2 - “Best friends, worst enemies”: China’s rise and the blowback of American grand strategy

Summary

“If China remained closed, then the doors would have to be battered down.”

Alan Peyrefitte

World history cannot be regarded as the sum of disconnected events. More often, it is the product of encounters between different, competing civilizations, political systems, and technologies and the tensions that exist between them. Although the Chinese elite were committed to making China great and deserve credit for the success that the PRC achieved in the post-1978 era, the West played a fundamental role in bringing it into a world capitalist economy. China's success can also be interpreted through the lens of “blowback” of European and Japanese imperialism, but most importantly US globalism. Technically, “blowback” is used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to describe the unwanted consequences of covert operations. Subsequently, it was applied by political scientist Chalmers Johnson to reflect the unintended effects – backlashes – of US foreign policy. To Johnson, “acts committed in service to an empire but never acknowledged as such have a tendency to haunt the future” and the US “cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback” (Johnson 2002: 8, 13). This concept is essential to appreciate the responsibility that the United States’ strategy-makers had for encouraging the rise of China while overlooking its long-term strategic implications.

Blowback, however, is also a constant feature of empire. Imperialism's coercion, disruption, and lack of respect for other countries or regions tend to have unpredictable and perilous consequences decades or even centuries later. China has become a great economic and military power because European and Japanese powers, even before US hegemony, had a hand in her formidable ascent. Indeed, the continuum from the eighteenth century up to China's entry into the WTO in 2001, has been that of western powers seeking to open up the Chinese economy to the world in order to profit from it. As different parts of this book show, this has come at a geopolitical cost. For good or ill, the foreign policies of imperial Britain, Japan, France, Portugal and Germany, but also the United States, have had far-reaching effects on China's process of political renovation.