Antonio Navalón
Last November 8, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held its sixth plenary meeting in Beijing to take stock of its achievements and trajectory in its one hundred years of history. But above all, it was also to determine and learn about China’s true role today. As was logical and expected, Xi Jinping’s intervention only strengthened the historical experience and what has been achieved in the last decades.
The world has to understand that there has been a process of reconversion in reverse. Since the Middle Ages, the Western world started from a structure in which, little by little, our cultural, intellectual, political, and even geographical development – with the formation of States – allowed us to know each other more and better every day. But at the same time, the arrogance derived from the hegemony that was exercised by the Western part of the world for so many years led to very partial and limited interpretations of what was happening on the Silk Road or in the territories that Marco Polo knew while serving the Great Khan. During this time, China was shaping and developing into the power it would end up being today.
The West began to lose sight of its success while China began to accept and overcome the systemic doubt about whether it would be possible for a communist country to survive in the capitalist era. But, above all, China’s lost dignity is the great element that explains its success and the emergence of its current role in the world. Since the history of the Great Khan, China has been a country made up of multiple ethnicities and by the success or failure of the political systems that have governed it and are based on its citizenry’s diversity.
Both Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping made the same bet. Reconciliation and the pride of the Chinese people come from a time of systemic violations and war situations where its national symbol was a great wall to defend itself from the attacks of others. With that in consideration, it is also necessary to know that the possibility of having an accident, a separation, or an internal war is always a critical national unity factor in China’s history. When people talk so lightly about the possibility that a war could break out over the Taiwan issue, they forget fundamental facts about the Taiwanese reality. The first is that Taiwan has been part of China for hundreds of years. The second is that there are territories such as Alaska, the Falklands, or the territories conquered in the Sea of Japan by the Soviets after their triumph in World War II, which have been part of the states that govern them for much less time than Taiwan has been part of China.
Since 1971 when Henry Kissinger traveled to China, the Taiwan issue was over. At that time, the United States accepted Chinese unity and territorial integrity. However, that does not detract from the fact that – in the game of checks and balances – from time to time, there are joint military maneuvers and there is that sword of Damocles that, should China attempt to occupy Taiwan, the United States would or would not honor its commitment and enter into direct war against China. However, this is something that will not happen. The world has changed. It is constantly changing. But much of the pain, death, and loss of time is directly related to the time in which one needs to accept reality. Reality is straightforward. Take note – barring an accident, a loss, or a mistake like when the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened – there will not be a war over Taiwan.
Just as the West will have to get its moral balance sheet in order regarding the slavery issue, we are faced with a situation where China also has to live with the memory of the Opium War. A war in which opium became an object that had to; be consumed by order of the British government, a measure that had to be used in order to finance this conflict. As a consequence of this event, Hong Kong became the global financial emporium it still is today.
We have reached a point where denying reality or not daring to look at what is in front of us is leading us to play again and again – as if it were a dreadful game – with the idea and possibility of a new war breaking out. In my opinion, the real danger of the conflict between East and West lies in the ignorance that the West has come to have of itself and in the minor sensitivity, it has shown to accept realities that – although very painful – are part of the new world map.
Suppose it were possible to conduct reliable sociological surveys on the degree of happiness and quality of life between the two parts of the world. In that case, I am sure that the results from the Eastern world would be substantially higher than those from the Western world. Theoretically, one might think that democracy and freedom are the elements that bring happiness. And that is true. What happens is that, in the midst of the chaos, of the crisis, but, above all, of all the concatenated elements that have triggered the reconfiguration of the world, today the West is a more unhappy part of the world than the East. The internal unhappiness of the developed world and the situation that the Western world is going through are elements that are creating an increasingly dangerous combination. A situation in which either we proceed to remake the foundations of Western society and then their agreement and understanding in the regimes of greater realism and bring them into accord with the empire of the East, or the situation will really become more and more worrying.
