America’s latest ‘red scare’ is overblown. China is not intent on world domination
- The US Committee on the Present Danger focusing on China misreads the Communist Party’s intentions. While China will seek to dominate transnational sectors it sees as essential to its survival, conquering the world would be too much trouble
So I ordered a martini at a Los Angeles bar for my favourite “former” US intelligence official and asked what we sane Americans are to make of the latest red scare. “I think it’s threat-mongering,” he said, very carefully, adding, “Which isn't helpful … If everything China does is a threat, then nothing is.”
No panda-hugger, though, this savvy official warns against smug complacency about Beijing’s aspirations, which are not necessarily those of the US, or, in many instances, those of China’s Pacific neighbours. “I'm still seeking some steadiness in my own view,” he admitted. China, he emphasised, is complicated. Tell me about it.
But doesn’t everyone just know, as does the Committee on the Present Danger, that China’s long-range objective is total world domination? Of course, how this will be achieved and/or when it will become the global destiny is not at all clear. Yet there always seems to be “certainty” when communist China is blithely equated with the former Soviet Union, the communist superpower whose existence as an empire was, for so many years, an indisputable pain of geopolitical life. So if the Soviet Union was expansionist, China is or will be too.
Is it that simple? Actually, it is not. If anyone inside the Chinese government or the Communist Party is seriously thinking of world domination, his head needs to be examined. Ask the British or any elderly Soviet communist. World domination is a tough gig. Throughout history, empires have risen and fallen on the conceit that they did not have enough and needed more – territory, space, religious converts.
World domination wouldn’t be so hard, one supposes, as long as the world is more or less comfortable with being dominated. But, with so many of its own people to house, feed, educate and otherwise keep loyal, China has a great deal of work to do within its borders before the People’s Liberation Army gets locked and loaded for stirring marches into Montenegro, Monaco and Minneapolis on its world domination tour.
No doubt, China will aim to dominate transnational economic sectors it views as central to its survival, such as energy, commodities and especially technology. It will beg, borrow, steal and, if necessary invent, every last piece of the technology it needs. Perhaps, in this sense, we can agree that its DNA might someday hover over the globe, along with that of others.
But the world has changed greatly since the heyday of the Middle Kingdom. The good days of old are long past and they won’t be anything like the good days ahead.
The Chinese elite, at least, must know that. Over a recent dinner in Hong Kong, trying hard to keep a straight face, I asked a former foreign minister from Asia, well respected by Chinese as well as American diplomats of all stripes, about China’s campaign of world conquest. A short pause, then we both laughed, saying as if one: “China is not stupid enough to try.” World domination is a crown that weighs heavily on headquarters. Just ask the British, the French, the Turks or even Americans for that matter – perhaps especially us Americans.
Giants of Asia book series author Tom Plate is the distinguished scholar of Asian and American studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute