‘Ways of the World’: Don’t judge by words but by actions (Lee Yee)
The tables are turned as the Sino-US relations have reverted to half a century ago. No, it is even worse.
In 1969, the evil flames of the Cultural Revolution were still burning and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led the blind crowd to shout every day, “Down with American Imperialism, Down with Soviet Union Revisionism.” During that year, there was the Sino-Soviet border conflict between the Soviet Union and China in the vicinity of Zhenbao (Damansky) Island. The border clashes were so serious that the Soviet Union was ready to employ nuclear weapons on China’s nuclear military base. At that time, the Soviet ambassador to the US informed the US National Security Advisor Heinz Alfred Kissinger of this intention, hoping that the US would remain neutral. However, President Nixon categorically rejected as he believed once Pandora's box of nuclear weapons was opened, the entire world would kneel before the polar bear. He opposed the Soviet’s operation and leaked the news to a newspaper for publication. China immediately called “the entire nation to enter a ‘Ready to fight’ mode.” The actions of the Soviet Union were contained and the nuclear disaster did not occur.
The following year, in 1970, Mao Zedong invited American pro-CCP journalist Edgar Snow who made a trip to China for an informal talk. Snow might have been entrusted by Nixon to investigate the possibility of breaking the ice in Sino-US relations. In July 1971, Dr. Kissinger made a secret visit to Beijing and facilitated Nixon’s ice-breaking journey to China the year after, and thus began the China and US strategic interactions.
After the Cultural Revolution, China and the US established diplomatic relations in 1979. In that same year, Deng Xiaoping visited the US. On the plane, he said to his associate, “As we look back in the past few decades, all those countries that were in good relations with the US have prospered.”
China has indeed become rich. The American policymakers and businesses all expected that economic freedom would lead China towards political freedom, but no such thing happened. On the contrary, China’s authoritarian politics became harsher and harsher and finally fulfilled Nixon’s frightful prophecy: fearing that he had created a “Frankenstein” by opening the world to the CCP.
If dictatorship does not carry out political reforms in response to economic needs, then all dictators will eventually become a giant monster. What is more terrifying than any other dictators in history is that the US and the Western world have fattened China. Rich and powerful in military strength, its money and influences have penetrated across the globe, giving rise to a situation of what US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described in his speech last week, “If we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build...If the free world doesn’t change – doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us.”
Pompeo’s speech not only declared the start of the cold war between the US and China, but also signified that a tougher, close-to-war era is looming.
He quoted President Reagan’s saying, that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of “trust but verify.” When it comes to the CCP, said Pompeo, they must “distrust and verify.” “Trust but verify” means they would trust what one says but also observe how one acts; “distrust and verify” on the other hand, means they do not listen to what the person says, but only watch what the person does. Facing deterioration of the relationship with the US, the CCP keeps saying both parties should resume dialogue. But the US is fed up with dialogues. As Pompeo said, all the dialogues with Yang Jiechi are nonsense.
Comparing with speeches made by Chinese politicians, which are often lacking substance but full of self-praise, what touched me most about Pompeo’s speech was how he acknowledged and reflected on previous policy mistakes. He said, “Perhaps we were naive about China’s virulent strain of communism, or triumphalist after our victory in the Cold War, or cravenly capitalist, or hoodwinked by Beijing’s talk of a ‘peaceful rise.’”
Actually, being naive, triumphalist, hoodwinked, were all one, or all of the mistakes committed by numerous countries, investors, people in the past 50 years. Now Pompeo, openly reflecting on these, suggested that the US has completely awakened. Yesterday, Xinhua News Agency was still mumbling about “China-US cooperation would be a win-win situation; fighting against each other would only lead to a lose-lose one.” From the US point of view, the win-win of working together only means China would win twice; when fighting against each other, it would be lose-lose, losing twice for China.
Over a hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French historian famous for his studies on the new world’s politics and culture, said, “America is great not because she is cleverer than the other countries, but she is more capable of repairing mistakes she made.” This is down to the fact that the US has sufficient freedom of speech, which China lacks. And it is exactly because China prohibits people from “unwarranted public distortion” of the central government, that it keeps making mistakes, again and again.
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