In an extraordinary new article, the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf attempts to delude his readers as to the nature of the U.S.-China conflict. Contending that the Trump administration, not Chinese President Xi Jinping, is responsible for declining U.S.-China relations, Wolf suggests that America is the economic, political, and military agitator.
Wolf’s absurdity begins with his deployment of the old anti-American trope that America invents enemies to distract its people. He claims that “For the U.S., [China] can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent.”
But America, he says, has created false narrative on China: “The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US is questionable.” Wolf continues, “The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.” Later in his article Wolf actually implies that Chinese intellectual property theft is a moral entitlement in face of American greed. “What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is illegitimate.”
That 4% reference is to the U.S. population.
But Wolf’s argument is utterly ludicrous. China’s intellectual property theft has allowed its major telecommunications firms to usurp market positions from those who actually researched and built that intellectual property. That theft has also allowed China’s military to dramatically shrink its capability gap with U.S. military. Wolf also ignores China’s massive state subsidies to domestic manufacturers, its technology transfer requirements as conditions of market entry, and the barriers to entry it imposes on foreign competitors.
Then Wolf truly enters the Beijing propaganda twilight zone.
With rhetoric that would fit perfectly on the pages of China’s state media newspapers, he warns that U.S. policy “risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason. China’s ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union’s was. Right-wing demagogues are far more dangerous.”
In 2019, very few statements are as absurd as “China’s ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union’s was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous.”
What Wolf fails to realize is that China’s ideology is targeted toward more effective competition within the international rules-based order, but towards the destruction of that order. By words and by action, Xi is building a feudal mercantilist empire that will see China sit atop all others. This is why Xi threatens those who do not kneel at his feet and why he keeps millions of civilians in concentration camps.
It’s totalitarianism 101, just this time from the schools of Mao and Xi, rather than Lenin and the KGB.
Wolf might be delusional, but if he hasn’t received it already, he deserves a five-star vacation courtesy of Xi Jinping. The two share a love of dangerous fiction.
