- 04 Jan 2018 01:23
#14876446
See, link for more.
NPR
New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos says Chinese leaders think of President Trump as a "paper tiger" who makes promises he can't deliver and who can be "managed" with flattery.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Under the banners of America First and Make America Great Again, President Trump has been reducing commitments abroad and withdrawing from treaties. Meanwhile, China is doing the opposite, trying to fill the gaps, expanding its power and playing a larger role on the global stage. How and why it's doing that and what that means for the U.S. is the subject of an article in The New Yorker called "Making China Great Again: How Beijing Learned To Use Trump To Its Advantage." It's by my guest, Evan Osnos.
President Trump has been leaning on China to pressure North Korea to end its nuclear program. But the fragile relationship between China, the U.S. and North Korea became more complicated yesterday after President Trump sent out a provocative tweet that he has a bigger nuclear button on his desk than Kim Jong Un does. On New Year's Day, North Korea reached out to South Korea, and now they've agreed to begin talks and open a hotline. I'll ask Evan Osnos about that a little later. He reported from North Korea last year. Osnos lived in China from 2005 to 2013 where he first reported for The Chicago Tribune, then for The New Yorker. He went to China at the end of last year to report his new article.
Evan Osnos, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So I want to start the interview the same way your piece does because it's such a great start. Your article starts with a Chinese action film that you think has a message about the direction China is heading in and the image it's trying to create under President Xi. And this is a movie called "Wolf Warrior 2." I guess it's the sequel to "Wolf Warrior."
EVAN OSNOS: Right.
GROSS: It's an action film released in China in July. It's China's official entry into the Oscars. So tell us about this movie.
OSNOS: Well, I first thought that "Wolf Warrior 2" was going to be a pretty forgettable sort of shoot-'em-up. You know, it had a lonesome hero and a lot of explosions, and I don't think anybody saw "Wolf Warrior 1" as far as I can remember. And then something surprising happened, which is that "Wolf Warrior 2" instantly became a phenomenon. People started standing in the theaters at the end and giving it a standing ovation, and they started singing the national anthem. This is all, of course, happening in Chinese theaters. And it became quite clear that the story had captured something really important about where China was, and the story is very simple.
I mean, the story is about a special forces veteran of the People's Liberation Army who goes overseas and goes into a sort of fictional African country and saves civilians, not just Chinese civilians but also foreigners and helps get them to safety. And there's this one scene where he's saving an American, and the American says, well, the U.S. Marines will come to our rescue, and the Chinese villain says, well, where's the U.S. Marines now? And so there's moments like that that really expressed in a lot of ways the way that Rambo kind of captured the Reagan era for Americans. "Wolf Warrior 2" captured something in China's self-image, a much more muscular iteration of its own self-image. And it wants to be seen now not only as a more vigorous, forceful presence around the world but also as something of a protector, something of a leader, and that was really new and interesting.
GROSS: I like the way America is depicted because in the final battle, the villain, the American villain, tells the Chinese hero people like you will always be inferior to people like me, get used to it. And then the Chinese hero beats the American to death (laughter).
OSNOS: Yeah. Yeah, it's - you know, it was not a subtle piece of work, I have to say, but it does capture exactly what the message is they're trying to give off.
GROSS: And then you write that the film closes with the image of a Chinese passport and the words don't give up. If you run into danger, please remember a strong motherland will always have your back.
You say in your article that there are things in this movie that wouldn't have made sense, that wouldn't have existed as concepts in a Chinese film when you first went to China to report from there in 2005. What are some of those things?
OSNOS: Well, in 2005, there were very few Chinese businesses that were operating around the world, meaning they didn't have large numbers of staff that were in Africa or in Latin America. That was really just beginning. China adopted a policy around that time called the Going Out policy, which meant that they were literally going out into other parts of the world where China hadn't existed. There's always been Chinatowns, of course, but this was something different. This was about Chinese companies and individuals planting the flag.
And the other thing that was new was that for a long time China viewed itself - really for more than a hundred years China has viewed itself as being in a position of weakness. At the end of the 19th century, there was a great Chinese philosopher named Liang Qichao who called China the sick man of Asia because it had been invaded and it had been carved up by foreign powers, and that became the defining image. The sick man of Asia was something that extended all the way through the communist revolution all the way up even into the late 20th century as China began to become more prosperous.
But it was only really in the last couple of years - just, you know, in the last sort of three or four years - that China began to see itself as a much more powerful player in the world, as something that was beginning to edge towards becoming a competitor or a rival to the United States. But until recently, it still held itself back, and there was a - there was an expression that the Chinese political class used. Deng Xiaoping coined it in 1990. He said we must hide our strength and bide our time, meaning let's just make sure that we keep a step back from the United States because we don't really want to irritate them. We want to let them be the sole superpower in the world, and we'll just steadily build up our strength as we go.
GROSS: And is that changing now under President Xi?
