Jaw-Jaw: China is a Funny Sort of Revisionist Power — A Conversation with Dean Cheng

War on the Rocks ^ | November 13, 2018 | Dean Cheng and Brad Carson

[Zhang Fei]

Brad: Dean Cheng, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and author of the recent book, Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations. We have recently labeled China a revisionist power. Is that a characterization that you’d accept, and if so, what exactly are they trying to revise?

Dean: Well first, thank you for having me. I think China is a funny form of revisionist power. Now, what I mean by that is the following. Both the United States and China think of themselves actually as status quo powers. The problem is always, whose status quo? How do you define the status quo? The United States, our status quo not surprisingly, dates all the way back to 1776. So, it’s about 250 years. And during most of that period. We have dominated at a minimum, North America, most of the western hemisphere, and eventually became the global superpower.

For China, its history dates back at least 5,000 years. During most of which time, it dominated all of East Asia. And part of the problem here, is that our status quo happens to overlap the one period of greatest Chinese weakness. The so-called “Century of Humiliation,” which began in 1839 when the British started the First Opium War, to force China to accept British opium sales within China, all the way through 1949. This was the period when China faced the greatest potential of being really turned into a colony, in a way that neither the Manchus nor the Mongols could really effect on China.

So, since 1949 when Mao Zedong stood atop Tienanmen Square and waved and declared that China had stood up, the People’s Republic of China, the China under the Chinese Communist Party has been basically trying to get itself back to the position it was

[ifinnegan]

The true humiliation came after 1949 and it was solely inflicted by the Communists.

[FreedomPoster]

Self-inflicted, it should be said.

The ideas may have come from Europe, but the implementation was almost entirely indigenous by Mao and his Red cadres.

Over 75 millions dead worth of self-inflicted humiliation, per Rummel.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

[marktwain]

Yes. But they built a totalitarian government that is very effective. You should read this essay on biological leninism.

Very thought-provoking. Scary.