Is China too Aggressive?

Someone stated on Twitter that China isn’t helping itself by being “over defensive”. I wondered why a foreigner would hold this view then got to thinking about how there are really only three international arenas where a country needs to defend itself

Militarily; Politically and economically

And yes, I came to a similar conclusion that China is hyper defensive in these arenas but I don’t agree that they are over defensive.

Let me explain: we’ve all heard of the century of humiliation, right? Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was apparent that China was in a state of collapse. There were some very wealthy landowners who had hundreds if not thousands of servants and the vast majority of people were living in poverty, their lives were filled with hunger and pain. A really good book to read about this was written in the 1880s by a Christian missionary called Arthur H Smith, the book, called Chinese Characteristics is a compilation of his “letters” which were published in US papers and believe me, life for Mr. Smith was pretty good, life for his many servants and people who worked within his sphere of influence was not.

Foreign traders were unhappy with the balance of trade, they saw abject poverty in China and, as we know from modern examples, one of the escapes from a life of pain and hunger is release through drugs. Seeing this as an opportunity, those foreign traders, quite legally, at the time started to import opium they were growing in the northern parts of the Indian sub-continent.

China was also being divided up into different parts of the western world, over a period of several hundred years there were more than 80 Foreign Concessions and Treaty Ports with many more planned but interrupted by the Second World War.

China may have invented fireworks but then they invented fireworks used them for festivals and celebrations. The west had different ideas and managed to make weapons with the same products.

They then used these weapons to create unequal treaties allowing them to control not just territories inside of China but people who lived in them. Any act of defiance was met with very harsh reprisals such as the sacking of the Summer Palace, where the 8th Earl Elgin (people who know history will know of the Elgin Marbles, stolen from Greece a few years before by the 7th Earl Elgin) His son ordered the palace to be destroyed and the contents looted — according to UNESCO, there are still artefacts from those fateful four days in 47 museums around the world.

It’s hardly surprising that China is humiliated and ashamed of this part of their history.

Imagine your country being visited by traders who then set up their own mini countries inside your borders; they called them concessions, you try to go in there without a permit and their police will lock you up, if you argue against it, they may kill you. They then send in their missionaries who try to change your lifelong and generationally held beliefs, they make you purchase products you don’t need which trap your working population in a pattern of addiction.

Fast forward to today and China is poised to become the world’s most powerful economy, it’s already the worlds most powerful manufacturer and it’s recently become the world’s most innovative country in terms of the numbers of patents and the number of academic reports cited and is, without any doubt, one of the world’s safest places in terms of low crime levels and improving health as well as one of the most educated places on earth with almost 60% of its high school graduates entering tertiary education.

Now, it’s fair to say, China is winning… Again.

But people say it’s building up a military capable of taking over the world and, indeed, it has built up a military that is second only to the USA. People say China will invade Taiwan, but no one in China’s government has ever expressed any intention at any level of doing this. People say it’s going to invade other countries; again, no evidence of this intention has ever been put forward. It’s built a military that will prevent any other country doing to China what many were doing for several hundred years. A defensive military.

China hasn’t sent troops to invade any other country in most people’s lifetime and when it did, it didn’t remain in the country it invaded, it spent 29 days in Vietnam in 1979 and then left. There’s no evidence of any colonial intentions. It’s the largest provider of manpower to the United Nations Peacekeepers but it has no military bases of its own except Djibouti, where it works with the US forces to eliminate piracy off the Horn of Africa. So no, it’s not over defensive in its military preparations, it just defensive enough and any claims of China’s military expansion are deliberate to provoke fear and sell more weapons.

Embassy officials, intelligence officers and international NGOs operate to undermine sovereignty in regions where it’s felt a better outcome to suit the “international community” should be sought. Tibet is part of China, Xinjiang is part of China, Hong Kong is part of China and, controversial as this may sound, Taiwan is part of China. Yet all of these regions have been badly affected by interference from diplomats, intelligence organisations and NGOs attempting to make Changes. Policies and strategies have been implemented and, in the case of Hong Kong, finally, a National Security Law was implemented. China has been attacked for its strategies in all four of these regions.

In the case of Tibet, it’s well known that the CIA have been actively funding and training Tibetans in exile and this has been going on for almost 7 decades.

The Tibetan issue is a matter for China to deal with internally and even the Dalia Lama agrees, Tibet is and should remain part of China and has a “Government in Exile” funded by Washington DC and private donations to a registered charity in India

In Xinjiang, I’m very well aware of the issues there, there was terrorism and now there isn’t. There was freedom of movement and now it’s hindered by checks but not prevented. There was poverty but now that’s been eradicated and there were millions living in unsanitary and unhealthy conditions whereas now there aren’t. Millions of ethnic minorities living in rural areas were un-educated and now they’re getting skills and training as well as jobs. Are there negatives to this? Of course, there are some people who disagree and think Uyghurs should have their own country and once again, they are encouraged and amplified by western governments and western media without a thought for the democracy they so clearly espouse. Like Tibet, they even have their own government in exile, strangely enough, based in Washington DC. But, they’ve never asked the people who live there.

Any method of eliminating terrorism is, of necessity harsh but during this period of time, every lifestyle measurement of the people in the region has improved. Their health, their education, their income and their prospects for the future. Every positive action taken by China has been turned into a negative by Western media and some low-level academics who also get funding from US or other government sources.

In Hong Kong, there was no democracy and there was no national security law but there was an agreement in place between the UK and China that one would be implemented. As part of that Agreement, China would be responsible for national security and defence of the Region, HK would be responsible for its own autonomy. At no place in the agreement did it say there would be a British or American form of democracy and, between 1842 and 1991 while it was a colony there was no form of democracy offered. For 6 the last years as a colony, under British rule, Hong Kongers were allowed to vote for a selected Executive Manager to work for and under the unelected British governor; that was the extent of their democracy.

And we can see clearly the moves to destabilise Hong Kong weren’t organically grown from a grass roots movement but were a carefully calculated attempt using outside influence and funding to change how people felt about China.

Turning to trade the obvious example is Huawei; after British intelligence spent months analysing a perceived threat, the UK decided to go ahead with the implementation of Huawei’s 5G because the assessment declared there was no threat. The US military headquarters, perhaps the most sensitive place in the world for intelligence security, the Pentagon, got an exemption to keep using Huawei. It’s apparent that Huawei wasn’t the problem, Chinese technological advancements were.

Australia had four products banned, suspended or tariffed by China: Coal; Lobsters; Barley and Wine. What Australian media forgot to tell it’s people was that Australia had already done the same to 85 Chinese products.

In other words, China isn’t threatening anyone with trade, China has never sanctioned a country, nor has it sanctioned a company except in retaliation of sanctions made against itself — these retaliations are highlighted and amplified as acts of aggressions by China when only half of the story is known

These are just obvious examples but it’s clear that China is a country under siege — they aren’t being overly defensive about any of these matters, they being defensive and, given the history up to the last 70 years, which country wouldn’t?