Question: Based on our investigation in this book, what is your final assessment of the claim that a rapidly militarizing China may represent a growing threat to peace and prosperity in Asia?

1. It is a paranoid delusion designed by right-wing extremists to whip up support for massive defense spending.
2. It is a legitimate concern based on any rational assessment of China's possible revisionist intentions, rapidly growing military capabilities, and increasingly aggressive actions.

The oft-referenced axiom “united we stand, divided we fall” is as true and relevant today as it was when it first appeared in the New Testament as “every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” The abiding fact here is that building peace in Asia through economic and military strength and keeping the peace by maintaining the requisite alliances can only take place within the context of a political consensus that a significant China security challenge may exist to begin with.1

The political hurdle, of course, is that actually building any such consensus may be far easier said than done. At the root of this “divided we fall” problem—nowhere more acute than in the United States—is the nature of democracy itself and the polyglot of competing interests that it breeds.

Just consider, for example, how the lucrative China trade has split American manufacturers into two distinct warring camps. On the one hand, there is a myriad of smaller domestic producers being mercilessly squeezed by illegal Chinese export subsidies; they have been crying out for an end to Chinese currency manipulation, the imposition of countervailing duties, and other appropriate remedies. On the other hand, there is a relatively small handful of large multinational corporations based in America—companies like Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, General Motors, and IBM. These companies greatly benefit from China's illegal subsidies, sweatshop labor, tax loopholes, and lack of environmental controls when they offshore their production to China and then export their products back into American markets.2

So just what has been the political response to emerge from this particular clash of manufacturing interests? Simply that powerful lobbying groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and Business Roundtable, which are controlled by America's large multinationals, wind up not opposing Chinese mercantilism. These “see no China threat” lobbyists openly subvert any efforts at a crackdown by the White House or Congress.

Witness, too, this “divided we fall” spectacle at the individual industry level: When solar-panel manufacturers in America sought countervailing duties against illegally subsidized Chinese solar panels dumped into US markets, it wasn't China lobbying the hardest against such duties. Rather, it was red-blooded American solar-panel installers who feared losing business if the price of panels rose.³

Even in an American state like Ohio—arguably ground zero in China's mercantilist assault on a US manufacturing base critical to maintaining military strength—the electorate in this well-known presidential election “swing state” remains split. On one side of this particular Midwest house divided, the blue-collar factory workers of cities like Akron and Cleveland and Dayton and Youngstown—many of them now on the unemployment line—are all for tough government action against illegal Chinese subsidies. However, out in agricultural areas like Darke, Madison, and Wood Counties where farmers are growing bumper crops of corn and soybeans for lucrative export to China,⁴ there is open opposition to any rebalancing of trade.

In fact, this particular swing-state struggle offers a perfect microcosm of the broader political problem that free and open democracies face in grappling with Chinese state capitalism. Just consider the bill offered up by Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan that would have cracked down on Chinese currency manipulation—Ryan represents the manufacturing cities of Youngstown and Akron. With no small irony, Ryan's bill was almost singlehandedly defeated by fellow Ohioan and Republican Majority Leader John Boehner.⁵

For Boehner, his political victory was a classic “two-fer”: He greatly pleased the farmers from his mostly agricultural district—one of the largest farm-producing areas in the Buckeye state6—and Boehner got to reap more campaign contributions for himself and his party from the big multinationals offshoring to China.

Similar such divisions exist within groups ranging from organized labor and environmental groups to human rights activists. For example, because of quite-legitimate concerns about losing even more jobs offshore, trade unions strongly oppose any type of free-trade pacts with defense allies like Japan and South Korea. However, if properly structured, such free-trade pacts would help boost the economic growth of both the United States and its alliance partners—and thereby contribute to the comprehensive national power of the alliance and its efforts to build peace through both economic and military strength.

As for those pesky environmental and human rights activists in America, they tend to view the Pentagon through a proverbial dark lens and strongly oppose any increase in defense expenditures. The irony, of course, is that these activists wind up helping an authoritarian regime that may not only pose a rising national-security danger but, without question, is also one of the worst polluters and human-rights abusers on the planet.

