John Pang
@jynpang

🇨🇳 ASEAN community of common destiny for mankind. LSE, Stanford, Columbia, Gov of 🇲🇾, McKinsey, Davos to Tankie. Political Theology. Bonum Communist.

Chinese statecraft is, if nothing else, patient. I think it fully appreciates that US elites need time to adjust to their loss of primacy even if ordinary (laobaixing) Americans, especially younger Americans, as the "Tiktok refugee" phenomenon suggests, or American techies, such as the DeepSeek disruption shows, do not share this hangup. You will recall Deng Xiaoping's invocation of 韬光养晦 (hide your brilliance, nurture your obscurity, or hide your strength, bide your time) This is not some mere stratagem about dissembling one's strength. It's and idiom counselling an approach to political and personal *conduct* that is deeply rooted in Chinese philosophy and etiquette. In relation to the US it counsels exactly the conduct that would seek to avoid the incomprehension and envy of elites. Deng didn't invent it. Xi hasn't stopped applying it. Every Chinese child is raised in this as a social norm.

ChinaWatchers fond of pitting nice little Deng against big bad Xi are really pining for a time when the Chinese economy was 120 times smaller than it is today (149 billion in 1978 vs 18 trillion nominal dollars today.)

China at 120X is a bit harder to hide. Shorn of the democracy prattle the dilemma of China's rise is arithmetic. Western elites feel threatened by China's very *development,* which has happened at a pace and speed that continues to surprise even the Chinese.

Underneath the pseudo sophisticated security-hawkery and NED/USAID funded human rights trolling, it is China's growth, not its conduct, or even its ideology, that is the real offence. It is about China's existence as China. Nothing in their educations prepares western elites for a phenomenon that defies western social science, political theory and historical memory. Hence some take comfort in annually renewed dreams of its fragmentation or collapse.

No one has the right to tell a fifth of humanity to wind down their development and recovery as a civilization, to stop alleviating poverty, educating their young, building their cities and greening their environment. It is an internal development, driven by a core internal priority, on a level that would disrupt any international order, let alone the anomalous, unsustainable post-Cold War unipolarity with which it coincided.

To Western elites still steeped in supremacist assumptions, that growth looks like the mirror of their own imperialism. In fact it has proceeded with none of the violence that attended emergences such as Prussia's and Imperial Japan's that were orders of magnitude smaller.

In economic terms, the spillover of China's rise on the rest of the world has been overwhelmingly positive, especially for the global South. The US, or rather US capital, has benefited disproportionately from it. (Through the Global Financial Crisis it even bailed out US capitalism.) The benefit of trade with China and Chinese production has not been well distributed. It has massively enriched the 1% (indeed helped concentrate it) kept the middle class quiescent on ever-falling prices of consumer goods while their wages stagnated, and shipped the manufacturing and industrial jobs of the working class abroad.

China-phobia is a Western issue, driven ultimately by Western political dynamics and its frustrated expectation of a servile, economically captured Third World. The answer was never going to come from China trying to pacify or charm the Beltway China barkers or propaganda channels known as mainstream media.

As it turns out, an answer of sorts, we may hope, a turn towards sanity and realism, is emerging precisely through the ideological revolution now underway in the US. It may at least buy us time, not for the present elite to come to terms with China, but for a new elite to arise capable of organizing a society oriented towards the common good. The resultant integrity, strength and confidence are necessary for managing great power relations without resort to phantoms and demons.


https://nitter.poast.org/jynpang