Question:
Right now, there’s a misunderstanding that China is a new imperialist power and the US loves to pump that out. Let’s take the blame away from us. Let’s say China is the new US when they also know that’s not the case. So could you speak more about maybe dispelling that rumor that ‘China is imperialist’?
Vijay Prashad:
There are some facts that make this statement absurd right now. The NATO countries spend about 80% of the world’s military spending annually, 80% of the world’s military spending. China spends roughly 4% of world military spending. That’s a very little amount of money for imperialism. China has a very powerful military force, but it’s not going to be out there conquering Europe. So what happened?
One is the military capacity is measured by the amount of money spent.
Secondly, China has no military bases around the world. There’s one naval station in Djibouti, but that’s set up to support a UN mission against the pirates of Somalia. That’s a different debate. Should China have joined that naval mission is a different debate, but it’s not really a military base. United States has 900 foreign military bases, many of them encircling China, many of them in Europe itself. They don’t have the military footprint to go around the world. The Chinese navy is literally not patrolling the whole world. There was a Chinese naval vessel that went around Australia and panicked the country. I don’t know why. One Chinese vessel unable to really do immense damage to the naval system in Australia, the coast guard would have been able to defend against it. I don’t know why there was so much shrieking. Why would China even think about launching some invasion of Australia? It’s ridiculous, but the point is that China doesn’t have that footprint. Imperial footprint, it doesn’t have bases in the Democratic Republic of Congo and so on.
Number three, the Chinese don’t behave like imperialists in the sense that they forgive a lot of their loans. They don’t want to indebt countries. They’re saying to countries for the first time in a long period, we want you to industrialize. We don’t want to have you be just a supply of raw materials, that’s important.
Number four, the Chinese government actually pretty forthrightly has said over and over again: We want a shared, harmonious future, we want win-win cooperation. Let’s take people seriously. Xi Jinping hasn’t made a speech saying I want to seize Greenland, I want to seize Mexico or rename the Gulf of Mexico. He hasn’t said, we’re going to seize Japan or we’re going to take Mongolia. The Chinese don’t talk like that.
Yes, it’s true. China has fought to consolidate its sovereign territory. It is true that China and India went to war in 1962 so that China could build a road from Xinjiang into Tibet that goes through Aksai Chin. It is also true that China and Vietnam fought a war in 1979 around the question of the killing fields in Cambodia. Furthermore, it is true that the Chinese government has said that it wants to unite the complete territory of China, which includes the Taiwan island. However, the government in Taipei also agrees that there is only one China, and Taiwan is a province of China that must be brought back under the sovereignty of China.
That’s actually not a controversial argument, because both Beijing and Taipei, since 1949, have said that there is one China. And they only disagree on where the capital is. Taipei has said the capital is in Taipei and Beijing has said the capital is in Beijing. Now the world community has basically agreed after the 1970s that there is one China, the capital is Beijing. Nobody really seriously thinks that Taiwan is going to be an independent country. So the idea that China is actually out there, ravenously taking territory, forcing countries to do things. It’s not true.
What Chinese companies and Chinese businesses are doing is operating in a capitalist manner. What you’re seeing on the African continent or in South America is inter-capitalist rivalries. In other words, a Chinese company, whether state-owned or not, is competing with a firm, maybe an American firm for a mining license or to set up a factory or whatever. These are inter-capitalist rivalries. These are not imperialist rivalries. They could become imperialist if the Chinese decided to deploy extra-economic force, military power, political power, to squeeze countries to give China a better deal in an interaction, but that’s just not happening. The Chinese are not using them. They’re not flying their planes over a country to scare the president into signing a deal. It’s not happening.
So I don’t understand when people talk about Chinese imperialism, their definition of imperialism. Do they believe that if a company goes to another country, it’s imperialist? In which case, let’s take a walk on the streets of Shanghai, there are lots of imperialist countries. Italy is an imperialist country, because I walked past an Italian store. There is a French imperialist country because there’s Louis Vuitton, there’s Gucci. What are we talking about? This is trivial.
The definition of imperialism that people use is not accurate, not interesting, does not apply to the Chinese experience.
Editor: Charriot Zhai
