Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  Lee’s emphasis on American society’s internal cohesion was telling in an Asian context. China’s leaders remain preoccupied by the disintegration of societies pressured to adopt Western-style economic and political practices like the former Soviet Union and Suharto’s Indonesia. In their eyes a decision to permit free association when there are so many inequalities of many different kinds left over from the old order or created by the new one is more likely to lead to a political revolution than to produce political harmony. On March 15, 1999, in a news conference that included foreign reporters, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji said, “Don’t support these so-called pro-democracy activists. They will bring neither democracy nor the rule of law to China.”13

  Chinese leaders—and foreign investors—also ignore human rights in their mutual exploitation of a cheap labor market. One prime way of doing so and of justifying what they are doing is to spread the idea that human rights (as conceived by Westerners) have no basis within Chinese culture. This kind of rhetoric is very common throughout Asian ruling circles today. The Burmese military (and their Japanese financiers) use it to keep Nobel Prize winner and National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest even though her party won 82 percent of the seats in the 1990 Burmese election; the Singaporean government and courts used it in 1995 to execute a Filipina housemaid, Flor Contemplación, for murders probably committed by her Chinese employer;14 and the Chinese government used it in sentencing Democracy-wall activist Wei Jingsheng to prison for a second fifteen-year term merely for suggesting that there might be a fifth modernization (democracy) in addition to the four favored by then party leader Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese government finally released Wei, deporting him to the United States after President Jiang Zemin’s visit in 1997, but the governments of Burma and Singapore have proved to be deaf to foreign criticism on human rights grounds. The Chinese government’s record of releasing political detainees when the issue is raised with it discreetly has not been bad. In his press conference of March 1999, Premier Zhu said, “We welcome foreign friends criticizing us in our work, but don’t be impatient,” noting that he has grown accustomed to “friends from abroad pulling out lists” of pro-democracy activists whom they want released from jail.15

  In the final analysis, two aspects of human rights policy transcend mere political rhetoric and deserve our attention over the long haul. First, the United States must strive to retain the respect of the relatively small group of Chinese elites who will eventually come to have influence or hold power in the next century. Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, divides the Chinese people into three broad categories in terms of their attitudes toward politics.16 The first category is made up of the leaders of the Communist Party. “Their main concern is keeping power in their hands,” says the Dalai Lama, and they are in that sense no different from other Asian ruling elites, like the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the military in Burma, whose main concerns are preserving their own positions of power.

  The second category is made up of intellectuals and students. “This is the group which ultimately will bring democracy in China. . . . No outsider, not the United States, nobody, can bring democracy to China, except those people.” A sound human rights policy would attempt to maintain the respect of these people through appropriate, supportive activities in our own country and in international organizations without continually pretending that something is being accomplished by “constructive engagement,” the current euphemism for the ineffective sermonizing and browbeating tactics used by the State Department and others to attack China verbally on the issue. Personal diplomacy by officials who are well informed and sensitive to Chinese society is always more effective when we are trying to win freedom for people who have risked their lives for ideals we support.

  The Dalai Lama’s third category is made up of the masses, concerned with “daily livelihood,” for whom “democracy is not much relevant in their day-to-day life.” The Dalai Lama argues that those engaged in a positive human rights policy toward China should seek advice from the second group on what ought to be done about preserving the rights of this third group.

  Human rights must be an important dimension of any American policy toward China that truly addresses Chinese problems and is sensitive to the Chinese record in particular cases. Such a policy is best implemented by trained and experienced diplomats, not by politicians speaking in generalities to domestic audiences for political advantage. Inevitably, demands for political reform will grow in China over time, just as they have in Taiwan and South Korea, so long as the regime’s basic policies remain what they are today. In the meantime, the U.S. government should exercise patience and firmness, while discreetly intervening in particular cases where we might make a difference.

  The second aspect of human rights in China we must recognize is to ensure that poor working conditions and prison labor in China (and elsewhere) do not end up destroying the livelihoods of American workers. Without question the most powerful human rights tool the United States could wield would be to deny access to the American market to products from multinational companies that have abandoned American workers to seek out low-wage foreign workers lacking in economic or political rights of any sort, not to speak of human rights. The economics profession may attack such policies as “protectionism,” but the time is long past when the United States should allow corporations to use the bottom line, “globalization,” or the pressures of competition—”Adam Smith made me do it”—as excuses for their indifference to basic human rights at home or abroad. Failure to consider this dimension of the rights question leaves the United States open to a charge of hypocrisy.

