China was uncharacteristically bold in demanding “a greater voice” on the world stage at last week’s summit on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Honolulu. But I see no cause for the alarm this caused in some regions. After all, given the transformative mendicancy involved in the EU now competing with the U.S. to have China fund its debt, this is rather like a parent demanding a greater voice in the care of her dependent child.
My only concern is that China acts like a parent who seems to think her only duty is to feed and clothe her child – all guidance about and regard for right and wrong be damned. The latest example of this is China’s refusal to even voice disapproval of the brutal crackdown Syria is now carrying out against pro-democracy protesters. (More than 3,500 people have been killed and thousands more injured since March.)
This stands in instructive contrast to the coalition of the willing the U.S. is amassing to impose even stiffer sanctions against Syria. The Arab League – which has a history of blithely countenancing the human-rights abuses of member states – so disapproves of the crackdown that it voted this week to expel Syria.
Also noteworthy is the fact that Jordan is using its considerable moral authority in the Arab world to join the U.S. and EU in calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. And Turkey is threatening to cut off the electricity it supplies, claiming that Syria is using it to commit crimes against humanity.
Of course, in a rather perverse way, at least China is being consistent. For the one thing every brutal dictator who fell during the Arab Spring could count on was China’s tacit, and sometimes overt, support. Indeed, it behooves the black countries of Africa and the Caribbean that are sucking up to China these days as a more generous Sugar Daddy than the U.S. to appreciate that, if the Apartheid government of South Africa were still in power, China would have no qualms about doing business with it too.
Hell, just yesterday, in an unwitting, or perhaps telling, bit of timing, the China International Peace Research Center announced that the neo-Stalinist prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is this year’s recipient of its Confucius Peace Prize, which was established “to promote world peace from an eastern perspective”….
It is tempting to assert that the moral deficit in China’s relationships on the world stage is a direct result of the way it forfeited all moral authority at home when it massacred its own pro-democracy protesters in 1989. I submit however that if the U.S. can justly claim redemption and reclaim its moral authority to lead after black slavery, then surely China can do the same after Tiananmen Square.
The only problem is that China has been proclaiming with unbridled pride lately that it is only reclaiming the position it enjoyed on the world stage for thousands of years before the U.S. was even a figment in the imagination of the freedom-loving Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock.
After all, nothing demonstrates why the U.S. enjoys unparalleled moral authority on the world stage quite like the fact that it went from slavery to a black president in less than 350 years; whereas China is still treating its people like vassals instead of citizens after more than 3,500 years. But I digress….
Not so long ago we lived in a bipolar world because many countries pledged common cause with the Soviet Union based on its promise of a worldwide communist utopia. Today we are forging another bipolar world because many countries are pledging common cause with China based on its promise of easy money. I have no doubt however that the democratic values that made the U.S. far more enticing and enduring than the Soviet Union will make the U.S. equally so in this burgeoning Cold War with China.
China seems content just to be the biggest loan-shark and megastore in world history. But (small) debtor nations beware:
What happens if China decides that it is in its strategic national interest to convert the container ports, factories and chemical plants it has funded throughout the Caribbean [and Africa] into dual military and commercial use? Would these governments comply? Would they have any real choice? And when they do comply, would the U.S. then blockade the entire region – as it blockaded Cuba during the missile crisis?
Now, consider China making such strategic moves in Latin America where its purportedly benign Yuan diplomacy dwarfs its Caribbean [and African] operations. This new Cold War could then turn very hot indeed….
(China buying up political dominion, The iPINIONS Journal, February 22, 2005)
Incidentally, apropos of another Cold War, the U.S. announced today that it intends to base 2,500 American troops in Australia. So it will be interesting to see if China counters this chess move by announcing its intent to base 25,000 Chinese troops throughout the Caribbean and Latin American – in (pawn) countries whose fealty it has already bought.
After all, China is viewing this U.S. basing of troops in Australia today as every bit as provocative as the U.S. viewed the Soviet Union basing of nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962: Your move Beijing….
Related commentaries:
China buying dominion over Caribbean
China prevailing on South Africa…