Page 2 of 5 CHINA AND APPEASEMENT,
PART 1 Beyond Munich: Geostrategy
and betrayal By Henry C K Liu
to break up the Rome-Berlin axis and establish cooperation between Britain,
France and Germany."
As opposition leader, Blum campaigned for France to end its non-intervention
policy toward the Spanish Civil War. On March 13, 1938, Blum was returned to
power as prime minister. He
immediately reopened the frontier with Spain to allow military aid from France.
Blum then came under heavy pressure from the right-wing press and politicians.
On April 10, the Blum government fell for the last time and he was replaced as
prime minister by Edouard Daladier, a radical socialist leader, with a centrist
"national government", supposedly above party politics and speaking for the
nation as a whole. Without help, the Spanish left was smashed by General
Francisco Franco.
The French national government came into being shortly after Nazi Germany's
annexation of Austria. It capitulated to British leadership on the Munich
crisis, swallowed the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, oversaw the outbreak of a
"phony war" over German invasion of Poland, and fell in March 1940, nearly two
years after its formation, because of Daladier's failure to aid Finland during
its Winter War with the USSR, which lasted from November 30, 1939, to March 12,
1940. Moscow's poor performance in the Winter War damaged the Soviets'
international image, putting the fighting ability of the Red Army into open
question, a fact that some argue contributed to Hitler's decision to launch
Operation Barbarossa against the USSR on June 22, 1941.
When Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, Daladier fled with other members
of the government to Morocco under the false impression that the government
would continue in French North Africa. He was arrested after France capitulated
on June 25, tried for treason by the Vichy government, handed over to the
Germans, and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp until the end of World
War II.
Munich thus was less an example of Franco-British appeasement to preserve the
peace than an example of devious geopolitical maneuvering by scheming great
powers for war.
Pre-Munich meaning of appeasement
The Encyclopedia of US Foreign Relations says "appeasement" as the term
was used before Munich "primarily referred to timely concessions to disgruntled
nations whose grievances had some legitimacy, in the hope of defusing
difficulties and promoting peace and goodwill. Acting from a position of
strength, the appeasing power was motivated not by fear or weakness but by a
sense of statesmanship and a perception that limited concessions would not
endanger its vital national interests."
The key words for an effective appeasement policy are "acting from a position
of strength", "not motivated by fear or weakness", and "that limited concession
would not endanger its vital national interests". Without such preconditions,
appeasement toward an insatiable belligerent will unfailingly be a policy of
failure.
China's history of positive appeasement
China has a history of effective positive appeasement in its diplomatic
dealings with small neighboring states through the ages, bringing long periods
of peace and prosperity to the Sinic world. Yet the fall of every Chinese
dynasty can be traced to earlier appeasement policies.
Appeasement by dynastic China was based on an outlook of hope and confidence,
Confucian in its optimism on innate human goodness, in its belief that
societies evolved from savagery to civilization, and that inclusiveness is a
path to peace under heaven. Throughout its long history, Chinese appeasement
was a movement to open up the center of civilization to less developed nations
that aspired to join the advanced Chinese system, not to change or destroy it
or to rid it of its backwardness.
The Mongol and Manchu tribes conquered Han China not to change Chinese
civilization but to preserve Chinese political, socio-economic and cultural
institutions because those were the coveted price of conquest. They quickly
became Sinicized through cultural assimilation.
Western imperialism in China
Western imperialism in China took on a fundamentally different, destructive
character. Europeans came to China with an unwarranted superiority complex
derived narrowly from its advanced militaristic technology.
Western political and economic imperialism was imposed at gunpoint,
rationalized by presumptuous cultural imperialism, not by innate moral
superiority. It was an intercontinental spread of the dark triumph of
militarist Spartan over civilized Athens. Notwithstanding that Western
imperialism sought not just to exploit China, but also to enslave the Chinese
race, the West assumed a moral pretext of saving China from its alleged
backwardness by seeking to change it, even though China has a longer continuous
civilization than the expansionist West.
Unlike the West, China has been predominantly defensive throughout most of its
history, trying to keep out barbarian invaders who clamored to join a more
advanced civilization, whereas the West since the Age of Imperialism that began
in the 17th century has acted as aggressive invaders that conquered, suppressed
and destroyed indigenous civilizations and religions.
