Cork Irish

Integrating a rapidly developing China into the global political system was always going to be a challenge. China’s cultural assumptions led to conflict with the Western nations early in the modern period. In the late 18th century, when Lord Macartney led a trade mission to the Celestial Kingdom, he was commanded to kowtow before the Emperor: the Western version of the tale tells how he refused to kowtow before a non-Christian, but China’s own annals save national face by claiming that the kowtow was performed. Throughout the 19th century, China found it hard to adjust to the reality that the people they viewed as the “Western Barbarians” were more advanced and more powerful. Even today, the ruling Communist Party carefully nurtures the story of China’s humiliation at the hand of the Western powers. As a result, China comes across as an angry power at times, giving rise to valid questions about the impact that a resurgent China will have on the world as a whole, particularly later in the 21st century.

China’s tale of humiliation between 1840 (the Opium War) and 1949 (the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China) is dubious on various accounts. Firstly, a moral objection to Western colonialism ignores the question of why the Western powers were able to briefly humble the Chinese Empire in the first place. Compared with the landmass of China, Great Britain is but a small dot in the north of the Atlantic Ocean that would comfortably fit several times within some of China’s provinces. Moral considerations projected backwards over more than a century into the past to a time when all the great powers engaged in territorial rivalry—including the loser in this Great Game, China—are just an irrelevance. The real question that needs to be asked is why it was the Western powers and not China that made the modern world. In cultural terms, China was clearly not as great and accomplished as it still holds itself to be. The recognition of that fact has come very hard to China in modern times.

Secondly, if anything the Western powers have done to China really does amount to a century of humiliation, it pales into insignificance compared with China’s own actions in much more recent times. China’s occupation of non-Han territories such as Tibet and East Turkestan has been accompanied by a much more systematic attempt to extirpate the local culture, and even demographically dispossess the local peoples, than anything any nation could ever have attempted by the West in the case of China. The Chinese continue to bring up the Nanking Massacre when up to a quarter of million Chinese were killed by the Japanese—the numbers are disputed, and I do not doubt the willingness of the Chinese to overstate the numbers, just as the Japanese might be inclined to understate them—and like to highlight the use of a history textbook in Japan that glosses over the massacre. But the large numbers of Tibetan and other minority peoples killed, tortured and imprisoned in the modern period are not mentioned in China’s textbooks, and in any case nothing imperialists have done could compare with the 30m deaths in China’s self-inflicted Great Leap Forward.

Thirdly, China, so far from finding its ambitions constrained by the Western powers in the modern world, is permitted to occupy a uniquely privileged position in the global political system. Why does the People’s Republic of China wield a veto in the UN Security Council? Why is China permitted to insist on the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan? Which of the other developing countries has seen a global financial centre (Hong Kong) just land in its lap? The rise of China as the next global power seems to have been accepted by the West, which has invested frenetically to make this scenario come true. Chinese leaders are frequently told by their Western counterparts that this is going to be “China’s Century”, and so why should the Chinese themselves not believe it? There seems to be no substantive reason why China should be an aggrieved power in the modern day. On the contrary, there would be many reasons for China to feel satisfied and relaxed on account of its treatment at the hand of the Western powers today.

China’s essential problem is not that any foreign powers have held back China’s development at any point in history, or even that foreign powers are seeking to constrain China’s rise. Rather, China is resentful of the success of the Western countries. A century of humiliation remains a factor in China’s thinking precisely because China still erroneously believes itself to deserve the top slot in the global pecking order as of right. China’s tragedy is not that pesky Western barbarians harried its coasts a century ago and occupied some ports—China’s economic development would be less rapid today if Britain had not occupied Hong Kong and Japan had not occupied Taiwan—but that so little of China came under Western rule and was transformed by Western rule. China’s cultural assumptions remain intact because it alone of the developing powers was—contrary to the domestic propaganda retailed by the Communist Party—hardly touched by the hand of colonialism. China’s problems are entirely of its own making, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution to the corrupt and exploitative social structure of the modern day. No country has a “rightful” place in the world, and China’s own failure to innovate for centuries in succession mean that its current position in the world as a poor, developing power is the one it deserves.

China’s current economic development is not simply the product of the ruling party’s farsightedness in embarking on economic reforms. China has benefited from a decision made by the Western powers to co-operate with China’s reforms, largely as a function of the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, the Cold War was an unnecessary foreign policy development that led to a series of decisions that have weakened the geopolitical position of the West today. China was brought in from the cold, given a position on the UN Security Council, and subsequently found that the Western willingness to invest, coupled with the role played by the Hong Kong and Taiwan economies, put it in pole position for a rapid rise as a great power. The experience of decades of fast economic growth has created a euphoric rush of blood to the head in China. China has emerged as an important global player, only confirming China’s deep convictions of its rightful place in the global order. In the late 19th century, China started to doubt itself, as witnessed by the top-level debate on the relative roles that Chinese learning and Western learning should play in national development. By contrast, all of China’s cultural assumptions of superiority are currently being confirmed and underlined in its contacts with the West.

