Despite dangerous new Washington consensus on China, voices for peace must not falter

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with a limited amount of information about a particular subject can perceive themselves to be experts
As Washington seems to be filled by such experts on China, more moderate, fact-based thinkers are sorely needed

David Dodwell

Published: 10:15pm, 7 May 2023

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In 1933, on the brink of World War II, philosopher Bertrand Russell observed: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

This depressing observation seems to have been front-of-mind for several friends who have had the dubious pleasure in recent months of visiting the United States in general, and Washington in particular. Most doors to officials were closed. Those who left doors open showed more interest in lecturing than listening.

Suggestions that life in Hong Kong has not been radically deformed since 2019, and that claims about China’s nefarious ambitions are at best overhyped and at worst factually wrong, are dismissed. We are naive apologists at best, and ill-intentioned collaborators at worst.

The new Washington consensus is that China is a comprehensively evil force, set on going to war over Taiwan and overturning the global “rules-based order”. To paraphrase Russell, it is being driven by fanatics who are very certain of themselves, and have bullied into silence those wiser heads who fear the truth may be much more complicated.

Russell’s observation is often linked with the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. It refers to how a person’s confidence in understanding a particular subject skyrockets with just a little exposure to that information, but then plummets as one begins to learn more. In short, it illustrates how people with a limited amount of information about a particular subject can perceive themselves to be experts. It seems Washington is today filled by such experts.

I would add three further thoughts: that 21st century social media has greatly powered this effect; that certain types of people prefer simple untruths to complicated truths; and that even among those perceived as experts, fallibilities like confirmation bias allow them to build narratives on evidence that cannot survive scrutiny, and on aggressive motives that are of their own imagining.

Noting that even the traditionally pragmatic US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has reaffirmed that national security concerns now sit at the heart of US foreign policy after four decades of emphasis on economic engagement, economist Stephen Roach wrote: “The US case rests not on hard evidence but on the presumption of nefarious intent tied to China’s dual-purpose military-civilian fusion.”

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With this Washington consensus pushing the world in a very dangerous direction, how to bring speculation down from fever pitch, and to get more moderate, fact-based thinkers back into the room, has become an urgent question. Not very long ago a senior US military officer who should know better discussed not just whether there is a danger of military conflict with China, but suggested that conflict over Taiwan may take place as soon as 2025.

Historian Adam Tooze, writing in the Financial Times last week, observed that the international business community, which has acted over the past four decades as a powerful voice for pragmatic engagement with China, has been silenced by the national security-obsessed “new Washington consensus”.

“The ‘peace interest’ anchored in the investment and trading connections of US big business with China has been expelled from centre stage,” he says. “On the central axis of US strategy, big business has less influence today than at any time since the end of the Cold War.” He added that “the era of ‘Davos man’ is over”.

That perhaps explains why so few US business leaders – even those with billion-dollar businesses in China – have publicly voiced concern over the catastrophic implications of the hard-line national security and industrial policy obsessions of the Biden administration, and why they are so ineffective in their closed-doors dealings with the administration.

Tooze calls for “a diplomatic effort at the highest level” to defuse tensions, and to get more moderate and accurately informed people at the table. Longer term, he says, we need a new security order for East Asia “based on the accommodation of China’s historic rise”.

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It is also a measure of the daunting challenge facing those Hong Kong-based business groups – not just the American or Hong Kong chambers of commerce, but brainstorming groups like The Better Hong Kong Foundation headed by Hang Lung’s Ronnie Chan – who feel duty-bound to organise briefing missions to the US, and engage Washington officials in discussions.

Washington is likely to be impervious to government initiatives like the “Happy Hong Kong” campaign. As my mother always argued, there are none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear, especially if they are fools or fanatics imbued with a certainty that can only be envied by wiser folks.

At present, such efforts by “the peace interest” to restore more constructive and pragmatic engagement are likely to feel forlorn and fruitless. But that does not mean we can afford to give up trying.

Philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill back in the 1800s said that bad men will inevitably succeed if good men look on and do nothing. In such dangerous times, the price of looking on and doing nothing is simply too high.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades.