Posted on: Friday, April 13, 2001
Jingoism rears its ugly head
By David Polhemus
Advertiser Editorial Writer
There's a scary specter loose in our land that we haven't seen for some time: the spirit of jingoism.
We were able to summon up a bit of it in the Persian Gulf War, but the troops were marching home from that one before many of us got aroused.
Today the object is China. We were angry at China before the Navy EP-3E crew was forced to land on Hainan island, no doubt in part because of China's execrable human rights record, but also out of incipient guilt that a huge proportion of everything we buy is made there, and once was made here, by American workers.
The jingoistic impulse was already there, but reinforced by presidential candidate George W. Bush, who advocated treating China as a "strategic competitor" instead of — as columnist Tom Plate pointed out on these pages this week — the rather naive formulation of "strategic partnership" crafted by Bill Clinton.
But the beauty of trying to act as if China were a strategic partner is that it enhanced the chances of its becoming one. The opposite is true of Bush's approach.
You want saber-rattling? Check the screed on these pages yesterday by respected national columnist Charles Krauthammer: "We must make China pay a price. There has to be a cost for buzzing a U.S. plane, causing a collision, taking the plane apart and holding the crew hostage."
Now that the crew is safe, he thundered, "it is time to show some steel."
It turns out that Krauthammer's idea of steel is to deny the Chinese the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympics. Others, in Congress and elsewhere, want (after a decade of hard work to get this megatrading nation housebroken) to deny China a spot in the World Trade Organization. Still more want to arm Taiwan to the teeth.
To what end? The United States has an opportunity to influence what sort of power China will become later this century — not through confrontation but, as far as possible, through cooperation. Right now, China is extremely difficult to deal with. It requires nuanced diplomacy, not sloganeering aimed at domestic sound bites.
China comes from a place of wounded pride as the result of its colonial experience, bristling nationalism and a system of governance that is all but dysfunctional.
It's amazing the degree of acceptance in the United States of the notion that if something is nominally legal, you must exercise the right or risk losing it.
The Chinese military recognizes that the Pentagon is bent on exercising its "right" to eavesdrop on China from its shores, but they regard it as unfriendly. And in a friendly and informal way, they had warned their American counterparts that this practice was likely to become a problem.
Consider if you will the homeowner in Pearl City or Hawai'i Kai who wants to install a floodlight on the edge of his property and keep it burning all night even though it shines through his next-door neighbor's bedroom window. That's the homeowner's right, but what kind of neighbor does that make him?
That homily may seen quite a stretch from international power politics, but it doesn't hurt to be aware of the enormous emphasis placed on morality over legality in Chinese thought.
Why, you may ask, should Washington go out of its way to be a good neighbor to China, while China's leaders often seem to behave like spoiled teenagers?
The answer is that China's leaders don't have the power to behave otherwise, while American leaders do.
None of the above detracts in any way from the dedication and bravery shown by the American EP-3E crew. But one has to question the wisdom of Vice President Dick Che-ney in suggesting that the United States will resume unarmed aerial surveillance close to China's shores.
In no way should a decision to abandon such flights be allowed to appear as bending to Chinese threat. It should be a unilateral decision based on a careful review of risk, as we know it, versus reward.