China is not a democracy. Its citizens have managed to conquer a right that they had not had for hundreds of years. Today they are guaranteed food, their right to exist, and their self-esteem in exchange for forgetting all memory of democracy and any guarantee of their rights to individual freedom. Even though the Orientals do not know formal liberties, they have been able to answer the great question that for decades we Westerners have been asking ourselves, which is whether Capitalism would or is capable of destroying Communism. This has proven not to be possible. At the moment, the most reliable Capitalism is that which represents the hegemony and control of the Communist Party over the Chinese as a whole.
While the West has lost its compass and has a crisis of values from North to South and East to West, the East has managed to rebuild its self-esteem, a fundamental factor of national dignity and which hopefully will not end up turning into arrogance since, if it does, it would be a great danger. As one sees how, for example, the Democratic Party – after such a traumatic experience as that of Donald Trump’s presidency – is capable of bleeding to death and delaying the approval of fundamental aspects such as the Budget, one can get an idea of the internal polarization that is taking place. The fact that not even among themselves they can agree, and the fact that the United States has a centralized system of government makes it very difficult to understand, first, how they were able to overcome a crisis such as the health crisis and makes incomprehensible the fact that at this moment – although I do not know for how much longer – President Biden also has the acceptance of its citizens.
Oriental invincibility, as Sun Tzu’s principle says, comes from self-knowledge. Our vulnerability and the real danger of our war come from our lack of knowledge of ourselves and them. In the East, millions of people study English and significantly fewer in the West study Mandarin. And this is not only due to a lack of interest but because they have already become accustomed to language as their first defensive element. But, in addition, the time had passed when they needed – if they ever needed – the knowledge of others. Now what they really need is the balance of their own knowledge and their own strength.
As long as there is no new agreement, there will hardly be a promising future for both China and the West. It is necessary to be aware that this new agreement must be built on what has already happened, which is the success of the East’s revolutions – first political, then economic, and even technological – in the face of the permanent defeats of the West.
Since 1945, the West has not won a single war. Surely this is because they never understood the wars they were getting into. They did not understand the difference between Chinese and Soviet Communism. They did not understand China’s role in the Korean War. They did not understand the role of China and the Soviet Union in the Vietnam War. They did not understand the real role the Communists wanted to play within the Cold War, their penetration of the Arab world, or the dynamics of many other wars. That lack of understanding of where the enemy was or what the object of the war really was is one of the elements that explains and helps to understand perfectly why so many defeats.
Invulnerability depends on self-knowledge, and if I have come to any conclusion, it is that most of the wars lost in the last half-century and so far this century is due, in the first place, to a lack of self-knowledge as societies. And, secondly, it is due to our lack of seriousness to really get to know our enemies.
Comments:
“The first is that Taiwan has been part of China for hundreds of years. The second is that there are territories such as Alaska, the Falklands, or the territories conquered in the Sea of Japan by the Soviets after their triumph in World War II, which have been part of the states that govern them for much less time than Taiwan has been part of China.”
I see this line of dialogue quite often and the obvious rejoinder is that identical claims have been made by some of the most petty and pathetic regimes in the history of the world, including Nazi Germany with respect to Germany and Austria. And in the case of Nazi Germany as in the PRC, these claims are at least partially disingenuous, as these states are/were ‘new,’ with 20th century forms of government resulting from turbulent internal implosions, and have no connection to the state that previously governed the two territories.
Secondly, has anyone invoking the former point considered what the people of Taiwan themselves want? They clearly do not want to be subject of the ‘People’s’ Republic of China. For that matter, nor do the people of Hong Kong. Would you be willing to hand over your national (and personal) sovereignty to a totalitarian regime of faceless, unfeeling bureaucrats angling to sell your labor to the world just because they speak the same language as you and are nominally also in territory once ruled by the Ming and Qin dynasties?
Lastly, it goes unsaid that Taiwan has indigenous peoples of its own. Considering that the PRC’s claim to Taiwan is simply based on the accident that their co-ethnics have lived there a long time, it’s worth noting that others have lived there far longer.
St. Cyr