Opinion: The US is not responsible for China’s rise – By Janan Ganesh (Financial Times) / December 14, 2021
The west struggles to understand that the rest of the world has agency of its own
You will have seen it play out on the news so often as to become cliché. A bereaved person embarks on a crusade against whichever disease, crime or public safety hazard claimed their loved one. A campaign is set up. Donations roll in. What motivates their efforts is a sincere desire to spare others from the same grief. But so does a deep psychic need to claw back control. Having been done to and acted upon by a capricious world, the feeling of agency, however brief, soothes them.
Nations too have losses to process. Whether or not China ever surpasses it, the US has been bereaved of its 1990s unipolarity. It copes with the trauma by dwelling on what could have been done about it. If only China had not been waved into the World Trade Organization 20 Decembers ago. If only successive White Houses had not been so credulous in their dealings with Beijing. The recriminations go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still fancy, the US “lost” China to communism.
On the surface, this self-reproach looks courageous and honest. In fact, it is the easy way out. The alternative is to admit that the much larger and older country was bound for world eminence (again) once it began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. The west might have postponed its arrival at the top table, at some cost. Preventing it outright was never in its power.
Impotence is more painful to own up to than guilt. The rest of the democratic world finds it no easier than America. “How the west invited China to eats its lunch”, has the luridness and fake-Everyman patter of a Fox News headline. It is in fact a BBC one, from last week. Consider its two implications. First, the WTO, in 2001, could have plausibly blackballed a fifth of humanity that had just undergone a generation of market-friendly reforms. Second, doing so would have somehow only stymied China, and not the west, even though American and other companies gorged on low-wage labour there ever after.
