The Real China Threat - by Bevin Chu : Antiwar.com

"There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it ever come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence."

~ Daniel Webster

Our American way of life is under threat. Not from PLA F-8 interceptors in the South China Sea, but from China Threat Theorists on Capitol Hill. These Blue Team Sinophobes demand the domestic adoption of right wing socialism, better known as fascism, in order to combat a nonexistent foreign threat of left wing socialism, better known as communism. Unless Real Patriots expose these China Threat Theorists' "impostures of pretended patriotism," the great republic bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers is at serious risk of being transformed into a Warfare State waging "perpetual war for perpetual peace." Ordinary Americans' lives, liberty and property will be sacrificed on the Altar of the Almighty State, long before any foreign threat appears on the horizon.

COLLISION COURSE

"Moral judgments must be "universalizable." This notion owed something to the ancient Golden Rule... anyone who uses such terms as right and ought is logically committed to universalizability. To say that a moral judgment must be universalizable means... if I judge a particular action... to be wrong, I must also judge any relevantly similar action to be wrong. The same judgment must be made in all conceivable cases... the same prescription has to be made in all hypothetically, as well as actually, similar cases."

~ Britannica.com

ETHICS/ 20TH-CENTURY WESTERN ETHICS/ METAETHICS/ UNIVERSAL PRESCRIPTIVISM

On April Fools Day, 2001, a US Navy EP-3 Aries engaged in "routine" spying on highly sensitive military installations on China's Hainan Island, collided with a Chinese F-8 interceptor. A Chinese "surveillance aircraft" did not collide with a US Navy F-14 while "routinely" spying on southern California's San Diego Naval Base.

China, in marked contrast with the World's Self-appointed Policeman, does not routinely dispatch Chinese warplanes 8,000 miles across the Pacific to spy, or in Pentagon spinmeister Craig Quigley's coy formulation, conduct "overt, routine surveillance and reconnaissance" of US military bases in Washington, Oregon, and California.

Amid the claims and counterclaims over "who swerved into whom," and who was "flying straight and level," this fact is undisputed. It is undisputed by President George W. Bush, by Vice President Dick Cheney, by Secretary of State Colin Powell, by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

And this fact represents everything wrong with our post Cold War China policy.

THE COLD WAR IS OVER. THERE IS NO "COMMUNIST THREAT"

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."

~ Thomas Paine

"Without a Golden Rule at the heart of our relationship, we are left with what our hawks define as the Moral Equivalence doctrine. We are more "moral" than the People's Republic of China... we are able to hold the PRC to higher standards... we must be permitted to fly along their coastline, giving them only a 12-mile cushion, but if they come within 200 miles of our coastline, we won't simply harass them, we will shoot them down. Our hawks carry this Moral Equivalence doctrine into every corner of our relationship with China... "

~ Jude Wanniski
"Moral Equivalence, or Golden Rule?"

The only moral use of force is in self defense. Any non-defensive use of force is initiation of force, i.e., aggression, and untenable by any code of morality one cares to invoke.

Marxism-Leninism was a messianic revolutionary movement with no regard for national sovereignty, dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalism the world over. Marxism-Leninism respected no borders, therefore the Cold War against international communism could logically be considered defensive. I myself subscribed to this reasoning during the Cold War. I myself was among the coldest of Cold Warriors, and considered Richard Nixon "soft on communism."

BUT THE COLD WAR IS OVER

The Cold War with the Soviet Union ended in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev in effect acceded to Ronald Reagan's ringing demand, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

The Cold War with "Red" China ended even earlier, in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao Zedong denounced as "Number Two Capitalist Roader," turned his back on Marxism-Leninism, declared that "To get rich is glorious!" and led China down the path to free market capitalism.

With the ideological demise of doctrinaire communism, Taiwan's capitalism was no longer under threat from mainland communism, and the conflict between Beijing and Taipei reverted to the status of a non-ideological Chinese Civil War within the confines of China's borders.

With the end of the Cold War the issue of America's self defense had been removed from the Chinese equation. America no longer had any dog in China's fight.

CHINA IS NOT COMMUNIST. THERE IS NO "CHINA THREAT"

"According to OECD Survey figures published in Economic Outlook (June 1998), the "Marxist" Chinese government collects under 11 percent of Chinese GDP, unlike most Western democracies that swallow up between 30 and 51 percent of the yearly wealth generated in their countries."

~ Paul Gottfried
"Buckleyite Warmongers"

Mainland China has not been communist for 23 years, the "anti-communist" New Republic and Weekly Standard to the contrary notwithstanding. Unfortunately millions of ordinary Americans aren't aware of this fact.

How many Americans know for example that mainland Chinese pay less in taxes than Americans? Not just slightly less than Americans, but up to two-thirds less than Americans? Mainland Chinese pay less than 11% in taxes, 6% less than the 17% China demonizer Steve Forbes proposed Americans pay under his highly touted flat tax scheme.

China's public sector today comprises a mere 30% of China's GDP. It is smaller even than the public sectors of France and Germany, and smaller still than those of Denmark and Sweden.

If this is what the Blue Team insists on referring to as "Communism," then I say let's have more of it! It probably never occurred to Forbes that one reason he couldn’t reduce taxes on Americans any lower than 17% was that he and other alleged "fiscal conservatives" refuse to stop buying all those $36 million EP-3s they keep sending across the Pacific to spy on China.

Mainland China's phenomenal transformation from a totalitarian collectivist dictatorship under Mao Zedong during the 50s, 60s and 70s, to economically liberal free market capitalism under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin during the 80s and 90s, is the best kept secret in the world. See: "Asian of the Century," Asiaweek magazine.

CHINA'S QUIET REVOLUTION, THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA'S OPEN SECRET

Why doesn't the American public know this?

They don’t know this because Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin's post-Cold War transformation of mainland China, in contrast with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin's post-Cold War transformation of Russia, emphasized economic substance rather than political appearance.

They don’t know this because even though mainland China radically restructured her economic system, and substantially liberalized her political system as well, she never underwent the high profile, media-genic "official makeover" of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries.

Mainland China never altered her official name from the "Peoples' Republic of China," never redesigned her national flag, never commissioned a new national anthem, and perhaps most important of all symbolically speaking, never ripped down the portrait of Mao Zedong above Tienanmen Square.

The bitter irony is that mainland China's gradualist, dare I say "conservative" reform strategy has worked against China's reformers image-wise. Because mainland China's post Cold War transformation stressed economics rather than politics, our own Political Class, which considers Politics their reason for living and Democracy their secular religion, demeaned China's quiet revolution, unprecedented in human history, as "mere economics," and heaped adulation on Russia's political reforms instead.

Hundreds of thousands of American expatriates living on the Chinese mainland however know better. These bold Yankee traders in Beijing and Shanghai know China is a free market capitalist economy which has neither any intention nor any desire to commit aggression against America.