(continue from last post)
Starbucks Delusion
After Fairbank passed away in 1991, the CCP's influence in the U.S. continued. On the recommendations of politicians, U.S. administrations have, in general, taken an appeasement approach towards China in the past four decades.
There was a belief among American scholars in the 1980s that, as China opened up more and adopted more of the American lifestyle, such as eating fast food like McDonald’s, the Chinese would think more like Americans and political reform would transform China. Even the Tiananmen Square Massacre did little to squelch that belief.
“The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night,” wrote Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and self-described progressive, adding that the freedom to order Starbucks would be an indicator of democracy. “So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China – trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.'s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines have triumphed over Marx,” he wrote in a June 2004 New York Times article titled “The Tiananmen Victory” to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the event.
If scholars’ mistakes in the 1940s helped the CCP to take over China, their failure to learn the lesson in “The Farmer and the Snake” helped the CCP to become a global power and advance communist ideology globally as we see now.
Before Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji visited the U.S. in 1999 to discuss China’s entry into the WTO, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro published The Coming Conflict with China in 1998. These two former Beijing bureau chiefs with long experience in Asian affairs warned America of China’s continuing portrayal of America as the enemy, China’s increasing military strength, and its concerted efforts to hijack technology. The authors also analyzed Beijing’s “rigorous attempts - often through American corporations profiting in China - to influence U.S. policy” as well as espionage.
“We are brought face-to-face with the startling implications of the trade imbalance between the United States and China (our deficit is $40 billion and growing). We learn of the struggles within the Chinese leadership and how assertive Chinese nationalism augurs a turbulent period ahead,” wrote the authors, “This book is an informed and illuminating examination of a high-stakes clash of competing ideologies and economic interests.”
But Ezra Vogel, then Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, dismissed these concerns and defended the CCP. During a hearing in the Committee on Foreign Relations in the U.S. Senate on April 11, 2000, Vogel and 11 other scholars were strongly in favor of granting the CCP Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) and WTO.
“China's workers need higher labor standards, but opposing Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China is not going to help... Whoever may benefit from a sanctions approach to trade with China, it will certainly not be Chinese workers or their children,” wrote the open letter.
Twenty years have passed and the Chinese people are still suffering under the communist regime. The only difference is that the CCP is stronger and more powerful worldwide, suppressing opinions globally and threatening the free world.
Learning from Lessons
Yu Ying-shih, a renowned Chinese-born American historian, said that many scholars outside of China who study the CCP had some level of idealistic bias instead of looking at solid facts.
The lessons mentioned in this article are not limited to Fairbank alone, as many other scholars have also been deceived by the CCP’s propaganda. Over the past few decades, the CCP has changed its narrative from time to time to serve its own growth, expansion, dominance, and control. Similar things also happened with the Soviet Union Communist Party (SUCP).
Fortunately, some scholars were able to see through the CCP’s tactics. One example is Roderick MacFarquhar, author of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. In a book review he wrote for Mao’s Great Famine, he explained the scale of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961): demographer Judith Banister estimated a death toll of over 30 million with solid academic analysis, while senior journalist Yang Jisheng suggested 36 million.
“Perhaps the crucial source is the finding of a team of two hundred officials sent out by Premier Zhao Ziyang at the beginning of the reform era in the 1980s to assess the human impact of the famine... The report was never published, but according to a senior member of the team, Chen Yizi, in exile in the US since the Tiananmen events, the conclusion was that the number of excess deaths ranged from 43 to 46 million,” he wrote.
There have been other scholars who really understand the CCP. Michael Pillsbury, Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, is such an example. In his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, he referred to a CCP plan to replace the U.S. as world leader 100 years after its establishment in 1949. The book was written based on declassified files and other resources available.
Michael Pillsbury (whose Chinese name is Bai Ruibang) and his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
The book mentioned two defectors, “Mr. White” and “Ms. Green,” who came to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Mr. White said “the power of the hawks, and their sweeping effort to crush pro-American sentiment in the country” had gained support from Deng Xiaoping. Ms. Green said Deng and his successor Jiang Zemin wanted to cooperate with the U.S. Unfortunately, U.S. officials chose to believe in Ms. Green.
Mr. White also said, “a strategy was devised to build a winning pro-China coalition inside the American government.” But U.S. officials still did not listen. Later Ms. Green was proven to be a double agent and many incidents by then had confirmed Mr. White’s prediction. But it was too late. Helping the Chinese economy and its entry into the WTO did not improve democracy in China. Instead, it made the CCP’s economy and media more powerful.
Ms. Green described “a secret unit at the top of the Chinese leadership that controlled the media carefully to ensure that only the ‘right’ messages got out about China. The key, she said, was to shape messages to foreign nations, and especially the United States, by first disseminating them in domestic channels.”
“She revealed that the operation had a $12 billion annual budget and was run by the Politburo’s Standing Committee,” Pillsbury wrote in the book. “The other component of this operation was a secret unit... called the United Front Work Department and has its own intelligence collection and analysis capability.”
One example is how the CCP influenced a U.S. congressional vote in 2000 on trade normalization between China and the United States as well as China’s full membership within the WTO. “The strategy of the program in this instance was to suppress information both inside China and overseas about China’s absolute opposition to relinquishing its socialist economy, and to imply instead that China’s moderate reformers wanted to move to a free market and were likely to succeed in doing so. This line would be needed to win over a generally skeptical U.S. Congress.”
