The China Situation Isn’t as Bad as It Looks. It’s Far Worse
michaelpsenger.substack.com
michaelpsenger.substack.com
Recently China seemed to realize its “wolf warrior” aggressive stance towards the world simply was leading to well armed and prepared adversaries, so the CCP stopped being so aggressive in its diplomatic stance.
The most disturbing part of all this is that at least here in Australia, much of society seems to have bought the new narrative that China was never a threat and indeed it was our own government at the time (now voted out) that caused the degraded relationship with China.
People seem to believe that China has gone back to being non threatening, non aggressive. They seem happy to believe that China’s clearly stated intent to control the world is no longer its goal.
It looks to me like China had a short period where it showed its true hand, and realizing its error, had gone back to hiding its true ambitions behind a friendly smile. This will lull countries like Australia into a false sense of security and does not bode well for the future, in which China has realized it must carry out its plans with surprise rather than telegraphing hostility early.
Our politicians are all too willing to back down and stop becoming prepared.
It’s extremely unfortunate that in Australia there are many people who equate being defensively ready with warmongering. I’m no hawk but I sure do believe we should defend our sovereignty and be ready well in advance to do so. We are far, far from able to defend ourselves right now.
There are, unfortunately, many people who when presented with modern reality, say things like “we need to stop being a slave to U.S interests”.
Many people I believe simply haven’t followed international affairs closely enough to realize what is actually happening, and they carry through 1970s “we are not a US colony” thinking to the present. I find it startling when people haven’t seen what is happening on our doorstep.
I for one am extremely glad of the US alliance and if anything want closer defence connections. We are going to need it.
It’s extremely concerning that the new Australian government has been working extremely hard to reestablish friendly and close relationship with China. This will come at a heavy price I fear.
Dissenting voices in Australia seem far more aware of the profit motive behind potentially unneeded militarization. I believe this is due to less complicated accounting of government spending when compared to countries like the US.
>The diplomatic messaging from the CCP became extremely aggressive a couple of years ago. The outcome of this bullying was essentially to wake up the world to the threat that China had become.
It's clear the Chinese hear western propaganda and respond to it, shouldn't be surprising. Everything from the blame for covid (which recent signs point to being a US lab creation) to western thought leaders openly discussing nuking a billion relatively peaceful people and not being condemned for it. This naturally results in a re-adjustment in approach to engagement.
>This period of Chinese open hostility towards the world essentially made many countries into enemies or at least adversaries of China.
This statement doesn't ring true. They havent been hostile to the world, just to factions within a few western countries that make up a small minority of the planet's population.
I doubt any recovering nation that's been invaded by these same western countries and is planning to survive the next few centuries would take further threats of mass murder and invasion lightly.
>western thought leaders openly discussing nuking a billion relatively peaceful people and not being condemned for it
>They havent been hostile to the world, just to factions within a few western countries
Western countries have an ignorant habit of posturing like they are more than 15% of the world population, they even go so far as to frame themselves as the global majority in many cases.
Free trade expansion, economic cooperation, debt forgiveness, etc... encompassing more than 70% of the world population make claims of general Chinese hostility sound like westcentric nonsense.
"The New Candidate Countries For BRICS Expansion"
https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2022/11/09/the-new-can...
"(US-China) Great Power Conflict Fuels BRICS Expansion Push"
https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/great-power-conflict-fuels-b...
"China Forgives 23 Loans for 17 African Countries, Expands ‘Win-Win’ Trade and Infrastructure Projects"
https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/23/china-forgives-23-loans-fo...
>>>which recent signs point to being a US lab creation
"Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of Covid-19"
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-...
"DARPA docs on the origins of COVID-19 & confirming gain-of-function research."
https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/status/1608179885297508353
>>>western thought leaders openly discussing nuking a billion relatively peaceful people and not being condemned for it
"US admiral would ‘nuke China next week’ if Trump ordered it"
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
“We need a military full of Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls”
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-guest-we-need-mili...
