My annual intake of reactionary anti-China, pro-US global strategy book turned out to be a novel version of Kennan's "Long Telegram" for the 21st century.
Friedberg thinks that the Western governments underestimated Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) resilience to liberalism. The expectation was that the country would slowly but surely evolve into a liberal, democratic "partner" of the Western alliance. In Marxist jargon we rather call it a dependent society, a neocolony destined to forever supply the imperialist capital with cheap labour power, mid-level engineering, raw materials and a market.
In many senses, Friedberg's book is a requiem for a miserably failed attempt to neocolonise a country that after 40 years of engagement, ironically managed to become a great power itself.
The author's analysis of how the CCP lured the Western capital into a honey trap of lucrative investments and markets, just to gradually transfer the technology, promote growth and shut the Western criticism against its non-liberal methods while keeping the Party’s rule and vision intact, was really interesting.
Friedberg then proceeds to analyse the transformation that China’s domestic and international economic/political strategies underwent in the last 40 years. These chapters are well-researched but contaminated with many pro-imperialist prejudices and a neocolonial gaslighting (“why are the Chinese rulers so aggressive and skeptic towards US, while so far we have been nothing but friendly, democratic, liberal and generous?”) His Kissinger-ish sense of superiority, entitlement and self-legitimacy is terrifying.
The book becomes “red in tooth and claw” in the final chapter. Friedberg says,
“The United States and its partners must mobilize their societies for a protracted rivalry with China and harden them against CCP influence operations; partially disengage their economies from China’s while strengthening ties among themselves; intensify military preparations and diplomatic measures to deter coercion or aggressionİ and actively challenge Beijing’s ideological narratives, both in the developing world and, to the extent possible inside China itself.”
He brazenly recommends that China must be represented as “the other against whom [the western] societies must now rally in self-defense” because “strengthening feelings of solidarity and national identity among Americans … will require othering authoritarian and illiberal countries”.
Seems like a new “red-scare” is on the making, not only to stop China’s rise but also to oppress the brewing domestic turmoil that the crisis of capitalism is destined to cause.
This is an important book, because I believe the ideas in it have already become a blueprint of the US-led Western alliance’s policies against China, and it will only get worse in the coming years.
