Great brawl of China getting out of hand

Suffice to say the Chinese have a clear memory of what the Western powers and their Asian neighbours visited upon them in recent history; yet, in my experience they have somehow remained welcoming and courteous towards Westerners.

I've travelled to China off and on for nearly 40 years, first as a tourist enjoying the thousands of years of Chinese history and culture.

In the last two decades, I've spent considerable time in China as a sort of academic ambassador and marketing professor at a Chinese university. Over this time, I have met and worked with many Chinese and been treated with unfailing courtesy and generous hospitality. I respect and admire much of what China and the Chinese have accomplished in recent years.

It bothers me when I hear the rhetoric from the legions of “experts” in the West who position China as a snarling dragon bent on destroying our way of life. Equally, some of the pronouncements of the Chinese government have descended into the Cold War doggerel of the 1950s and '60s.

Before we march off to war, cold or otherwise, we might want to think about China's place in the world from their point of view and understand just a little of their history in relation to the West over the last 200 years or so.

For instance, much has been made of the attacks on democracy in Hong Kong by the Beijing government. How many people in Canada know how it was that Hong Kong became a British colony in the first place? In 1840, Queen Victoria and her ministers launched the first Opium War, a fight designed to allow a privately owned, profit-seeking business, the British East India Company, to continue to sell immensely profitable narcotics in China. Among other concessions, this war forced the Imperial Chinese to “gift” Hong Kong to the British.

By 1856, the British decided the Chinese weren't keeping up with their commitments and launched the Second Opium War. This time, the French joined in the fun and they captured and sacked Beijing. We might forgive the Chinese when they react negatively to the now virtually toothless British empire sailing, as a supposed show of force, its only operational aircraft carrier across the South China Sea earlier this year.

Space doesn't permit a further recounting of recent Chinese history. Anyone interested in reading a little more should look up the Japanese invasion of 1931 and the massacre in Nanjing in 1937-38. Do so on an empty stomach and in broad daylight as it makes for terrifying reading.

Suffice to say the Chinese have a clear memory of what the Western powers and their Asian neighbours visited upon them in recent history; yet, in my experience they have somehow remained welcoming and courteous towards Westerners.

In 2021, China has the world's largest population and the secondlargest economy. While it is by any measure one of the world's two superpowers and should be treated as such, China faces incredible internal economic and social development challenges.

China is currently ranked 85th by the United Nations Human Development Index. In contrast, Western nations such as Canada, predominate in the top-20 list. In many respects, China remains a developing nation with massive needs to provide its population with many of the conditions taken for granted in the West — conditions such as potable drinking water, sewage systems, social services, transportation infrastructure, health care, employment and all related issues. Understandably, providing these basic quality-of-life conditions for its people remains a priority. To do so, China now competes globally with

Western corporate and national interests for the resources necessary to sustain its economy and socioeconomic development.

China's competitive success and resulting strengths largely fuels the “fear” expressed in mainstream media reportage of military posturing and human rights concerns. There is also little doubt that Western “fear” is at least partially rooted in the racist beliefs encapsulated by the idea of a looming “yellow peril” threatening to overwhelm Euroancestry peoples. Given its history of relations with the West and development challenges, China has legitimate concerns with regard to assuring its security and sustaining its continued development.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is not some cuddly Asian uncle. He is a ruthless politician with a clear idea of China's place in the world and a plan to get it there. He and his immediate predecessors have turned China from a backward, largely agrarian country to an economic superpower in just 30 years. Xi does not want anyone standing in his way, and that includes both domestic and foreign opposition. However, the West should not perceive the launching of every new Chinese navy frigate as the prelude to the Third World War.

China is not Canada, and we as a country need to better understand their point of view and priorities. Trying to understand is not the same as accepting. Our countries are competitors and, as in any competition, we as Canadians need to compete hard and make sure the rules are obeyed by both sides. Canadianbased natural resources provide us with the basis for building a strong, sustained and mutually beneficial economic and social relationship. Canadian interests in creating as much new wealth as possible from the development and sale of these resources needs to be our competitive and relationship priority.

At the end of the day, however, we need to shake hands and, as any Canadian hockey player would do, compliment the other side on how well they played and get ready for the next competition.