"Why is Biden Risking Nuclear War With China? - Chomsky and Ellsberg"
All the lab leak theories are about Chinese labs, not US.
None of the people you quoted are "thought leaders" in any meaningful sense. I'm sure there are plenty of talking heads on Chinese media who spout very aggressive rhetoric. The US will never go to war with China unless it invades Taiwan.
I'm not saying that the dragon is no longer a problem, either, I'm just saying that the world is at least suddenly treating it accordingly.
First, "wolf warrior" is a manufactured western label for PRC being diplomatically assertive in response to assertive western moves against PRC interests. PRC's assertiveness has relative success in deterring regional countries from signing up against PRC containment. Washington hopium prior to Trump era pivot envisioned massing US hardware all over the first island chain, then PRC diplomats showing a little fang and third parties in region decided signing up was suicide. Current arrangement of QUAD/AUKUS would have been given a barely passing if not failing grade relative to prior aspirational blob proposals since involve the already forgone partners while India is not committed to the security dimension. It's hard to overstate how bad US+co posture around PRC is currently with respect to earlier proposals relative to the amount of US diplomatic effort through two adminstrations. It's prime how it started, how it's going meme. Really apart from getting new bomber and missile basing in western Australia, PRC assertiveness has prevented backyard security environment from degrading to point that would stop/reverse trend of PLA dominating region over time. Reality is PRC has already established relative military supremacy within first island chain that PRC assertiveness can convince unaligned parties (most) in region PRC cooperation is better than containment. It was simply prudent for PRC to unleash wolf warrior to counter Trump/Biden's China hawk team (US wolf warrior) because PLA military is already modernized enough to compel everyone in region to hedge.
Other considerations, no more new EU sanctions after PRC finally decided to counter sanction EU officials. No more PRC elites getting kidnapped post Meng/Huawei after PRC counter kidnapped Canadian Michaels. There's more coordinated transatlantic tech/industrial containment policies, but IMO that was always forgone with how much US controlled the tech stack, but US had to unilaterally implement these sanctions with softpower costs, just like how 3/5th of 5VEYS didn't ban Huawei gear until US made it impossible with sanctions that made long term hardware supply issue. Even JP boosting to defense 2%, in lieu of adopting basing concepts that would actually assist US in PRC containment (AGILE basing). Mainly because JP fucked up so bad that now they're in crosshairs of THREE nuclear powers (PRC, NKR, RU). And that doubling unlikely not even get properly funded and if did, nor will it stretch far on US platforms with how much Yen has crashed. Also good luck on AU getting nuke boats in next 30 years.
The TLDR Wolf warrior essentially elevated PRC to become nearly sanction and extradition proof by anyone except US, including LIO countries who drunk the Uyghur genocide narrative. That's Hague Invasion Act tier privileges solidifying PRC's rising power status. Even USSR didn't have those perks. Like PRC diplomats just beat the shit out of HK protesters in UK and basically nothing. Ultimately, despite assertiveness being perceived as counterproductive by western, wolf warrior has revealed how much others will put on the line against PRC containment. And so far, including developments post RU/UKR it's been more words/theatre than action. It's not about making friends or peeling away entrenched US allies with aligned interests - that was never feasible. Constraining ostensible US containment arrangements and making them toothless was as good as it was ever going to get. And that it did, spectacularly.
Your example of AU simmering down to more cordial relations under new gov is reflection of that. AU short/medium term interests still US aligned, but AU politicians just learned sensibly that they can't out wolf-warrior PRC for domestic politics.
>> "wolf warrior" is a manufactured western label for PRC being diplomatically assertive in response to assertive western moves against PRC interests.
Actually “Wolf Warrior” is an extremely anti western, deeply hostile Chinese movie. The aggressive Chinese diplomacy was named Wolf Warrior because the level of hostility was similar.
You can watch it here, it’s startlingly aggressive in its stance:
Wikipedia:
Wolf warrior diplomacy (Chinese: 战狼外交; pinyin: Zhànláng Wàijiāo) is a style of coercive diplomacy[2] adopted by Chinese diplomats during the Xi Jinping administration. The term was coined from the Chinese action film Wolf Warrior 2.
Hence it's a WESTERN label.
PRC foreign ministry doesn't call themselves wolf warriors, just like US State Department doesn't label themselves as Rambo for their Rambo Diplomacy. Linking to a wiki where the sources are just western MSM manufacturing and repeating the label reinforces my point. "Wolf warrior" or "coercive diplomacy" is western propaganda, which is really a side note to my broader point that PRC being diplomatically ASSERTIVE has worked well, and out maneuvered US failed minilateral efforts (soft power) in the region.
BTW, since you use the term MSM, I assume you are a Trump supporter, since that is a favorite term of the Trump crowd. I’ve never heard anyone else use that word before, at any rate.
They're not western inventions, but entire PRC watching circles suddenly popularizing label by formalizing jingoist PRC netizen meme as state department verbiage and have such rhetoric deseminate into MSM as the default label when discussing PRC diplomacy is where we enter manufactured propaganda territory. There's reason it's popularized over the actual foreign ministry terms like big country / great power diplomacy by PRC watchers who should actually know better, but unsurprisingly clickbaity labels like "wolf warrior" gets pushed. Deng's 韬光养晦 / hide strength bide time was translated / shorthanded fine. Xi and foreign ministry elevating 大国外交 / big country diplomacy hard in the last few years gets the wolf warrior meme treatment, because that brings an entirely different set of imaginary connotations than merely "assertive" diplomacy. And it gets repeated online by "useful idiots" with only surface knowledge for intended affect.
I'm not American and indifferent about Trump. "Western MSM" is just useful term when describing western manufactured consent / propaganda system in relation to PRC perspective. It's no different then when I describe CCP perspective as "state media narrative".
The term MSM is pretty loaded, it automatically flags you as a conspiracy theorist Q-anon Trump supporter even if you actually aren't, if that isn't your intention, you should at least be aware of the picture you are painting to others. It doesn't really make sense from a Chinese perspective, where the TVs are all broken at 7PM showing the same newscast.
> It was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe since the Second World War, and the largest man-made famine since the Great Leap Forward. And it was all for nothing. Lockdowns had never been science. Rather, they’d sprung into global policy on the order of the CCP princeling who would become the most influential member of the Baby Boom generation; an aberration thrust upon the world through an unprecedented, international influence operation.
> By corrupting global institutions, promoting forged data, publishing fraudulent science, and deploying propaganda on an unprecedented scale, the CCP under Xi Jinping transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. This is the story of how he did it, and why.
This is not even accounting for the propaganda machinery spamming the internet, or their role as the world's factory.
While the US has been overthrowing governments and replacing them with puppets, China has been diplomatically and methodically setting up the chess board to be in a winning position in the long run. This makes them a far scarier adversary than the West with its military superiority.
It remains to be seen whether African countries will prefer to continue paying their debts to China or join the Western side and take all that infrastructure for free.
> Chinese interest-free loans are frequently cancelled. And it’s widely understood that when China extends such credit lines, they are rarely ever paid back in full. Beijing was certainly not counting on the likes of Burundi, Congo or Mozambique to service these debts. And it has regularly rescheduled loans to African sovereigns worth billions in the last 20 years.
https://africanarguments.org/2022/09/will-china-africa-debt-...
https://www.txtreport.com/news/2022-12-01-germany-predicts-%...
You could say: been there, done that.
The agencies engaged in China are mostly commercial like Tesla, apple, car manufacturing and media like News Ltd. Intellectuals my arse!
