My latest #ThoughtoftheDayonChina: Thanks to Trump, US threat of a ‘peaceful evolution’ recedes for China
Reprinted from today's South China Morning Post
As someone born in the 1960s in China, one of the earliest lessons our generation learned in school was to be vigilant about the perceived dangers of American conspiracies and attempts aimed at subverting and overthrowing the Communist Party of China through peaceful means.
Through classroom teachings, propaganda films and slogans plastered prominently along the streets, we were repeatedly exposed to Chairman Mao Zedong’s warnings about the threat of "peaceful evolution", encapsulated in his assertion that American imperialists would never give up their desire to subjugate China.
Mao began sounding alarms about a peaceful evolution as early as 1959, responding to US policies advocated by John Foster Dulles, then the secretary of state, which marked the initial stages of the ideological Cold War. This strategy aimed to undermine socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China by promoting Western values and inciting dissent against the Communist Party’s rule.
Mao famously remarked that while there was little hope for the United States to incite change among the Chinese people within two generations, the outcome after three generations was uncertain.
Interestingly, three generations later, China has emerged as one of the world’s largest economies and a rising power increasingly viewed as a challenger to America’s superpower status. Meanwhile, the US has shifted away from nation-building efforts and vowed to stop offering lectures on how others should live or govern.
In the first overseas trip of his second term last month, US President Donald Trump told a business crowd in Saudi Arabia that “the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built – and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves”.
“They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves,” he said. He also commended the people in the Middle East for “pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way”.
Trump might speak to the people in the volatile region but his remarks have resonated in China as well. Moreover, some media commentators believe that Trump has effectively articulated the “Trump Doctrine” in foreign policy, focusing on a transactional approach and moving away from the decades of US policy he disparaged as “flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.
As Beijing and Washington go mano a mano across the whole spectrum from trade and technology to human rights, ideology and values, the emerging Trump Doctrine could introduce new dynamics into their bilateral relations.
Historically, China’s leaders have remained mindful of Mao’s warnings about the dangers of “peaceful evolution”, even during periods of close diplomatic, economic and social ties with the US.
They have framed the threat of peaceful evolution in terms of “colour revolutions” or hostile forces seeking to undermine the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule, similar to how they attributed the massive Tiananmen protests in 1989 to manipulation by the US and its Western allies, justifying the subsequent bloody crackdown.
Shortly thereafter, Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader at the time, said the US and its Western allies were waging a third world war without smoke or fire but through peaceful evolution.
Since taking office in late 2012, President Xi Jinping has declared that under his leadership, China has never been closer to achieving the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation nor so close to the centre of the world stage.
But one of his greatest fears remains, reportedly, the potential for a Soviet-style collapse, as Chinese officials believe Western influences and values were significant contributors to the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991.
Last November, Xi met outgoing US president Joe Biden on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru, where the Chinese president spelled out the “four red lines” in defining the boundaries in its relationship with the US. They are: the Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s development right.
Much has been written about the implications of those four red lines. From one perspective, except for the Taiwan question, the other three can be traced back to China’s long-standing fears of a peaceful evolution led by the US and its Western allies.
In particular, the two red lines on democracy and human rights, and path and system, are part of Beijing’s efforts to strengthen its discourse power on those issues which are currently dominated by the US and its Western allies, and which paint China in a negative light. Xi articulated those four red lines to Biden, but the messages were meant for his successor Trump.
Since Trump returned to the White House in January, he has sharpened his “America first” approach at home and abroad by launching a global tariff war and even waging a war against America’s finest education institutions including Harvard, threatening to revoke foreign student visas, and pushing academics out of the country.
As American beliefs and values, once aptly described as of “a city upon a hill”, have lost their lustre, Trump’s declaration that the US is done nation-building and intervening could not have come at a more opportune moment for China.
There is no doubt China and the US will continue to battle it out over trade and technology for years but Chinese officials need no longer be preoccupied with the spectre of peaceful evolution, a concern that once kept their predecessors awake at night.