“Calls for China regime change are ‘reckless’: Kurt Campbell. U.S. deputy secretary of state says ‘careful coexistence’ needed with Beijing,” Nikkei. Geostrategery, Taiwan Republic 台灣国 and world history classrooms. I would love to see a scholarly study on why Western imperialist academia, IR circles, and policymakers love to trap themselves in these strawmen-extreme arguments. It is such a waste of time and energy, and they can’t seem to get enough – strategic ambiguity, engagement, regime change …. China’s either going to take over the world, or it will cease to exist …. We either need regime change or engagement. To Campbell’s credit — one of the Biden liberal hawks I admire — his position coheres to the real world, couched in diplomatic phrasing because he is an important official. As a retired monkey, I can be less diplomatic. What happens in communist China does not concern me. How the Chinese choose to organize their nation is not my business. My interest in communist China is purely focused on how Chinese imperialism threatens democratic Taiwan Republic, the US, and the Free world. That’s. It.
As a retired academic historian, I really should not have to remind Americans, of all people, why “regime change” is never a good idear. I mean seriously, the invasion of Iraq and the American quagmire in Afghanistan was not that long ago – imagine those decades and trillions America poured into the Middle East invested into this global struggle against communist China and other autocratic forces. Nor should the US give the ethno-nationalist Chinese Communist Party an easy excuse to rationalize their imperialism and belligerence. As a historian of China’s history, I am also delighted to share this reminder: it could always get worse. That is to say, millions of ordinary people lost their lives from the end of the Qing Dynasty to now because of utopian promises of a new order in China, and the recurring lesson is that with China, it could (and often) become worse. Call me cautious or conservative – better the devil we know as far as geostrategic choices for liberal democracies.
“Engagement” unrestricted is how we got ourselves into this current global crisis in the first place – Campbell’s interesting modifications of one of these Western imperialist academia cult-like phrases is reassuring. Liberal democracies cannot engage communist China because it is not an ordinary member of the family of liberal democratic nations. No more than we can pretend that there are private Chinese companies not under the thump of the dictatorship, or that Chinese universities are different than the Chinese Communist Party. Liberal democracies cannot “engage” China without caution because the Chinese Communist Party’s stated goal — Beijing is frank and honest, it is the West that has been delusional for decades — is to subvert and defeat the liberal democratic world order. This is a fact even during what some Western imperialist academics consider to be the “good old days” of engagement when Chinese dictators such as Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were more reasonable. Go ask the Tibetans and Uyghurs if these communist dictators were more mellow. More importantly, the core position of The Party did not change, albeit the tone and atmospherics were of course different than dictator Xi.
So, the academic arguments and catch-phrase wars notwithstanding, the main public policy choices facing the US and the Free World are to protect global democracies with better social welfare safety nets, to modify previous decades’ mindless globalization with a better system that enhances liberal democracies and punishes autocracies, and to update core liberal democratic principles to defeat the multi-domain war waged against them by autocrats foreign and domestic, state and nonstate. The only way to deter a Chinese imperialist war is to build global alliances (not merely military, but economic, educational, technological ….), to stock up on munitions and harden military bases, and to take a cue from the innovations in thinking led by the US Marines, and for the US and its democratic allies to deliver a clear message to dictator Xi that the consequence of a war instigated by him will be the end of his dictatorship. The Free World failed to convince Putin of this, and the survival of the dictatorship and the ill-gotten gains of the dictator and his family are the only things dictators care about. Short of a military war instigated by the autocrats, we must find ways to contain and mitigate these autocracies as peacefully as possible. 13.6.2024
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