There's a point to be made, and it's made: do not trust propaganda coming out of China which disagrees with basic measurements you can make from outside, or comparable situations outside which disagree by orders of magnitude in health and economics. Do not trust any licence or contract which retains substantive control inside China of a bilateral outcome, without significant evidence of mutual benefit to the state.
Accusations against intellectuals and politicians in the west are at best polemic, and at worst bad faith. The author appears to want to bash western intellectuals they disagree with.
Very little we do in the west would alter the trajectory inside China, and parallels with interwar Germany are over stated: the modern state of China post 49, at no point has been subject to partition (Taiwan and Hong Kong noted) or oversight or forced to pay reparations. It's grievance with the global free market economics is about the cynicism of trade agreements, the historical disagreement over Taiwan & Hong Kong and the utility inside China of harping on about Japan, Britain and the west's perfidy over time. Calling out a protest against Japan or Britain is as trivial for the Chinese state as it is for the Iranians to remind people about Jimmy Carters helicopter fiasco.
If you want realistic views on China, talk to Vietnam. The Vietnamese I know from inside that economy are careful how they engage for a reason: little brother grew up, big brother doesn't fully understand it.
China hasn't invaded anywhere outside its own territory for a long time. (Other states dispute what its own territory is, eg the spratleys) It bickers with India along a border. China draws attention to western military forces having been active in multiple unrelated territories consistently across the same timeframe: this is a point of some substance inside China, and in client states in Africa and pacific Islands. They sell this story to source "Coltan": we invest in you for minerals and fish: repression inside your own polity is your own business. Contrast this with world bank economic obligations or social requirements to get western funding. (We're not wrong to seek the social justice. It's hurt us economically because China doesn't and pays well)
Australia and New Zealand dropped the ball in their own backyard, China picked it up. There's been a massive about face by the west reinvesting in the places China opportunistically invested in, for fisheries rights and for future military/police relationships. China asks for friendly faces in votes at the UN and related agencies on matters which don't directly affect the states it engages in. It's a low bar, easy payback. It probably has raised the price for western re-engagement which is of course beneficial for those same states.
The spratleys and the other islands and sandbars of the China Sea are the major worry. The Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore and japan have food for thought there. Australia's refusal to accept international court jurisdiction over its bullying and spying of East Timor undermined its own standing in the same courts acting against what China is doing.
I accused the author of rambling. I've committed the same offence.
The comparison to Nazi Germany is on point.
Yes, Xi is bad, and we should not want to be governed as Xi governs, but there is absolutely no risk of this happening outside the areas China controls or claims it should control.
If they want to defuse tension, stopping writing their history books as white out and celebrating yasakuni shrine war criminals would be a good start, based on the west German experience. I don't love the federal Republic of Germany or the CDU but they aren't in denial about 33-45.
This is Beijing's policy about as much as Fox News' rantings were GOP or Trump Administration policy. Beijing holds a leash and can tighten or loosen at will, but to that extent it's still just saber rattling and fodder for domestic politics. Just like with American media, such opinions deserve attention only after after a long-term, durable pattern of specific policy preferences which see significant uptake by the political machine.
I thought you were hinting at the Anschluss, but here is something to think about: why does Putin invade Georgia, Moldavia, Ukraine? The answer is that dictatorships ultimately have to eat outside its borders, because for a productive society you need to have a broad middle class, allow dissent, foster debate, allow ideas to spring up so as to make sure society can progress, keep the rule of law, have an accountable government etc. Instead, if you want to make it you will need to be part of the Party. You need the favor of those that are closer to the center of the power. Your business can be closed any day, you have no say about what new legislation will be put in place. All the power and capital will accumulate at the center of the party.
The rule of dictators tend to end with a bang. The bad thing is: the surveillance is on such an evil level that it will be really hard for the people to rise up and free themselves. They can only hope for a power struggle in the highest echelons. These are dark days..
Have we already forgotten Tibet?
Hardly. Hitler and his cronies were driven by a level of crazy that outdid most of the other autocracies of the 20th century. Just two examples:
* Starting a war of conquest that utterly destroyed Germany itself.
