The conflict between China and the West is a conflict of centuries. And over the last decade and a half, my sympathies have come to lie ever more with the Chinese. However, the events of the last several weeks have forced those sympathies onto a knife edge. For Chinese president Xi Jinping has chosen to become an ally of Russian president (and imperialist) Vladimir Putin. In so doing, I would assert that he has begun to sell out both himself and his nation to a process of subjugation from which China managed to extricate itself only within the last seventy or eighty years. And he has shown himself to be evil.
To understand the roots of the present conflict between China and the West (and of the sympathy for China which had until recently been growing in me), it is helpful to examine a bit of history. And the history of European (and later, American) contact with China from the eighteenth century on has been a history of "breaking and entering", to use the lingo of cops. That breaking and entering involved things like
the use of British and American military power to force China to open its economy to trade with the West. (This was almost exactly like the f
orced entry of the Japanese economy by the United States in the 1850's.) This then led to economic, and later, military and political colonization of China. The aftermath of breaking and entering is usually looting, and the nations of Europe, together with the United States, engaged in a
long campaign of rapacious exploitation of China. (See
this and
this also.)
This breaking and entering, along with the resulting looting, was accompanied by a concerted attack on the Chinese soul. This attack took two forms: the
opium trade, and the forced entry of European and American Protestant missionaries into China. The opium trade was the diabolical way in which Britain sought to correct the deficit it had run up in its trade for Chinese luxury goods. European goods were not as good as Chinese goods, and the hard currency of European silver was running out, so the British substituted opium for silver, and ensnared millions of Chinese people in crippling addiction as a result.
The damage done by European and American missionaries was of a different sort. It consisted first of a degrading and infantilizing treatment of Chinese people by the missionaries, a treatment whose source was a smug and arrogant attitude by the missionaries toward the Chinese, as captured in such statements as this:
"It may be interesting for you to know how I go about the country. I dread laziness in the Chinese helpers. I have already seen some of it. If the foreigner rides, his Chinese brother will also expect to ride..." -
Goforth of China, page 96.
It is only understandable that such an attitude would anger the native Chinese, for these missionaries did not come with the humility of Christ, but as part of a conquering imperial cabal, a cabal of imperious shovers of things down other peoples' throats. When the inevitable backlash that was the Boxer Rebellion occurred, these same missionaries forced poor Chinese peasants to pay obscene reparations. But the most galling thing was that these missionaries sought to teach the Chinese that their duty was to "submit to their earthly masters" (that is, to their European masters), even though these missionaries were citizens of nations which had never turned the other cheek or submitted to even the slightest imagined injustice without a bloody fight.
So we come to the events of the mid-20th century, in which a number of subjugated nonwhite nations were, by means nonviolent in some cases and violent in others, throwing off the yoke of their European oppressors. At about the same time that the nonviolent Indian struggle for independence under Gandhi was coming to its climax, two leaders of armies in China were slugging it out with both foreign oppressors and with each other. And it is important to note that neither Chiang Kai-Shek nor Mao Zedong were without a certain hostility toward the West. Both men sought to establish a separate, self-sufficient Chinese identity. But theirs was a duel between competing revolutions, a duel which Mao won.
One immediate result of Mao's victory was the beginning of a violent purge of historically corrupting Western influences from Chinese culture. Thus drug users faced prison (and sometimes, death), drug dealers faced death (almost always), and missionaries faced both prison and death. But in his drive to establish an ideologically pure expression of "revolution," Mao fell into the error described by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
"However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating 'bureaucracy' the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation."
That is, Mao's revolution became "stagnant" and "turned against the people, using the old repressive, bureaucratic State apparatus." This was one of the factors which caused Mao's China to stagnate economically and intellectually.
It was this stagnation which his successor Deng Xiaoping sought to reverse by gradually loosening the strictures of Maoist China to allow more independent thinking, entrepreneurship, and creativity. The result of Deng's changes was an explosion of prosperity within China, although it was unequally distributed, as noted in Deng's expression "Let some get rich first." Yet this explosion of prosperity led to an explosion of national economic (and hence political) power, which led to a huge increase in Chinese soft power. A final result of Deng's reforms was the emergence of a China every bit the peer of any nation of the West - a China that had decisively freed itself from white Anglo/American/European domination. I suggest that this is what provoked the wrath and opposition of Donald Trump against China. And because Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, I suggest that Trump's economic aggression against China was an expression of Russian uneasiness about China's emerging power. You see, China became the big fish that got away - a separate, non-Western, nonwhite, self-sufficient polity that could no longer be subjugated or exploited.
