while Venezuelan security forces employed rampant repression measures against anti-Maduro voters on Sunday, Maduro continued to claim victory. The vast majority of international governments, including Latin American governments, have rejected Maduro’s victory as lacking any credibility.
Not so Maduro’s allies in Moscow and Tehran. Nor Maduro’s allies in Beijing. Indeed, the supposed put-the-people-first democrats of the Chinese Communist Party insist not only that Maduro won but that he did so without controversy. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman praised Venezuela’s “smooth presidential election” and congratulated Maduro on his “successful reelection.” China, he said, “stands ready to work with the Venezuelan side to enrich the all-weather strategic partnership between the two countries and deliver more benefits for the two peoples.”
Note the impulsive deference to autocracy in his rhetoric. Just as a Chinese official would never risk presenting Chinese leader Xi Jinping by describing him as anything other than a demigod genius, nor will they risk offending Maduro by offering even the slightest hint of a question mark over his electoral theft. The Chinese spokesman could, for example, have called for all voices in Venezuela to be respected.
While that language wouldn’t have accomplished anything, it might at least have offered a hat tip to those Venezuelans and Latin American nations that are concerned with what happened on Sunday. But even this is a step far too far for a regime that ultimately cares only about raw power.
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Maduro offers China a one-sided partnership and a means of undermining democratic partnerships with the U.S. in the Americas. And that’s all that matters to Beijing. That Maduro has caused the nation with Earth’s largest proven oil reserves to become a great bastion of terrible poverty doesn’t matter.
What matters is that this relationship is a “win-win” for Xi and Maduro.