Two More Voices Speak Out against the Anti-China Hysteria

April 30, 2021 (EIRNS)—Two more professional voices have spoken out against the anti-China hysteria in the U.S. government and U.S. press.

Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was an interpreter for President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to China in 1972 (and later Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy), was interviewed on April 26 by China Daily on his role in the Nixon visit. China Daily ended the interview with this comment by Freeman: “I find it noteworthy that the most belligerently anti-Chinese members of the current U.S. Senate are also its youngest” who “have no experience” of the Cold War’s “anxieties” and “appear to take its sudden end as predestined,” said the diplomat, who believes that to compare the current Sino-U.S. confrontation to the Cold War of 1947—1991 is

“profoundly misleading and delusional. The U.S.-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China ... is part of the same global society as the United States. China is now fully integrated into the global economic system and cannot be walled off from it.... To recall this (the Nixon trip) is to remember the narrowness and precariousness of the strategic reasons that brought the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China together. We were starting from complete estrangement and reaching for a common understanding,”

Freeman said.

Secondly, Michael D. Swain, head of the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy on April 21 under the title “China Doesn’t Pose an Existential Threat for America.” Although Swaine gives credence to most of the arguments and lies about China’s allegedly “bad acts,” he reviews each one and insists that none rises anywhere near the level of “existential threat,” which, as he notes, “has become a cottage industry in Washington and in parts of Europe these days.” On Biden, he writes:

“Despite shunning the Trump administration’s habitual use of most of these inflammatory adjectives, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken nonetheless depict Beijing as challenging the entire ‘rules-based order’ that maintains global stability and as the major focal point of a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, which is now, according to Biden, at an ‘inflection point.’

“Such language echoes the premise of various strategy documents of the Trump administration and the speeches of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: that the United States is now locked in a strategic, great-power rivalry with China that overshadows any other foreign (or even domestic) threats or concerns facing the country....

“And in this regard, it is extremely counterproductive to U.S. interests to assert or even imply, as many now do, that the above Chinese actions constitute an all-of-society, existential threat to the United States, the West, and ultimately the entire world, thereby justifying a Cold War-style, zero-sum containment stance toward Beijing. Such an extreme stance stifles debate and the search for more positive-sum policy outcomes while leading to the usual calls for major increases in defense spending” [emphasis in original].