US, China should end their self-serving narratives
EVEN as the temperatures keep rising in the troubled relations between China and the United States, of far greater concern perhaps are the people-to-people relations roiling ordinary Chinese (even extending to our region’s Chinese diaspora) and Americans.
Americans’ current violent anti-Asian frenzy at home is rightly a concern for Asians here, especially those with friends and relations living in the US. Racism as a US socio-political scourge is, of course, nothing new.
It was unfortunately exploited by former US president Donald Trump in his feud with China over other issues.
Current US President Joe Biden has come out strongly against the violence. The worry is that it may now be China’s turn to seize any opening to rally ordinary Chinese behind Beijing as it goes head-tohead in its rivalry with Washington.
Chinese nationalism is a potent and volatile force and the current campaign waged against Western fashion houses in the wake of the Xinjiang human-rights debate is a scary spectacle, especially if officially encouraged.
Poisoning the well of people-topeople goodwill among Chinese and Americans will only make it that much harder for their governments to confine their differences to only the issues that divide them.
Popular passions, once whipped up, may prove difficult to bottle up again.
Why have we come to such a tempestuous East-West juncture?
From first-hand experience, I have been struck by the ferocity of anti-American animus shown by many Western-educated and well-read ethnic-Chinese professionals, who seem like they have just woken up to a realisation that they had been subconsciously brainwashed by Western-dominated media.
There is a common thread — a collective sense of victimhood of China as the clear underdog being bullied and ganged up on by the West led by the US — and a dread that this is the start of another era harking back to China’s “century of humiliation” under Western machinations.
This is obviously a self-serving narrative that China’s current rulers are latching on to and even promoting. It gives them popular backing, especially as under President Xi Jinping, Beijing is out to demonstrate that it will no longer cower and bow to Western demands but rather will give as good as it gets from the West.
The unfortunate thing with such a narrative is that the West is also playing victim; only it is to China’s predatory economic policies (a persistent Western complaint made more pressing now with the conviction in many quarters that the juggernaut China has become will not give up on its mercantilist impulses), which arguably, gave rise to Trump’s election.
His campaign rhetoric that China is to blame for his country’s economic misfortunes and that Beijing was long given a free pass has become respectable even despite him not winning re-election.
This is also a self-serving narrative as it disregards the fact that while there may be truth to the economic predations visited on the US by China, the US itself had also long been politically paralysed, making instituting needed economic reforms near-impossible.
That said, perhaps as a democracy, there is something to the notion for the United States needing to focus popular imagination against a foreign threat in order to galvanise Americans to support what needs to be done at home.
And China, as a non-democracy by choice and therefore, presumably facing less if not none of the pressures the US faces from its voting public, should be seeing through all the smoke of American politics and realising that it is high time it got proactive in addressing the many quite legitimate economic concerns the West collectively has — not so much to placate the West as to serve China’s own long-term interests.
Economic decoupling between China and the West looks more likely with each day that both sides posture and threaten instead of getting down to the brass tacks of righting the mighty globalisation tanker and placing it on a sustainable trajectory anew.
For both the sake of China and the West, and that of the wider world, their current political insanity and economically self-destructive moves borne out of unresolved bilateral and multilateral economic issues must quickly end.