While Christianity encountered resistance from Islam, it met no resistance from
Buddhism, a religion of detachment. Modernization was abducted to mean
Westernization, not only for China, but for the whole non-Western world, as
described in my 2003 Asia Times Online series on
The Abduction of Modernization.
This insidious attitude was made even more obscene by the rise of racism in
19th-century Europe.
Chinese appeasement in the Age of Imperialism
Unlike historical Chinese magnanimous appeasement of culturally deferential
neighboring states, the new Chinese appeasement toward 19th-century Western
barbaric encroachment was based on a new mood of fear, not moral strength,
Confucian in its untenable self-satisfaction, blind denial of reality and
refusal of self-criticism based on false pride, Buddhist in its insistence on
secular detachment to justify swallowing unjust oppression in the hope that
even Western barbarians must have some redeeming quality of human decency,
pessimistic in its belief that ephemeral Western technological superiority
would remain interminable, and fatalistic in its conclusion that militant
imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, despicable as it is, should be
accepted as a new socio-economic order for lack of moral alternatives.
The only rational salvation then was to copy Western imperialist ways, for the
victim to out-ape the oppressor. Survival of the fittest is twisted to mean
survival of the morally unfit. This was Japan's answer to the Western threat,
by a return to moral barbarism. Many thinkers and leaders in Asia, perverted by
Western cultural imperialism, continue to this day to believe firmly that what
went wrong with Japan was not that it embarked on a Westernization path that
inevitably led to imperialist expansion, but that it lost the war of
imperialist rivalry to US imperialism.
The dean of Chinese studies in the United States, John K Fairbank of Harvard,
wrote in an article, "The Manchu Appeasement Policy of 1843", in the Journal of
the American Oriental Society, Vol 59, No 4, December 1939, pp 469-484:
Those
who delight in the study of pre-Tang China are commonly observed to scorn the
ignoble senescence of the late Ch'ing [Qing] period. But the political
pathology of 19th-century China affords insights into Chinese civilization just
as surely as medical pathology aids medicine.
A century ago the Manchu Dynasty was debilitated by corruption and all but
bankrupt, lacking both the men and the ideas necessary for a creative response
to the Western impact. But in its weakness it retained the Confucian tradition,
and the bureaucrats who negotiated with the British invaders after 1840 still
thought in Confucian terms - so much as, in fact, that unless the modern
historian does likewise, their diplomatic maneuvers will remain as baffling to
him as they were to the first residents of the treaty ports.
It is both instructive and pathetic to see the Manchus taking their last refuge
in an ancient system of human relationships which held no meaning for the
British barbarians and so failed completely to subdue them.
Chinese
appeasement on US belligerence
There are disturbing signs that Chinese relations with the US have been moving
again in the direction of a failing appeasement policy on the part of China,
making concessions to an unendingly disgruntled United States whose ideological
grievances have no legitimacy, with China not acting from a position of moral
strength but motivated by needless fear of losing the US market, by ideological
weakness devoid of self-confidence and by the delusion that unprincipled
concessions will not endanger vital Chinese national interests.
Worst of all, similar to the failed Qing Dynasty's appeasement blunders,
Chinese appeasement toward unreasonable US demands will only encourage more
outrageous US belligerence. With such unsound preconditions, Chinese
appeasement will be a policy of failure that will lead not to peace between
China and the US, but to otherwise avoidable future conflicts, since both sides
are buying temporary peace while preparing for future war.
Taiwan and peaceful evolution of China
Two fundamental issues highlight Chinese appeasement as a policy doomed to
failure.
The first and more immediate issue is Chinese appeasement to escalating US
violation of Chinese sovereignty by interfering in Chinese internal affairs in
the matter of Taiwan. The second and longer-term issue is Chinese appeasement
on US strategy to change China from a socialist system toward a capitalistic
market economy through "peaceful evolution".
On both issues, China has repeatedly made appeasement concessions to
illegitimate US demands that endanger Chinese national interests. Such
appeasement will inevitably lead to conflict, even war. The two issues on which
no appeasement can be tolerated are: (1) protecting the territorial integrity
of China and (2) preserving the socialist system in China.
After more than two decades - since 1950 - of hostile US containment policy
toward China through diplomatic isolation and economic embargo of the new
socialist republic by a Western bloc dominated by US superpower, a new page on
US-China relations was turned on the basis of a milestone bilateral
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