The World Is Learning to Say “No” to China

In 1996, the nationalistic book, China Can Say No, was published, arguing that China’s time had come, that it need no longer swallow perceived insults from other countries (especially the US and Japan), and that it should adopt a more bellicose foreign policy.

Today, though, it’s the rest of the world that’s starting to say “no” to China. In just the past few years, the US has gone from a policy of engagement with China to initiating a trade war with it. The UK has gone from trumpeting a “golden era” with China to cutting Huawei out of its 5G network and offering British National Overseas passports to fleeing Hong Kongers. The EU has gone from courting Chinese commerce to freezing its trade deal with Beijing and, together with the US, UK, and Canada, sanctioning Chinese officials for their role in the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Lithuania has withdrawn from China’s 17+1 cooperation forum and is moving closer towards Taiwan, even opening a trade office (i.e. a de facto embassy) in Taipei. Japan, too, seems to be drawing closer to Taiwan, and, just yesterday, its deputy defense minister said his country should defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression and questioned whether the policy of denying it recognition as a sovereign state is obsolete. At the conclusion of their summit this month, the G7 countries called China out for its human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. All these things predictably infuriated China, and, a few years ago, most of them were unthinkable; what happened?

For decades, China used the narrative of its own victimhood to get other countries to go along with it – and, to be fair, it had legitimate cause to feel like it had been victimized, since it was treated appallingly in the past. It invoked the memory of its “century of humiliation” – the depredations by foreign powers, the Opium War and the unequal treaties that resulted from it – to guilt-trip other countries into giving it what it wanted, and many of them, whether out of shame or sympathy, acquiesced. Poor China. It had been abused in its formative years, and if it now acted-out, wasn’t this to be expected? Wasn’t it entitled to a little leeway for its misbehavior after all it had gone through? And so, many countries looked the other way when it violated international norms and international treaties. They accepted unequal trade arrangements with Beijing, in which the same sectors of their economies that were open to Chinese companies were closed to foreign companies in China. They allowed it to steal their intellectual property with impunity. They tiptoed around China’s hair-trigger sensibilities, sensitive to how it would construe any criticism of its oppression of its own people as “interference with its internal affairs.” They bent over backwards to keep from upsetting China, even snubbing the Dalai Lama, a man known for his decency and grace (and for being the spiritual leader of one of the biggest religions in the world), and indulged Beijing’s ridiculous charade of pretending Taiwan isn’t an independent country. And, of course, as China grew richer and more powerful, this created even more incentive to please it.