On Chinese Racism and American Confusion

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

Feb. 7 2022

Someone has managed through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to dislodge a consultant’s 254-page report to Andy Marshall’s legendary Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense from way back in 2013. Marshall, who died in 2019, and his ONA are legendary in defense and intelligence circles (his nickname was Yoda) for its outside-the-box thinking and projections, many of which proved themselves out over time.

The 2013 report in question bears the title “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States.” The author’s name is redacted, but is identified as “a political scientist, [and] the managing member of Thayer Limited, LLC. Formerly, he was a tenured associate professor in Missouri State University’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies.” He has also served as a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and as a consultant to the Rand Corporation, along with several other distinguished academic things. Other publications by the author are also redacted.

The author’s name may have been redacted because of the blunt language contained in the report. Such as:

Quote

Racism remains a key component of how the Chinese see the world, their central place in it, and the world’s other, inferior inhabitants. . .

Virulent racism and eugenics heavily inform Chinese perceptions of the world. United States decision‐makers must recognize that China is a racist state, much closer to Nazi Germany than to the values upheld in the West. Most often, the Chinese do not even recognize their racism as a problem. They believe that racism is a Western phenomenon and that Westerners are obsessed with race. This obsession is seen by the Chinese to be a strategic vulnerability of the West, whereas China is not affected by racism.

Second, racism informs their view of the United States. From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.

(Snip)

Of course, the moral and cultural relativism of the United States and other Western nations will likely make any such American appeal incoherent. And I suspect the sophisticated Chinese know this.  In fact, I have old notes about President Clinton visiting China in the 1990s, and the then-Premier Jiang saying “the two countries have different means and ways of realizing human rights and fundamental freedoms” —perfect faculty room multiculturalism! Clinton responded weakly about how American values change over time, and apologized for the “painful moments” in American history when we fell short of our ideals, as though he was afraid the Chinese might suggest that Kent State was the moral equivalent of Tiananmen Square. Actually, that’s what of American leftists do believe.

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Thing people need to understand. Other parts of the world are Not America (and the West) when it comes to Race. I did a tour in the ROK. They didn't like White People and they REALLY didn't like Blacks. By that I mean, I meet Koreans who could give Bigot Lessons to the KKK.