Following Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's trip to China's Taiwan region, over 170 countries and global organizations have shown their support for the one-China principle. Aside from official government declarations, how do individuals outside China view this issue? Beijing Review reporter Li Wenhan interviewed John Pang, a senior fellow at Bard College in New York, via video. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow: 

Beijing Review: What do you think Pelosi hoped to gain from this trip? 

John Pang: Hard question. Even people in the United States have asked what she achieved for the U.S. national interest, as opposed to her own. Her visit reveals instead an incoherent, erratic foreign policy. On the one hand, the White house proclaimed its adherence to the one-China principle; on the other, we are asked to believe Pelosi’s "right of free travel" overrides longstanding U.S. policy toward China.

How will the visit impact China-U.S. relations? 

The mainland has pursued reunification with Taiwan according to guidelines that prioritize the peace and prosperity of people across the Straits. These guidelines allowed for strategic ambiguity, negotiation and the organic growth of social and economic ties between the mainland, Taiwan and the United States in a changing world. They allow for the peaceful resolution of contradictions over time. The United States is in a state of decline. We have come to the point where its leadership can only understand such patience as a weakness to be exploited. For this purpose, no stunt is too cheap, no gesture too vulgar. We have crossed a threshold. There is no longer any ambiguity to the U.S. intention to use Taiwan as a flashpoint to be triggered at will against the peaceful rise of China. 

This crossing of the reddest of China’s red lines signals how dangerous that decline is going to be for the rest of the world. Unable to cope with domestic crises, failure in war after war, and the loss of global hegemony, the U.S. is starting fires around the world.

We have noticed rising negative views of China in the United States. Why? 

The past few years have been a rude wakeup call for Asians living in the U.S. We've lived amidst a massive, concerted campaign of disinformation against China that began with the "pivot to Asia" and grew steadily until it had become, with the disinformation over Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the "Wuhan virus," a flood of the vilest hate-mongering dressed as concern for human rights and democracy. We've lived on the ground level of the strategic revival of Yellow Perilism in the West and everywhere else in the world its media has had influence. Asians in America, especially our elders and the working class in New York and San Francisco, have been singled out to be spat upon, beaten, stabbed and pushed under trains as collateral damage to the mobilization of hatred in service of foreign policy.

American political and media elites piously declare that they "hate the government, not the people" of the People's Republic of China (PRC) but their beliefs about China are so bizarre, so decoupled from reality that to take them seriously you also need to be replaying 19th-century tropes of the Yellow Peril and Oriental Despotism. To be so passionately, invincibly ignorant about the most populous people on earth, the greatest socioeconomic transformation in human history, you also need to believe the Chinese are "not human like us." You also need to hate them. Asians in America experience, often directly, the functional role of racial hatred in America's mobilization for its wars on Asian people, from the Philippines and Korea and to Viet Nam and now once again China.

There's also the animus of spurned love among liberals who had previously promoted "engagement" with China. They assumed that modernization led in a straight line to liberalization. They "engaged" in the faith that China would come increasingly under American economic and ideological control. Modernization turned out to have other futures, history turned out not to have ended in global American hegemony, and China has its own path. Just as in the 1950s the result is anger and recrimination at having "lost" a China that somehow belonged to them. 

The world in my lifetime has been defined by the sense that "history" had ended after 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent capitulation of China to the market, in the permanent reign of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism under American hegemony.

The Western elite raised from this period inhabit a frictionless realm of the virtual. They are symbolic manipulators. Their media dominate the world and they react to the world as media. They traffic in optics and language, live in a Marvel Universe in which they are the champions of good vs evil with full-spectrum domination over  all. Anyone who goes against this narrative is obviously a puppet of the Evil Dictator. They consume their own propaganda and then forget they produced it. They end up in an increasingly inflated symbolic bubble, detached from reality, whether it's about "controlling the narrative" or printing the U.S. dollar.

From inside the bubble it feels like you can keep inflating forever. You never need to land. How else to explain the U.S. Government torpedoing the entire basis of its relationship with the PRC, dismantling the postwar security balance in East Asia, and setting the world on a path to world war, for the sake of an inane stunt by an end-of-career politician?

This is the circus that confronts the material, logistical, industrial and human reality of China.

In what way can Asian nations work together against the uncertainties created by the U.S.? 

With Pelosi's visit the United States is demonstrating that its headline contribution to 21st century Asia will be destabilization and war.

It has galvanized ASEAN integration with China. The Pelosi visit, to Asian eyes, is a shocking display of weakness. No matter how many aircraft carriers you have, you look weak when you can't keep commitments one day to the next and when nobody, including yourself, knows what you're doing. Whatever else this piece of performance art was meant to convey, to Asian leaders it showed an empire led by fundamentally unserious people.

If we had hoped the theatrics would end with Donald Trump we now realize the issue is structural. It's theatrics all the way down.

We are watching the end of the liberal, white supremacist universalism that entitled itself to the earth and its peoples for four centuries. In its wake, while the West encloses itself with sanctions and threatens everyone outside, we see the leaders of the non-Western world eager to come together to build a fair, multipolar world order through multilateral arrangements such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN-China cooperation.

We see people in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America hungry  for a harmonious, prosperous, and connected world. A new cosmopolitanism. This calls for a bold international imagination not seen since the Bandung Conference. To build a post-Western, de-colonized world, we need to be animated by worldviews rich enough to support that process. We have used concepts such as sovereignty in ways defined by the West to defend ourselves against the depredations of the West. This has been necessary but will not be enough to build a new global community. We will now need to envision, out of a dialogue of equals, and inspired by our classical traditions, conceptions of order and shared destiny liberated from the violent, avaricious assumptions of Western liberalism.

(Print Edition Title: Wakeup Call) 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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