Progressives show lack of understanding about China.

In a recent letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, 40 environmental and other advocacy groups ranging from CODEPINK to Friends of the Earth called on the president to abandon “the growing Cold War mentality driving the United States’ approach to China — an antagonistic posture that risks undermining much-needed climate co-operation.”

“Like the pandemic and so many of our most urgent crises,” the letter continues, “climate change has no nationalistic solutions. To combat the climate crisis and build a global economy that works for everyday working people — in the U.S. and China alike — we must shift from competition to co-operation.”

Interestingly, not once in their appeal do the environmental, antiwar, or otherwise left-leaning organizations acknowledge the ultranationalism that has characterized Chinese behaviour since Xi Jinping’s emergence in late 2012. According to them, it is the U.S. that has adopted a “Cold War mentality” — a telling echoing of Beijing’s rhetoric whenever it seeks to deflect criticism — and is antagonizing China, a country that, over the past decade, has done rather well at antagonizing an ever-growing number of countries around the world.

Despite some signatories of the letter including organizations that are ostensibly foreign-policy oriented, the progressives display a naive understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates. In their view, if only the U.S., along with the liberal democratic order, could stop angering Beijing by calling upon the Chinese leadership to end ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang and Tibet, its crackdown in Hong Kong, the threat to invade neighbouring Taiwan, the kidnapping of foreign nationals, defiance of international law in territorial disputes and rampant technological theft, China would spontaneously show itself willing to co-operate on climate change.

Never mind the tens of millions of people whose rights and freedoms would be further trampled upon were they abandoned by the international community. Anyone who understands the mindset of the CCP knows that China would use global abdication as an opportunity to grab what it can without any guarantee that it would engage in the kind of collaboration they argue is necessary.

The groups’ claim that the U.S. is alone responsible for the poor state of relations with China, and that it is Washington’s responsibility to repair that relationship, constitutes a complete misreading of the situation. For the U.S. is not alone in having increasingly conflictual relations with China, nor is it responsible for other countries encountering very serious difficulties in their own relations with that country. We need to ask ourselves: If one member in a group has escalating disputes with an ever-growing number of counterparts, then perhaps the source of the problem lies with that one party rather than the rest.

What the progressive groups are calling for is a grand bargain: the dismantlement of the liberal democratic order, and the abandonment of a human rights regime, in exchange for a promise of collaboration by an authoritarian state that, on global health, for example, has had no compunction in lying to the international community and undermining efforts to combat the current pandemic.

Yet somehow we are to believe that, on global warming, the CCP would act differently.

Tropes and all, the progressives are carrying Beijing’s water. They are participants in a cynical effort by the CCP to turn the tables. It wages a cold war on the liberal order, and yet it is the democratic world, which seeks to prevent a further erosion of that order at the hands of autocratic states, that is to blame, that has a “Cold War mentality.”

It is true that China is an

A COMPLETE MISREADING OF THE SITUATION.

indispensable part of the solution to develop the strategies and technologies needed to tackle climate change. However, what the progressives fail to realize is that China, too, has a choice. It doesn’t have to hold the entire planet, and future generations, hostage by making its participation conditional on the rest of the world turning a collective blind eye to its outrageous behaviour.

There is nothing wrong in calling upon the American president to re-emphasize his commitment to working with China (as he has stated) on the essential issues of our time. However, to blame the Biden administration for the current impasse is invidious. Worse, it risks making the signatories complicit in the CCP’S crimes against humanity. The signatories would have more credibility and moral standing, therefore, if they issued a similar appeal to CCP General Secretary Xi, who is much more responsible for the poor state of the relationship than is President Biden. Where, one wonders, is the letter to Xi?