'"(As for the United States) for a relatively long time it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance....We must conceal our abilities and bide our time."--
Lieutenant General Mi Zhenyu, Vice Commandant, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing.'
Saturday, October 21, 2017
CHINA AS GLOBAL CITIZEN
It really is a sort of similar thing to what I was saying, back then, about Japan's intentions, which remain the same, 30 years ago now, all over again, but now in a much much more serious situation, going forward, than 1985.
Take a look at p 750. This was cited in Pillsbury, Ch 1 fn 36
Here is an especially wholesome and charming passsage about global citizenship:
In current discussions of world order, it is popular to see traditional China as a benevolent and magnanimous empire that provided peace and stability for centuries before the arrival of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. This narrative is now used in Chinese and Western IR texts to explain why China is not a threat to world order in the twenty-first century (Li 1999; Zhang 2001;Kang 2007). Yet this comparison of a war-mongering Westphalian Europe with a peace-loving imperial China employs a very narrow definition of ‘‘war’’ as an inter-state phenomena, and a very shallow understanding of China’s historical experience (Kang 2003:65–66; Hui 2008). Actually, the Chinese state was oftenengaged in violent interactions with states and semi-states along its frontiers. In its first century, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) expanded massively in the west, including a struggle over the northwest frontier with Czarist Russia and the Mongolian Zunghar state that lasted into the 1770s. Rather than being a case of Western imperial incursion into China (as it is presented in China’s modernhistory textbooks), this episode is better understood as a violent struggle between three empires—the Manchu Qing, Czarist Russia, and the Mongolian Zunghar—which resulted in the annihilation of the Zunghar as a people...
...The second development, an intellectual one, is even more interesting: a loss of interest in history as it was understood from the eighteenth century until the last third of the twentieth. This began in the academy, in the midst of the Vietnam War, which taught a whole generation of young academics--my own--to regard authority as inevitably oppressive and corrupt, and to look for virtue and inspiration among the oppressed. Initially in the 1970s the oppressed were defined in economic terms, but in the next two decades race and gender became far more important categories. And interestingly enough, the academic focus on race, gender and sexuality as, it would seem, had important political consequences. Black and female Americans have gained enormously in power, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, signals at long last the end of formal legal discrimination against gays in America. These are important achievements--but they have come at a gigantic price. The interest in those issues has led to a nearly total eclipse--really--of interest in the kind of great political struggles that I learned about, and wrote about, in college and graduate school. Virtually no one makes a career in history or political science any more by doing detailed research into politics and government...." DK
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