If the U.S. misreading of the CCP in the Republic helped the CCP seize power, the U.S. misreading of the CCP again after the Cultural Revolution helped the CCP achieve economic take-off while the world witnessed the tragedy of “The Farmer and the Snake” played out again and again.
“This time back, we’ve lost half of China! Our best friends, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, who have both passed away, are half of China in our hearts. But this half, we have lost forever!” In May 1972, Fei Zhengqing, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, said at a dinner arranged by the Chinese side that this was the first time he had set foot in China since he left the country in 1946. In the intervening 26 years, he had watched the fire from across the river, imagining that the United States could make amends with the China in his heart, but not knowing what the Chinese Communist Party had actually done in China, even the death of two dear friends had not awakened him.
In a letter to a friend in 1973, he said: “Mr. Nixon’s visit to China showed that Communism had become better or neutral, that we had completely discarded the idea of the 1950s. We have completely discarded all the amazing things that emerged in the fifties.”
It was not until he read Bao Ruowang’s book of blood and tears, Mao’s Prisoner, based on his seven years in a Chinese prison, that Fei was deeply shaken, and it gave him the chills. As one of the most influential “China people” in the United States at the time, the fact that Fei was so late in learning about the tragedy in China also shows how deeply the Chinese Communist Party hid its evil deeds from the world.
In November 1973, Fei wrote a commentary on this subject, which was recorded as an act of hostility by the Chinese Communist Party. Later, when he asked to go to China, China refused to give him a visa. But in May 1975, Fei was still praising Mao as “always the greatest liberator,” unaware that Mao had caused the unnatural deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people during the three-year Great Leap Forward and its various campaigns.
After Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the United States with a friendly smile, Fei and his colleagues were excited again that China was willing to move toward democracy. It was not until the June 4 shooting in 1989 that they woke up to a fundamental shift in the perception of the Chinese Communist Party by American China experts. Fei finally completed his last book, China: A New History, two days before his death in 1991, and had the opportunity to correct his previous misconceptions about the CCP in his final moments, admitting that without The Japanese invasion and Mao’s revolution “a new dictatorial power was laid down in the countryside”, when China, under Chiang Kai-shek’s “Nanking government, could have gradually led China to modernization”.
This was 60 years after his first visit to China in 1931, and the effects of his misinformation and misjudgment of the U.S. government have been irreversible. So, what made this most famous and influential American “China man” look the other way?
The Misjudgment of 1949
Born in the United States in 1907, Fei Zhengqing died in 1991. He lived through the twentieth century, saw two world wars, experienced the Cold War between the East and West, witnessed the rise of communism, and in his later years saw its demise in Eastern Europe. He was an encyclopedic figure who made many contacts throughout his life and had a great influence on the academic and political worlds.
Fei Zhengqing, originally named John King Fairbank, went to China in the summer of 1931 to investigate and further his studies in order to write his doctoral dissertation on Sino-British relations in the 19th century, and began to study Chinese, befriending architects such as Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, whose Chinese names he and his wife, Fei Weimei, were given.
From September 1942 to December 1943, Fei was stationed in Chongqing by the U.S. government as an official of the U.S. Bureau of Strategic Information, and was also a civilian officer in the China Relations Division of the Cultural Relations Department of the U.S. State Department and a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to China.
From October 1945 to July 1946, he returned to China as Director of the U.S. Information Agency in China. Because of his early experience and contacts in China, his service in the U.S. government, and later his teaching at Harvard University, he was recognized as a “China man” in the U.S. and abroad.
In June 1946, Fei and his wife visited Zhangjiakou, the Communist Party’s border area, where Fei saw “the establishment of democracy and the creation of a new life. The Communist army assisted the peasants in their work, helped them collect grain, organized mutual aid in planting crops, ran rural cooperatives, and made friends with them. Upon his return from the visit, Fei wrote in the American publication The Atlantic Monthly, “One of the things that an onlooker feels most struck by is the fact that they have taken the most pressing need of the Chinese peasants – economic improvement – as the basis for their party.” The CCP’s brutal killing of landowners and the CCP’s brutal infighting was something he simply could not see or even imagine.
At the critical moment when China’s direction was being decided, Fei Zhengqing also spread remarks in the United States about the corruption of the Kuomintang, attacked the credibility of the Kuomintang, suggested that the United States should abandon Chiang Kai-shek, advocated that it was in the interest of the United States to establish relations with the CCP, and even advocated that the CCP regime should be given a seat in the United Nations. As a result, Fei became a hero in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, while also being lambasted by the Kuomintang.
