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Preface
The Opium War of 1840 was the starting point of a century of humiliation, and the decaying and declining Qing government left the impression of weakness and deception on the foreign powers.
Even when New China was founded, they lacked the respect they deserved.
Not only that, but they also "hate" China, and have repeatedly smeared, isolated, and suppressed.
Only a few "people of insight" realize that sooner or later China will wash away the shame of the past, and all countries should be cautious in their relations with China.
What is the deep meaning behind "hate"? What does Brzezinski think about China?
1. The war opened the prelude to the history of shame
In the sixties of the eighteenth century, Britain experienced the Industrial Revolution and became the most powerful capitalist country in the world at the beginning of the 19th century.
However, it was in a very awkward position in trade with the Qing government.
China's "tea silk porcelain" is very popular in European countries, but it is difficult for British industrial products to enter the Chinese market, on the one hand, the public acceptance is not high, and on the other hand, the Qing government refuses to trade with Britain.
As a direct result, Britain faced a huge trade deficit, with a large amount of silver flowing into China.
Not only that, Britain had already implemented the gold standard at that time, but the Qing government directly collected silver.
Therefore, if it wanted to buy goods such as "tea silk porcelain" from China, Britain had to go to other European countries to "exchange silver" first.
As the British came and went, they felt that they had taken a lot of losses, so they began to think of ways to reverse this unfavorable situation.
First, the British tried to negotiate diplomatically, but the Qing government closed them up.
The British, unwilling to give up, thought of an even more despicable method: selling opium to China for profit.
Despite their despicability, the English did get their goal, and they were able to get six million taels of silver a year.
Seeing that the finances were gradually drying up, the Qing government began to save itself, and issued eight bans in 1821~1834 in an attempt to ban opium.
The government worked with the people, and the ban on opium quickly paid off, but the British, believing themselves in their military strength, did not take the Qing government seriously.
In 1839, he deliberately plotted the "Lin Weixi" case to provoke disputes, but later he was even more reluctant to pretend, and directly tried to open the "door to Chinese trade" with guns.
At that time, the number of troops of the Qing government was still considerable, with more than 200,000 soldiers in the Eight Banners alone, and the total number of troops approaching the 900,000 mark including the Green Battalion soldiers.
On the other hand, the British expeditionary force, the navy and army combined were only 20,000 people, and the number ratio was 45:1, and the Qing government did not think that it would lose at first.
However, the backwardness of science and technology and concepts eventually led to the fiasco of the Qing government.
Even Yang Fang, who was known as a famous general, was a little overwhelmed in the face of the British army's strong ships and cannons, and later listened to the absurd suggestion to use the "toilet" to meet the enemy, and was nailed to the pillar of shame, and finally the matter ended with the Qing government ceding land and paying compensation.
The impact of the war was catastrophic, and it showed the Qing government that it was strong from outside.
At that time, it was not only Britain that was booming in industry, but also France, the United States and even Russia, and since the Qing government was so easy to bully, they naturally had to come to "get a piece of the pie".
In 1858, the Anglo-French troops gathered at Dagukou, and the Governor of Zhili fled in fright;
In 1900, the Eight-Nation Alliance, with a total number of less than 20,000, entered the city of Beijing, and more than 100,000 Qing troops and hundreds of thousands of Boxers could not stop the fire of the Makqin machine gun......
There is a good saying that military defeat spreads like a plague, and the Qing government not only lost a land battle, but also a naval battle.
The Beiyang Naval Division, known as the "strongest in Asia", was directly annihilated in the First Sino-Japanese War, and the Qing government was powerless to resist and could only sign one unequal treaty after another in humiliation.
The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the corrupt and incompetent Qing government, but the doom of the Chinese nation did not end there.
During the 918 Incident, due to Chiang Kai-shek's strategy of non-resistance, the Northeast fell, Japan's aggressive ambitions were unprecedentedly inflated, and after the 77 Incident, Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai fell, and Nanjing was massacred......
It can be said that the history of the past 100 years has been soaked in the blood and tears of the Chinese people.