  The United States is formally as well as emotionally and intellectually committed to an academic textbook definition of “free trade,” which it believes (or pretends to believe) was the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Created in 1948 as a specialized agency of the United Nations, GATT governed trade among the so-called free-market economies during the era of the Cold War. Its greatest accomplishments were a series of multilateral negotiations among its members to reduce or eliminate tariffs on many different products, which greatly stimulated international trade over the years. It was replaced on January 1, 1995, by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Actually, for most of the Cold War, GATT was part of an American grand strategy vis-à-vis the USSR in which the United States traded access to its market and its technologies in return for support against communism by nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The WTO has no similar strategic purpose; it must either deliver the allegedly mutual benefits of free trade or else it is a menace to the livelihoods of all working Americans. Far too often free trade has meant in practice free access to the American market for foreign products but American toleration of closed foreign markets regardless of the damage this has done to U.S. industries and good jobs in manufacturing.

  China’s primary trade goal is to gain admission to the WTO with the status of a developing country. As a developing country, China would not have to open its markets to foreign competitors on an equal basis and would be exempt from the provisions of the WTO treaty concerning national subsidies for industries and intellectual property rights covering items like foreign films and books. If it achieves that—as the ideological myopia of American trade negotiators of both parties and the economists who advise them makes likely—its mercantilism will ultimately do serious damage to the American economy, not to speak of the WTO system. Like Japan before it, China will run up huge trade surpluses with the United States rather than generating a balanced and mutually beneficial trade. Managed trade is the antidote to this, and it need not hamper China’s economic development, but it is anathema to the economic ideologists of the United States. Management of trade with China would require the kind of political leadership and a governmental capability that the country may simply not be able to muster in the post–Cold War world. After all, the United States has never given the same priority to trade as to hum
an rights, arms sales, or territorial disputes.

  Before the economic crisis that began in 1997, which greatly expanded global dependency on the American market, the United States was already absorbing about 25 percent of all exports from East Asia and running annual trade deficits with the area well in excess of $100 billion. China’s trade surplus with the United States, more than $60 billion in 1998, is second only to Japan’s and growing much faster. When China launched its economic reforms in 1978, its overall foreign trade totaled $20.6 billion; by 1993 the figure was $195.8 billion, an increase of 950 percent. Some 80 percent of China’s exports are manufactured goods, and China is the world’s largest textile exporter as well as the largest source of American textile and apparel imports. The Europeans and Japanese also run trade deficits with China, but the U.S. deficit is approximately two to three times theirs.

  In a sense, this “trade problem” is really a matter of “systems friction,” the clash of different forms of capitalism, exactly as one might expect given the developmental-state strategy that China is pursuing. The point of this strategy is to bend the rules and norms of laissez-faire capitalism in order to achieve national wealth and power, since economics in this view is inevitably a zero-sum game in which some nations win and others lose. China has never tried to become a “free-market economy” but rather to engage and exploit other market economies to become a great power. Economic reform, after all, was undertaken in the first place in order to preserve the Communist Party’s political control and to achieve through other means what it had failed to achieve through Stalinism and then Maoism.

  The U.S. response to this challenge has primarily been to try to induce or cajole China into “reforming” its economy to give it the look of American-style capitalism. Thus, in 1994, reflecting the attitudes of Washington’s economic theorists and trade bureaucrats, the Washington Post editorialized that in order to be allowed into the WTO, China must 1) publish its trade regulations in a transparent form accessible to importers, 2) ensure that all foreign and domestic companies receive the same treatment from the legal system, and 3) stop using artificially low exchange rates to boost exports and impede imports.17 These proposals, of course, were not only culture-bound but thoroughly at odds with China’s chosen strategy of economic development as well. Even if China were to abandon its strategy of economic development, it would never do business the way the United States does.

  The answer to these problems, in the sense of helping to promote China’s economic development while preventing its predatory trade policies from provoking international conflict, is managed trade. All this means is the use of public policy to manage outcomes rather than procedures. It assumes that when either public or private companies in different economic systems trade with and invest in each other’s economies, a mutually beneficial outcome cannot be assured merely through agreement on rules. Managed trade is not nearly as uncommon as professional economists imply. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, when the United States began to trade with Poland, Romania, and Hungary, it set goals that these Leninist countries had to meet. It required, for instance, that Polish imports from GATT countries rise 7 percent per year or trade would be cut off.18

  The economic challenge of China is likely to be the most difficult test not just for American economic policy but for its foreign policy in general in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, Americans still remain confused by the idea that the foundations of power no longer lie in military but in economic and industrial strength. They tolerate, even applaud, irrationally bloated defense budgets while doing little to rebuild and defend the industrial foundations of their own nation. When the world economic crisis began in Asia in 1997, the United States responded with the stale formulas of the International Monetary Fund, only worsening the situation. Inadequate political leadership, inappropriate staffing of the government, and an inability to redirect the foreign affairs, defense, technological, and intelligence agencies to pay more reasonable attention to Asia in general and China in particular seem endemic problems for the foreseeable future.

