Politics

With the UK government’s cancellation of Huawei’s 5G infrastructure projects and a recent commitment to asylum seekers from Hong Kong, it’s tempting to conclude that our relations with China are quickly deteriorating. However, just as I pointed out in a previous post, the relationship between China and the West has been remarkably stable for a number of years now.

The sad truth is that, just like a battered spouse, the West is finally beginning to realise just how lopsided and abusive our alleged partnership has been, and for how long.

To put it bluntly, the Chinese Communist Party has been helping the West to fund its own decline for many years, and that decline is carefully designed to ensure that our political, media and business leaders profit greatly from it. Because scrutiny of supply lines does not serve the interests of Western elites, our toxic culture of conspicuous consumerism built on bonded sweatshop labour goes largely unreported. Apple and Nike are two of the worst offenders when it comes to the exquisite hypocrisy of corporate virtue signalling powered by political prisoners who have suicide nets installed in their factories. Do you have suicide nets in your workplace?

I guess Chinese lives don’t matter.

Whether we’re prepared to admit it or not, there’s no escaping the fact that a new Cold War has been raging since at least 2001, although only one of the parties involved seems to have cared or even noticed…until now.

Western democracies have been burdened with a stupefying level of naivete for at least the last century, and its consequences have been far more destructive than anything the coronavirus could ever wreak upon our open and tolerant societies. One of the more insidious side effects of this liberal-democratic mindset is an unfortunate tendency to judge the motivations of others by our own standards. This very often leads Western policy makers to view others as sharing our motives if not our viewpoint, rather than identifying a rival and incompatible belief system for what it really is and effectively challenging it. This peculiar mental pathology remains as much a threat today as it did when Kim Philby was officially cleared of spying for the Soviet Union.

“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”  Sun Tzu’s Art of War

Perhaps the most egregious example of this huge blind spot has been the sense of invincibility that settled over the West when the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989. We thought it was over and we thought we’d won, but that complacency has cost us dear.

Of course, we in the liberal democratic West were not the only ones taking notes as the Soviet experiment collapsed; communist China was also watching carefully, determined not to follow that same road to ruin.