China has managed to join the world on its own terms. it has gained leverage over the US through its purchases of US Treasuries—although one could argue the resulting interdependence will prevent China from exercising such leverage. China’s policies towards Taiwan were enforced during the Taiwanese presidency of Chen Shui-bian largely through putting pressure on the US to ensure that Mr Chen did not overstep any of China’s red lines with respect to Taiwanese independence. The US military commitment to Taiwan has therefore meant that the US government has emerged as a key enforcer of China’s geopolitical ambitions. China is a recipient of large inflows of concessional aid from the World Bank and other sources—but also maintains its own aid programme. Sums in excess of US$1bn have been extended by China to clients such as Cambodia and Angola. Sinologists in the West have largely “gone native”: multiculturalism has meant that Chinese language departments in Western universities are staffed with patsies for the rise of China. Many of these claim to be “experts” on Chinese culture, intoning that it is always better to show concern for China’s face in dealings with China, as confrontation is said to be counterproductive in Chinese culture. China is exporting people as fast as it can, and the recent reaction of the Chinese community in the US and elsewhere to international protests against China’s policies in Tibet shows that these communities are largely loyal to China—not their host countries. China refuses to take back its illegal immigrants to Western countries, on the grounds that if they have destroyed their identity papers their nationalities are unknown. Countries with relatively small populations such as Australia and New Zealand could conceivably end up with majority Chinese populations by the end of the 21st century, and politicians in those countries are scrambling to improve relations with China.

Let us take up the point that “it never works to put pressure on the Chinese”. It is undoubtedly true that the Chinese prefer to save face, and prefer to be flattered on the international stage. This is really all that the views of “experts” on China amount to. China puts a high premium on its “face”, and this can lead to infantile reactions by the Beijing government. When German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met the Dalai Lama, China responded by blocking German access to economic deals and contracts for months. Similarly, the conferring of the Congressional Gold Medal on the Dalai Lama was followed by China’s decision to turn away the US ship, the USS Kitty Hawk, from the port of Hong Kong, where it hoped to dock in time for Thanksgiving. Dealing with nations that hold issues of “face” in high priority can often seem like dealing with five-year-old children, and Western nations often choose to “rise above” such issues and ignore them. But it is worth asking whether the Western countries should always deal with China in the way it prefers to be treated. The theory that international relations can be fostered by nurturing soft power and maintaining extensive contacts with counterparts ignores the fact that these interactions are always underpinned by hard power considerations. While there is no reason to go out of our way to court poor relations with China, Western governments need to maintain their independence of action with relation to China (for example, by not becoming overindebted to a strategic competitor), and should treat China, not in a way that suits its cultural assumptions, but in a manner that is befitting to a developing country with a standard of living hardly one-tenth of that of the West.

It seems incontrovertible that Western policy towards China has been allowed to drift, possibly as a result of the focus on unnecessary side-issues such as the Iraq War, but the security situationin Iraq, Afghanistan and other failed states and Islamic militancy more generally do not represent the challenge to Western dominance of the globe that China does. A further problem is that whereas China is a united country, the European nations including North America and Australasia, are not, giving China the ability to play off the EU against the US, and play off individual EU powers against one another in the granting of favours. The EU itself is problematic in that, although it claims to unite European countries for the purpose of international negotiations, it also explicitly aims to confront US geopolitical power, and so necessarily divides the European-descended nations on the global stage. I would argue that, in the unlikely circumstance that European-populated nations could show a common front to the outside world with the aim of seeking to perpetuate European geopolitical power for as long as possible, key policies towards China would need to include the following.

