Opinion | America’s latest ‘red scare’ is overblown. China is not intent on world domination

In the coming month, look for broad gripes and bright anti-red stars over the land of the free and the home of the brave. For starters, the Committee on the Present Danger: China begins its anti-communist show in the US capital this week. The self-appointed panel includes not only former defence and intelligence officials, some barely disguised frontmen for the US military-industrial complex, but also political personalities of the more entertaining kind, such as Republican Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and once-college professor who is as colourful as he is sometimes unbalanced.

Even so, the propaganda attack against “the PRC’s ominous trajectory” – the committee’s phrase – is well timed. Sino-US relations, which have never been light and lively, are a downright downer these days. Right now, there is more civility in an angry Hong Kong couple pacing back and forth in a 200 square foot flat than in the Beijing-Washington odd couple.

Firing up issues that include the South China Sea and trade negotiations, the committee will have no trouble finding material to engage in its perilous fight. The committee says it aims “to help defend America through public education and advocacy against the full array of conventional and non-conventional dangers posed by the People’s Republic of China. As with the Soviet Union in the past, Communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom – one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat.”

This prospect is chilling. Recall previous “red scares” in Washington. We suffered through the notorious McCarthy era of 1950-54 that proposed to expose severe Soviet infiltration in the government although, in the end, few communists were found. Then, in the late 1990s, a Republican-controlled Select Congressional Committee sought to discredit the Democratic administration of president Bill Clinton for being “soft” on China.

Its final 1999 report, titled “The Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China”, made allegations of Chinese spying in the US. Picked apart by many experts that looked at it carefully, the report garnered little traction politically. But here we are, 10 years later – if one doesn’t succeed at first, cry and cry again.