Emperor Xi and the CCP ARE NOT AND CANNOT Be Our Friends

asiatimes |  Besides the economic and military realm, decoupling is also occurring at the local level of academic and people-to-people exchanges. A Bloomberg article in June 2019 revealed that the US is purging ethnic Chinese scientists, including US citizens, from cancer research in top institutions, as well as various other projects in STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – fields. Many institutions have partnered with the FBI to target Chinese scientists and scholars for surveillance, leading to fear among Asian Americans this could be a dangerous lurch down the path of paranoia and racial profiling, similar to China’s campaign of racially profiling Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Back in 2015, after various bungled cases, Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and 42 members of Congress raised these concerns with the Department of Justice. But in face of an increasingly fearful and tense environment in academic institutions, there has been a chill in bilateral scholarly exchanges and research collaboration, and this decoupling looks likely to continue.

Given Kissinger is known to have prescient observations, at this critical juncture it appears his warnings in regard to a new Cold War seem apt. Paul Haenle, a former Asia adviser to presidents Bush and Obama, said: “If you talk to folks in the Pentagon, they say they’re no longer debating whether or not China is an enemy. They’re planning for war… and if you talk about cooperation, you’re [seen as] naïve.”

Evan Osnos of The New Yorker noted how Kissinger compares the current bilateral situation to a disturbing analogy about the First World War. In that view, the trade war is an ominous signal of economic polarization, the same kind that pitted Britain against Germany before 1914, which has often been a prelude to real war.

“If it freezes into a permanent conflict, and you have two big blocs confronting each other,” Kissinger said, “then the danger of a pre-World War I situation is huge. Look at history: none of the leaders that started World War I would have done so if they had known what the world would look like at the end. That is the situation we must avoid.”

Yale historian Odd Arne Westad agrees. He noted: “The pre-1914 parallel is, of course, not just the growth in German power. What we, I think, need to focus on, is what actually led to war. What led to war was the German fear of being in a position where their power would not strengthen in the future, where they were, as they put it in the summer of 1914, at the maximum moment.”