• Diplomatic and other relations with Taiwan should be restored by all Western nations immediately. As a matter of principle, it is unacceptable that any nation require all its diplomatic partners to shun a state the whole of which it claims as part of its territory. While claiming to oppose intervention in a country’s internal politics, China is in this way forcing every nation on earth to intervene on its side on the Taiwan issue. This does not mean that Chinese reunification should be opposed. Military and other guarantees by the US to Taiwan should be dropped. Ultimately, if China did launch military action against Taiwan, there would be little to gain for the West by intervening.
• Western nations should leave the UN. As a permanent member of the Security Council, China wields a veto and a growing crowd of sycophantic Third World supporters, and the organization could well become a vehicle for Chinese geopolitical influence.
• The reality that China holds Tibet and East Turkestan cannot be affected by Western grandstanding. We should withdraw from the game of pronouncing whether a territorial holding is “de jure” or “de facto”, and simply maintain relations with any regimes that hold their territory and appear likely to continue to do so. This way, China could not claim that Western nations had “agreed” that Tibet was part of China: we would simply not comment on the legitimacy of such things any more. Western leaders should not be afraid of inviting Tibetan and other such leaders to the West should they wish to do so, but should avoid giving encouragement to such groups, simply because the reality is that we have no interest in supporting their causes and they cannot therefore rely on us.
• Chinese departments in Western universities should not be permitted to act as support groups for China’s emergence as a great power. There are a number of Chinese academics in the West who use their positions to argue points such as “Tibet has always been part of China” and “the West is seeking to limit China’s rise”. They should simply be required to adhere to tough academic standards instead of engaging in politics from their academic strongholds.
• The human rights dialogue with China should be cancelled. While sympathising on an individual basis with victims of abuses, there is nothing we can do about them, and nothing that we should do about them, given that our foreign policy should be geared to our national interests.
• China should be deleted from the list of countries eligible to receive concessional loans from the IMF, the World Bank or any bilateral or multilateral institutions.
• We need to work out what level of investment in the economies of rival civilizations is appropriate. Natural resources investment needs to take place where the resources are. Arguably, we benefit from cheap imports of low-level manufactures (T-shirts and toys), but ought to draw the line as China’s exports move up the value chain. Higher-value manufactures should always be sourced from within the West.
• Each Western nation should avoid becoming too dependent on imports from any one non-Western nation. Free trade and the World Trade Organization should be rethought.
• Immigration from China and applications for naturalization from Chinese should be rejected as a matter of course, as China is a potential enemy power.
• Chinese students should be ineligible for study grants or postgraduate study of any kind in Western universities. We are currently building up a rival power, and, to the extent that these individuals enter academe, traducing our own academic institutions.
• While we can, and maybe should, do little to make China a democracy, it is worth considering what level of international interactions is appropriate with such a country. China should never have been given the 2008 Olympic Games.
• The current Western hostility towards Russia, which is pushing Russia and China together, should be reversed. Russia is a European nation, and in any possible future conflict ought to be on our side.
• We should avoid fatuous geopolitical games, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that merely enable China to win brownie points for failing to cast vetoes at the UN. Co-operation with China in anti-terrorism, likely a cover for a crackdown on separatists in the West of China, should be halted. Confrontation with Iran and North Korea ultimately is not in the Western interest, and China should receive no credit for any diplomatic efforts it makes with those regimes.

The difficulty we as conservatives face in trying to get a hearing for our ideas in the mainstream media and also in private conversations is that it does not really matter how right we are. We can go to great lengths to research political topics and to hone our arguments, but the more we do so, the more we prove to liberals just how “obsessed” we are. A cogent argument is a “rant”. The debate has moved way beyond facts and logical argumentation. Our conviction that the truth will win out is encapsulated in the saying that “a racist is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal”. Presumably, the liberal is expected to privately realize he has lost the argument, and perhaps be more amenable to reason next time. I am afraid that is not how it works.

What the accusation of racism means is that people who make conservative arguments are not nice people. It has nothing to do with the truth or otherwise of our arguments. This was pointed out in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Professor Bloom argued that cultural relativism was not a point of view arrived at after extensive research of the cultures of the world, but amounted to a saccharine moral that “we should all get along”. We should be “nice people”—and that means refraining from expressing negative attitudes towards other cultures, whether well-founded or not. A liberal will often stop a conservative from explaining his point of view in mid-sentence, not in fact because he fears our understanding and greater reasoning ability, but in order to prove his moral superiority. Quite simply our ideas are deemed to be nasty—supposedly, only nasty people want to retain their national culture or remain in a majority in their own societies. It is simple to point out that the same liberals value the attempt of minorities to keep their own cultures, and so their views contain double standards and logical errors, but to approach the question in this way just becomes a “rant”.

