Don’t Be Fooled! China in the 2020s is Japan in the 1930s
Australian journalist Stan Grant recently wrote a piece for the ABC explaining what the Chinese-Australian diplomatic stoush looks like through Beijing’s eyes.
He tells a story of China’s communist party manufacturing an economic miracle by taking the nation from agrarian poverty to an economic powerhouse in merely three decades. Added to that he lauds the Chinese government for its membership in the WTO, WHO, and signing up to the Paris Climate Accords. China’s rise to hegemony is, Grant stresses, even more stunning considering the “hundred years of national humiliation” that China endured at the hands of western exploitation and interference.
He points out that Australia’s call for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, criticism of Chinese anti-democratic crackdowns in Hong Kong and the mass detention of Uighur Muslims, and the signing of a defence pact with Japan are incredibly incendiary in Chinese perspective. That is because China does not wish to be lectured by another white western country that reflects a hegemony that has long since receded and which China now believes rightfully belongs to her.
Grant — like an earlier article — regards China’s authoritarianism as over-bearing yet incredibly effective. He glosses over Chinese autocracy with a modest admiration for a nation that has been able to radically reverse its fortunes and now stand up to and even over its former colonial masters.
Viewed this way, Grant’s portrayal of China matches similar portrayals of Venezuela by some western liberals in the 2000s. The socialist revolution led by Hugo Chavez was, in some minds, Venezuela’s coming of age, an assertion of independence against American domination, and a model of resistance against white western imperialism. In their view, while Venezuela’s authoritarianism was admittedly regrettable, Venezuela remained a paragon of socialist success whereby the resources of people and land were deployed in the cause of self-sufficiency and standing up to evil empires.
My contention is that China is not the Venezuela of the 2000s, an anti-western people’s liberation movement with a few niggling human rights abuses on the side. Rather, China is much more like the Japan of the 1930s, an imperial Asian power with a strong self-belief in both its destiny and racial supremacy.
First, during the second world war, the Japanese Empire’s aims were clear: expel western colonies from Asia and annex the resource rich pockets of south east Asia. Japan wanted to seize as much territory as it could, destroy the US Pacific Fleet, and remain poised to threaten Australia. Thereafter, Japan would use its newly acquired territories, superior military power, and proximity to Australia to force western nations to sue for peace and acquiesce to Japan’s Asian hegemony. The strategy was simple: negotiate with nations when you have their head in your mouth.
Communist China like imperial Japan has experienced a lighting fast rise in technological innovation and military development to the point that it is now able to manipulate its adjacent economic-political spaces. China’s rise as a global superpower is thus complete even if untested in the military sphere on a major scale. China is increasingly dominant and domineering in the Asia-Pacific region with its economic clout and expanding power-projection capabilities. Of course, not all hegemons are the same, and the question is what kind of hegemonic power will China become? It is certainly possible that in the future China and its strategic partners will operate in “a more ethical, relational, and cooperative fashion” (Zhang 2015, 4). However, it is also possible that China could seek a more confrontational approach in the region and engage in overt intimidation by multiple instruments ranging from cyber-attacks, to trade embargoes, to full scale annexation. Whereas China strategist Zheng Bijian had consistently emphasized China’s “peaceful rise” and “soft power,” under President Xi Jinping such language has disappeared in favour of asserting China’s military ascendency and making room for the PLA’s ambition for military parity with the USA.
While internal and external factors may well constrain China’s ability to successfully assert itself, even so, China could potentially emerge as an Asian hegemon who succeeded where imperial Japan failed.
Second, another area where Communist China and imperial Japan are similar is in the racial aspect. Imperial Japan in the 1930s was “a lethal mix of statist militarism, xenophobia, and racism” (McVeigh 2006, 3). The Japanese government believed in their own inherent superiority compared to the soft westerners and backward minority groups. Despite this, the Japanese empire tried to paint itself as the liberators of Asia from western domination and varyingly ingratiated themselves to local elites among conquered people. Japan was remarkably successful, initially at least, in playing the anti-colonial card and recruited tens of thousands of Indians and Burmese to its anti-British campaign. Eventually, however, Japanese racial prejudices were revealed and indigenous populations soon had ample reason to hate their new overlords just as much if not more than the former ones.
Similarly, an important yet not well-appreciated aspect of Communist China is the underlying Han-supremacist ideology. China is home to dozens of people groups who make up about 8% of the population. What is more, despite a constitution that guarantees rights for all ethnic groups, the Chinese government acts with an overwhelming prejudice against minority peoples. A prejudice now documented in the criminal mistreatment of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjang province. China’s minority peoples face discrimination and forcible assimilation to Han identity and culture. According to Ian Law:
“Sinicisation involves the aggressive, state-led, promotion of Han culture, language and identity, and the concomitant dissolving of the language and identity of non-Han groups and the social disappearing of those groups into the mass of the Chinese nation. Racial sinicisation involves a double movement of inclusion and inferiorisation where racialised groups (including some groups of rural Han migrants) are locked into systems and positions of inferiority inside the nation. It is a position also founded on the paradox of state denial and bureaucratic processes of racial discrimination and marginalisation embedded and rationalised in communist ideologies and hierarchies of development and civilisation” (Law 2012, 97–98).
Stan Grant portrayed China as a morally complicated actor whose rise to power is, because of western colonisation, in some sense deserved. My assessment is far less sympathetic. Just as China was once an imperial power that exerted a tribute system over its neighbours prior to western colonisation, one day China might well rise to even greater heights of regional supremacy depending on intra-Asian dynamics. Given its clandestine cyber activities, crimes against ethnic minorities, brutalities in Hong Kong, menacing threats against Taiwan, illegal territorial occupations in the South China Sea, and sabre rattling on the Sino-Indian border, one would never be surprised if China acted in a nakedly militaristic fashion.
A hegemonic China should not be fawned over like 2000s Venezuela, but rather, cautiously monitored and kept in check like 1930s Japan.
References
Law, Ian. 2012. Red Racisms: Racism in Communist and Post-Communist Contexts. New York. Palgrave Macmillan.
McVeigh, Brian J. 2006. Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Zhang, Feng. 2015. Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Michael F. Bird is an Anglican Priest and Academic Dean at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons