That the Xi–CCP regime continue and be scrupulously deferred to throughout the world is not our hope and not the hope, we assume, of any very great percentage of the many millions of innocents imprisoned, tortured, “reeducated,” and otherwise abused by the Chinese Communist Party or whose friends, family members, and neighbors have have been disappeared or murdered by the Chinese Communist Party.
Probably the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, practitioners of Falun Gong, Christians, Hong Kongers, and members of other groups at present especially targeted by the Xi–CCP regime would not be averse to regime change as long as the successor regime were less tyrannical and murderous than the present one. Probably even many Chinese not so immediately and gravely endangered by the Xi–CCP regime would be okay with seeing it end up on the ash heap of history.
Careless cautious coexistence
But something like the opposite of this preference is the sentiment of a U.S. State Department official who “defends ‘cautious coexistence’ amid rising talk for tougher stand with Beijing” (“Top Biden China adviser Campbell says U.S. not seeking regime change for communist China,” Washington Times, June 12, 2024). Bill Gertz reports:
Responding to an article by former Trump administration National Security Council official Matthew Pottinger and former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, until recently chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, [Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell] said the U.S. has a limited ability to change China’s increasingly troubling international behavior.
Instead, the U.S. should accept China’s system as it is, despite what critics say are growing signs Beijing is seeking to replace the Western democratic system with its authoritarian model.
Mr. Campbell, until recently the administration’s main point person on China policy, argued that President Biden’s policy of countering Beijing through strengthened relations with Asian allies and partners is working, telling a forum hosted by the Stimson Center, a think tank, that trying to undermine China’s domestic system would be “reckless” and counterproductive….
Writing recently in the journal Foreign Affairs, Mr. Pottinger and Mr. Gallagher argued that the Biden administration produced multiple failures of deterrence in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East. They criticized the current policy toward China as seeking a “short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy.”
“The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it,” Mr. Pottinger and Mr. Gallagher wrote. “Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.”
Campbell counsels a “high degree of modesty of what we think is possible with respect to fundamental changes in how China sees the world.” But “China,” here, is a shorthand for the current rulers of China. The 1.4 billion or so people of China do not all see the world the same way.
“I do think we need to accept China as a major player, and doing constructive diplomacy with them is in America’s strategic interest,” he said, citing an uncertain global landscape with wars in Ukraine and Israel, Houthi rebel attacks against shipping in the Red Sea, and famine fears rising in parts of Africa.
And if China is taking the side of Russia in the Ukraine, if it is taking the side of the Houthis and Hamas, and other terrorists and autocrats…?
Major problem
But Campbell speaks as if he were oblivious of the Gallagher–Pottinger observation that the People’s Republic of China “is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.”
If they are right—and Campbell must know they’re right if he knows enough to have been a “main point person on China policy” in the Biden maladministration—how can he think it’s possible to just coexist with China and default to what he calls “constructive diplomacy”? The CCP is ready to engage in “constructive diplomacy,” ready to walk off in a huff, ready to do anything that it thinks will help expand its power and more effectively push other people around. The Chinese government is a major player that is happy to pat you on the back while stabbing you in the back.
Regimes can change. Regimes can change for the worse. They can also change for the better. It depends.
Maybe one of the things it depends on in the case of China is whether prominent voices around the world, representing governments, say we should just accept the current Chinese system as if it were a law of nature, like gravity, immutable, unassailable. A policy that in practice—since Chinese Communist Party rule is not a law of gravity—means reinforcing and enabling that regime.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “China Is Stoking a New Cold War With the West”
“Pick any terrorist group, rogue regime, or horrific conflict in the world today and you’ll likely find that China is behind it.”
StopTheChinazis.org: China, the Crazy Neighbor Who Just Won’t Leave People Alone
StopTheChinazis.org: Big Biz–Big China Alliance