After the outbreak of the Korean War, American China experts saw the need for a military deterrent against communist forces, and in a memo written in December 1951, Fei Zhengqing spoke of the horrific prospect that communism in China also brought to the Chinese people, forced into mass slave labor by the state, the repression, destruction and ruin of human personality, children turning in their parents, neighbors spying on and informing on each other, etc.
Fei Zhengqing was also outraged and shocked to see the Maoist regime launch a campaign to reorganize the intelligentsia. In a letter to a Taiwanese, he wrote: “The efforts to control thought made under the present Communist regime are the most cunning I have seen in all of Chinese history.” In 1952, he testified at a hearing that the Communist Party used power to bring everyone into its fold, to be controlled, isolated and used by this regime. Later, he said sadly, “In China, I can see clearly how the reforms have gone down the drain and how this situation has made the uprising the only way out.”
The awakening of 1989
When Nixon was first elected president in 1969, Fei wrote to Nixon and others suggesting that the United States engage with the Chinese Communist Party. visited China, and “America and China,” written by Fei Zhengqing, was one of two or three books Nixon read before his historic meeting with the Chinese.
However, Fei and Nixon did not know that the scenes Nixon saw on the streets of Beijing were all planned, all a song and dance created by the Chinese Communist Party. There was a shortage of daily necessities in China, and they had to purchase them with tickets, and suddenly the shelves were full of them, but after everyone pretended to purchase them, the stores had to take them back. How could foreigners see through the fake drama played by the people?
Even though the American people were awakened by the June 4 shooting, the United States adopted a policy of inaction and appeasement toward the Chinese Communist Party under the role of Secretary of State Kissinger and other pro-Communist figures, and Fei’s successors were still bewildered by the Chinese Communist Party, whose ideas had already passed through a stage of formation. In 1955, Fei and his colleagues founded the Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, which received many grants and trained many American scholars in sinology, and Fei, as an academic titan, influenced a large number of people.
In the 1980s, when China began to rise, the “McDonald’s will win” theory was popular in the American academy, arguing that “as the Chinese eat more and more like us (hamburgers), they will become more and more like us.” The New York Times leftist columnist Guido said: More Chinese people are drinking American “Starbucks coffee”, and when people have more coffee choices than leadership choices, political change is inevitable. American business and academic circles, including political leaders, have generally favored this “contact theory,” mistakenly believing that with the development of a market economy, the CCP would gradually move toward political democracy and peaceful evolution. As it turns out, this did not happen, and while the Chinese drank coffee and wore suits to study abroad, the CCP became more authoritarian.
If the U.S. misreading of the CCP in the Republic helped it seize power, the U.S. misreading of the CCP again after the Cultural Revolution helped the CCP achieve economic take-off. The world thus witnessed the tragedy of the farmer and the snake played out again and again.
It was not until 1997, on the eve of Zhu Rongji’s departure for the United States, that two former China-based journalists, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, co-authored The Coming U.S.-China Conflict, in which they asserted that “China as such a force will inevitably cease to be a strategic friend of the United States and become its long-term enemy .”
While the China threat theory was being put forward, Fei’s successor, Fu Gaoyi, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, came out in defense of the Chinese Communist Party, saying that this conclusion was based on a lack of analysis of the facts and was a misdirection.
As Chinese historian Yu Yingshi commented, “American China researchers explain the rise and development of the CCP with a layer of idealism and romanticism to a greater or lesser extent.”
The CCP is the most shadowy and scheming organization in history, repeatedly frozen but not dead, defeated but not defeated, and taking advantage of the slightest opportunity to return to life. By showing weakness, the CCP is luring the international community to let down its guard, accepting it, supporting it, and then waiting for an opportunity to engage its benefactors; by showing strength, the CCP is intimidating the international community, abandoning its guardianship of justice and freedom, automatically surrendering its arms, and intimidating control.
Containment of 2019
Marrold, who also served as director of the Center for East Asian Chinese Studies at Harvard University, is the author of three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution and is one of the few sober China experts in the United States. He argues that the people now have no relationship with the Chinese Communist government, which they do not own, given the extreme corruption of the Communist Party and the enormous damage to China’s environment.
Michael Pillsbury, born in 1945, is one of the most influential “China minds” in the U.S. Today, he has served as director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for China Strategy since 2014 and is an adviser on U.S. defense policy. He is President Trump‘s trusted expert on China.
