Page 1 of 5 OBAMA, CHANGE AND CHINA, Part 2 A dangerous balance
By Henry C K Liu Part 1:
The song stays the same
Since the end of World War II, the issue of China has extended beyond the
confines of foreign policy to stay as a prominent bone of contention in US
domestic politics.
Until Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1972, the old anti-communist China
lobby was in many ways as controversially powerful as the Israeli lobby. This
state of affairs first developed after anti-imperialist revolutionary forces
led by the Chinese Communist Party liberated China in 1949 after which
Republicans in US partisan politics accused the Democrats of having "lost"
China, as if China was their's to lose.
In a way, the accusation was understandable. The Republic of China under the
Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) had been under Washington's
paternalistic umbrella since its founding in 1911. US support for the KMT
further strengthened after the left wing of the party was purged following the
assassination of 48-year-old leftist party leader Liao Zhong-kai on August 20,
1925. During and after World War II, the Republic of China was reduced to the
status of a client state of the US.
Dr Sun Yat-sen, father of the 1911 nationalist revolution died of cancer, aged
59, on March 12, 1925. Six months later, Liao, a top comrade-in-arms and
political heir to Sun, was assassinated by right-wing forces. Sun had unified
all progressive forces in and outside of China to overthrow the
three-century-old Qing dynasty that, in its final decadent decades, had allowed
China to fall under the exploitative dominance of Western imperialism since
1840.
In less than one century, China fell from the position of a great power with
one of the world's oldest and most advance civilizations and prosperous
economies to that of the "sick man of Asia". China was left helplessly open to
Western exploitation, which reduced it to semi-colonial status with a bankrupt
economy and a decadent government totally unable to protect its national
interests or to revitalize its national destiny.
Chinese civilization came to be viewed by all in the West, except some
historians, as outdated and irrelevant for the modern world. China became an
underdeveloped country not only in the eyes of Westerners but also in the minds
of its own people in the modern context. As a result, the US, with a history
shorter than that of the Qing dynasty, along with other modernized Western
nations, developed an unwarranted sense of superiority over China.
Sun spent his youth in the US territory of Hawaii, where he attended the elite
Punahou School, the alma mater of the young Barack Obama a century later. Liao,
whose father was sent to San Francisco in the employ of the Hong Kong Shanghai
Bank, the institution that had financed British imperialism, was born there in
1877, received his early education in the US where he met Dr Sun before
returning to Hong Kong in 1893. Liao then went to Japan in 1903 to study
political science and economics at Waseda University and Tokyo University. Liao
was a key supporter of Sun who founded the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance
(Tongmenghui) in 1905, which later became the KMT, of which Liao was a leading
member of the executive committee.
Sun modeled his early revolutionary ideas on American democratic values,
particularly those of Lincoln, from whose Gettysburg Address Sun derived his
Three People's Principles - "of the people, by the people and for the people" -
while adopting Hamiltonian political economic nationalism updated with
Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy to free China from
Western imperialism. Sun became the first provisional president of the Republic
of China in 1912 and Liao was the first finance minister of China when the
provisional government was located in Guangdong.
US 'open-door policy' for China
By the end of the 19th century, Western imperialism had carved up China into
spheres of influence controlled by competing imperialist powers. In 1899, after
the US had become a Pacific power through the acquisition of the Philippines,
US secretary of state John Hay proposed on January 2, 1900, the Open Door
Policy for China to preserve US interests in the huge Chinese market, where the
US was a late comer and had not established a sphere of influence. Hay was US
ambassador to the Court of St James in London in 1897, sent by president
William McKinley when he cemented a longstanding community of interests between
Britain and the US. In August 1898, Hay was named secretary of state and
continued in that post after Theodore Roosevelt succeeded McKinley, until his
own death in 1905.
Hay sent "Open Door Notes" to the major powers with established spheres of
influence in China, namely Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan,
asking them to declare formally that they would uphold Chinese territorial and
administrative integrity and would not interfere with the free use of the
treaty ports within their separate spheres of influence in China. The Open Door
Policy, in essence a regime to keep the Chinese market open to all foreign
powers, thus eliminating the possibility of China playing competitive foreign
powers against each other for defensive advantage, gave the US a moralistic
claim of having saved China from partition like Africa.
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French expeditionary forces,
having marched inland from the coast, reached Beijing. On the night of October
6, French units diverted from the main attack force towards the Old Summer
Palace, known in Chinese as Yuanmingyuan. On October 18, the British high
commissioner to China, Lord Elgin, ordered the destruction of the palace and
British and French invaders carried off numerous treasures. (Lord Elgin, of
Elgin Marbles fame, is also noted for having looted and shipped to London a
huge collection of classical Greek marbles sculptures and architectural members
from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens.)
The artifacts from the Old Summer Palace continue to surface in modern times.
Two Qing dynasty bronze animal heads, one depicting a rabbit and the other a
rat, were put up for auction by Christie in Paris in February 2009. They were
part of a set comprising 12 animals from the Chinese zodiac that were created
for the imperial gardens during the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the 18th
century. The Paris auction followed previous sales of five other heads (pig,
ox, monkey, tiger and horse). China views the relics, installed as
fountainheads at the Old Summer Palace, as a significant part of its cultural
heritage and a symbol of how Western powers encroached on the country during
the Opium Wars.
