风萧萧_Frank
以文会友
Far-Right Delusions About China Miss the Real Problems
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/21/far-right-delusions-about-china-miss-the-real-problems/
“You Will Be Assimilated” represents a worrying strand in analysis.
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The cover of U.S. economist David P. Goldman’s latest work, You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, depicts a golden dragon statue wearing earbuds against a menacing Commie-red background. It’s at least a modernized twist on the motif; most books about the threat of China just tend to slap a dragon on and be done with it. The visual cliché notwithstanding, no one can accuse Goldman of being uncreative: At one point, he tells us the “Chinese have few friends”—thanks to the absence of “political friendship in Aristotle’s sense.”
The book is riddled with factual and analytical errors, is poorly sourced, and is not well written. For all its flaws though, You Will Be Assimilated does provide insight into what the upcoming wave of far-right takes on China will look like—and how they may leak into the mainstream.
You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, David P. Goldman, Bombardier Books, 274 pp., $17, July 2020
Goldman, an influential columnist for PJ Media who has given talks at the Heritage Foundation and shared a podium with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, represents a major strain of free market conservative China hawks. They were uneasy with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war at a strategic level but otherwise very much on board with combating the dragon of the East. This unrelenting hawkishness cheapens the real and pressing issues the United States must face as China continues to ascend, flattening relations into a battle of civilizations where there is no possible outcome but the domination of one side. Ideological clashes and human rights concerns are set aside in favor of racist rhetoric.
Goldman’s assertions about China are bemusing. Some of them are just comically wrong like the idea that Chinese schoolchildren practice characters “for hours at home with a brush and inkpot.” Others are bafflingly misleading like the casual and nonsensical assertion that “since 800 A.D., the Chinese borders have stayed the same.” Half the citations are bare URLs, and I could find no Chinese-language sources in the 214 endnotes, save for one text in English translation. Published scholarly work is relegated to backing up bizarre—and usually outright wrong—assertions about Chinese culture or history.
His cluelessness is genuinely encyclopedic, extending into the fields of pedagogy (“The Asian work ethic explains why 28 percent of students at America’s Ivy League colleges are Asians,” despite the immense variance in academic achievement across various Asian American ethnic groups), comparative politics (“Unlike the lethargic southern Italians, the Chinese derive irreplaceable benefits from their state”), and geopolitics (“China’s military buildup threatens America’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, but presents little threat to … the territory of America’s allies,” seemingly forgetting about Taiwan).
The book is obsessed with the notion of coherent, inevitably stereotyped civilizations that imbue constituents with consistent psychosocial attributes. Culture influences the self, of course, but Goldman treats the world like a grand strategy computer game or a Samuel Huntington fanfiction: Every worthy civilization needs a unique trait or two to stretch across history. It is around these neatly divided and largely spurious civilizational categories that he organizes his book—and evidently, his entire worldview.
Accordingly, Goldman argues the Chinese are historically ruthless and ambitious, willing to accept “hardship and even cruelty on behalf of the collective need,” as if peasants forced into corvée labor to build the Great Wall really had that much of a choice—or were they that different from French peasants drafted into roadbuilding? Goldman states the “cruelty of Chinese governance astonishes and disgusts Westerners.” He goes on to describe the Chinese as patient and strategic, planning “over a horizon of several generations” like some sort of enlightened tortoise. The United States, he contrasts, is “playing checkers and China is playing Go—an ancient boardgame of slow and inexorable encirclement.”
This fetish for a clear historic-cultural-political mythos can produce comically amateurish proclamations of modern China’s politics as well as bigoted views of the nation as a whole. But it’s not just a joke; it’s a prominent characteristic of the Trump-era conservative movement. Sometimes, this manifests as blatant racism, such as Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s tweet that “China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing. Some things will never change.” The specter of communist China also melds with the right’s efforts to denigrate progressive positions on race, such as when the Federalist clumsily drew parallels between the Chinese Communist Party and critical race theory or a Heritage Foundation scholar baselessly proclaimed Black Lives Matter protests were driven in part by the Chinese state.
Goldman boldly reprints an interview of himself in the book that contains some of his most bigoted musings. Among other absurdities, he believes “the idea of public trust and subsidiarity that’s fundamental to democracy is unknown to the Chinese” and most tellingly repeats his idea that “the Chinese, as individuals, have no friends.” Perhaps it is just that no Chinese person wants to befriend him.
Noticeably absent from the book is any criticism of mass internment and reeducation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. A campaign that seeks to literally “Sinicize” Uyghur religion and coerce them into abandoning cultural-religious practices deemed unacceptable by Beijing seems to match the book’s theme perfectly. But instead, Goldman functionally recites the Chinese state’s justifications for its actions, always sure to note the terrorist attacks committed by Uyghur separatists on the few occasions he does bring up repression in Xinjiang.
This tracks with his general disdain for Muslims. In his 2019 review of The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, Goldman lets us know he considers Islam permanently backward, saying Muslims “nowhere have created a functioning modern state, with the partial (and fading) exception of Turkey” and subscribe to a religion based on bloodshed. Hamstrung by his own resentment of Muslims, Goldman is incapable of articulating a meaningful critique of the Chinese state and its deployment of technology and power against them.
