The warnings of the “China Hawks”, which have been disseminated in intensive media campaigns, conferences and publications, have had a decisive influence. The latest in a series of anti-communist lobby groups was the Committee on the Present Danger: China, which was founded in 2019. It sees the USA as existentially and ideologically threatened by the totalitarian regime in Beijing.
Fifty Shades of Yellow
The image of China in Germany and the USA ranges from silly clichés to fear of a powerful economic competitor.
“Yellow Peril” or whimsical wonderland in the style of the China chapters in Michael Ende’s ‘Jim Button’ books? China is one of the best-known nations in the world in the West, and yet almost no one seems to know much about this great country. When Germans or Americans look at their relationship with China, the West almost always appears to be the victim of Eastern “flooding” with cheap goods or a rather dimly perceived threat. The devastating effects of European imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which can be summarized under keywords such as “century of humiliations”, “opium wars” or “gunboat policy”, are hardly known. In addition, US cinema in particular cultivated clichés such as the sinister Chinese criminal, the Asian beauty in need of protection or the lovable but somewhat dotty Chinese man. Current political developments are once again heading towards a clash between two worlds, which could well become dangerous. Statements from the US right in particular are raising concerns about a trade war or even a military conflict.
by Wolfgang Sachsenröder
[This article posted on 7/31/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/fifty-shades-of-yellow.]
China in the German perception
When German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer orated “I only say Kina, Kina, Kina” (original quote) at the end of the 1950s, it was about the Federal Republic’s ties to the West and its ideological defense against socialism. After the victory of the communists in China, this seemed to increase the Soviet threat. For older Germans in the post-war period, this fitted in with memories of Nazi propaganda, which had highlighted Asian elements among the ethnic groups of the Soviet Union as a particular threat to European culture. In the general perception after the Second World War, China was far away, traditionally trivialized by the children’s song about the three Chinese with the double bass and popular carnival costumes with conical hats and artificial pigtails.
The German Empire’s involvement in the colonial exploitation of China after the devastating Opium Wars has been all but erased from collective memory.
In 1900, Germany used considerable military force to acquire an important port and a model colony in what is now Qingdao, but lost it again at the end of the First World War. What remains is one of the largest breweries in Asia. However, anyone drinking a Tsingtao beer in Germany today is unlikely to think of the colonial past.
The black and white television screens of the Germans showed the Chinese Cultural Revolution in disconcerting images and reports about chaotic conditions and the incomprehensible personality cult surrounding Mao Tse Dong. Economically, China could be forgotten for a long time after this period of crisis, until Deng Xiao Ping ushered in the Chinese economic miracle at the beginning of the 1980s. According to the World Bank, over the last 40 years around 800 million Chinese have grown out of poverty and become consumers who are increasingly traveling the world as tourists. But above all, hard-working Chinese people, working far below German wages, have turned useful items into export hits through mass production, which are often still dismissed as “Chinese scrap”, but this has hardly harmed their sales.
Less noticed, even by the German media, has been the rapid technological catch-up process of the Chinese economy. In some respects, it is comparable to the industrial rise of Germany after the foundation of the German Reich in 1871 or the race to catch up by Japanese industry after the Second World War.
When Britain recognized German competition as a threat to national security, Germany was accused of unfair trade practices. These are still common arguments for punitive tariffs in the EU today. The West was more lenient with Japan because it was seen as an ally against Soviet and Chinese communism.
In the meantime, the successful modernization of China and its export economy can no longer be overlooked. The fact that large Western corporations have made a significant contribution to the transfer of technology, particularly in the electronics sector, through the contract manufacturing of computers and smartphones, was ignored for a long time because it was so profitable. In recent years, however, contract manufacturing has given rise to an astonishing level of innovation in Chinese industry. State support for the education system has also contributed to this, which has met with an already traditional appreciation of learning and education.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students have also contributed to this, contributing to the modernization process after returning home with what they had learned at Western elite universities. All of this has since contributed to a leading role in various areas of technology and research, such as fusion reactors, quantum computers and many more. In Germany, the emerging technological leadership in e-cars is becoming a dangerous dilemma, as German premium manufacturers have so far generated a significant proportion of their profits from sales in China.
The other European manufacturers are in the same boat, but without comparable experience and cooperation with Chinese partners such as Volkswagen and Mercedes. The usual reflex of Western free trade apologists is then, as always, the introduction of punitive tariffs, somewhat milder in the EU than in the USA, but with the same intention of protecting their own car industry. Almost all Western manufacturers have neglected the important task of securing raw materials for battery production and have rather hesitantly followed the political guidelines imposed on them for environmental reasons.
The extent to which China has now become the world’s workbench was recently documented by Statista with an impressive figure. In 2023, a full 71% of the goods sold by Amazon worldwide came from China, with only 6% coming from Germany. There will be no way around economic cooperation with China in the coming decades, while the EU’s “de-risking” requirements appear to be more of a risk. There is currently a wide gap between political and economic interests, with Brussels’ approach clearly being heavily influenced by American positions.
The USA and China
Historically, the American view of China differs significantly from the German view, although the German Empire and the emerging USA pursued very similar colonial interests in China after the Civil War. With the fastest sailing ships of their time, the legendary clippers, American traders on the east coast had taken considerable parts of the lucrative opium trade with China from the British. Trade and Christian missionary interests initially led the USA to pursue an open policy towards China after the Opium Wars. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 granted China “most favored nation” status and opened the borders to migrants from the impoverished areas of the weakened Qing Empire. More and more Chinese immigrated to the USA in several waves, reaching more than 300,000 in 1882. Initially, they were welcome as willing and largely underpaid workers. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad lines, they made a significant contribution to the development of the Wild West or eked out a living with small laundries and inexpensive restaurants.