* Murdering millions of Europeans in the name of anti-semitic racial theories developed decades earlier. (Hitler and Goebbels were quite clear about this long before they came to power.)
There are many more. China's rise looks more like great power politics.
Though I’m certain you know all of this already.
If you want to go there, the CCP has its own brand of horrible (The Great Leap Forward) which in some ways is worse, as it continues to treat even its own Han majority as disposable.
Perhaps it's more useful to look at figures like Stalin and Pol Pot to understand what happened in the Great Leap Forward. Or from Chinese history itself.
And to understand the current situation and how to react to it (from the point of view of American strategy) you need to look at comparisons that include nuclear and naval power. In some ways what's going on now in the Eastern Pacific looks like a replay of the Japan/US rivalry with a more formidable adversary operating on interior lines. As for nuclear issues, look at the Cold War. (If only because we got out of that one without incinerating the planet.)
<rant> I'm an American and find the constant Nazi analogies really tiresome. It's as if everyone's knowledge of history comes from WW II movies. GGPs post was a thoughtful and enjoyable contrast. </rant>
We altered the trajectory by making a pact with Mao, who bears the honor of more killings on his name than Hitler.
> Accusations against intellectuals and politicians in the west are at best polemic, and at worst bad faith. The author simply wants to bash western intellectuals they disagree with.
I think your criticism is a bit shallow here. Kissinger did sell the pact with Mao as a strategic outmaneuver of the Soviet Union. But his main point is that "Wandel durch Handel" (as the Germans insisted on in the last decades towards Russia despite US warnings) is just an eufemism of "lets make money".
I guess you'd have seen how big western brands bend over to China to betray human values. Apple, Tesla, Google you name it, they all sold their soul (if there would have been anything left) for more, more.
The result is that in the West people gets cynical or don't think about human values as worthy to uphold anymore. Its a slippery slope. To the surprise of the autocrats, we are not morally dead yet. Putin thought we would bend over again for some coins, calculating that we already went in a deadly, eternal sleep. Us acting for once altered Xi's calculation wrt Taiwan.
> China hasn't invaded anywhere outside its own territory for a long time
You should wonder why every neighbor of China is wary or is having a conflict right now. You should pay closer attention to Hong Kong, look even more closely how the Party deals with Han-Chinese vs non Han Chinese, and how any one not Chinese enough ends up in a concentration camp.
> (We're not wrong to seek the social justice. It's hurt us economically because China doesn't and pays well)
"We're not wrong..." You are missing the forest for the trees I am afraid. One of the central themes of the CCP and Putin is that they support autocracies and try to thwart democracies. The biggest threat to any autocratic leader is democracy, the rule of law and innate rights for the people. They call their disgust for those matters as striving for multi-polarity. The rule based world order is what they try to overthrow. For that, they need support from the oligarchs in the West. They need their capital and the knowledge of the free world. Our billionaires brought it, they are bending more on request.
This is not just hurting us a a by product, it is a win-win for the CCP.
Western arms did not prevent or provoke CSKs abandonment of the mainland. Mao wasn't armed by the west.
Mao's insane famine inducing policy, his rapprochement with the USSR and breakup, his involvement in the Korean war was all in the future, as was Kissinger and Nixon. At the time, needing bases to bomb the Japanese heartland, making a pact with Mao made sense. Do you argue otherwise from non post-hoc reasoning?
My biggest fear is a post-Xi destabilising China-internal fight for control. It's more likely it leans to Russia than not. No claimant to controlling the Chinese autocracy will want to look weak and agreeing to western norms will look weak, where selling arms to a fellow autocrat and sourcing cheap oil looks clever.
Xi must be weaker now than he's ever been, caving in on covid restrictions caused predictable chaos. He's off-brand. It's worrisome.
Australia’s most left wing government in a long time has adopted an incredibly anti-China stance.