The loosening of strictures and the gradual encouragement of freedom in China was not without its challenges. For there needed to be a healthy definition of freedom, and not the definition currently in fashion in the United States, where freedom means the freedom to become an addict of capitalist exploitation - that is, the freedom to become enslaved by means of one's addictions. But the Chinese leadership was also left with a lingering insecurity about the possible effect on their people of any allegiance which might compete with unquestioned and total allegiance to the Chinese government. This is why, for instance, opposition to Biblical Christianity (and to other religions not sponsored by the state) continues in China.
I do have a certain sympathy for that insecurity, although I also have a sharp criticism of that insecurity. As a Christian, I am concerned by the persecution of Christians by the Chinese government over the last century - a persecution that continues to this day. But I must also say that I perfectly understand the reasons for that persecution. For if goons and thugs had done to me what European and American missionaries did to the Chinese people in the 19th and 20th centuries - if they had also tried to use the Bible to justify what their governments and big businesses and soldiers did - I too would be strongly tempted to reject what was being served up to me as "Christianity"! In fact, this is what has happened to me as a Black man in my exposure to the toxicity of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church! It is a miracle that I am still a believer. Every day I have to remind myself that all that garbage is not God's fault.
And yet as a Christian, I must confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and that I must live out my life as a statement of subjection to Him. I must also say that I support the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ. And regardless of one's religious persuasion, I believe that everyone on earth will one day be forced to accept the fact that they are creatures made by a Creator and accountable ultimately to Him.
But the weakness of the Chinese insecurity is that the Chinese government, in its response to historical oppression, has set itself up as the god to whom its people must give their sole allegiance. The presence of any other independent authority provokes feelings of massive insecurity among the rulers of China!
This means that the emergence of any sub-groups of self-sufficient, self-determining people among the Chinese population constitutes a threat. Thus the presence of genuine democracy anywhere in the world, or the possibility of genuine democracy in China comprises a terrifying threat to the leadership of China. This is why in allying China with Putin, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have shown themselves to be opposed to a world in which any independent group of democratically-organized people exists anywhere, lest awareness of such a group of democrats tempt the Chinese people to want such a free life for themselves. For the revolution begun during the days of Mao has once again fallen into "bureaucratic" doldrums from which it has not yet been able to rescue itself.
This, then is the motivation of Xi Jinping's alliance with Vladimir Putin. For Putin has the same desire to set himself up as a god in opposition to any other authority. Hence, Putin has the same fear of a free society existing anywhere on earth. Autocrats such as Putin wish to create a world in which responsible, independent self-determination is unimaginable because no examples of it can be found or seen anywhere, a world in which the only thing that can be seen is the autocracy of the autocrats. But in allying himself with Putin to create such a world, Xi Jinping is about to discover that he has found a
frenemy - or rather, that the frenemy has discovered Xi Jinping to be a chump. And China may find itself ensnared in yet another relationship of subjugation to an earthly foreign power. I think of recent studies that show the
impact of ambivalent personal relationships on personal health. Relationships with frenemies are a very world of ambiguity, and Putin has been known as a master of ambiguity. I expect that Jinping's China will find itself valued only for how useful it is to Putin - while having to endure, from time to time, the dumping of narcissistic
Russian ethnic hostility onto some of its citizens,
as happened in 2020 during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. China will be taken on quite a ride. A certain tail will wag a certain dog. And Xi Jinping may soon find himself leading quite the dog's life.
P.S. I forgot to elaborate on the statement I made at the start of this post. I said that my initial sympathies for China have been forced onto a knife edge by events of the past few weeks. Let me explain a bit more. If the government of China continues to support the government of Vladimir Putin IN ANY WAY, I will begin to BOYCOTT ALL Chinese-made goods to the maximum extent possible. I will not do this with joy, for my sympathies toward the Chinese people remain steadfast. It is their government, like the government of Russia, which must be resisted, as it is being run by thugs.
