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 Publishing, 231 pages, $27.95)
Most Americans—even those who barely ever read a newspaper—are
by now well aware of China’s astonishing rise to global great power
status over the past four decades, of that country’s phenomenal
wealth and its propping up of the American economy through the
purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds. You would have to have lived since
1980 in a New Mexican rock hideaway not to have become aware of
America’s soaring trade deficit with China or to know that the
People’s Republic of China, no thanks to its Communist founder Mao
Zedong, now probably boasts more billionaires than there are
registered Republicans living in the South Bronx. A growing number
of Americans have also learned that China is fast emerging as a
military superpower, with a military about twice the size of
America’s, naval cruise missiles specifically designed to kill U.S.
carriers, and an amorphous mob of semi-military computer hackers
who routinely take down U.S. government websites.
What few Americans understand, however, is that China is not
merely a friendly economic rival to the U.S., but a nation-state
specifically aspiring to gain global primacy over the U.S. and, in
many areas of contention with America, competing ruthlessly for
national advantage. China, to judge by innumerable official Chinese
policy articles in books and the Chinese media, doesn’t want simply
to emulate American success in the global arena. It wants to
obliterate America’s ability to compete with China in economics,
military affairs, and the “soft power” of international
propaganda.
In the past decade, a few books have warned America of the
“Chinese threat,” from Steven Mosher’s Hegemon to
Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz’s The China
Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America. Other
titles like Martin Jacques’ more recent When China Rules the
World take a sobering look at what kind of global hegemon
China might be if most of its national aspirations came to pass:
not a pretty one, and certainly not with the relatively benign
Anglo-Saxon openness that characterized Britain’s imperial heyday
in the 19th century and most of the American century in our own
time. What Brett Decker (editorial page editor of the
Washington Times) and William Triplett (former chief
Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) bring
to the discussion of China’s growing strength are some alarming new
examples of China’s military connections with rogue regimes around
the world like North Korea and Iran, the crony capitalism
guanxi (“connections”) of the country’s Communist Party
“princelings,” and the constantly expanding role of Chinese “agents
of influence” close to centers of power in official Washington.
The book performs a helpful role in reminding readers of the
sheer nastiness of the Chinese Communist regime; torturing and
beating to death dissidents, crushing religious opponents (both
Christian and Tibetan Buddhist), and the underlying premise of such
behavior: rule by law rather than rule of law. It
also provides a dismaying reminder of how many China apologists
occupy high places in the U.S. government and business communities;
none being more prominent or more shamelessly exculpatory of
Beijing’s political repression than former Secretary of State Dr.
Henry Kissinger.
It seems impossibly long ago now that American optimists in the
1980s were trotting out the lazy cliché that growing Chinese middle
class prosperity would soon enough force the Communist Party to
concede power to some sort of multi-party democratic governance.
After all, went the argument, South Korea and Taiwan were at one
point rather thuggish one-party regimes, but their growing
integration into the global economy and global culture eventually
forced them to ditch their dictatorships and launch forth into
parliamentary democracy. Surely, the argument continued, middle
class economic pressures inside China would soon enough force the
Communist Party to make compromises in favor of true democracy.
What the authors of Bowing to Beijing show, however, is
that precisely the opposite has happened in China. The Chinese
Communist Party has actually strengthened its hold on power by
rewarding loyal supporters, especially at the top of China’s
business tree, with fabulous financial advantages over merely
“ordinary” Chinese entrepreneurs. China’s capitalist class is the
strongest bulwark of the Communist state, say the authors. They
add, “it’s likely that China will continue to become richer without
becoming freer.” What is rather frightening about this observation
is how closely it mirrors the pattern of Nazi Germany. As German
capitalists benefited from Hitler’s crusade to revive the German
national spirit, so they helped reinforce the tyranny of the S.S.
and the Gestapo.
The title of the book is derived from the now infamous
photograph of President Obama bowing, like a British schoolboy to
the Queen of England, during an early meeting with President Hu
Jintao. Indeed a sub-theme of the book is the alleged tendency of
the Obama administration to bend over (in most cases backward) both
to placate Beijing and to downplay any fears that China might
already be posing a significant threat to American interests and
freedom. In one of their more telling anecdotes, the authors
describe the dismay with which many senior American intelligence
analysts responded to the Obama administration’s decision to remove
China from the “Priority One” category that it shared with
countries like Iran and North Korea to “Priority Two,” a category
that placed China as an issue alongside humanitarian problems like
the earthquake in Haiti. The authors remind readers of the more
than 60 examples of Americans indicted for spying for China during
the merely three-year period 2008 to 2011, the 128,000 Chinese
students studying at American universities and completely
overwhelming FBI abilities to keep track of their activities, and
rather unpleasant cases of Chinese “agents of influence” in the
U.S. like the Sanya Group, a cozy club of retired former American
and Chinese military officers. American members of the Sanya group
have been known to attempt to delay the release of congressionally
mandated Pentagon reports of Chinese military power.
BOWING TO BEJING is certainly an alarming reminder
of China’s growing power unrestrained by any normal moral limits.
It also reveals that far too many Americans have succumbed to the
financial inducements of China’s growing “soft power”; for example,
the Confucian Institutes being set up at a number of American
universities. Nominally institutions that make available to
American students knowledge of Chinese language and traditional
culture, the Confucian institutes also function as convenient
propaganda establishments distracting American academics from
paying too close attention to the ugly side of Chinese Communist
rule: the suppression of dissent, the torture, and the constant
lying about the realities of Chinese life.
The overall gloomy picture that emerges from Bowing to
Beijing, however, may not be the last word on China. There are
many brittle weak points in China’s burgeoning economy. Even the
vaunted political stability enforced by the Communist Party, the
People’s Liberation Army, and the Public Security Bureau may not be
impermeable. Thousands of annual domestic protest demonstrations
against corruption and injustice could yet get out of hand, leading
to a serious erosion of China’s great power status, if not a
fundamental political realignment of Chinese politics.
Finally, and not least important, arguably the most important
cultural story in the modern world is the steady Christianization
of China: the demand for morality and accountability and honesty in
national life. China in the historical past has sometimes
demonstrated commendable unity and civilized decency. It would be a
rash prophet who completely ruled out a possible return to those
standards. In that sense, it would be pleasant if some of the worst
fears about China of Decker and Triplett did not come to pass.
