John Robson: Beijing’s Turn Toward Cute Puppy Diplomacy Shouldn’t Be Trusted

A China Central Television news broadcast shows footage of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, on a giant screen outside a shopping mall in Beijing on June 19, 2023. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

One of Robson’s Rules of History is “Never attack the Anglosphere.” Doing so might seem redundant these days given the harm we’re already inflicting on ourselves, from fiscal policy to gender. But free societies possess an extraordinary resilience tyrannies can neither understand nor match. And the runner’s faltering steps, laboured breathing, and uneasy looks in China’s “Hundred Year Marathon” show a serious problem.

The Economist recently wondered, “Is Chinese power about to peak?” and NBC asked, “Why does China suddenly seem open to warmer U.S. ties?” Well, it’s not from the goodness of their hearts, that’s for sure.

Of course, I don’t trust the MSM’s take on tyrannies, which has been far too inclined toward appeasement and even self-loathing since at least the 1930s. Nor most Western politicians inclined to mistake any aggressor’s tactically softer tone for evidence that there never were real differences, just misunderstandings. One vain would-be statesperson after another think they’ve made “a good and I think important start” in repairing relationships, and now we must forget the aggressive conduct by the other side that caused the breach.

Still, even NBC suspected “Better ties with the U.S. may be about one thing: China’s struggling economy.” Finally. Most Western commentators have been even more deluded than Chinese authorities about the PRC’s real economic strength. But the Chicoms had no idea how their “wolf warrior” diplomacy would be received in the West. Even in Canada the exposure of their meddling, and egregious bad manners when caught, have caused a significant public setback.

Partly they thought we were ready to be pushed over. The reason tyrannies cannot match free societies’ resilience is that they cannot understand it. For my sins I am still reading Xi Jinping’s “The Governance of China,” and staggering through Volume II I find he claims to have read both Locke and Friedman. But if so, he learned nothing worthwhile, whereas from this trilogy also called “Xi Jinping Thought” I have learned much including that one can be bored and horrified simultaneously.

This collection of speech excerpts is a turgid and treacherous mess. Turgid because China’s Maximum Leader tends to speak in conflicting generalities, calling for originality that toes the party line, caution without timidity, and so forth.

Of course Aristotle, whom Xi also claims to have read, wisely advocated a golden mean between sterile or perilous alternatives nearly 2,500 years ago. And as usual in life, pace legendary Oakland Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler, “easy to call, hard to run.” But Xi’s prose is also treacherous because party cadres, naturally forced to study his ideas, cannot possibly choose any course of action (or inaction) that does not expose them to reproach from one side or the other, or both, at the whim of arbitrary individual authority or a sudden shift in the party line.

Xi’s thought and style appear to me to reflect personal as well as party and national trauma from the Cultural Revolution. He never commits himself in a way he could not subsequently deny, despite now holding supreme unaccountable power. I recently saw a Politburo photo where all the members with enough hair had adopted precisely his “do.” Grotesque. But this Yertle also betrays very real and deep anxieties about China’s shaky economy, fractured society, and cynical officials.

Far too few Western pundits understand that “Despite being the world’s second largest, China’s economy is obese and weak. Inadequate capacity for innovation is its Achilles heel,” Xi writes. Hence all the intellectual property theft. And while the PRC is now “a major factor in changing the world political and economic landscapes ... it remains the case that China’s economy is big but not strong.”

That Xi and his colleagues nevertheless made a deliberate, public plan to become the dominant global power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the “Revolution,” then from 2050 to impose what they call “harmony” on our messy planet, is a tribute to the incapacity of tyrannies to process information even when they manage to gather it. They lacked the internal strength for the effort, and nobody who saw it dared speak.

Their growing doubts have prompted a turn toward cute puppy diplomacy that should not be trusted. Not primarily because it’s devious, though it is. Because its leaders’ vision of how a society, and the globe, should be ordered remains defective in more or less exactly the ways “The Governance of China” lays out. And Xi is growing impatient at age 70, while a key marker of political system illegitimacy is the absence of any mechanism for orderly transitions.

What they want is still bad for us, and indeed for them, and they still want it. So they should be told firmly if they want plenty and peace for their people, they must ditch their bullying efforts to conquer the world. Is it so much to ask?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.