How China almost became an American backyard

262 Pages·2017·3.57 MB·English

How China almost became an
American backyard
China versus the United States in comparative perspective
Bertrand M. Roehner
ABRACA PUBLISHING
2017
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ABRACA PUBLISHING
Roehner, 26 ruePoliveau,Paris 75005,France
[email protected]
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/∼roehner
First Published2017. Commentsare welcome.
Printed inFrance
Thispublicationisnotcopyrightedin thesensethat
itscontentcan beused withoutrestrictionfornon-commercialpurposes.
ISBN 978-2-9500181-0-6
EAN9782950018106
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“We have got to keep the Pacific as an American lake.”
— President Eisenhower, Security Conference, 2 June 1954 (FRUS)
“What should we be doing? We should be reaching out to our allies and
constituencies within China. There are 500 million internet users in China
and 80 million bloggers. They are bringing about change, the likes of
which is gonna take China down.”
—Jon Huntsman, former US ambassador in Beijing, 12 November 2011
“I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down
the Soviet Union.”
—Ted Malloch, Deputy Chief at the “United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe” from 1988 to 1992.
16 November 2016 (interview given to the BBC)
“Current [US] rules on campaign finance are an abomination. A regime
that allows a minority of wealthy people to use their wealth to determine a
political outcome for the majority cannot be called a democracy.”
—Jon Huntsman, Lecture given at UCLA on 16 April 2014
[Speaking of Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang] “A person who denies his own
culture does not have a future”.
—Chinese Physics Nobel prize winners, T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang. cited in
Jong 1989
There is a strong family resemblance about the misdeeds, and if you have
allthedetailsofathousandatyourfingerends,itisoddifyoucan’tunravel
the thousand and first.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear (1915)
Quoi! Des cohortes e´trange`res feraient la loi dans nos foyers!
—French national anthem (excerpt of 3rd verse), July 1792
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Table of contents
Preface
Ch. 1 The sweet drug of Americanization
Ch. 2 Dollar vs. renminbi
Ch. 3 The Pacific as an American lake
Ch. 4 “Our constituencies in China”
Ch. 5 How to start revolutions
Ch. 6 US influence in Russia (1991-1999)
Ch. 7 Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang and Tiananmen
Ch. 8 Conclusion about foreign political influence
Ch. 9 Conclusion about Deng’s domestic legacy
Ch. 10 The US foreign affairs machinery
Ch. 11 Acronyms
References
Most of this book was written in the first semester of 2015. Additional material was
included subsequently whenever coming to the attention of the author.
List of figures, tables and text boxes
Fig.2.1: Share of central bank reserves of the pound sterling and dollar respectively.
Fig.2.2: Advantages of a common trade currency
Fig.3.1a US possessions in the Pacific. First set consisting of 20 islands.
Fig.3.1b US possessions in the Pacific. Second set consisting of 27 islands.
Fig.3.2: Silk road projects
Fig.3.3: Relentless and well-organized public relations campaigns by small groups
of activists.
Fig.3.4: US-China visits of military officials
Fig.3.5 A Chinese amphibious dock ship (type 071) and the guided missile cruiser
USS Cowpens
Fig.4.1a,b: China’s Leaders in Development Executive Program (2012)
Fig.4.2: How Harvard comes to China
Fig.4.3: Performance of national healthcare systems
Fig.4.4: State Department endorsement of the ICMA China Center
Fig.4.5: Income inequality
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Fig.4.6: Meeting of February 2010 between the Dalai Lama and President Obama
Fig.4.7: AmbassadorHuntsmaninaflash-mobdemonstrationinBeijingon20Febru-
ary 2011
Fig.4.8: Bernard-Henri Le´vy with two Syrian “freedom fighters” (May 2012).
Fig.4.9: Actions by a group which called itself the “HomMen”.
Fig.4.10: Russian President Boris Yeltsin with US and Chinese presidents.
Fig.4.11: French president Sarkozy and US president Bush
Fig.4.12: Protection by US Diplomatic Security special agents
Fig.5.1: Polish poster for the election of 4 June 1989
Fig.5.2: The rendition program
Fig.5.3: The 15 republics which constituted the USSR
Fig.5.4: Protests in Hong Kong
Fig.6.1: GDP per capita in Russia.