Here's how Pentagon analyst Michael Pillsbury ultimately sums up this particular house-divided conundrum—while painting a clear picture of American interest groups playing checkers in a chess world:

These eight or ten [critical interest] groups in America, and their representatives in Congress will not cooperate. In fact, they hate each other and would rather oppose each other on broad philosophical grounds. Tax cuts are good, or tax cuts are bad. Corporations are bad, or the labor unions are bad. They'd rather have this kind of bickering among themselves than focus on China as a challenge. And the Chinese view of this is “we've got to be sure we don't become a big subject in Washington. We've got to have a low profile, and not drive these groups together.”⁷

Unfortunately for the cause of peace through strength, the “divided we fall” syndrome facing democracies like the United States is not just a matter of a panoply of interest groups being far more eager to fight one another than to unite against a common threat. There is also the stark asymmetry between the far-ranging ability of an authoritarian China to influence the political process in open democracies versus the far more constrained ability of those competing democracies to similarly influence the closed and extremely opaque Chinese political process.

One of the most outspoken critics of such Chinese co-optation of the American political process has been Michael Wessel of the US-China Commission. As Commissioner Wessel frames this cooptation problem:

China is advancing its comprehensive national power on every front; and here in Washington, they are looking at trying to advance political power. Chinese companies are spreading money around, they're hiring law firms, hiring lobbying firms, hosting parties, doing all the things that a normal special interest group trying to advance power in Washington would do. And they are very effective at it.8

As part of this “spreading money” around phenomenon, Wessel also notes with alarm the millions of hard advertising dollars that the Chinese government is pouring into efforts to ensure a softer media line on Chinese authoritarianism. Says Wessel:

If you look at many of America's national papers, you'll find them stuffed with regular advertising inserts from faux [English-language] Chinese newspapers like the China Daily or China News, and many Americans unwittingly think these inserts represent real news rather than mere propaganda.⁹

In pushing its own political narrative on Western soil, it's not just what the Chinese government is saying through its lobbyists and advertising dollars. It is also what the Chinese government has prevented journalists around the world from reporting to the public about China.

The taproot of what has become a pervasive form of self-censorship within the Western press is this particular turn of Beijing's Orwellian screw: To cover the news in China, the Western media must have correspondents with boots on the ground. However, the Chinese government has been using the visa process for decades to limit access to any journalists who take too hard a line against Beijing's policies or who dig too deep into news about such political “third rails” as corruption or pollution or democratic activism or worker unrest.

Just consider this confession of long-time China Hand Dorinda Elliot who was Newsweek's bureau chief in Beijing and now is the global affairs editor at Condé Nast Traveler. Said Elliot: “I am ashamed to admit that I personally have worried about the risk of reporting on sensitive topics…. What if they don't let me back in?”10

Then there is the case of the Atlantic's James Fallows—a well-known long-time dove on the possibility of an emerging China threat. Even Fallows has finally admitted that his reporting has been affected by his “knowledge of how thin-skinned the Chinese government might be.”¹¹

Visa denials are, however, hardly the only problem Western journalists face. While propagandists from China's government-run media are free to roam the world, Western reporters are routinely blocked from visiting large portions of China, and they are just as routinely subject to harassment, interference, and even physical violence in the field.¹²

To understand just how effective such pressures can be at inducing self-censorship, one need look no further than the stark case of Bloomberg News. After a Bloomberg report on Chinese corruption at high levels within the Communist Party, the Chinese government engineered a boycott of the purchase of Bloomberg's cash cow—its financial-market data terminals, which account for over 80 percent of the company's revenues. The next thing the world bore witness to was the retreat of Bloomberg from truly hard news coverage about China.¹³ Said Bloomberg's groveling chairman Peter Grauer in acknowledging the vastness of the Chinese market: “We have to be there.”¹⁴

In thinking about this “divided we fall” failure of citizens in countries around the world to be adequately informed about a possibly emerging China threat, it's not just the news portion of the media that is a major culprit. One must also consider the equally pervasive self-censorship that is taking place within another key shaper of public opinion: the entertainment industry.