In order to understand why liberals like to grandstand morally, we need to understand the role that morality plays in society and how it underpins the rule of the social elite. This issue is key to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a Marxist who noted the relative stability of “bourgeois society”, and drew the conclusion that this was because the ruling class enjoyed “cultural hegemony”. A ruling class cannot survive based on force alone; its power is buttressed by cultural support—buttressed by a moral image—that usually renders its monopoly of force redundant. Such a view can be described as conservative in that it is essentially contradictory to the “materialist” assumptions of Marxism, reflecting Gramsci’s disillusionment with the failure of the revolutionary movement in Italy. Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony was set out in his work The Modern Prince, which drew on the thought of Niccolò Macchiavelli, who argued that the Prince should promote whatever cultural and religious customs would unite society, regardless of whether they were true or not. As long as the population believed in those cultural and religious traditions, support for them would render the Prince’s rule morally acceptable. So it was that the leading figures in English society as late as the 1930s were required to appear to support the Christian church, the monarchy, and our customs and way of life more generally. The working class for their part were attracted in greater numbers to Methodism than to Marxism.

However, since the Enlightenment, Western culture has become more amenable to rational deconstruction, unlike its rivals in the Islamic and East Asian civilizations. While our traditions could have continued to buttress the rule of our elite, cultural hegemony is not entirely cynically accessed. An elite that no longer really believes in its mission begins to search for alternative value-systems—other systems of morality that can justify its rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the British elite was required to support British culture as the price of its rule, but there was little reason why they should not want to do so. But once the culture had been subjected to ruthless Marxist and Freudian deconstruction, and following the traumatic experience of the two world wars, which intellectually discredited Western civilization, the search was on for a more workable morality, leading in the post-war period to the assertion that anti-racism and support for cultural diversity represent the acme of good morals. The discovery of the theory of evolution and modern Bible criticism had undermined belief in our traditional culture somewhat earlier. The Russian Revolution and the pointless barbarity of the First World War also knocked the West’s confidence in itself, but, as Gramsci noted, civil society, morality and patriotism allowed the system to trundle on, only to culminate once again in fascism, genocide and the 55m dead of the Second World War. Many soldiers returned from the war to find that their wives had been unfaithful (this prompted the formation of the Marriage Guidance Council in England). Patriotism was smeared by a (false) association with fascism. There was no energy or belief in imperialism left, and the British Empire was quickly disposed of.

The real arguments for morality and patriotism that conservatives are still trying to win were lost in the 1950s, and a gradual search for a different set of values to underpin the Establishment’s cultural hegemony was set in motion. The process was partly obscured by the Cold War—while our rulers were shifting their ground and putting in place the foundation for a new type of society, conservatives were mainly chasing down the dead end of anti-communism. Freedom was declared to be the defining point of Western society in the 40 years before the fall of communism, while policies were adopted that would dissolve the real fabric of society, in turn laying the foundation for a retreat from liberty more recently. We have traditions of liberty, but no society can be mainly about liberty alone; we are learning now that liberty becomes licence and diversity, which eventually corrodes any real social bonds. Put differently, real liberty depends on a society that still has the glue of a common culture.

No longer convinced that the nation-state represents an adequate moral project to justify its rule, the Western elite is anxious to portray itself in more universalist terms, and that requires a recreation of society demographically. The key point about immigration is not that business interests support immigration in order to get cheap labour—this somewhat reductionist analysis may be the easiest one to advance in a five-minute conversation, but that the issue is seen as a moral one by our new rulers. Business leaders who do want cheap labour are able to grandstand morally as if their self-interest were some kind of altruism. But the search for cheap labour is not really what drives the agenda of cultural diversity. It follows therefore that the cheap labour argument falls flat for us, because we are thereby not taking on the moral agenda of our new elite, one that inspires it with a sense of self-righteousness despite the negative effects of such an agenda on society as a whole. It is important to recognize that cultural hegemony has two aspects: justifying an elite’s rule to society at large, and justifying its own rule to itself. As long as the ruling class in society is cohered by a sense of values and purpose, it will bring enough middle class people along with it to remain in power. So, the second moment, that of justifying its rule to itself, is actually primary. Just as the Soviet Union fell because the Soviet nomenklatura no longer believed in itself, our rulers cannot be undermined without undermining their self-belief first.

True, there is the difficulty for the new Establishment that, unlike the old morality of family, church and nation, the morality of supporting diverse lifestyles and of encouraging cultural diversity cannot really unite society. True morality and patriotism hold a society together—social leaders were once forced to uphold these values as a price of their positions, but the quid pro quo for us was that a decent society was created. Diversity, by contrast, divides society into competing groups, and cannot realistically become an ideology that fully unites society. But by dissolving the national spirit and culture, English people (and the same process is at work in all other European and European-descended nations) lose their connection with one another. As real communities cease to exist, the population becomes individuated. Even the family is no longer the unit that it was, as most marriages end in divorce and children do not necessarily maintain contact with their parents. As civil society becomes weaker, state intervention is extended to more areas of life.

