We Need an Enemy: Hey, Here’s China!

Now that Deng Xiaoping’s funeral is history, no further deference is necessary and we might just as well say it: “Hey, China! You don’t like us and we don’t like you. So put up your dukes: We Americans are tired of kowtowing to you.” One, two, three, four, isn’t it time to start a war?

Oh, come on. What kind of raving is that? Do we really think that the Sino-U.S. relationship could come to blows? Well, that’s the drift of a major new book, “The Coming Conflict With China.” It comes from a well-regarded publisher, Knopf, and is excerpted as the cover story for the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the East Coast foreign policy establishment. Did you know that the People’s Republic of China is out to get the United States? That we are China’s officially designated enemy and long-term adversary? Oh yes, you paranoids of the world: “‘China is gambling that it can prepare for the coming conflict with the United States even while publicly denying its ultimate objectives.” That is the thesis of veteran journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, the book’s authors. They’re serious, and they’re not alone. Just last fall, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington seriously advocated turning away from Asia and retreating to our Eurocentric womb.

Remember the sizzling 1990 book about Japan titled “Agents of Influence”? According to that gem, there were clever Japanese operatives under almost every U.S. bed (though, not then at least, under the one in the Lincoln Bedroom), and the Japanese were buying or co-opting or corrupting all of America. The book sold like rice cakes at a health club.

So here we go again. And why not? Now that the Japanese economy is in trouble and its profile seems less threatening, America needs to develop a new big-time hate. The Asia money scandal provides some grist for the anxiety mill, but this campaign fund-raising mess reveals a whole lot more about the ways of Washington than the ways of Asia.

No, America must have China to hate; who else out there can fit the bill? And, to make it all so easy, the Chinese too often seem willing to cooperate. They don’t play nice with their political dissidents; they play games with foreign access to their markets; and their anti-West propaganda machine whines on overtime, with all the sophistication of a Mao version of Captain Kangaroo.

But serious and thoughtful but sadly misguided books like “The Coming Conflict With China” more likely will heat up domestic passions than advance public enlightenment. Rather than learning how to hate China or even fear Asia, would not America be a lot better off simply learning real truths about the fastest-growing region of the world economy? For we are dumber about Asia than Asians are about us: Nearly 200,000 Asians study here; many Asian public schools offer, if not require, English as a second language. How smart they are and how smart we’re not: Only 6% of American college kids who study a foreign language are tackling an Asian tongue. Tellingly, U.S. students abroad overwhelmingly go to Europe. Worse yet, America is eviscerating its diplomatic presence abroad. Aside from military personnel, fewer than 900 foreign-affairs officers are posted in Asia, with budgets that have been cut in half over the past 10 years. Thus it’s not surprising that America is soft in the head, even a little intimidated, about Asia. As a nation, we haven’t committed ourselves to truly trying to understand them.

Sure, China will act in its national interest. What do we expect--that it will act in America’s interest? And, yes, Beijing will sometimes be a huge pain in the neck--unlike Tokyo, not to mention Ottawa or London sometimes and of course Paris, right?

But is building fearsome war scenarios the answer? If we have serious problems with China, let U.S. diplomacy apply pressure at trade and human-rights conferences. Or in a real crisis, send gunboats from the U.S. Navy to bob around the South China Sea, as they did last March to calming effect when China blustered over uppity Taiwan. (China is still smarting, but the manuever worked because it was restrained: The carriers kept a respectful distance from the Taiwan Strait itself.) And we can always organize a boycott of Chinese toys at Christmas: that would really hit China where it hurts.

My worry is that the way things appear to be unfolding, both China and the United States are beginning to need each other in the sickest and most dangerous way. Perhaps the United States believes it can’t develop a coherent foreign policy unless it finds a substitute punching bag for the former Evil Empire. And how else can China keep the noses of 1.2 billion people to the communist grindstone without some Occidental Evil Empire to grind against? China did, after all, have a huge best-seller last year with “China Can Say No.” If enough people on both sides work hard to stir the poison, maybe a coming conflict with China indeed will be in our future.

Don’t both countries have better things to do with their sons and daughters than to get sucked into a devastating arms buildup and potential world calamity?