It is a history of humiliation, and it also shows us how a deadly threat to national security can be caused by military backwardness.
Since then, the People's Republic of China has been established diligently and diligently all the way to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again.
However, Western countries, which used to play the role of "executioners", have consciously assumed the role of "suppressors" at this time, trying their best to exclude, isolate, and contain China.
It even seems to have created a situation in which "all Western countries hate China" for a while, what is going on?
2. Avoid the "Thucydides Trap"
In fact, it is not so much that Western countries "hate" China, but that they "fear" China.
Western countries know what kind of suffering the history of humiliation has brought to the Chinese in the past hundred years, and they know that they have too much blood and mud on their hands, and they are naturally worried that after China's rise, they will go to them to "settle accounts after the autumn".
In 2012, Harvard scholar Graham Allison proposed the Thucydides trap, which provided a "fig leaf" for Western countries to suppress and contain China.
From the conflict of city-states thousands of years ago to today's great powers' struggle for hegemony, emerging powers will inevitably challenge the status of old powers and embark on the road of "a strong country must be hegemonic".
Since everyone is fighting sooner or later, what's wrong with me suppressing you?
If we look at the modern history of the West, we will find that there is a place for this statement.
The "sea coachman", once dominated in the 17th century, eventually turned into a broken tulip bubble;
In the 19th century, the empire on which the sun never sets, which won countless colonies, was eventually overtaken by the United States and ushered in its own "Suez moment";
There are also Germany and Japan, which wanted to conquer the world after their rise, and finally set off two world wars, causing the tragic fate of countless people;
The Soviet Union, which once stood in opposition to the United States, also fell apart on the road to hegemony and ushered in its disintegration at the end of the 20th century......
"If a country is strong, it will be hegemonic", this seems to be an unfalsifiable proposition, and it also gives the United States and Western countries an excuse to openly suppress and contain China.
However, this set does not actually apply to China, as retired Turkish colonel Savash said in an interview with the media:
"Why don't many Western countries trust China? In fact, because they are not trustworthy on their own. ”
To use an old saying on the mainland, that is, "to live the belly of a gentleman with the heart of a villain", Western countries themselves cannot get rid of the curse of "a strong country is hegemonic", so they try to put this name on China.
In fact, this is very absurd, because "a strong country will be hegemonic" is not the law of history, "national hegemony will decline" is!
Any country that attempts to seek hegemony and engage in hegemonism will be jointly resisted by the people of the world and will inevitably end up in decline.
Take the United States today as an example, its attempt to engage in dual containment between China and Russia has already aroused "the wrath of heaven and the resentment of the people" and is under tremendous pressure.
Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned in his book that perhaps the biggest risk to the future for the United States is an alliance between China, Iran and Russia.
Moreover, he pointed out that the alliance between the three may not be ideological, but rather the "anti-hegemonism" that they share in common.
Now it seems that Brzezinski "made a prophecy".
In recent years, the United States has made frequent moves, not only gradually expanding Iran's influence and promoting close cooperation between China and Russia, but also causing widespread doubts and criticism from the people of the world.
Let's talk about Iran first, the United States launched the Iraq war and solved the elbow problem of Saddam's regime;
This was followed by the introduction of a popular democracy project, which led to the rise to power of Iraqi Shiites and the "connection" between Iran and Iraq.
To some extent, it has revitalized Iran's situation.
In addition, China and Russia, in the early years, oil and gas prices soared, which was not very friendly to the mainland at that time.
Some speculate that this is also one of the reasons why the United States and Western countries speculated on high oil prices, when they played the idea of "killing two birds with one stone", both to earn wealth and to slow down China's development.
Who would have thought that this would not only fail to contain China's rapid economic recovery, but also provide conditions for Russia and Iran, which are dependent on oil and gas combinations.
The most important thing is that the United States has still been making mistakes in recent years, taking the current suppression and containment of China and Russia as an example, it is pushing the United States into the abyss of reverse isolation!
We still hope that Western countries, represented by the United States, will heed Brzezinski's warning and take a cautious view of their relations with China.
