Pro-China, anti-China dictatorship: Readers respond

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See the Lev Navrozov Archive By Lev Navrozov SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

On June 16, 2005, I received a page-long e-mail from Jonathan Carleton, a young American Sinologist who speaks Mandarin Chinese, lived in Beijing and Taipei (Taiwan), and “made friends in both cities,” for he is “not anti-Chinese,” but is against dictatorship wherever it is. As he puts it: “If China was a democratic nation with peaceful intentions, I'd support their growth just as I support India's.”

His e-mail is a response to my column about conformists and dissidents with respect to the dictatorship of China. As an example of a conformist, I took a Ben Yap, who had sent me an e-mail proclaiming that those who are against the dictatorship of China are “anti-China” and “anti-Chinese,” apart from being stupid and ridiculous. Having read my column, critical of his conformity,Yap sent me on June 17 another e-mail in which he accused me of supporting the war in Iraq (I have never supported it), while “harping on the Tiananmen Square incident [!] and the hundreds [!] or perhaps a few thousand misguided [!] students who died [!] there.” You see? They were not killed though unarmed, but just “died” (of misguidance?).

Incidentally, those in sympathy with the movement, spread all over China, ran into millions, not “the hundreds or perhaps a few thousand” and included at least one ruler at the top of the dictatorship.

The “Subject line” of the Sinologist Jonathan Carleton's response to my column about conformists and dissidents with respect to the dictatorship of China is: “You're absolutely right.” He begins his page-long e-mail as follows:

For the past two years or so I've been reading your articles on the China threat, and I wish more journalists could be as forthright about China's true intentions as you are. I even used a few of your articles in my senior thesis.

Jonathan's information is grim, but I quote his e-mail because of his professional experience and outstanding intelligence:

What scares me the most about the current situation in China is that the average Chinese doesn't care enough about his/her government's dealings. As long as they are making money and living a decent lifestyle, the average Chinese citizen will turn a blind eye to the oppression and corruption that is plaguing China. If anything, a large majority of the Chinese, even the ones that are currently living in the U.S., actually support the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and its growing influence because they believe that “a strong China is good for all Chinese” regardless of the political system. This Yap fellow that e-mailed you is obviously one of them [he denies that he is Chinese]. I am sure that when China invades Taiwan and takes over the Spratly Islands, these people will still support that fascist regime. The excessive nationalism that is sweeping through China could easily be manipulated by the CCP for its own evil intentions. It's like Mussolini's Italy or Nazi Germany. Just as Hitler used the 1936 Olympics to gain support for his fascist ideals, China could also do the same in 2008.

This does not mean that the collapse of the dictatorship of China is impossible. No one had predicted the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in 1991. Way back in the early 1970s, the Voice of America and other Western radio stations broadcasting to Russia in Russian veered from critical analysis of the Soviet dictatorship to Western-Soviet friendship. The last Soviet dictator, Gorbachev, in the second half of the 1980s, was a darling of the British Prime Minister Thatcher and the U.S. President George H. W. Bush as well as a Nobel Prize winner and a reformer intending to introduce capitalism “in earnest and for long,” as he quoted Lenin. Yet in 1991, he collapsed amidst the total indifference “of the masses,” and this attitude toward him has never changed, while the Western political cultural establishment is as much in love with him as it was in the late 1980s.

The Soviet dictatorship collapsed not because “the masses” loved all dictators, from Lenin to Andropov, and suddenly came to hate Gorbachev, but because, sociologically, dictatorship may conquer the world, yet is vulnerable from within as a tall thin tower of power, with a dictator at the top. On the contrary, a democracy like France was toppled “from without” by Hitler's armed forces in five weeks (actually, in four days). On the other hand, “from within,” the Communists of France never took power through up to a quarter of the electorate voted Communist!

Rev. John P. Reynolds of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, writes to me in his e-mail of June19:

You really hit the nail on the head about the dictatorship/worship mindset. For sure dictatorship can rise and fall unexpectedly. So we hope and pray that in China it will collapse and China will reform into some sort of democratic republic.
Regarding Yap: There are so many who don't see what is really going on in geopolitical terms, and so many more who see from a skewed perspective. I appreciate your insights and continued effort to help those who “have an ear to hear.”
I pray for continued strength, insights, and supernatural protection for you.

As for Jonathan Carleton, he continues:

Many American politicians hope that China's economic growth will eventually lead to political reform, but what if it doesn't? In the next 25 to 30 years we might be faced with the much more powerful China being run by the same Communist dictatorship that seeks world domination. By that time, it might be too late. Maybe the only way to topple the CCP is for them to start and lose their war. This is why Taiwan is so important. The U.S. cannot allow China to take Taiwan at any costs.

Alas, the dictators of China are more sophisticated in geostrategy. They will not try to seize Taiwan unless they are absolutely sure that the United States will not start war as a result of the Chinese dictators' aggression. The dictators of China will anyway obtain Taiwan (without war) if they establish world domination via their post-nuclear superweapons, able to annihilate or neutralize the Western weapons of nuclear retaliation.

In May and June of this year, the new Western “China fashion” has been growing.

In May and June came reports that the Pentagon's military assessment of China would be much harsher than the previous annual assessments. On June 3, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed a two-page critique of China—for the first time since Jan. 30, 2001, when his memo was thrown away, and the China threat in this memo was replaced by the threat of Iraq, tragicomically enough. But let us look at Rumsfeld's sensationalized critique of China almost four and a half years after his memo was thrown away. This is how the AP report begins:

Singapore (AP). Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Saturday said China is not a threat to the United States, but is building up its military without being threatened by any other country.

Rumsfeld's critique can be headlined the “Puzzled Donald.” China is “building up its military.” What for? Rumsfeld is puzzled. All that he is sure of on June 3, 2005, after his memo was thrown away on Jan 30, 2001, is that “China is not a threat to the United States.” Of course not! Iraq was, and now Iran and North Korea are.

On the cover of the June 20, 2005, issue of U.S. & News Report, we read: “The CHINA [in two-inch high letters] Challenge.” Pleaase note: in the 1990s, it would have been “threat” or “danger.” As of June 20, 2005, it is “challenge.”

China became a Communist dictatorship in 1949. I use the word “Communist” advisedly, since according to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, whom the “supreme leaders” of China so often invoke, but the Western reporters leave out, the world is to be a single Communist state. Now, in 2005, that is 56 years later, the magazine announced (in June, but not in March or January!) that China is a challenge (not a threat or danger).

A “Special Report” in the cluster of these articles of the magazine is entitled “The Rise of a New Power.” What a discovery! Surely it could not be made in March or January 2005.

The final article of the cluster “What to Do About China” is written by Robert Haass, the President of the Council of Foreign Relations and the author of The Opportunity: America's Moment [!] to Alter History's Course [!] On June 20, the author was interviewed in mainstream television.

How to alter history's course? The conclusion of the foreign policy “ realists” is: the United States should “prevent China's rise.” However, according to Haass, this is impossible.

More important, the United States shouldn't want to discourage the rise of a strong China. America needs other countries to be strong if it is to have the partners it needs to meet the many challenges posed by globalization: the spread of nuclear weapons, terrorism, infectious diseases, drugs, and global climate change.

The Haass article and other such magazine articles, books, electronic interviews, and official statements may have an unexpected geostrategic result, favorable for the democratic West: reading them, the “supreme leaders” of China and their advisors will die of laughter. Thus the dictatorship of China will end.

The trouble is that Haass does not seem to understand that “the form of government” in China is dictatorship. Says he:

Working with India, Japan, and others, our goal should be to integrate China into the international system, to make it a pillar [!] of the global establishment [!].