The Opium Wars and the Open Door Policy contributed to the rise of xenophobia
in China which found expression in the Boxers Uprising against Western
inhabitants and missionaries in foreign concessions in Peking. The uprising
brought about an eight-nation coalition invasion of China in the summer of 1900
that ended with victorious Allied troops conducted a bloodbath of
indiscriminate slaughter, rape, and pillage.
The irony of most-favored nation status
The device used to keep China open to indiscriminate exploitation by all
foreign powers equally was the clause of most-favored nation (MFN) status in
all unequal treaties imposed on China by Western imperialist powers. Unilateral
MFN clauses were first imposed on China by Britain, the most powerful of all
Western imperialist countries, in the unequal Treaty of Nanking of 1841 after
Britain defeated China in the First Opium War, with the ceding of Hong Kong to
Britain permanently as a colony.
MFN status established a floor on which the most egregious concessions granted
by China to any one imperialist power would automatically be granted to all
others enjoying MFN status. MFN clauses demanded non-discrimination by the
Chinese government towards any competing imperialist countries with MFN status.
It effective neutralized any selective protectionist measures on the part of
China. A century later, with MFN status having become a prerequisite for
application for World Trade Organization membership, the US continued to resist
granting China permanent MFN status until 2001 for anti-communist ideological
reasons.
China rejects Western democracy for Socialism
After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, a regime of regional war lords,
each with its own army, emerged in China within the separate spheres of
influence controlled by foreign powers that styled themselves as democracies.
Sun Yat-sen, assisted by Liao Zhong-kai, realized that to unify China against
this regional war lords regime, the young Republic of China needed a national
military, which could be created only by training its own officer corps in a
new military academy.
The Russian October Revolution in 1917 had a profound influence around the
world. In 1921, Chinese nationalists, disappointed with the alliance between
Western capitalist liberal democracy and imperialism, turned to the new Soviet
Union under communism, since it was by default the only anti-imperialist force
at the time. The Western democracies were proving themselves to be eager
imperialist heirs to the imperial governments they overthrew at home.
In 1923, a joint statement by Sun and a Soviet representative in Shanghai
pledged Soviet assistance for China's national unification. The Comintern sent
Soviet advisers such as A A Jeffe (Chinese: Yuefei) and M M Borodin (Chinese:
Baoluoting) to China to aid in building the KMT. Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
members were encouraged to join the KMT as individuals, forming the First
Nationalist-Communist United Front. The CCP was still a small, young party at
the time, having a membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. The KMT in
1922 already had 150,000 members. Today, the CCP has a membership of 70
million.
In early 1923, Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's young lieutenants in Tongmenghui
in Japan, was sent for military and political training in Moscow. He returned
to China in late 1923 to participate in the founding of the Whampoa Military
Academy (Huangpu Junxiao) as its commandant, with Liao as political commissar
for the KMT and Zhou En-lai, a leading member of the CCP, as the deputy
commissar in his individual capacity as a member of the KMT.
In 1924, Sun held the first KMT national party congress, during which he
stressed the Three People's Principle (also translated as sanmin zhuyi -
and as nationalism or minzu zhuyi; democracy, or minquan zhuyi;
and people's livelihood, or minsheng zhuyi) as a strategy against
imperialism. Within the KMT-CCP united front, Sun adopted three major policies:
diplomatically, alliance with the Soviet Union; politically, alliance with the
CCP; and domestically, supporting peasants and workers.
Split between nationalists and communists
After the death of Sun and the assassination of Liao, Chiang, set out as
commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, with CCP support, on the
long-delayed Northern Expedition against the northern warlords to unite China
under KMT control. By 1926, the KMT had divided into left-wing and right-wing
factions. Neither wing had any use for Western democracy, which presented
itself as an agent of imperialism.
The left turned toward communism while the right turned toward fascism with
support Nazi Germany which was challenging the British Empire beginning in
1933. In 1937, Japan having shifted from its alliance with Britain to
reoriented toward Germany, invaded China to launch the Sino-Japanese War, which
morphed into World War II after Pearl Harbor in 1941.
US involvement in China's domestic politics
The US became directly involved in Chinese domestic politics as she entered
World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and
as China became a member of the Allies against the Axis Powers, which included
Japan. For China, World War II, which began in Europe on September 1, 1939, was
merely a continuation of the Sino-Japanese that had begun on July 7, 1937.
After the Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin by Germany, Italy and Japan on
September 27, 1940, China was officially at war with the Axis powers.
Sun's approach of revolution through capitalistic democracy had attracted
financial and political support from US progressive circles and his personal
embrace of Christianity endeared him to US protestant missionary groups active
in China. Thus it was natural that the US elite developed a fraternal
proprietary interest in China while the predominantly ethnic-European US public
continued to wallow in deep-rooted racial prejudice then prevalent in all
Western societies.
China's effort to modernize an ancient society received well-wishing support
form the enlightened US establishment, as exemplified by influential figures
such as China-born of missionary parents Henry Luce in media, John D
Rockefeller in philanthropy, Herbert Hoover in humanitarian relief and Franklin
D Roosevelt in international politics.
By 1924, impressed with the October Revolution of 1917 that eventually led to
the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922,
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