Objectively recognize the fact that China's rise is unstoppable, and stop maliciously smearing China or promoting the "China threat theory" to undermine relations with China.
3. Brzezinski's Transformation and Admonition
There is no doubt that Brzezinski is a wise man, and he "understands" China.
He is the 13th U.S. official to be named an "old friend" by the mainland, and Brzezinski has contributed as much to the promotion of Sino-American relations as anyone else.
However, he was not optimistic about Sino-US relations at first.
That was in the early 60s of the 20th century, when Brzezinski, lacking an understanding of China, believed that China and the Soviet Union were close and could even be "tied together".
Therefore, he does not support the close ties between the United States and China, believing that this "gains outweigh the losses"-
It is not only impossible to make China an ally of the United States, but also easy for Southeast Asian countries to misunderstand and make them mistakenly believe that the United States has "abandoned them and chosen China."
At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Brzezinski's views did not change, and he was even a supporter of the Vietnam War.
However, with the gradual changes in the international situation, his understanding of China has also deepened, and his views have gradually changed since the 70s of the 20th century.
Brzezinski proposed that in the coming period, China will learn from the experience of other countries to carry out the modernization process.
This also means that the shackles of ideology may be opened, and China will embark on a very different path, and "recovery and rise" will be irresistible, and China will wash away the shame of the past.
Sensing that China and Japan are interested in strengthening cooperation, Brzezinski became more and more convinced of the need for the United States to improve relations with China.
When we talk about "breaking the ice between China and the United States" today, we often think of Nixon and Kissinger, but we don't know that Brzezinski is also a strong supporter of this concept.
Interestingly, Brzezinski actually had a lot to say about Kissinger.
First, the two are competitors in the position of "safety assistant", and it is inevitable that they will "light each other"; Second, he really doesn't look down on Kissinger's series of strategies.
Only on the issue of "China policy" does he have an attitude of approval.
Not only that, but Brzezinski even considered them too "conservative".
At first, he himself advocated that "technology delivery" and "military assistance" could be done before the formal establishment of diplomatic relations, but later he also realized that this was too difficult, and it was necessary to have diplomatic relations as a foundation.
After taking office in 1976, Brzezinski still did not change his attitude toward China, and even did not hesitate to fall out with Vance, who served as secretary of state, for this reason.
Vance believed that "as long as we actively campaign, the United States and the Soviet Union still have room for manoeuvre," while Brzezinski insisted that building good relations with China should be a higher priority.
At that time, Vance had visited China, but the effect was not good, and Brzezinski realized this and applied to China for a personal visit despite Vance's dissuasion.
After coming to China, Brzezinski assured mainland Foreign Minister Huang Hua that "the United States agrees with the one-China principle."
At that time, Brzezinski also had a meeting with Deng Xiaoping and had a friendly exchange.
Carter realized that this was a "good opportunity", so under pressure from Vance, Brzezinski took full responsibility for the negotiations with China, and China and the United States formally established diplomatic relations in January of the following year.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans thought they had won, but Brzezinski was not happy.
He argues that liberal democracies do not fill all institutional gaps, and that if not handled well, they can exacerbate tensions and bring greater risks, and the subsequent situation of terrorism confirmed his fears.
All we can say about this is that Brzezinski was forward-looking, but unfortunately more Americans did not realize this, and they did not take his words to heart.
Taking the China strategy as an example, the current approach of the United States is at odds with Brzezinski's original warning.
China will surely wash away the shame of the past 100 years, but this does not mean that the mainland will also embark on the road of "hegemony if the country is strong".
On the contrary, the mainland will achieve this by developing its strength, strengthening cooperation with other countries and regions, and jointly participating in the construction of a community with a shared future for the earth.
This is also the best rebuttal to those conspiracy theorists and those with ulterior motives!
Resources
"For half a century, Zbigniew Brzezinski has been emphasizing cooperation between China and the United States" The Paper
"Brzezinski, the old American cadre who knows China best, is gone" Global Network
"The United States has committed a strategic taboo, Brzezinski's warning has become a prophecy" North Evening Online