Society never really feels good about itself anymore, but the more problems there are, the more middle-class people become involved in attempts to manage social conflict. School teachers get a rush of moral superiority as they punish pupils—even infants, according to the newspaper reports in the UK—for politically incorrect language. Every company employs a phalanx of workers dedicated to the promotion of anti-harassment codes and equal opportunities. The diversity agenda continually wears society down with the negativity of social discussion, but anybody who is anybody embraces the new moral agenda. Traditional views become largely confined to the working class, or people nowhere near the trough. Those who are at the trough justify their position by their moral superiority over those who do not accept the new moral agenda. The middle classes have always sought respectability, but the current values that enable them to claim moral respectability just happen to be socially divisive. However, as long as they believe that their values are socially divisive only because nasty people—“racists”—are standing in the way of a more successful embracing of their values, these social values will remain an avenue for social respectability.

“Respectable” individuals enjoy to an extent the feeling of disgust they feel when confronted with someone who refuses to accept the anti-social values being promoted by the elite today. At the very least, it enables them to get a “fix” of moral superiority. These are the people who wrung their hands over Chile under Pinochet while studiously ignoring a much greater death toll during the same time period in Zimbabwe (where around 30,000 members of the Matabele tribe were slaughtered). This synthetic morality seems curiously selective. The eyes of the politically correct glaze over if you point out such details—they are not really interested in any of their causes as such—they do not really give a damn about the desaparecidos of Pinochet’s Chile any more than the Matabele—so much as the chance to prove their own moral superiority to themselves. Even people who disagree on the science behind claims of global warming can be seen as immoral, as utterly trivial issues such as the use of a supermarket plastic bag become touchstones of people’s moral characters.

We need to paint the current elite and its middle-class hangers-on in their true light, as immoral collectively and individually. This is a challenge, as these “respectable” people go to great lengths to demonstrate their niceness. They are not imperialists, or “racists”, or “sexists” or “homophobes”. They love everyone and everything. They fret—or claim to fret—about women’s rights in Mauritania and the plight of homosexuals in Iran. They are delighted to let you know they vote for parties that would enable people like themselves to pay a bit more in tax, because they are concerned about the poor. They are the very definition of the Pharisaical “whited sepulchres” that the Gospels speak of. Unless we can demonstrate that these seemingly nice people are actually self-serving and uncaring we do not stand a chance of undermining their rule. There are various arguments we could adduce. Liberals undermine the socioeconomic position of the most vulnerable in their societies by fostering immigration. Their enthusiasm for state intervention and welfare has led to the growth of single-parent families—it is “nasty” to criticize them, but what about the children? Such children are statistically highly likely to end up in crime, delinquency, welfare and prison. Support for divorce, abortion and homosexuality has in fact led to tens of millions of unhappy lives. We need to hammer home that these self-righteous people are spreading misery in their own societies. People who support the EU on the grounds that it represents international co-operation are actually closing off Europe from trade in agricultural commodities with the poorest of nations. Supporters of state spending are actually fostering the growth of a large group of public-sector workers, whose salaries and pensions are in many cases financed from the taxes of people who face greater challenges in struggling to make ends meet.

As far as immigration is concerned, we are robbing developing nations of their most mobile populations—whatever you think of immigrants, both legal and illegal, they are undoubtedly resourceful in managing to better themselves at our expense. As far as liberal concern for other nations and the human race as a whole is concerned, maybe we could point out the reality that, short of recolonizing the entire developing world, we must respect those nations’ right to sovereignty, as how can we be responsible for the plight of people over whose affairs we have no say? Real morality begins with creating a good society—and if other countries have less successful societies that is a problem for them to address. The self-righteousness of internationalist concern for failed societies beyond the seas leads directly to wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, which the liberals, of course, claim to oppose. Self-righteousness in our own countries leads directly to a rise in crime and social anomie, complemented by the growth of an underclass. A desire for a national culture is not bigotry at all, but a quest for a social discourse that provides meaning and a place in society even for the economically disadvantaged. The smugness of liberals who oppose a national culture has written the most vulnerable out of society. Liberalism must be exposed as exploitative, nasty, cynical, hypocritical and self-serving. True, pointing out that business leaders want cheap labour paints them as self-serving in a financial sense. But liberals more generally exploit their moral grandstanding to paint themselves as wonderfully compassionate figures, despite the colossal negative impact of the policies they support. I am sure better conservatives than I can think of many ways in which the claims of “liberalism” to the moral high ground can be refuted. Until we get to the point where many of our rulers privately start to wonder whether multiculturalism, diversity, the large state and so on are actually deeply immoral projects, we will continue to lose all significant ideological battles.