The obvious problem here is that any television or movie studio that wants to participate in the China market must be careful not to offend the Chinese government with any of its offerings. The tacit rule here is that any one single movie or TV show that portrays China in a negative light can mean a Chinese boycott of all the movies or shows in the studio's product line. It follows—at least in the minds of many self-censoring studio executives—that if a studio wants to successfully play in the vast Chinese market, all of its product line must cast China in a positive light.

To see that this is a very real concern, one need look no farther than MGM Studio's 2012 remake of the classic film Red Dawn. In the original 1984 rendition, the Soviet Union launches a surprise invasion of a small American town, and valiant American teens rise up to defeat the red menace—hence, the film's title.

In the remake, China was supposed to substitute for the now-defunct Soviet Union. However, after negative news stories about the remake began to surface in the Chinese press, MGM went to the film producers and had them digitally “de-Chinese” the invaders. What is perhaps ultimately most interesting about this particular example of self-censorship is that MGM made the change not because of any official complaints from the Chinese government—there were none—but rather, according to a spokesperson, simply to “give the film greater box office appeal in China, which has become one of the most profitable markets for American movies.”15

As a final comment on self-censorship, there is arguably its most surprising manifestation in what is supposed to be the ultimate repository of truth—the ivory tower of academia. Here is the overarching problem as Commissioner Wessel has described it:

Academia is increasingly a business, and the fact is that universities are always looking for research dollars. Unfortunately, more and more of these research dollars are coming from Chinese entities—effectively allowing China to buy space at American universities. The unfortunate result has been a subtle form of self-censorship as university administrators mute voices critical of China even as they hold their hands out for a fistful of yuan.16

This often self-censoring search for research dollars is not, however, the academy's only fall from ethical grace. There is also the disturbing matter of the proliferation of so-called Confucius Institutes not just on college campuses but at levels ranging from elementary to high school.¹⁷

While such Chinese-funded institutes help what are often cash-strapped American public schools offer Chinese language and culture courses, Chinese curriculum development, and even student-exchange programs free of charge, these Confucius Institutes have also been roundly criticized for feeding Chinese propaganda and doctrine right into the minds of America's youngest, and therefore most impressionable, citizens. Warns Commissioner Wessel:

Such propaganda has had a dramatic effect on the writings of many professors and increasingly on the views of many students who are going to be the public policy leaders of tomorrow. It's smart, it's effective, and it's very detrimental to US interests.¹⁸

The theme of this chapter—the last in our detective story—has been this: To peacefully counter the serious security challenges now being posed by a rapidly rising China, there must first be a political consensus on what the appropriate economic, military, and other actions are to take. However, achieving any such political consensus will obviously be difficult in free and open democracies where economic interests are divided by their stakes in the China trade, lobbying groups would rather fight each other than band together in common cause, an authoritarian Chinese government is able to exert significant media control over the China narrative outside Chinese borders, and both Western journalists and Western universities engage in systematic self-censorship.

In fact, this “house divided” assessment in our final chapter goes a long way toward explaining why democracies in the West—and America in particular—have been so slow to reach any real political consensus on the need to address the overarching “will there be war” question. Perhaps needless to say, if this head-in-the-sand trend continues, this is a story that can only end badly for all of us.

Of course, it is not too late to solve this detective story in a far better, and far more peaceful, way. In fact, there is great cause for hope if only the truth can truly bubble up to the surface so that all of us, both within and outside of China, can come to fully understand just how big the stakes are and just how large the scope for catastrophe may be.

This has been the ultimate purpose of our investigation—to explore these truths that need to become self-evident in order for peace to prevail. In this spirit, and to turn the rear-view wisdom of Spanish philosopher George Santayana on its head, let us end, then, with this: “Those who can truly see all of the possible futures have the best chance of choosing the best one and avoiding the worst.”19