TOM PLATE (in the South China Morning Post, 8 December, 2015) -- At times China and its ways are viewed from
America as if little has changed. One of those times is now. This is our quadrennial
U.S. presidential campaign season. Sometimes it is our silliest season.
One spurious claim about China recently
marinated into a campaign issue and produced its first candidacy casualty –
without Beijing having to lift more than one pinky of denial. Here’s the story
and the background:
In the arduous process
of installing a new U.S. president in January 2017, the China question has been
simmering on the backburner of the debate but not front and center, yet.
Several reasons explain.
One is the current U.S. focus on Islamic
extremism.
Another is that a non-posturing,
truly substantive debate on any foreign policy issue is difficult to achieve when
scoring voter points rather than unraveling complexities is the task at hand;
but complexities are at the heart of all significant foreign issues, especially
relations with China.
Yet another is that none of the
candidates, except for Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state, can
honestly say they know much of anything about China.
Of the two Republicans who in fact have
chalked up headlines knocking Beijing, it looks as if only one will remain
standing much longer. This is Donald Trump. His campaign line, avoiding
subtleties as any pitchman would, has been reductionist: Little good can come
to the U.S. when substantial good goes China’s way. It’s a one-way street. The
Sino-U.S. relationship functions as a competitive struggle, not as a common
cause. You either beat them, or they beat you. At the moment they are “beating
us.” So we gotta beat them back. It is true that in America, domestic rather
than foreign issues usually dominate presidential campaigns. But with skill, Trump
has set up China primarily as a nexus issue of economic rather than
geopolitical disadvantage. The real-estate tycoon’s analysis is bogus, to be
sure, but is rather politically clever, and demonstrates anew his towering
capacity for teeing up entertaining over-simplification that capture some voter’s
rapture.
Less skillfully, the otherwise
soft-spoken and provincial Republican Ben Carson, until recently a close to Trump
in the ever-roiling opinion polling, may have hit his tripping point when he slipped
badly on the China question. Almost out of nowhere, the former neurosurgeon rhetorically
wandered off the campaign trail into the Syrian desert, claiming to detect a
sighting in that maelstrom of vast tragedy that no one else had: the presence
of China.
The odd assertion,
made about a month ago during a Republican TV debate, has been sticking to
Carson like a celebrity medical malpractice suit. His Syria misstep was: “You know, the Chinese are there, as well as the Russians….” With
that inadvertent revelation of incompetency, Carson strongly reinforced the
point that not every American, not even a board-certified neurosurgeon, should
be permitted to operate in the White House.
Be that as it
obviously is, the poor doctor is anything but unique in ahistorically conflating
China and Russia. For something like a computer virus on the
U.S. political hard drive invariably prompts an automatic psychic recall of the
former Soviet Union whenever the subject of China arises. The recall protocol includes
the absurd notion that any country run by a communist party poses an inherent
threat, as the former Soviet Union once did. But times change; even former
‘pure’ Communists can marinate into BMW roadster-capitalists; today’s communist
Vietnam, former all-out evil enemy, is now practically whimpering at the White
House backdoor in a lost dog’s effort to find a new pal; and lately Russia
(these days terribly non-communist indeed) seems more the thorn in Washington’s
side than China.
Carson’s clumsy Syrian slip prompted
the question: Do we - or do we not - have the right to require presidential candidates
to present at least a responsible level of knowledge about the big issues if
they want the big job? America, which is not a dishonest society, knows in its
heart that it must own up to aspects of its own international ignorance. Every
sane American now recognizes that absolutely zero weapons of mass destruction
were found in Iraq after we invaded, and that was the stated reason for the
operation. And so now we have had tendered by a presidential candidate a phony
claim that Chinese forces or agents (or … Chinese restaurants…) are in Syria,
when they are not there and almost certainly never will (there’s a far better
chance of a meditation in the Great Hall of the People led by a mantra-chanting
Dalai Lama than Beijing ever showing its face in Syria).
This unprepared candidate, blithely unfamiliar
with core international fact, looks to have seriously deflated his presidential
balloon. It’s not often we see a candidate implode on a foreign-policy issue, but
with the world getting smaller with every new, gruesome terrorist explosion, foreign
policy questions no longer seem so foreign and ignorance no longer such bliss.
The instinct
to conflate China with Russia is what Mainland Chinese term America’s “Cold War
mentality.” I have always thought this criticism a fair point, notwithstanding
our differences with Beijing. So in a sense we should thank Dr. Carson for his inadvertent
illustration of a recurring intellectual error and agree that it’s past time
our national thinking were updated and refined if we want to understand China and
the world properly. Sure, China needs to understand America better - this too is
true. But sometimes what our White House-ambitious politicians say and do seems
inexplicable, incomprehensible and incompetent, even to Americans who, after
all, are more or less used to this sort of nonsense, especially during
campaigns.
Columnist Tom Plate
teaches courses on Asia, as well as on the United Nations, in the political
science department of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is
the Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies.
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