Since the start of COVID, the U.S. and China have drifted toward a Cold War that threatens to become a hot one.
China insists we don’t understand it. All they want is the respect due the world’s second largest economy. That means a sphere of influence covering East Asia. That means no one questions their government’s actions.
They say the U.S. has that. We reject that idea but look at the record. Since World War II, America has built an empire on the backs of our military. We haven’t lived up to our ideals any more than China has lived up to Karl Marx’. We’re hypocrites.
I know what you’ll say. China’s record is worse. It’s doing to Xinjiang’s Muslims what we did to our native Americans. Its behavior in Hong Kong is as bad as ours against black Americans. It sees Taiwan as a threat it needs to take out. We feel the same about Cuba.
The sad fact is this planet can’t afford another Cold War. Not when there’s a hot one in Ukraine. Not when the crimes of climate change are coming home to roost. China is doing more, with solar power and electric vehicles, than we are to fight that Ultimate War.
I’ve learned a lot following the career of Joe Wong. Joe is a native of Harbin who got his Ph.D at Rice, my alma mater, a quarter-century after I started my B.A. in political science. What he found here was freedom. Instead of becoming a biochemist (like my son), he chose to become a stand-up comic.
When Joe plays an American comedy club, his show posters show a pensive social critic. When he plays a large Chinese theater, his posters show a grinning comic eager to please. In his TikToks, he’s the befuddled dad of a Gen Z American kid. On Twitter, he is often a worried American liberal.
He holds all these identifies in his head and hasn’t gone mad. I root for him to cross the streams, so that Chinese might better understand Americans and Americans the Chinese. I know of no one better qualified for that.
We have far more, far deeper, and far more comprehensive relations with Chinese people today than our grandfathers did with Soviet Russians. They’re in our colleges and in our labs. Americans still travel and study in China. If there’s an answer to the drift out there, it lies here.
Both countries face enormous challenges to keep themselves together. China’s economy is debt-ridden and its recovery from COVID is anemic. America is threatened by its own fascism and intolerance. But both countries share this one planet, and both are staring down a demographic cliff. Its solution lies in immigration and tolerance, but voices on both sides insist it can only be cured by higher birth rates and nationalism.
Anyone who cries peace, on either side of the Bamboo Curtain, is open to criticism. But jaw jaw is better than war war.