Fig.7.1: President Reagan walking with Premier Zhao Ziyang during his visit to the
White House in 1984.
Fig.7.2: Gene Sharp in Beijing in late May 1989
Fig.7.3: Liberty statue on Tiananmen Square in 1989
Fig.7.4: Violence and casualties
Fig.8.1: Celebrating the President of Venezuela
Copyright notice: Most of the pictures are either made by the author or are in the
public domain. However, if you think you are the copyright owner of one of them
then please get in touch so that we can find an arrangement.
Table 1: Meetings of US presidents with the Dalai Lama
Table 2.1: Share of the renminbi in financial markets (2014)
Table 3.1: Challenges to US hegemony in the Pacific
Table 4.1: Foreign students in the US
Table 4.2: French and British “grantees” of the “International Visitor Leadership
Program”
Box 2.1: The dollar in disarray in the 1960s
Box 3.1: Military incidents between China and the US
Box 4.1: Amway in China
Box 4.2: “We will send you to Harvard”
Box 4.4: Liu Xiaobo
Box 4.5: Chronology of WikiLeaks
Box 4.6: The BitTorrent procedure
Box 4.7: Riot in Guanxi (excerpts of a Wikileaks file)
Box 4.8: Discussion with US political officer about North Korean nuclear tests
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Box 4.9: Discussion with US political officer about Chinese oil supply to North
Korea
Box 5.1: Contacts between US intelligence experts and leaders of Baltic countries
Box 5.2: Possible scenario of a Baltic country-like episode in China.
Box 7.1: Stone Corporation / Stone Institute
Box 8.1: Xu Zhiyong
Preface
A distinctive characteristic of the present study is that, as advocated in Roehner and
Syme (2002), it uses a comparative approach. We strongly believe that comparisons
bring with them a deeper understanding. Comparison makes us realize that people
and nations are more alike than might be thoughtat first sight. Justto give oneexam-
ple in the West it is customary to ridicule the fact that in the USSR photographs were
retouched to remove leaders fallen in disfavor. Yet, something similar happened in
the United States during the Cold War. When the movie “Friendly Persuasion” was
released in 1956 the screenwriting credit was left blank because the actual screen-
writer, Michael Wilson, was on the Hollywood blacklist. His credit was officially
restored in 1996. The same thing happened in 1957 for the film “The Bridge on the
River Kwai”. The screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were on the
Hollywood blacklist and could only work on the film in secret. The official credit
was given to Pierre Boulle, the French author of the novel on which the film was
based. Despite the fact that he did not speak English the Oscar for Best Screen-
play was awarded to him! Only in 1984 did the “Academy of Motion Picture Arts”
rectify the situation by retroactively awarding the Oscar to Foreman and Wilson,
posthumously in both cases. Incidentally, Wilson also wrote a script for a movie
about the “Industrial Workers of the World”. Titled “The Wobblies”, this movie was
never produced.
A second characteristic (which is in fact a consequence of the first) is that our ap-
proach brings to light interactions between countries. All too often interferences of
foreign countries are largely overlooked. Taking exogenous factors into account is a
crucial requirement of a scientific approach.
As an illustration one can mention the role of US “advisers” in the privatization pro-
grams set up in Russia after 1992. Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article entitled “Pri-
vatization in Russia” does not mention any foreign advisers. Yet, in the present case,
far from being hidden, US influence was channeled through well-known institutions
such as:
• The “Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission”, named after US Vice-President Al
Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. In the Wikipedia article
aboutthis commission, its rolein theprivatization isindeed recognized butdescribed
Preface 9
only very briefly at the end of the article.
• The “Harvard Institute for International Development” (HIID) advised the
Russian government on privatization. It was headed by Harvard Professor Andrei
Shleifer and supported by funding from the State Department’s “US Agency for In-
ternational Development” (USAID). Among several other Harvard figures who par-
ticipated in theprivatization, onecan mentionJeffreySachs (whohad alreadycarried
out the privatization program in Poland), Jonathan Hay (in 2000 he was indicted for
conflict of interest together with Shleifer), Marshall Goldman and Graham Allison.
With the exception of Shleifer, none of these “advisers” was fluent in Russian. In
fact, although we call these persons “advisers”they were much more than just advis-
ers.
