The Hostile Panda
by AC Grayling
The Guardian
April 12, 2001The spy plane drama shows China wants to be a superpower. It should be stopped
No one used the words "hostage crisis" about China's 11-day detention of the US spy plane crew, but in blunt terms the deal they wanted was the crew's return in exchange for an apology.
China's insistence on an apology is revealing both of its attitude to the outside world and its inner tensions and aims. In particular, its extreme touchiness to perceived slights from the west is evidence of a disturbing fact: that although China desperately needs western trade, technology, and capital, the dominant section of its leadership is profoundly hostile to the west, and resents being dependent on it.
Under government influence, China's media described the spy plane's flight as an "invasion," and linked it directly to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The two incidents are cited as evidence of western, and specifically American, hostility. Chinese public xenophobia is thereby roused, serving the regime's propaganda aims of reducing western attractiveness to young Chinese, and propping itself up by directing attention towards a supposed outside enemy. An apology from America over the spy plane incident was seen as a essential for propaganda purposes; which is why Chinese news media began selectively translating American regrets over the loss of China's fighter aircraft as if they were the apology demanded, thus preparing the Chinese public for announcement of the crew's release.
The use of anti-western propaganda has been standard practice by the communist leadership in China since its victory in 1949. During the years I lived in Beijing and subsequently worked as a China human rights activist, I saw many instances of the regime's divided attitude to things western, but could not fail to recognise its underlying tenor as hostile. In analysing China's attitude to the spy plane incident, one premise has to be that China does not see the west in terms of present or potential partners and friends, but as a rival and a threat.
One obvious reason for China's insistence on an apology was to gain time for its intelligence services to examine the spy plane's equipment, and to eavesdrop on the crew. But the foreign relations game masked a perennial battle within China's ruling Communist party between modernisers and the old guard. The latter are the last phalanx of leaders directly connected to the party's early revolutionary struggles, most notably the Long March of 1934-5 which saved them from defeat. They remain dominant, and have their followers among the younger generation of leaders. These latter accept the necessity of western trade and technological tutelage, but regard it as supping with the devil; their prickliness over the spy plane incident is a measure of the length of chopsticks they accordingly use.
These attitudes are not products of Communist party ideology but a longstanding feature of Chinese relations with the outside world. In this respect China's contemporary leaders are no different from Empress Ci Xi a century ago, who supported the Boxer Rebellion aimed at expelling all foreigners from Chinese soil. Modernisers in her time were regarded as traitors and that attitude persists, which is the fatal weakness in the position of such leaders as Jiang Zemin, who recognise that without engagement with the west, China will fall behind in world terms.
This fear is the key to a further aspect of Chinese attitudes. The Chinese nourish enormous historical resentment towards the west as a result of foreign domination in the 19th century. China had then long been weak because its institutions and army were antiquated and its economy too reliant on subsistence agriculture. It fell easy prey to the commercial exploitation, missionary arrogance and territorial depredations inflicted on it by foreign powers. Feeble attempts at resistance were heavily punished, as when British and French troops famously destroyed the emperor's summer palace outside Beijing in reprisal for infringement of foreign rights on Chinese soil.
These historical insults are galling because China always had, and has still, a "master-race" syndrome. It has always regarded itself as superior to the rest of the world, an attitude fostered by its justly held pride in once being, in Tang times (6th to 10th century AD), the world's most advanced country. Chinese attitudes remain racist and supremacist, to a degree startling to foreigners when they first encounter Chinese hostility to black people, and learn of their belief that the "minority peoples" who live as colonised populations within China's current borders are less evolutionarily advanced than the Han Chinese.
A persistent theme in China since 1949 has been the impulse to growth in military power and territorial expansion, under the guise of "reclaiming" past possessions, and the realisation of its superpower aspirations. China's huge but once useless army suffered humiliating defeats in Vietnam; now that its military technology and capacity has been and continues to be upgraded dramatically, it has grown in confidence - witness its newly aggressive stance towards US monitoring. The collision between one of its fighters and the US spy plane shows how aggressive its posture has become.
It is a mistake to think that, under its present regime, China can be treated as a reliably peaceful partner in trade and international relations. Western treatment of China should instead be premised on the fact that China is a potentially rogue state, which will not flinch from any means to get its way if it thinks it can succeed - especially as regards Taiwan, where the prospect of an invasion by China is a real one.
One need only look at the persistently high level of human rights violations in China, and its brutal behaviour in Tibet, to see how it is capable of acting.
The west needs to operate a policy of severe containment until China has democratic institutions. Chief among them should be trade sanctions and restrictions, withholding full membership of the international community, denying China cosmetic triumphs such as the Olympic Games, and maintaining pressure on China's widespread human-rights violations.
The US should continue to arm Taiwan and support its autonomy; and the west collectively should keep watch over China's other territorial ambitions, especially towards Mongolia and the islands of the South China sea. All China's claims about "reclaiming" its territories are a nonsense - it is a regional imperialist power, as witness its occupation of Tibet, Xinjiang, and other minority areas (the so-called "autonomous regions") which China has colonised over the centuries. These colonies will fight back one day, as is already happening in Tibet and Xinjiang, and China will not be able to contain them indefinitely. Perhaps their efforts ought to be supported by the west, since that is a good way of preoccupying China, reducing its threat to peace in the Pacific region and hastening the demise of the current regime.
That, at any rate, is the moral to be drawn from the agenda concealed behind China's anger over the spy plane incident. China longs to be a superpower, and if it becomes one it could be a menace; it is never too soon to limit such pretensions, but it can too soon become too late.
• AC Grayling is the author of two books about China, where he has lived. He teaches at Birkbeck College.
a.grayling@philosophy.bbk.ac.uk