(to be continued in next post)
Starbucks Delusion
After Fairbank passed away in 1991, the CCP's influence in the U.S. continued. On the recommendations of politicians, U.S. administrations have, in general, taken an appeasement approach towards China in the past four decades.
There was a belief among American scholars in the 1980s that, as China opened up more and adopted more of the American lifestyle, such as eating fast food like McDonald’s, the Chinese would think more like Americans and political reform would transform China. Even the Tiananmen Square Massacre did little to squelch that belief.
“The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night,” wrote Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and self-described progressive, adding that the freedom to order Starbucks would be an indicator of democracy. “So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China – trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.'s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines have triumphed over Marx,” he wrote in a June 2004 New York Times article titled “The Tiananmen Victory” to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the event.
If scholars’ mistakes in the 1940s helped the CCP to take over China, their failure to learn the lesson in “The Farmer and the Snake” helped the CCP to become a global power and advance communist ideology globally as we see now.
Before Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji visited the U.S. in 1999 to discuss China’s entry into the WTO, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro published The Coming Conflict with China in 1998. These two former Beijing bureau chiefs with long experience in Asian affairs warned America of China’s continuing portrayal of America as the enemy, China’s increasing military strength, and its concerted efforts to hijack technology. The authors also analyzed Beijing’s “rigorous attempts - often through American corporations profiting in China - to influence U.S. policy” as well as espionage.
“We are brought face-to-face with the startling implications of the trade imbalance between the United States and China (our deficit is $40 billion and growing). We learn of the struggles within the Chinese leadership and how assertive Chinese nationalism augurs a turbulent period ahead,” wrote the authors, “This book is an informed and illuminating examination of a high-stakes clash of competing ideologies and economic interests.”
But Ezra Vogel, then Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, dismissed these concerns and defended the CCP. During a hearing in the Committee on Foreign Relations in the U.S. Senate on April 11, 2000, Vogel and 11 other scholars were strongly in favor of granting the CCP Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) and WTO.
“China's workers need higher labor standards, but opposing Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China is not going to help... Whoever may benefit from a sanctions approach to trade with China, it will certainly not be Chinese workers or their children,” wrote the open letter.
Twenty years have passed and the Chinese people are still suffering under the communist regime. The only difference is that the CCP is stronger and more powerful worldwide, suppressing opinions globally and threatening the free world.
Learning from Lessons
Yu Ying-shih, a renowned Chinese-born American historian, said that many scholars outside of China who study the CCP had some level of idealistic bias instead of looking at solid facts.
The lessons mentioned in this article are not limited to Fairbank alone, as many other scholars have also been deceived by the CCP’s propaganda. Over the past few decades, the CCP has changed its narrative from time to time to serve its own growth, expansion, dominance, and control. Similar things also happened with the Soviet Union Communist Party (SUCP).
Fortunately, some scholars were able to see through the CCP’s tactics. One example is Roderick MacFarquhar, author of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. In a book review he wrote for Mao’s Great Famine, he explained the scale of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961): demographer Judith Banister estimated a death toll of over 30 million with solid academic analysis, while senior journalist Yang Jisheng suggested 36 million.
“Perhaps the crucial source is the finding of a team of two hundred officials sent out by Premier Zhao Ziyang at the beginning of the reform era in the 1980s to assess the human impact of the famine... The report was never published, but according to a senior member of the team, Chen Yizi, in exile in the US since the Tiananmen events, the conclusion was that the number of excess deaths ranged from 43 to 46 million,” he wrote.
There have been other scholars who really understand the CCP. Michael Pillsbury, Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, is such an example. In his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, he referred to a CCP plan to replace the U.S. as world leader 100 years after its establishment in 1949. The book was written based on declassified files and other resources available.
Michael Pillsbury (whose Chinese name is Bai Ruibang) and his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
The book mentioned two defectors, “Mr. White” and “Ms. Green,” who came to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Mr. White said “the power of the hawks, and their sweeping effort to crush pro-American sentiment in the country” had gained support from Deng Xiaoping. Ms. Green said Deng and his successor Jiang Zemin wanted to cooperate with the U.S. Unfortunately, U.S. officials chose to believe in Ms. Green.
Mr. White also said, “a strategy was devised to build a winning pro-China coalition inside the American government.” But U.S. officials still did not listen. Later Ms. Green was proven to be a double agent and many incidents by then had confirmed Mr. White’s prediction. But it was too late. Helping the Chinese economy and its entry into the WTO did not improve democracy in China. Instead, it made the CCP’s economy and media more powerful.
Ms. Green described “a secret unit at the top of the Chinese leadership that controlled the media carefully to ensure that only the ‘right’ messages got out about China. The key, she said, was to shape messages to foreign nations, and especially the United States, by first disseminating them in domestic channels.”
“She revealed that the operation had a $12 billion annual budget and was run by the Politburo’s Standing Committee,” Pillsbury wrote in the book. “The other component of this operation was a secret unit... called the United Front Work Department and has its own intelligence collection and analysis capability.”
One example is how the CCP influenced a U.S. congressional vote in 2000 on trade normalization between China and the United States as well as China’s full membership within the WTO. “The strategy of the program in this instance was to suppress information both inside China and overseas about China’s absolute opposition to relinquishing its socialist economy, and to imply instead that China’s moderate reformers wanted to move to a free market and were likely to succeed in doing so. This line would be needed to win over a generally skeptical U.S. Congress.”
(to be continued in next post)