US President Donald Trump said last week: “I want China to do great. I’m very friendly with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping (習近平)]. I have great respect for him and for China.”
Trump believes the way for China to do well is simply to open its markets to US goods. That would be a step in the right direction, but it is not sufficient for a peaceful resolution of the world’s China problem. For that, the Chinese government must open up not only to US goods, but also to Western ideas and universal values. It would not do so voluntarily.
When former US president Richard Nixon laid the intellectual foundation for his historic opening to China in his seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1967, he said: “[W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”
Although he never expressed the kind of personal admiration for Mao Zedong (毛澤東) that Trump has lavished on Xi, Nixon knew that Mao’s thinking was the impetus for China’s resurgence after the twin calamities of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, as well as for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. He called “the thoughts of Mao” a “poison” that had to be “detoxified.”
“The world cannot be safe until China changes,” Nixon wrote.
He was thinking of much more than trade and economic issues.
Mao died in 1976, but Maoism — repression at home, aggression abroad — persisted through the following decades, despite the Chinese people’s aspirations for change. The opportunity for a genuine opening of China’s political system appeared to be at hand in the 1980s under the rule of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), known as “the great reformer.”
Chinese made clear that they wanted Deng’s economic reforms to extend to the political arena, but, with the experience of Eastern Europe’s democratic revolution fresh in the minds of China’s communist leaders, Deng drew the line and ordered the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to turn its tanks and guns on the millions of Chinese peacefully demonstrating in Tiananmen Square and scores of other Chinese cities.
Then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s partner in the one-way opening to China, explained away Deng’s crushing of popular dissent as a relatively normal governmental response and continued his post-1972 crusade of shepherding the US-China rapprochement to full fruition. As China’s chief influencer in US power circles, his efforts largely succeeded as China was welcomed into the WTO, the Olympics and important international institutions.
After decades of generous Western aid, investment, technology transfers and diplomatic prestige, well ensconced now within “the family of nations,” it remained the “Red China,” that Nixon spurned until his overture in 1972. Under Xi’s neo-Maoist rule, Beijing is as committed today to “nurtur[ing] its fantasies, cherish[ing] its hates and threaten[ing] its neighbors” as it was during Mao’s rule — except that now, under less-than-watchful Western eyes, it is exponentially more powerful and dangerous.
It is years past time for the US to flip the script on Beijing’s continuing anti-Western hostility, and shift from fearful and reactive defense to assertive diplomatic and informational offense — and Trump, given the unpredictability of his decisionmaking, might well be the best-suited president to do it.
Trump’s trade-and-tariff confrontation with Beijing has put the US in a dominant negotiating position. That advantage would last only as long as he adheres to his core demands and does not settle for a smokescreen outcome as he has been inclined to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin on ending the war in Ukraine.
The Trump tariffs have impacted the Chinese economy and increased Chinese discontent with the performance of the Xi regime, giving the US greater leverage with China across the board. The time is especially propitious for an effective information campaign against the domestic failings and repression of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the international dangers presented by its malign behavior against the US and its allies. China routinely colludes with other aggressive powers — Russia, North Korea, Iran — and “is providing satellite imagery to the Houthis” for their attacks on US Navy ships in the Red Sea.
Xi’s urgent call for intensified indoctrination of CCP officials suggests that economic discontent, if accompanied by an effective information campaign, could lead to an erosion of party discipline and loyalty toward Xi’s neo-Maoist agenda. Communist authorities have always feared the Chinese people even more than perceived external enemies; now they have reason to worry about the cohesion of the CCP itself.
Given China’s relentless and permanent attacks on US institutions and values even during so-called win-win periods, Trump should have no qualms about launching an aggressive information campaign against Chinese communist legitimacy at the same time the parties negotiate about cooperation in other areas.
Three-quarters of a century of CCP rule, four decades of which was endured during vigorous good-faith Western engagement, have taught that China’s communist leaders would not willingly change and, as Nixon warned, the world would remain in constant and increasing danger as long as the regime is in power.
It would be far better for it to be changed through peaceful action by Chinese, supported by wise and effective Western information support, rather than as the result of a costly war over Taiwan, the Philippines, or Japan, triggered by a fatal Chinese miscalculation about the sustainability of US will.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the US secretary of defense from 2005 to 2006, and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010.
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