The UK has become incredibly anti-China despite basing Brexit on the idea that trade with China will compensate for trade with the EU.
A couple of years ago the EU was looking likely to collaborate far more with China. That has changed dramatically since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S. political class is broadly anti-China. The current Democratic government has taken extremely strong steps to reduce trade with China and Trump the Republican made opposing China a centerpiece of his campaign.
Edit: Unfortunately this article is little more than BS propaganda. None of the claims it makes actually follow from the evidence it provides. Just as an example, it claims that many Western countries had stricter lockdowns than China, which may be the most asinine claim I’ve ever heard. And it pretends lockdowns were about eliminating COVID. That’s absolute BS. The entire lockdown argument in the West in the beginning was about “flattening the curve”. The entire idea was to avoid the acute need for medical services that were seen in China that required it to build hospitals treating tens of thousands of people in days, the massive deaths in Italy and NYC due to the explosion of illness at a time when we knew nothing about treating COVID (the gold standard of treatment at the time, using ventilators, was almost certainly wrong and led to the deaths of thousands of people in NYC who would have been alive if we had the information we did even a few weeks later).
Lockdowns happened to be extremely effective at preventing COVID, but that was a pleasant after the fact surprise. However their original justification was always “flattening the curve”.
Hitler planned for conquest of Europe. Xi is seeking to gain the territories disputed with its neighbors due to treaties signed with KMT officials instead of with CCP officials. The threat to liberal democracies is not remotely the same.
I’m not suggesting it’s not, but all I seem to find is meditation, tai chi and some inconsistent philosophy; very similar to other religions.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-21/inside-falun-gong-mas...
Seems like typical misguided religion rather than a cult. I’m not saying it’s good, but I would reserve the term ‘cult’ for Scientology and the like.
First, one piece of opinion in a larger body of text doesn't tell you "all you need to know" about the rest of it. Much of the other arguments might be very good even if a few are wrong. What a silly notion to say otherwise.
Secondly, whether Falun Gong was cult-like or not doesn't change the fact that China brutally repressed a religious movement of tens of millions of members that didn't engage in terrorism, violence or forcibly integrate new members. This repression coupled with so many of China's other repressions of different groups and minorities makes it absurd to blame a religious group for being crushed ruthlessly, instead of the obvious giant state and police apparatus doing the crushing.
It certainly does when Falun Gong and the Moonies are purveyors of far right propaganda, which the author subscribes to.
> Secondly, whether Falun Gong was cult-like or not doesn't change the fact that China brutally repressed a religious movement of tens of millions of members that didn't engage in terrorism, violence or forcibly integrate new members.
As far as China's repression of Falun Gong, I wholeheartedly disagree with its methods, but as Falun Gong was and remains an anti-CCP entity, the repression of that organization is entirely understandable.
More verbs and ajectives don't reduce the significance of "internment."
Loyalty to one's own people, or that there even is such a thing as "own people", and not just random individuals that happen to share passports, is rather taboo in the West, isn't it?
It would be hard to espouse loyalty to America as a Japanese origin US citizen locked up in ww2 because of assumptions about loyalty. Somehow they did. Admirable.
The modern day pledge of allegiance was confected to reassert religions role in the state (against the express wishes of the constitution drafters) as if loyalty could be measured by willingness to recite a pledge under threats implicit or explicit.
The entire existence of the modern US polity is founded on a rejection of one kind of loyalty and replacement with another. Loyal british retreated to Halifax. They continued to trade with their southern neighbours.
What loyalty the black panthers owed was unclear.
Leo Amery M.P. (and a privy counsellor, thats loyalty) disowned his son who joined the nazi forces. He was executed at wars end 7 months after the victory in Europe.
E.g. your example of the Black Panthers - they may not have been loyal to the US government, but they were unapologetically loyal to what they considered 'their people' - African-Americans.
"Die Lösung" by Bertold Brecht comes to mind