It makes me wonder why would China perceive the US as the eventual enemy, as
claimed by many American hawks? America is separated from China by the Pacific
Ocean and is in no danger of attacks from a China that places the military least
of its four modernizations.
Besides, why would a revived and assured China dissipate the progress it has
achieved on unproductive wars?
Perhaps the US must focus on other events than Tiananmen to appreciate
China's improvement on human rights far surpasses the period when she suffered
under Western imperialism. The latter is often referred to as "a hundred years
of humiliation." It is this feeling of injustice done to her by the West that to
a large extent motivates her response to perceived Western slights.
Barbara Tuchman's essay, "If Mao Had Come to Washington," revealed that in
January 1945, four and a half years before the communists achieved national
power, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, in an effort to establish a working
relationship with America, offered to come to Washington to talk in person to
President Roosevelt. The objective was to convince the President the Chinese
communist Party represented the future of China. Unfortunately, the US made no
response to the overture.
The author wrote, "If, in the absence of ill feeling, we had established
relations on some level with the People's Republic, permitting communications in
a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to
make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have
been no Korean War with all its evil consequences."
More than 54,000 Americans died in the Korean War (1950-1953), and 58,000 in
the Vietnam War (1954-1975). The wounded were more than 103,000 (Korea) and more
than 153,000 (Vietnam).
In the Korean War China had to communicate with the US through Indian
ambassador K. M. Panikkar. General Omar Bradley did not want Josef Stalin to
involve America "in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and
with the wrong enemy."
America wisely extricated itself and the Korean War was a stalemate.
President Nixon felt that it was perilous for the US to isolate some 1.3
billion angry Chinese. The 1972 rapprochement with China put right what
President Roosevelt failed to do in 1945: It opened a line of communication.
China needs more reassuring than the US because she is the weaker of the two.
She had suffered the ravages of war and a hundred years of humiliation from the
West.
That makes her sensitive and at times 'intransigent'.
China bashing can only propel the Chinese to high resolve, to put right what
she perceived as wrong done to her.
One has to read the extensive research of Iris Chang on China's missile
program, or John W. Lewis and Xue Litai's work on the nuclear research of
China's military, to exhort the US never to isolate China.
She must be allowed to take her rightful place in the world.
[End]
