The West is being naive about China’s ambitions

Paul Kelly’s commentary has revealed the extent of China’s totalitarianism.

Paul Kelly’s excellent article reveals the true depth and extent of China as a threat to liberal democracy and the international rules-based order (“Stalin and Mao the key as Xi engineers China’s soul”, 30/1).

China is culturally and ideologically the West’s enemy. It is a culture with “an absence of the social mind”, as Lin Yu-tang wrote 80 years ago. The West has been ignorant and naive to the point of stupidity in allowing China to pursue its destructive, global, hegemonic agenda.

As the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote: “Know yourself and know your enemies and you will not be defeated in a hundred battles.” The West does not “know” China and is being defeated, though I suspect the tide is turning. Similarly, China does not “know” the West.

Xi’s totalitarian regime will bring upon itself another dynastic collapse, one that is essential if it is to be reconstructed as a modern nation.

Jim Wilson, Beaumont, SA

Paul Kelly’s article and John Garnaut’s analytic address on China should be recommended reading for those academics who are against the establishment in our universities of chairs in Western civilisation funded by the Ramsay Centre, while they accept courses funded by China.

Garnaut’s “perpetual struggle” to maintain the communist ideology promoted by Stalin, Lenin, Mao and now by Xi, should make Western democracies wary of accepting offers of money or other economic incentives that may facilitate the subtle infiltration of their ideology and soft influence on our democratic way of life — a life based on tolerance, freedom, and acceptance of diversity.

B. Della-Putta, Thorngate, SA

John Garnaut’s take on Xi Jinping’s guiding principles is plausible. But he might have given more emphasis to Xi’s existential threat from the rise of a growing, informed middle class.

Had former leader Deng Xiaoping embraced the liberalisation of the Chinese Communist Party, as advocated by fellow politburo members Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the Tiananmen Square massacre might have been avoided, and the consequent loyalty education program based on a hyped-up existential need to avenge the 100 years of humiliation at the hands of the avaricious and pernicious West may not have occurred.

Xi had little choice but to build on the success of the loyalty education program to retrieve and safeguard the credibility of the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party — and beyond, a new middle kingdom with the “belt and road initiative” perhaps — to bask in the imagined glory of old (like the need for endless growth under capitalism).

It will pay the West not to fan Xi’s sails, especially with self-righteous rules-based adventures such as freedom of navigation, or demonising Huawei as the second coming of Fu Manchu, that cunning oriental villain with PhDs from Cambridge.

Remember, the Opium Wars were all about freedom of trade. Times are different though. China is no longer the sick man of Asia — far from it.

Chek Ling, Corinda, Qld

We are deeply indebted to Paul Kelly for publicising John Garnaut’s brilliant analysis of Chinese governance. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the piece is Garnaut’s admission that he felt impelled to “dumb down” his initial analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the Chinese state — few politicians seem able to think beyond conventional political and economic banalities.

On the bright side, I wonder if a superb piece of historical irony might not be in the making: if it took a movie actor US president to successfully confront the Russian communist monolith, might not another president, one schooled in reality TV, succeed against China?

Terry Birchley, Bundaberg, Qld

Greg Sheridan’s view that the simmering Huawei confrontation between the US and China does not presage a new Cold War is correct (“Not yet a Cold War, but shift in balance”, 30/1). Yet a cold war could easily turn into a hot war.

One in five Americans is engaged in military or security. That is, 20 per cent of the American workforce earns their livelihood from the arms industry or its security industry. As the war on terror is settling down, the US needs a new war to keep its workforce employed. As a consequence of our security ties with the US, Australia could be drawn into such a war.

Bill Mathew, Parkville, Vic