  JAPAN AND THE ECONOMICS

  OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

  During the Cold War the Soviet Union lost any number of friends and potential allies by forever hectoring them about Marxism and the stages of economic growth they would have to go through in order ever to hope to live like Russians. Such Marxist rigidity clearly benefited the American side in the superpower face-off of that era. Ideological arrogance turned many countries, like Tanzania and Egypt, against their Soviet economic advisers, and overbearing Soviet behavior contributed heavily to the Sino-Soviet dispute. Unfortunately, in the post–Cold War era it is the United States that is exhibiting a capitalist version of such heavy-handedness and arrogance.

  Ideology—that is, the doctrines, opinions, or way of thinking of an individual, a class, a nation, or an empire—is as tricky a substance to use in international conflicts as poison gas. It, too, has a tendency to blow back onto the party releasing it. During the late 1950s, in the depths of the Cold War, many Americans began to suspect that the Soviet Union was actually a third-rate economy; but it still had the world’s most alluring ideology, a body of thought capable of attracting more people in the Third World than the “possessive individualism” (to use the philosopher C. B. Macpherson’s term) espoused by the United States. Soviet intellectual appeals were built around the ideas of Karl Marx—indubitably a man of the West and properly buried in Highgate Cemetery, London—which attracted even the most chauvinistic people on earth, the Chinese. Marxism-Leninism, as espoused by the Soviet Union, provided explanations for the inequities of colonialism, a model of economic development based on the achievements of Russia under Stalin, and the promise of world peace when all nations had passed beyond imperialism, which was the “final stage of capitalism.”

  Part of what gave Soviet ideology such power to convince whole peoples in the Third World was the way it assimilated and invoked the single most uncontested ideology of our century, that of science. It claimed to rest not on the hopes of idealistic reformers but on the logic of “scientific socialism.” The Soviets insisted that they were acting in accordance with laws of human development discovered by their patron saints, Marx and Lenin. By contrast, the ideology of the “free world” looked at best like a rationalization of the privileges enjoyed by Americans because of their exceptional geography and history.

  Not surprisingly, American leaders came to feel that somehow they had to match the ideological claims of communism in what they saw as a great global battle for the souls of earth’s contested majority. Nowhere did this need seem more acutely necessary than in East Asia, where Communist regimes had come to power in China, North Korea, and Vietnam despite the fact that Marx’s analysis of class conflict in industrializing societies bore only the faintest relation to the actual conditions in any of these countries. At the time, communism was also an active competitor in every other country of the region. Asians were attracted to it precisely because it claimed to be based on science—the ingredient that seemed to undergird the industrial and military might of their European, American, and Japanese colonizers—and because the example of the Soviet Union held out the hope of a solution that might someday be within their own revolutionary grasp.

  The American response, never expressly articulated but based on the total mobilization of the American people for the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy and other leaders, was twofold. First, we would do everything in our considerable power to turn Japan into a capitalist alternative to mainland China, a model and a showcase of what Asians might expect if they threw in their lot with the Americans instead of the Communists. Second, academic economics as taught in most American universities was subtly transformed into a fighting ideology of the “West.” From each of these transformations would come fateful consequences for the American empire after its competition with the Soviet Union ended. Because most Americans never understood either policy to be a strategy for
pursuing the Cold War, they took both Japan’s achievements and the wealth of the West to be evidence of an ineluctable destiny that made the United States a singularly appropriate model for the rest of the world. Any doubts raised about these propositions were seen as undermining the pretensions of the American empire. Thus, what began as tactical responses to temporary, often illusory or misleadingly interpreted Soviet “advantages” ended up as ideological articles of faith for the “sole superpower” of the post–Cold War world.

  From approximately 1950 to 1975, the United States treated Japan as a beloved ward, indulging its every economic need and proudly patronizing it as a star capitalist pupil. The United States sponsored Japan’s entry into many international institutions, like the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, well before a post–World War II global consensus in favor of Japan had developed. It also transferred crucial technologies to the Japanese on virtually concessionary terms and opened its markets to Japanese products while tolerating Japan’s protection of its own domestic market. It even supported the Japanese side in all claims by individual American firms that they had been damaged by Japanese competitors. In addition, the United States allowed Japan to retain an artificially undervalued currency in order to give its exports a price advantage for well over a decade longer than it did any of the rebuilt European economies.