The Chinese word for their nation translates into “Middle Kingdom,” innocent enough if you take it at face value, but fairly dismissive of the rest of the world when you read: “Center of the Entire Earth!” Until about 500 years ago, China was supreme in her part of the planet and rather unconcerned about the barbarians in the West. In the 15th Century, the Yongle Emperor was asked why his vast treasure fleets seemed uninterested in the lands beyond the Red Sea and coastal Africa, and he noted that except for some interesting theology in the Middle East, people in the more western and European areas were barbarians with little interest for China.
Until the late 1800s, no dynastic Chinese emperor had ever received a true ambassador – emissaries from foreign countries were allowed to pay “tribute” to China but never elevated beyond such “tribute ambassador” status – because to accept a true ambassador would have implied that there was a nation that was the equal of China. However, China’s self-image tarnished in the modern era. China struggled with the aftermath of the Opium Wars (where England and her allies forced the opium trade on China to balance the payments from western reliance on massive amounts of Chinese tea) and the western colonies in Hong Kong and Macau… and the international settlements in Shanghai. She suffered humiliation at the hands of Japanese conquerors and Western global domination throughout the 20th century.
But that was then, and post-Mao China has been a dynamic engine for economic growth. While the United States squandered her wealth on unwinnable wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, China kept her threatening nose out of any nation other than those where she maintained territorial claims and focused her entire efforts on internal structures, education, financing and construction. Her huge labor force grew to capture outsourced manufacturing on an unprecedented scale, swelling her coffers with trillions of foreign currency reserves. She grew modern, powerful and rich, while we lumbered through a massive economic collapse driven by unsustainable borrowings (much from China herself) from government, to corporate to personal.
China focused on China first, avoided the above-noted military spending that seems to be dragging our deficit toward the destruction of the very state it was designed to protect and has engendered a general “bully” perception of America all over this planet. Her recent foreign policy is based on her cash and willingness to pay attention to the “little nations” which have since fallen below America’s strategic radar… even to countries that are in our immediate neighborhood: “China’s economic might has rolled up to America’s doorstep in the Caribbean, with a flurry of loans from state banks, investments by companies and outright gifts from the government in the form of new stadiums, roads, official buildings, ports and resorts in a region where the United States has long been a prime benefactor.” New York Times, April 7th. In votes on international treaties and United Nations mandates, China has newfound clout.
With these dynamic shifts in relative power, China sees herself on a continuing and rapid ascent while the West, and most particularly the United States, are in what they believe to be a steep and precipitous decline, slowly being marginalized if not strangled by history herself. With the ultralong view of history, China believes that, like all governmental structures which end at some point in time, the United States status as a once-superpower, and probably as a unified nation continuing under the mandate of 1776, will soon be regulated to a chapter in history books and take her place among fallen empires like ancient Rome, the Ottomans, and the Spanish crown.
Given these changes, exactly how do Chinese leaders view the United States and their relations to us? Recent diplomatic clashes suggest a significant deterioration of Sino-American relations as an unprecedented level of distrust now permeates the air. They see the United States fighting a failing rear-guard action to maintain her greatness, employing efforts aimed at holding China back economically and militarily in order to cling to the American place in the sun a few moments longer.
The specifics of their views are as fascinating as they are disturbing. Wang Jisi once served on advisory boards of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies and is also a guest professor at the National Defense University of China’s People’s Liberation Army. He recently co-authored “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a report published in early April by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Institute for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University. Wang wrote the section on the PRC view of the U.S., while Kenneth Lieberthal, the director of the John L. Thornton Center for China Studies at Brookings, and a former member of the National Security Council under President Clinton, addressed Washington’s attitude toward China.
But today, I am focusing on China’s view of us, and it isn’t pretty: “In a joint conclusion, the authors say the level of strategic distrust between the two countries has become so corrosive that if not corrected the countries risk becoming open antagonists… The United States is no longer seen as ‘that awesome, nor is it trustworthy, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be much discounted,’ Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s leadership.
“In contrast, China has mounting self-confidence in its own economic and military strides, particularly the closing power gap since the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, he argues, America’s gross domestic product was eight times as large as China’s, but today it is less than three times larger… Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Lieberthal argue that beneath the surface, both countries see deep dangers and threatening motivations in the policies of the other… Mr. Wang writes that the Chinese leadership, backed by the domestic news media and the education system, believes that China’s turn in the world has arrived, and that it is the United States that is ‘on the wrong side of history.’ The period of ‘keeping a low profile,’ a dictum coined by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1989, and continued until now by the departing president, Hu Jintao, is over, Mr. Wang warns.
“‘It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,’ he adds… China’s financial successes, starting with weathering the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis, the execution of events like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010, contrast with America’s ‘alarming’ deficit, sluggish economic recovery and polarized domestic politics, Mr. Wang says.” New York Times, April 2nd.
Ask yourself how you would view the near-term if you were dropped from another planet and had to assess American chances to remain on top. Are we irreparably polarized? Is the U.S. run by a power elite at the expense of everyone else? Are our great infrastructural and educational systems crumbling to a state where they will be beyond repair? Is our deficit a governmental form of terminal cancer? This is how China sees us, how they are teaching their children to see the U.S. Is our sputtering economy going to move us back on top? Will China’s bubble burst? Most importantly: How do you see America’s future… really?
I’m Peter Dekom, and remaining great requires a cohesive and committed effort towards that goal, with the backing of the vast majority of Americans.
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