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The View | Why the American empire should stop worrying about the return of ‘imperial’ China
- Winston Mok says the US is getting agitated about China’s economic and military rise, and forgetting its own empire of military bases. Moreover, the US’ relative economic decline, starting in the late 1970s, has had little to do with China
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American alarm over a rising Chinese empire is not entirely misplaced, but it should be tempered by self-awareness: America itself is an empire, whose dominance is perhaps unparalleled in human history. American exceptionalism permits limitless expansion in the name of freedom, as seen in the United States’ “liberation” of Iraq. Yet, from the Philippines to Haiti, the US’ historical actions often fell short of the ideal of promoting democracy.
The age of empires has never quite left us. The Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman empire disintegrated near the end of the first world war. After the British and French empires ended around the second world war, there rose from the ashes a superpower that would surpass them all in military and economic might.
The cold war was really a clash of two empires: the US and the Soviet Union, which was the Russian empire in communist guise. After the cold war, the US, as the sole hegemon, continued to extend indirect control around the world. The world’s only superpower has parallels with the British empire, the Roman empire and even the Tang empire of China.
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The US has got all agitated about China’s military base in Djibouti, although it also maintains a base there, as well as nearly 800 others in more than 70 countries. To some extent, the world’s third- and fourth-largest economies, Japan and Germany, are protectorates of the US, a state of affairs that scholar Chalmers Johnson described as the US’ “international protection racket”.
The US sees Latin America as its backyard, and China’s economic overtures to those countries as “imperial”, though it has carved out spheres of influence in the Middle East and northeast Asia – China’s neighbourhood. The US also resists China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a threat to the unipolar world order.
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