Why did we say that a scientific approach must necessarily take into account exter-
nal forces? Consider a physicist who wants to measure the period of a pendulum.
Supposethat during the experiment heleaves open the windows and doorsof his lab-
oratory. As a result, the pendulum will be exposed to fluctuating air flows; certainly
this will lead to poor accuracy measurements. Note that even with closed doors and
windows one will face the same problem if the pendulum is subject to air flows from
the air conditioner. In this case, the device is endogenous but it is powered by an
exogenous source of energy. This would parallel domestic groups, for instance non-
governmental organizations (NGO), that are domestic but funded from abroad. The
example of the pendulum suggests that a study which would ignore external factors
will lead to fairly shaky conclusions. Moreover, foreign forces cannot be reduced
to their most visible parts such as foreign trade or diplomatic contacts. These parts
represent only the tip of the iceberg. When Indian NGOs get part of their funding
from the Ford Foundation this will certainly affect their actions although it may not
be easy to know to what extent. Identifying and describing (more or less hidden)
foreign forces will be one of the main objectives of the present study.
A third characteristic of the present study is that it tries to combine microhistorical
views and macrohistorical perspective. What do we mean by that? In all big events
(e.g. insurrections, revolutions, onset of wars) there are some defining moments.
Unless one can get an understanding of such events it will be difficult to understand
the meaning of the big event. So, in order to shed as much light as possible on such
moments we will describe them in great detail. In other words, the magnification of
our historical microscope will not be kept constant but will have to be adapted to our
needs.
Cold War versus China bashing
During the Cold War, there was a fierce competition between two ideologies. At
10 Preface
that time, the Communist model was still implemented in the Soviet Union in forms
which were easily recognizable: state owned enterprises, collective agriculture, little
emphasis on consumer products, limited possibilities for Soviet citizens to travel
abroad. A number of such aspects, not to speak of the repression of the uprisings in
Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968) made criticcizing the Soviet model fairly easy.
For China it is a different picture. Its average real annual growth rate of about 8%
from 1950 to 2014 has few historical parallels. Moreover, the increase of wages
followed the rise of the Gross Domestic Product, ar least since the end of the 1980s.
ThiseconomicsuccessposesarealchallengetotheUnited States. Hence, itbecomes
essential to critisize the successes, belittle the achievements, stress the failures (such
as the crisis of 1960-1961), and emphasize any possible dark aspects whether real
or invented. This is the core and rationale of China bashing. Roughly it may be
summarized by saying that it is almost impossible to find in American mainstream
media any positive assessment about what China has done. “OK, the “Three Gorges
dam is the largest in the world but over a million persons had to be displaced”. “OK,
the Chinese high speed train network was established in record time, but at the price
of a number of corruption scandals”, and so on and so forth.
The crux of the matter is the realization that a free newspaper with a worldwide
distribution can be set up for the cost of only one fighter jet. Take the example of the
“Epoch Times”. This is a weekly anti-Chinese newspaper with a paper distribution
of 1.5 million in about 30 countries1.
Did President Hu Jintao fall in a trap in 2006 at the White House?
It is of course impossible to prove that President Hu was set up (or stitched up in
British parlance). The only thing that can be done is to present the facts and then let
readers reach their own conclusions.
So, let us first describe what happened in the afternoon of 21 April 2006 in the
backyard of the White House during the wellcome ceremony for President Hu.
The weather was beautiful and, with President Bush on its side, President Hu started
to read his message. After having spoken for about 20s he stopped waiting for the
translation to be given. Just when the translation started another voice was heard
which came from the back of the audience where the cameramen were posted on a
stage. The tranlation lasted some 15s but the shouting continued as President Hu
was supposed to speak again. Obviously he did not know what to do; should he
stop or go on? In a low voice President Bush told him “You are OK” but he did
not make any gesture toward the numerous aids which were around to tell them
to stop the protestor. So, President Hu resumed his declaration but by now all the
1Ifthepaperweresolditwouldcostmaybe2euros.Thus,foroneyearthetotalcostcanbeestimatedat:52×1.5×2=
156milliondollarswhichisindeedofthesamemagnitudeasthecostofafighteraircraft.