President Obama is on a nine-day junket soaking up some sun on
the other side of the Pacific. Aside from visiting his boyhood home
of Indonesia, he’s dropped into Hawaii to grace the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit with his presence. In between
calling corporate America lazy and complaining about how his new
half-trillion stimulus package can’t get passed, he’s bellyaching
about China, saying they need to play by the rules. A recent Gallup
poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans perceive the People’s
Republic to be a threat, but they’re not exactly sure why. Here’s a
list of 10 books to help the curious reader bone up on Beijing:
When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and
the Birth of a New Global Order by Martin Jacques
(Penguin, 2009): The title says it all. No matter where one travels
around the world, there is a sense of inevitability that the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) is destined to be the next
preeminent global power. This rise can only happen in lockstep with
America’s demise, which also is seen as inevitable due to U.S.
fiscal indiscipline. “Hitherto, the arrival of a new global hegemon
has ushered in a major change in the international order, as was
the case with both Britain and then the United States,” the author,
a columnist for the UK’s leftist Guardian, writes. “Given
that China promises to be so inordinately powerful and different,
it is difficult to resist the idea that in time its rise will
herald the birth of a new international order.”
Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the
World by Joshua Kurlantzick (Yale University
Press, 2008): This must-read shows how Beijing is pulling all the
levers of statecraft to make headway winning friends and
influencing people. In short, the Chinese have courted the world by
taking advantage of the fact that America’s eye has been off the
ball and much of world neglected while we’ve been bogged down in
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “For the Chinese, soft power means
anything outside of the military and security realm, including not
only popular culture and public diplomacy but also more coercive
economic and diplomatic levers like aid and investment and
participation in multilateral organizations,” the author, a fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains. “It can threaten
other nations with these sticks if they do not help China achieve
its goals, but it can offer sizable carrots if they do.” The recent
entreaty for Beijing to bail out the collapsing euro zone is an
example of how the PRC can buy U.S. allies by sprinkling financial
goodies around.
Mao: A Reinterpretation by Lee Feigon (Ivan
R. Dee, 2003): This is one of the most dastardly dissertations
published thus far in the 21st century because its aim is to let
Mao off the hook for the tens of millions of souls who perished
under his monstrous rule. “It was not until the late 1950s that Mao
became a genuinely creative and original thinker and actor,” the
author sings. “Not only did Mao begin the process of opening up
China to the outside world, he also created the industrial
infrastructure that laid the basis for the resuscitation of the
Chinese economy during the Deng years.” He takes offense that Mao
is frequently compared to Hitler and Stalin and praises the Chinese
villain for being more of an anarchist than a Marxist and for
leading a truly populist “inclusive revolution” as opposed to one
framed by Ivory Tower intellectual elites. It’s helpful to read
this book to understand to what lengths Sino apologists will go to
whitewash the history of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP).
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating
Catastrophe, 1958-1962 by Frank Dikotter (Walker,
2010): This groundbreaking work, which is based on Chinese archives
never before seen, is vital to countering pro-communist revisionist
trash like the Mao encomium by Feigon. The author proves that
Chairman Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward was responsible for
more than 45 million deaths, much more than the previous estimates
of 15-32 million. Although usually explained away as the result of
mass famine accidentally caused by backward agricultural policies,
this book shows that millions were tortured and starved in mass
murder by design similar to what was perpetrated in Nazi Germany,
Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Soviet Union. It’s important not to
forget that today’s Chinese rulers operate in the party that Mao
built, and they still play by his rules.
Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and
Changing the Global Balance of Power by David
Aikman (Regnery, 2003): The former Beijing bureau chief of
Time magazine gives a peak behind the curtain to expose
how the purportedly modern, enlightened Communist Party continues
to persecute and brutalize its own citizens today for the crime of
religious devotion. Beijing’s fundamental operating principle is
control, and it cannot control faith — so it tries to suppress it.
Whether it’s bulldozing house churches, throwing 80-year-old
Catholic bishops into jail, confiscating Bibles from private homes
or sentencing pastors to hard labor, it’s dangerous to believe in
Christ in the Middle Kingdom. It’s a warning that the world would
be a much meaner, brutal place if tyrannical China supplants
freedom-espousing America as the dominant power.
Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s
Reform Era by Teresa Wright (Stanford University
Press, 2010): This is one of the most original works on the PRC is
years because it shatters the myth that as China becomes richer, it
also will naturally become freer. To the contrary, Beijing has
co-opted society’s upwardly mobile. Ironically, some of communism’s
biggest supporters are China’s new millionaires and the
white-collar professional class. The status quo in the country is
working out well for them so there’s no reason to rock the boat.
This newly enriched mob supports repressive policies to keep the
masses down because that limits competition for the country’s
wealth.
China: Fragile Superpower — How China’s Internal Politics
Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise by Susan L. Shirk
(Oxford University Press, 2007): This alternate theory sheds light
on what could happen if the PRC does not in fact gobble up the
planet, shove America aside, and take everything over. There’s a
good chance the whole place could simply crack up and fall apart
due to massive demographic, political, financial, social,
environmental, security, and resource-oriented crises that are all
simmering at the same time. “The worst nightmare of China’s leaders
is a national protest movement of discontented groups — unemployed
workers, hard-pressed farmers and students — united against the
regime by the shared fervor of nationalism,” the author, a former
deputy assistant secretary of state writes. “During an internal
crisis, keeping the lid on at home is much more important than
foreign relations.” How a threatened CCP would react to an
existential threat is anybody’s guess, but Beijing desperation
could pose the most serious danger of a Chinese war. This raises
the question: What happens to the PRC’s nuclear weapons if the
nation breaks up?
The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets
America by Bill Gertz (Regnery, 2000). This
classic was ahead of the curve in warning that the rise of the red
dragon was a phenomenon to fear, not welcome. “The fundamental
lesson of the 20th century is that democracies cannot coexist
indefinitely with powerful and ambitious totalitarian regimes,” the
respected Washington Times national security editor
posits. “Sooner or later the competing goals and ideologies bring
conflict, whether hot or cold, until one or the other side
prevails.” This book lays out all Beijing’s machinations from
proliferating arms and developing space-based weapons to stealing
technology and encircling democratic Taiwan. The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will
Dominate the Twenty-first Century by Stefan
Halper (Basic Books, 2010): This cautionary tale argues that the
democratic age is over, and it’s being replaced by a Chinese model
based on market authoritarianism that prioritizes economic growth
while suppressing political liberties. “China is the principal
international creditor, and we see the possibility of a shift away
from Pax Americana and toward the rising economies of Asia,” the
author predicts. “The market democratic model that America has
promoted as the universal endpoint of political-economic evolution
has been blamed around the world — rightly or wrongly — for its
unregulated excess and for bringing on a multiyear, global
downturn.” The result is a global turn away from freedom in favor
of systems based on more internal control. This dynamic could undo
centuries of progress that have sanctified the value of the
individual.
Bowing to Beijing: How Barack Obama Is Hastening America’s
Decline and Ushering a Century of Chinese Domination
by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II (Regnery,
2011): OK, full disclosure, this book was written by me, but that
means I can guarantee that it’s full of original information about
Beijing’s massive military buildup, corporate espionage, currency
manipulation, Christian persecution, forced sterilizations, slave
labor and human-organ trafficking. Its goal is to convince the
reader why the Beijing Consensus must not be allowed to come to
pass. The takeaway is that the world’s largest debtor nation cannot
remain a superpower for very long, but President Obama is driving
the U.S. economy into the ground, creating China’s opportunity to
dominate us. America needs to clean up its own financial house to
re-solidify its place as the leader of the free world.
