Resize Text: You will no doubt have been advised against adopting any view that seems or seeks to attribute all events to one single cause. (I am not speaking here about your relationship with the Almighty, which lies well outside the scope of this column.) But it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the absolutely central and consistent role played, in so many of our difficulties, by the People’s Republic of China.
Look at almost any point of the compass. From where does Iran propose to acquire its long-range missiles? From whom does North Korea receive economic and military backing and diplomatic protection? To what source did Robert Mugabe turn when he sought to import a massive infusion of small arms in between the first and second “rounds” of Zimbabwe’s “election”? Who is it that trades blood for oil in Darfur, acquiring most of Sudan’s oil and furnishing most of its armaments? When the stone-faced junta that treats the people of Burma like state property is challenged even slightly at the United Nations, which country moves to block any effective condemnation or action? This list is not by any means exhaustive.
Behind this near-axiom of solidarity with all manners of despotism lie two elements that are highly dangerous either singly or in combination: an increasingly powerful naval and military and aerial capacity and the inculcation by state media of a highly xenophobic and chauvinistic public opinion. We had a glimpse of the two things in concert in the very early days of your first administration: a mid-air mishap over the Chinese island of Hainan led to the impounding of one of our planes and its crew, and the orchestration on the streets of Beijing of demonstrations of massively regimented paranoia. (That this is a tactic that presents itself readily to the Communist Party leadership cannot be doubted: after the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade under the Clinton administration—on another occasion when China was being warm and helpful to an international outlaw regime—the crowds outside our Beijing mission very nearly went out of control.) The decline of Stalinist ideology and the new challenges posed by cults like Falun Gong and unofficial movements like underground Christianity have meant that the Party’s one sure and certain recourse is to the passions of nationalist resentment. As we have good historic reason to know, these emotions once stoked are difficult to damp down.
There seems to me to be a real danger that the toxicity of this nationalism may blind Beijing even to its own interests. If North Korea continues to act as it has been doing—testing missiles without warning by firing them over the Sea of Japan, for example—it will tend to create a nationalist counter-reaction in Japan and perhaps even induce the Japanese to abandon the disarmament and anti-nuclear elements both of their culture and their constitution. It is manifestly in the interests of the Chinese that these developments not occur. And yet their immense and exclusive leverage in Pyongyang goes, as far as one can judge, almost entirely unused.
The sign and symbol of China’s penchant for authoritarianism, allied to its regional and international ambitions, is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Its membership—China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Iran—contains only one state (Kyrgyzstan) that cannot be explicitly described—in Robert Kagan’s formulation—as an “autocracy.” Vladimir Putin, a man of whom it must be said that he disdains to conceal his true feelings and ambitions, has openly described the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a reborn version of the Warsaw Pact and as a direct riposte to the expanded NATO that has been such a centerpiece of your own diplomacy.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of the bestselling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
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