In the first chapter of The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2049), Baines discusses China’s dream of becoming a global power. In “China’s Dream,” he points out that after gaining power in mainland China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has been planning to become the world’s number one power by 2049, 100 years later, initially with the assistance of the Soviet Union as much as possible, and then with the Western world, which has already seen through China’s attempt to replace the Soviet power, while the Western world still knows nothing about it. The Soviets had already seen that China was going to replace the Soviet power, and the Western world still had no idea.
The content of 100 Years of Marathon is based on a variety of declassified intelligence documents, as well as secret interviews with Chinese Communist defectors over the years. The testimonies of anonymous Communist defectors recorded in the book are fascinating. For example, in the early 1990s, the United States received two “defectors” from the top echelons of the Communist Party, Mr. Bai and Ms. Green. Mr. Bai claimed that the CCP’s anti-American hawks had won the internal struggle within the Party and were supported by Deng Xiaoping. He told Mr. Bai that the CCP was not sincere about moving toward a true market economy, let alone political liberalization and democratization. On the contrary, Ms. Green told him that the CCP is now reformist, and that the Chinese leadership is trying to learn from the U.S. and reform the Chinese economy to look like the U.S., after which political reform will naturally occur.
In the 1990s, the U.S. pursued a policy of helping the Chinese Communist Party build its economy and enter the WTO, and the top brass selectively trusted intelligence like Miss Green. But then after Ms. Green settled in the US, the CIA exposed her as a double agent and had her arrested. Subsequent developments in China proved that the intelligence provided by Mr. White back then was the accurate one.
Through the story of these two defectors, Bangrui Bai illustrates that the CCP has been deliberately providing false information to the U.S. at all times to give the U.S. the illusion that China is friendly to the U.S. and determined to reform. U.S. policy makers often start from subjective wishes and are fooled by the CCP. For example, the U.S. helped China join the WTO in the hope that it would speed up China’s reforms, but that didn’t happen.
President Trump had hit the nail on the head, said Bonnie White. “When the president is talking about his predecessors, not only President Barack Obama, but going back to the days of George W. Bush and his father and Clinton, the former president has gotten the Chinese Communist Party used to — they can bully American companies, they can bully Hong Kong without any consequences — and the U.S. can just file human rights reports to a few paragraphs and be done with it.”
In his book, Bainbridge says that myths about China exist among academics, think tanks, financial institutions and governments in the U.S. and the West, and that some U.S. experts on China are afraid to face the facts for their own economic interests with China, for fear of not getting visas to China, or not getting research grants. The reason why Baines is able to deplore these myths and misconceptions is that he himself was a believer in these myths. And the result of this misjudgment of China is that the United States is feeding the tiger, allowing China to grow rapidly into a formidable adversary on its own watch. According to Bonnie Bai, U.S. researchers on China are waking up too late. It is well known that the U.S. did not implement multi-pronged sanctions against the CCP until 2019, including trade sanctions.
Unlike Fei Zhengqing, who watched the fire from across the river and believed in his imaginary CCP, Bainbridge has practical knowledge of the unbelievable things happening in China. He has cited the example of a U.S. appeals court judge who recently visited China, and one of the questions the Chinese judge asked him was: How does the Republican Party interfere with court decisions? How does the court get guidelines from the Republican Party? Does the Republican National Committee give the court a draft decision over the phone? The U.S. judge replied, “No, that’s illegal in the United States, whether it’s a civil or criminal trial, it’s illegal for a political party to bypass a trial and get involved in the legal process.” The U.S. judge said the Chinese judges in the room were surprised to hear his response and thought he was lying, that he just didn’t want to acknowledge the role political parties play in crafting legal decisions.
He also said wryly that you don’t need the help of the intelligence services at all, just a $55 annual subscription to the China Daily, and the arguments will be delivered to your doorstep automatically. It is full of ideas such as “every Tibetan is happy” and “don’t fight a trade war, the U.S. will definitely lose”.
In an interview with Fox on April 1, Bai said the first thing he learned from the New Coronavirus outbreak was that “the Chinese Communist Party believes in deception,” and in a May interview, Bai said there are three things the Chinese Communist Party fears most: the fall of the government, being surrounded by the world, and Trump’s re-election.
Today’s U.S. election, there is already evidence that China interfered in the U.S. election by not allowing Trump to be re-elected and counting people who don’t like Trump as a weight in the Communist Party’s chances of winning, further confirming this and showing many people the true face of communism’s attempts to destroy democratic societies. That is why many Americans participated in the march to support Trump and destroy the Communist Party, saying that what they oppose is counterfeiting, communism and socialism, and that what they defend is American democracy and values, and that what they defend is faith and freedom for all Americans.
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