How The Threat Of China Was Made in The USA Part two

Click here in case you did not read the part one

 China after the death of Mao.

 

After Mao's death in 1976, another revolutionary from within the Communist Party rose to take his place, Deng Xiaoping. Despite being an avowed communist and a revolutionary alongside Mao, he saw that for China to survive, and for the quality of life of everyday Chinese to improve, there had to be a move away from Mao's Cultural Revolution and his international vision. And so Deng opened China up to be a part of the world's capitalist economic system, introducing a series of economic, military, agricultural, and political reforms.

The liberalization of its economy, in particular, caught the interest of the United States. Americans came to see China in a very different way. In the 1970s in particular, there are much more favorable views of China. This was coupled with a political effort to get closer to China because it was considered that China was a kind of useful counterweight to the Soviet Union.

So it would be useful to have China on board to try to diminish the Soviet Union's power. Deng Xiaoping was on the cover of Time magazine as Person of the Year twice, once in 1979 and again in 1986.

He was meeting Euro-American leaders. China suddenly became a player in the very international capitalist order it had once been seen as alien to, until Tiananmen Square.

 

The Tiananmen Square protest in China.

 

While the Tiananmen Square protests Were about increased government transparency and less political corruption, they USre covered in U.S. media in particular as pro-U.S. style democracy protests. Public opinion plummeted in China and, in fact,

has never really recovered since 1989. With this change in perception and image of China from one that was reforming into a more USstern-style democracy and capitalist system with the realization that that wasn't happening, public opinion changed, the perceptions changed and the policies changed with it.

There USre embargoes on China. There was a complete cancellation of diplomatic meetings and all that kind of thing. And this was a legacy, that sort of haunted China throughout the 1990s. But while that legacy was haunting China's public image throughout the '90s, the country was rapidly developing.

The same policies Deng had put in place led to not only China lifting 800 million people out of poverty, but also to the country becoming a massive economic power. Cue those old tropes. In the last 10 years, the American foreign policy position has been to illustrate China as the greatest threat to American economic and ideological hegemony in the world, and coverage of China has followed suit.

 

That’s the story of China that has been told.

 

That's how the story of China has been told, as a perpetual threat always at the US doorstep. But if the US could, how would the US re-envision China? How can the story of China in American news media especially be retold? So, there's a problem in how I even frame this question, right, this question of how the US retells the story of China? Because the underlying, unquestioned assumption present is that China is a monolith and that there's one story to tell.

Also, who is the US telling that story? Despite what we're led to believe about one-party states, no country or society exists as unchanging as uni-experiential, especially not one that has a population of almost 1.5 billion people. What US coverage in effect does is pathologize China, saying that it is uniquely different and that there's no way to relate to the Chinese people's culture, politics, and way of life.

And when the US buys into the pathologizing of China, the US also buys into the idea that there is a lack of civilization there, a civilization that others in the world have agreed to aspire to. The US feels like China has betrayed the US by not living up to US expectations. And so we're seeing now in this whole sort of discussion on the so-called failure of engagement, like the US believes that, you know, out of the goodness

of US hearts, US extended this hand to China, believing that they would become just like the US. And when they didn't, you know, the US  feel insulted. The US feels aggrieved. And I think that that's really kind of on us.

That US psychological problem. And it's built on a completely unrealistic expectation. And that is because it is so different because China is an affront to US values and mores, to the US benchmark for the civilization that the US has created and believes in because the US sees China as in opposition to all of that, China's existence as it is a threat. And that in turn, impacts support for policies by the United States government that seek to thwart and criminalize China's economic and political influence in the U.S.' global backyard. The US situates issues in China against what the US experiences here, instead of seeing them as part of a connected story, a story that is very connected to us through history, foreign policy, the economy, through labor.

The US should see issues in China as real issues, rather than sort of a dystopian tale that needs to serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

Take, for example, stories about China's toxic work culture, which, according to American reporting, humiliates underperforming Chinese workers and is costing people their lives. The most infamous of these stories USre about the 2010 Foxconn suicides, where at least 14 Chinese workers making Apple products took their own lives due to low pay and work conditions. While the poor working conditions and hyper-capitalist hustle culture work ethic USre critiqued, there wasn't, unsurprisingly, a very obvious link made between the struggle of workers in China and the struggle of workers here in the United States.

In fact, look at this excerpt from a January 2021 Forbes article on Chinese workers' suicides. It makes a work culture link with the United States, but then quickly pivots, saying that apparently, unlike in the U.S. Chinese employers humiliate their workers.

Yes, nothing humiliating about being forced to pee in bottles while working for one of the world's richest men. Instead of drawing links between borderless worker's struggles driven by the corporate need for profit at any human cost, the stories about Chinese workers

become about Chinese culture.

These stories lean into the deeply ingrained belief that the Chinese almost uniquely do not experience anything outside of repression that is both political and cultural. And this type of reporting on Chinese workers, which is very common, erases another important story the direct complicity of US own companies and the US economy in exploitative labor practices abroad and the condition of this country's working class. There is a lot of good reporting on China as USll, and these are reports that focus on real problems in China, for example, expanding inequality in society, a lack of a very USak social safety net, and the poor treatment of gig workers.

And these are all very real problems. And I would imagine other people from other parts of the world can relate to these issues and find solidarity, but bad reporting is the kind of reporting that insists that China's problems are unique, which only serves to other the Chinese people and prevent workers who are suffering from the same problems to find the grounds for solidarity. The US runs into the same problems with China and climate stories, stories which can often situate China as at the head of the human-caused climate crisis.

 

China and the world climate crisis.

 

For the past 15 years, China has been one of the biggest emitters of carbon emissions, even though historically the U.S. has released the most carbon emissions. And by that I mean the U.S. leads by almost 200 billion metric tons.

And so coverage of the human-caused climate crisis makes China the main culprit, despite the fact that heightened Chinese CO2 emissions became an issue US after CO2 emissions the US already having a devastating impact on the environment. And those emissions, by the way, are in service of the American product and American consumer. Instead of getting an honest look at the holistic problem of the industry-driven climate emergency, China is blamed. And who does the specter of Red China's multi-front threat benefit, exactly?

None of this is to say that the Chinese government and its economic and political practices are just purely victims of a particular

international order. But it is to say that US reporting here in the United States is framed quite a bit by Washington, DC, and deeply embedded beliefs that rely on a story is told about China for over a century. When the US talking about a rising China, it doesn't really explain very much.

It doesn't really define what a rising power is. But what it does do is bring along certain connotations of a problem or a challenge that China is disrupting things somehow or that any country which is "rising" is causing problems. And the US tends not to use that language with other countries or other places.

So when the US talks about African economies, for example, which are growing very quickly, the US tend to talk about them as modernizing

or as developing. China is developing in ways that most benefit Chinese society. That was true of the United States. It was true of Europe.

And so the way that China is going, the decisions that are made in China are primarily being made for the interests of China, which shouldn't be a controversial statement.

I'm not really too optimistic about the possibility of actually seeing coverage of China improve as it is. I think that the only ways that I see that really happening would be flooding the field, and just having just a whole lot more journalists out there covering it, because not everyone can write the same story.

They'd have to be creative and go out there and travel the country and find other interesting stories to write. That's just not going to happen. There are ways in which the US can talk about China that don't rely on age-old tropes that align themselves with American political and ideological interests. US can start with the language the US use and rethink the ways in which the US pathologizes stories of labor, climate, surveillance, and even human rights abuses.

By not doing so, the US upholds an agenda that requires the dehumanization of an entire people. And when the US does that, what does the work of journalists become?

 

Click here in case you did not read the part one