By Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden | 27 February 2024 (IDN) — In Munich, recently, at the important annual Security Conference, we heard yet again that the West must not allow itself to be penetrated by Huawei’s 5G phone technology (which is cheaper than any Western counterpart).
But there was no intelligent response to a former Chinese ambassador to the UK who asked what was wrong with Huawei seeking Western markets when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Ericsson (the latter in direct competition with Huawei on its home ground) were such big players in China.
The Chinese government didn’t feel they threatened its security. He could also have added that if they do anything that the Chinese government doesn’t like, China is always able to deal with it—it has blocked out on Facebook texts critical of the government and the voices of Chinese dissidents. Likewise, the US could take countermeasures with a Huawei system if necessary.
Why this obsession with China’s supposed malevolence in trade matters—which presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump are also part of? Credit Suisse reports that the tally of quotas and other non-tariff barriers against foreign goods shows that China has one-third of America’s.
The leadership from the top over the last four American presidencies has steadily pushed US public opinion from being friendly towards China in the direction of hostility.
Intellectual property theft is a widely used reason for giving China a hard time. Yet, in a survey by the US-China Business Council, intellectual property protection ranked sixth on a list of pressing concerns among American companies that trade with China.
2014, China created its first specialized court to handle intellectual property cases. In 2015, plaintiffs brought before the court 63 instances. The court ruled for the foreign firms in all 63. China itself is clearly against the theft of business secrets. Last August, in a different kind of case, Chinese artist Ye Yongqing was accused successfully of plagiarism by Belgian artist Christian Silvain. He was awarded $696,000 in damages.
China acts responsibly
How many people outside China know the responsible way China acts internationally? Take the UN, for example. According to the respected journalist Fareed Zakaria, writing in Foreign Affairs, “Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the UN and UN peacekeepers. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined. Between 2000 and 2008, it supported 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on nations deemed to have violated international rules or norms”.
This is a very different China than the one projected by many Western politicians and journalists. Usually, China is reported as impeding the Security Council, using its veto fast and furiously. Even with the critical first resolution on Ukraine after hostilities began, it abstained, upsetting Russia.
China has not gone to war since 1979. It has not used lethal military force abroad since 1988. Nor has it funded proxies or armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the early 1980s. Believe it or not, it’s true that China is unique among the world’s great powers with this record of non-intervention.
China had no permanent military presence outside China until recently, when it finished building its first overseas base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa to protect the shipping of its oil through the unstable political waters of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. (China has taken the largest portion of Gulf oil.) The US has 84 bases and military presence around the world. China is angry when there is yet another incident of US spy planes flying through Chinese airspace or very close to it. China does not fly through US airspace. Its flights are on the other side of the world.
Monroe Doctrine
When it comes to the issue of its military expansion into the islands and atolls of the South and East China Seas, China makes the point that this was historically in its area of influence and that even today, the US falls back on the Monroe Doctrine, which deems Latin America to be off-limits to the great powers of Europe—and everyone else.
All this is somewhat different from the days of Mao Zedong. He was reported as saying, apropos of nuclear war, “If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” Mao said that although the West had “nuclear teeth,” it was “a paper tiger”. This kind of rhetoric has long gone. Indeed, on most issues, China is a paid-up member of those who want to settle disputes calmly and sanely.
We should have learnt from the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West the consequences of painting a big power black. There were the evils of the McCarthy witch-hunt of American dissidents, which ruined many professional lives. There was the bloody and counterproductive Vietnam War and countless other military interventions that nearly all failed at the cost of the deaths of hundreds of thousands, mostly innocent, people.
Between 1947 and the end of the Cold War, the US attempted regime change around the world 72 times. There was the frightening development of large arsenals of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, which were nearly launched on more than a handful of occasions.
Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, once asserted that the US and its allies must keep China in “its proper place”. This wasn’t the rhetoric of Richard Nixon with his opening to China half a century ago. Nor was it that of Jimmy Carter who gave full recognition to China. What will Trump choose to say if elected in November? The clock needs to be wound back. The US must negotiate with China in better faith than in recent years. And stop the slagging off.