How almost all of America finally got ‘woke’ on China’s misdeeds
In these times, Americans agree on almost nothing. Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got “woke” on China.
For years, our leaders yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents.
Almost every assumption Washington made, both by Democratic and Republican administrations, was logically flawed at best. And at worst, these calculations were a weird mix of conservative commercial greed, liberal political correctness and shared screwball naiveté.
American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but as weakness to be exploited. It was ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize.
Even sillier was the belief that China’s embrace of capitalist reforms would lead to constitutional government.
Instead, China auctioned off large sections of its more efficient economy to crony communist pseudo- capitalists in order to modernize, beef up the military, warp the international trading system — and get very rich.
Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China?
Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated.
Once American businesses got hooked on mega-profits, the Chinese government slowly started stealing their technology, infringing on copyrights and patents, dumping their own merchandise on the world market at prices below production costs, running up huge trade surpluses and manipulating their currency.
But by then, American corporations were addicted to laissez-faire profit-making and turned a blind eye.
Universities cashed in too, both by setting up lucrative satellite campuses in China and admitting tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who paid full tuition, turning once cash-strapped campuses into profitable degree mills. Most ignored China’s dreadful human rights record and occasional expatriate espionage rings designed to steal high-tech research.
Everyone profited and all remained willfully blind to the ascendant cutthroat and dictatorial colossus.
The domestic winners in the appeasement of Communist China were the New York financial industry, Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies, and the mega-research universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
Few cared about the “losers” in the now-hollowed-out Midwest and in rural America. For corporate America, domestic muscular labor could be easily and cheaply replaced by millions of Chinese workers. Academics didn’t care that the working classes were being wiped out, given their politically incorrect social and cultural views.
What finally woke America up were two unforeseen developments.
First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. They derided international commercial treaties.
In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th- century colonies. And they unapologetically lifted technology from America’s biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell’s “1984.”
Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and “re-educating” millions of Muslims in detention camps. This finally drove the left to accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.
Second, Donald Trump got elected president, screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. The cheerleaders finally admitted that China had been buck naked after all.
Did America wake up just in time or too late? Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we’ve known it.