Why the West should stop projecting its fears onto China and cultivate a more mature relationship

In the West’s black-and-white telling, China has been either good or evil in the past 70 years. The West swoons when it sees China becoming more liberal, but demonises Beijing when it stirs up Western fears of techno-surveillance

Frank N. Pieke

Published: 1:00am, 30 Sep 2019

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In the 70 years since its founding, the People's Republic of China has transformed from an impoverished country wracked by civil war into a power that awes and frightens the West. Modern China is unabashed about striving for supremacy and rigid control, and many Americans and Europeans fear they’re witnessing the birth of a techno-dystopia. But such anxiety says more about the West’s fears about its own future than about what’s happening in China.

The root of the problem is that Western attitudes to communist China have been black and white throughout its existence. Sympathetic stories like American journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China accompanied its birth; McCarthyite narratives of the “Red Peril” took over in the 1950s, and then US president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972 for what he modestly called “the week that changed the world”.

The love-hate relationship continues to this day. Basically, the West swoons when it perceives China is becoming more liberal and capitalistic – Beijing’s party for the world at the Olympic Games in 2008 was billed as a high point – and demonises it when China shows its repressive ferocity – Beijing’s suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989 was the low point.

China is either good or evil; such a bipolar view leaves no room for the grey tones that make up the world. In the West’s most recent telling of the “good China”, the Beijing Olympics were a celebration of a finally open and liberal China. Beijing’s reform-minded leaders eagerly promoted that view – but also saw the Games as an opportunity to demonstrate China’s new strength.

For Beijing, the Olympics were a carefully stage-managed display of freedom. China beckoned the world with pledges of openness, but when Western journalists came and tested them, they triggered the state’s repressive reflexes all too quickly.

As a result, Western opinion on China started falling back into the language of distrust before Xi Jinping and Donald Trump came to power. The Chinese and US presidents have fed the narrative – Xi through an assertive military policy in the South China Sea, for example, and Trump through his attack on China’s trade policy. But this time round, there are even more powerful forces fuelling the West’s fear of China.

The West doesn’t give China enough credit for its green leadership

At the end of the last century, the West regarded China as a developing country. Today, much like Japan in the 1980s, China is viewed as the cradle of tomorrow’s technology – with the added twist that Western fears about ever-cleverer technology are being used to demonise Beijing.

Western fear of technology comes in two variants: the Frankensteinian fear of machines surpassing their human inventors, and the Orwellian one of technology being used to control what people do and think. WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and the Cambridge Analytica scandal show how attitudes can be manipulated, in open societies as much as closed ones.

All societies are becoming more malleable, and governance is gradually crossing the threshold to social engineering and manipulation of public opinion. But Americans and Europeans perceive illiberal countries to be leading the way.

As a result, the West projects its worries onto China, compounding its fear of the country as some evil empire. This is a uniquely powerful mix – technology, the Devil’s instrument, the thinking goes, is now in the hands of our arch-enemy, communist China.

The perils of Chinese ambiguity: how it leads to mistrust of China

Huawei’s trials and tribulations show the consequences of such paranoia. The Chinese telecoms giant has been so demonised that no rational argument will convince those intent on banning its 5G networks. Detailed arguments about the West’s ability to manage risks like data theft are met by diffuse warnings about China being able to listen to and then pull the switch on us.

Similarly, China’s social credit system is viewed by the West as a technological nightmare – the state is monitoring everything and enslaving everyone.

I am not bemoaning the demonisation of China because I think it should be considered great – far from it. But we need to stop projecting our fears and hopes onto China and seeing things only in black-and-white terms.

We need to deal with Beijing in a more nuanced and businesslike way. As the People’s Republic of China turns 70, I wish the West’s erratic relationship with it would finally mature. The world is grey.

Frank N. Pieke is director and CEO of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin

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