OSNOS: Yeah. That's the big surprise for me, frankly. It's really quite stark. You know, I lived in China until 2013, and now I go back periodically. And when I came back on this most recent set of trips over the course of the last few months, it was quite striking how that period of hiding your strength and biding your time is just emphatically over. China is now embracing in a much more full-throated and explicit way the sense that it is - its moment has arrived. And the leader, Xi Jinping, says this much. He says - in a big speech in October, he said that a new era is here in which China will now move closer to the center stage in the world. He said we now represent what he called the Chinese solution, the (speaking Chinese) which means an alternative to Western democracy. And those are words that they never would have said as recently as three years ago.
GROSS: So at the same time that China is building itself up, America under the Trump administration seems to be withdrawing in some ways from the world stage, withdrawing from certain treaties, withdrawing from U.N. commitments. Is China trying to take advantage of the vacuum that we're leaving as we withdraw from certain areas?
OSNOS: They are. Actually, they'll say as much. If you go and talk to strategists in Beijing, what you find out is that they call this the period of strategic opportunity. And I asked a strategist in Beijing, this very prominent figure, a guy named Yan Xuetong. I said, how long does the period of strategic opportunity last for China? He says, well, it lasts as long as Trump is in office. And if you line up - just on a piece of paper, if you line up the ways in which the United States is withdrawing from the world, you see that there are all of these quite immediate and natural ways in which China is seeking to fill that void.
And it's worth pointing out that President Trump is not withdrawing from the world apologetically. He's doing it with some verve. I mean, he believes this is the right thing to do. So he is, as he said, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from UNESCO, he's pulled out of the U.N. negotiations on how to handle the refugee crisis, he's threatening to overturn the Korean Free Trade Agreement. And in each one of these cases, China has found a way to try to move into that space. So at the same time that the United States has said that the U.N. General Assembly needs to cut the peacekeeping budget by $600 million, China has said, well, we will now invest more in peacekeeping at the U.N. They've become one of the largest contributors of troops and money to U.N. peacekeeping.
Another example is foreign aid. You know, the United States, under the budget that the Trump administration has proposed for 2018, would cut foreign aid by about 42 percent. China has said in fact that it's expanding its foreign aid around the world. They've embarked on a project called The Belt and Road Initiative, which is essentially a play on the Silk Road of the old days where they're going to build bridges and railways and things like that. And it's a vast project. It's about seven times the size of what the Marshall Plan was in 1947, which was the U.S. project to rebuild Europe. So there's this very clear sense that into the void created by America's return, America's withdrawal to America First, is the possibility for a Chinese renewal and a new era of Chinese leadership.
GROSS: So that belt and road project, which is basically a huge infrastructure project, that's a project in African and Asian countries. That's not just a China project.
OSNOS: Exactly. You know, ironically, Terry, China is doing many of the things that the United States was doing about 70 years ago. That is to say that they are investing in the kinds of assets that we believed were really important to us at the end of World War II - diplomacy, foreign aid, influence beyond our borders, infrastructure. And that's why we undertook projects like the Marshall Plan, which was explicitly designed to, not only rebuild the physical infrastructure of Europe after the war, but really also to plant our values there so that when we rebuilt Germany or we rebuilt Japan in Asia, that we were also putting down things like freedom of the press, democracy, human rights.
Our view was that it would actually fortify America's position in the world. It would make us stronger because we had seeded our values beyond our own borders. And this president takes a very different view. He really believes that doing those kinds of investments - investing in foreign aid, investing in diplomacy - he believes it's either too costly or irrelevant and, therefore, he is cutting back systematically and quite dramatically from those commitments.
GROSS: So if America is pulling back on planting democratic values - and we should insert here that America has also propped up dictators, historically. It hasn't just been about planting democracy. But if we're withdrawing from countries and China is moving in to implant their values - they're an authoritarian country.
OSNOS: They are. They represent something almost sort of idiosyncratic in the world. I mean, let's - you know, China is a very odd political and economic picture after all. It's grown very fast over the course of the last three decades. And yet, at the same time, it's maintained this very rigid and repressive political environment - an authoritarian structure. And in some ways, I think it's going to have a much harder time projecting those political values around the world than they might imagine at the moment.
That's - it's sort of an interesting puzzle because they see this sense of opportunity. They grasp this moment of opening that the United States has presented. And yet, at the same time, you don't see a lot of people in countries in Latin America or in Africa or in Southeast Asia that say, yeah, we really want to adopt the Chinese political model. They're not ready to do that, but they are certainly interested in the kinds of economic inducements and the sort of foreign aid that China is willing to provide and that the United States is not as willing to provide anymore.
GROSS: Why don't we take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more? If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. We're talking about his new article "Making China Great Again: How Beijing Learned To Use Trump To Its Advantage." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
See, link for more.
Me, well I used to be known as Plaro....