Paolo Urio - America and the China Threat: From the End of History to the End of Empire

AMERICA AND THE CHINA THREAT

From The End of History
to the End of Empire

Paolo Urio

Clarity Press, Inc.

2022 Paolo Urio

ISBN: 978-1-949762-50-1

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-949762-51-8

In-house editor: Diana G. Collier

Cover design: R. Jordan Santos

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947284

Clarity Press, Inc.

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https://www.claritypress.com

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to quote all the people who have helped me in my research on Chinas reformsscholars, researchers, students, senior civil servants, and ordinary Chinese people I had the opportunity to meet during my numerous visits to China. I have recognized their invaluable contributions to my understanding of China in my previous books. But allow me to cite a few special contributions. My colleague Hu Angang of Tsinghua University, whom I met for the first time in 1997, has encouraged me in my research, providing advice, access to unpublished research papers, introduction to colleagues, logistic and academic support from assistants of his team. Among them, I should like particularly to thank Wang Qizhen, who worked on the preparation of my books when I was at Tsinghua in 2016 and has continued to provide assistance since then. While in the UK for a PhD, she has updated the statistical tables of this book and has given invaluable comments and suggestions on my analysis of Chinas ideology for . My former assistant, Chen Yali, has worked with me from 2012 to 2017, when she started to work on the integration of Chinese women who emigrate to Switzerland. She has just obtained a PhD from Geneva University in gender studies. She also provided very interesting insight on my analysis of Chinese culture.

My former publishers have granted me permission to use parts of my books published by them in 2018 and 2019: Routledge for China Reclaims World Power Status. Putting an end to the World America Made (2018), and Springer Nature for China 1949-2019. From the End of History to the End of Empire (2019). This allowed me, by using and starting from what I had written for them, and adding new insights, especially for the analysis of American and Chinese myths, to produce a more refined interpretation of Chinese ideology, adding new comments, and the update of statistics I had already used for my previous books.

Last but not least, my English wife has done, as usual, the difficult job of putting my prose in a form acceptable for an English-speaking audience. On top of that, Diana G. Collier, editorial director of Clarity, has provided several comments and suggestions that have allowed me to significantly improve the manuscript.

It goes without saying that I am responsible for errors, omissions and misinterpretations that an attentive reader may find in this book.

Geneva, August 27, 2021

I should not be surprised if my book were to be considered by many, both scholars and laymen, as anti-American. Well, it is not. But it is certainly very critical of the American establishment, based not upon a superficial, emotional reaction to the behaviour of the U.S. leadership during the last decades, but upon a careful enquiry into the origins of the extraordinary self-confidence that has underpinned practically all the aspects of the U.S. foreign policy since the Declaration of Independence. This is why, if my book is not anti-American, it is certainly anti-American establishment.

My generation of Europeans (I was born in 1940) was positively impressed by America. The victory over Nazi-fascism against the Axis powers, American films, music, jazz, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, skyscrapers, highways, Coca Cola, Abbott and Costello, freedom, democracythese were just a few features of American culture that impressed us. Only communists and left-wing socialists, a small minority, at least in my small hometown in the south of Switzerland, were anti-American. As a child, I have seen the American soldiers in their uniform, crossing Switzerland unarmed, as the Swiss government required. Impressive! As a teenager in the 1950s I welcomed with enthusiasm rock-and-roll, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Gerry Mulligan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and anti-racist films such as Giant, Shadows, and Imitation of Life.

I visited the U.S. for the first time in 1971, attending a summer program in political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I discovered that a former colleague, like me previously an assistant at the University of Geneva, was also attending the program. He was married to an American lady, and they lived in California. At the end of the program, we drove, in his iconic Mustang, from Ann Arbor to California, crossing the Middle West to Denver, down to Taos, Santa Fe, and the Painted Desert, up to the Grand Canyon, west to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I fell in love with California and Santa Barbara. In 1979 I sent our older son to a one-year exchange programme in the U.S. He lived with a Republican family. The father was a lawyer who campaigned for the post of Attorney General of the County against the incumbent of the Democratic Party and won. My son experienced the extraordinary American electoral campaign process, placing posters, stickers, visiting citizens and families, etc. Quite an experience. The following year we went to the U.S. to fetch him. The whole familyfather, mother and our 4 children aged 17, 14, 12 and 10crossed the U.S. from Washington D.C. to California, passing through Denver, Santa Fe, the Painted Desert, Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Las Vegas, Death Valley, then proceeding North to Yosemite, West to San Francisco, South on the N. 1 to Los Angeles. We ended the journey in Santa Barbara with one weeks rest. An unforgettable holiday for the whole family. Everywhere we were welcomed with sympathy, a helping hand when in need, and we experienced how much Americans appreciate families and children.

In the 1990s and until the beginning of the 2010s my wife and I spent many of our summer holidays in Santa Barbara. There we were able to become friends with a number of middle-class Americans. They were great people. None of them were left-wing. We found the Americans to be good people, who were used to travelling abroad, including Europe, proud of their country, but with no aggressive posture, and no need to teach lessons. Generally, I do not discuss politics with friends. But I understood that some of them were Republicans, some others, Democrats. All in all, they provided a good sample of the American middle class: a university professor, two City College professors, two nurses, a geological engineer, a pastor, two estate agents, an artist painter, a former cadre of a private enterprise, a writer specialized in Mexican traditional architecture and his wife. So, what went wrong?

Of course, there have been several warnings of matters taking a disturbing trajectory. The Korean war could have been one, but it was successfully presented as a just war. There was also the regime change in Iran in 1953, one of the first successful endeavours by the CIA, but again, the Iranian president, Mossadegh, was misrepresented as a trojan horse of communism. Then there was the Vietnam war that was strongly criticised, even in the U.S. But mainstream opinion countered: was it not a just war to stop the spread of the communist dictatorships? Paradoxically the fall of the Soviet Union may be the historical moment when the problem with U.S. foreign policy became evident: its