However, the mood among Americans from earlier waves of migration from Europe soon changed. The numerous caricatures of this era available on the Internet drastically reflect the racist demands to throw the Chinese out of the country with a symbolic kick. This had political and legislative consequences surprisingly quickly. As early as 1882, the “Chinese Exclusion Act” banned Chinese from entering the country. Business people, teachers, students, tourists and diplomats were excluded. The law was originally limited to ten years, but was repeatedly extended until the time limit was lifted in 1902. It remained in force until 1943 and was then relaxed in small steps until the respective national immigration quotas were abolished completely in 1965.
However, discrimination continued. From the 1930s onwards, the Hollywood film industry reduced Chinese actors to negative roles as the criminal “Dragon Lady” or the helpless “Lotus Flower” or characters such as the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu. Wong Liu Tsong made her first breakthrough with the stage name Mae Wong in numerous “femme fatale” roles, partly because she vehemently protested against discrimination. The selective immigration policy had also discriminated against certain groups among Europeans, particularly the Irish and Jews. However, they were able to assimilate in the medium term, while psychologists and racial biologists denied the descendants of African slaves and, to a large extent, Asians the ability to integrate.
The period after the end of the Second World War was characterized by an ice age between the USA and the People’s Republic of China, especially after the victory of the Communists in 1949. President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 ended 25 years without communication, but it was not until 1979 that the USA established official diplomatic relations with China and broke off those with Taiwan. The visit, which Nixon himself described as “a week that changed the world”, was in fact accompanied by the ideological rift and political estrangement between China and the Soviet Union. The visit, which was diplomatically prepared by Henry Kissinger, and its consequences stand for a pragmatic policy without ideological considerations and different values, which both the Republicans and the Democrats received equally positively at the time.
Economically, the People’s Republic was anything but competitive at the time, but rather a potentially growing sales market for American products due to its population.
In recent decades, students and visiting researchers at elite American universities – almost 290,000 in 2023 – have initiated a learning process in China’s favor, and not just individually, which has contributed in no small part to the economic catch-up process.
While goods manufacturing in the USA and Europe has lost ground massively in favor of the service industry, China currently produces practically everything that is in demand worldwide. This sales success is accompanied by low prices that are in line with the domestic cost of living, but are criticized in the West as dumping and exploitation of workers. The Chinese export industry reacts flexibly to demand and preferences among trading partners and is increasingly moving towards high-quality goods with cutting-edge technology.
Huge advantages are the labor pool of less than 1.4 billion inhabitants, the school system and many traditional skills from old trades. The Dutch economist Albert Winsemius, who advised Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, spoke at the time of the deft fingers of the Chinese. German entrepreneurs know the difference between the grandchildren of the Black Forest watch industry and the shipyard workers on the North and Baltic Seas. Especially in the electronics industry, such different qualifications and talents play a significant role and perhaps even more so in the expansion of automated production using robots.
The extent to which growing industrial competition may have played the main role in Americans’ increasing anti-China stance remains an open question. The latest Pew Research Center surveys in May 2024 show that 80% of Americans have developed a negative attitude towards China in the last five years, 43% even a very negative one. And 42% see China as an enemy of the USA. US military planners, however, see a direct threat to American interests through the armament of the Chinese armed forces, in the broadest sense even a military threat to the country’s territory almost 12,000 km away.
Strategically, of course, it is about American dominance in the Pacific, which the USA has maintained and expanded since the victory against Japan. Around 100 naval and air bases, 300,000 soldiers and 60 percent of the navy are stationed here. The competition for allies is in full swing, from the Philippines as a former American colony (1898 to 1942) as the largest country to tiny island states in the vastness of the Pacific.
The historical complications between China and the USA certainly no longer play a role in the Pew survey figures mentioned. For many years, the warnings of the “China Hawks”, which have been disseminated in intensive media campaigns, conferences and publications, have had a decisive influence. The latest in a series of anti-communist lobby groups was the Committee on the Present Danger: China, which was founded in 2019. It sees the USA as existentially and ideologically threatened by the totalitarian regime in Beijing and interprets the relationship between states as a new Cold War. The board includes controversial politicians such as Steve Bannon and the military theorist Frank Gaffney with his Center for Security Policy.
Influential “China Hawks” also work in academia, such as Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. In 2012, he presented his theory of the Thucydides Trap in the Financial Times. This theory states that a war between the USA and China is as inevitable as the war between Sparta and the rising Athens 2500 years ago. The theory is also controversial in the USA, but is one of the many pieces of the mosaic that make up the American image of China.
Blatant enemy images and threat scenarios are dangerous because they can make it easier for politicians and the population as a whole to overcome the threshold for the use of military force.
James David Vance, who has just been nominated by Donald Trump as his candidate for Vice President, is also regarded as a “China Hawk”. Thus, if he wins the election, it is to be feared that Trump’s thesis “The Chinese are stealing American jobs” will continue to complicate relations.
Wolfgang Sachsenröder, born in 1943, has worked as a political consultant in Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Europe and has lived in Singapore again since 2008. He is particularly interested in Southeast Asia, whose politics he has observed and commented on for a total of 25 years. In his latest book, “From Opium to Amphetamines – The Nine Lives of the Narcotics Industry in Southeast Asia”, published by WorldScientific in April, he describes the history of the opium trade and its political consequences to this day. In his blog partyforumseasia.org, he sheds light on political developments in the region.