The China threat is no invention

Chinese protest over the Diaoyutais last month

Try as they might to convince us that China is only reacting to a hostile environment rather than creating it, pundits miss the mark 

As the world anxiously waits to see which direction the Chinese Communist Party will take amid rising tensions pitting China against its neighbors and the US, some commentators appear to be bending over backward to try to explain away Beijing’s behavior, which, for those of us in Asia, has all the appearance of belligerence. 

From claims that the West is “inventing the China threat” to the argument that Chinese leaders have displayed “more self-control when it comes to sovereignty issues than their counterparts in Japan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan,” some pundits are proposing that China’s recent patterns of behavior have been solely in reaction to an increasingly hostile environment. 

As usual, it is the US, with its neoconservatives, military industrial complex and fear-mongering media, that shares the largest part of the blame for China’s anxiety. 

Or so we are told. Having “defeated” the Soviet Union, Washington had to “invent” a new enemy (global terrorism apparently was not enough) and embarked on a program to surround and contain it by “pivoting” to Asia, “re-opening” air force bases and coming up with esoteric concepts like Air-Sea Battle. 

My unsigned editorial, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.