Was it Japan, France, Germany, Russia, Great Britain or the United States?
“If you are not Chinese or a student of Asian history, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer to this question is actually all of the above,” said Dr. Peter Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist in his best-selling book, Crouching Tiger, recently published by Prometheus Books.
“In fact, China’s fear of being dominated by foreign powers and its pursuit of homeland protection are the most obvious reasons why it is seeking to build up its military,” said Navarro, who heads President Donald J. Trump’s White House Trade Council.
Navarro, also an expert on Communist China, is helping shape the Trump administration’s increasingly robust approach toward that nation, which has been waging “unrestricted warfare” against the US for at least two decades.
Navarro explained: “China’s security concerns are both fully justified and deeply rooted in its so-called ‘century of humiliation,’ which began in 1839 with Britain’s first opium war against China. It ran through the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945 and featured everything China fears today—from military domination and naval blockades to massive landgrabs, equally massive war reparations, repeated assaults on Chinese sovereignty and the slaughter of millions of Chinese citizens.”
Prior to 1839, he said, beginning in the 1600s, an imperial China, through a succession of emperors, was the undisputed superpower in Asia. “Vassal states, which regularly paid tribute to China’s dynastic rulers, included Burma and Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Nepal on China’s western flanks, and Korea and Japan in East Asia. By 1683, a dynastic China had also conquered a critical gateway to the Pacific Ocean—the island of Taiwan.”
He explained that “China’s undisputed regional hegemony would, however, come to an abrupt and inglorious end in 1839 when Britain and its powerful navy forced China’s emperor to cede the territories of Hong Kong and Kowloon—along with effective control of all of China’s major ports.”
“Over time,” he said, “the British Empire would also wrest Nepal from China’s sphere of influence and colonize Burma. Czarist Russia would militarily coerce China into surrendering a large chunk of its northeast territory—along with its strategic access to the Sea of Japan.
“And Imperial French forces would use, among other tactics, a naval blockade of Taiwan to force China to turn over control of all of northern Vietnam to France—thus paving the way for French hegemony in Indochina.”
“Despite these humiliations, the worst was yet to come as China’s once-loyal vassal Japan was quickly emerging from two centuries of isolation; and unlike China, the Land of the Rising Sun was eagerly embracing the new technologies of modern warfare. By 1894, under cover of the First Sino-Japanese war, Imperial Japanese forces would assume de facto control of the Korean Peninsula while taking the prize of Taiwan as a spoil of war,” Navarro said.
In hostilities that set the stage for the Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan would then seize mineral-rich Manchuria in 1932 under cover of the puppet state of Manchukuo. By 1940, Japan’s brutal occupation would encompass most of eastern China and all of China’s major ports. China’s century of humiliation would come to an end only with the defeat of Japan by Allied Forces in 1945.
Throughout this century of humiliation, it wasn’t just the loss of so much territory that so deeply scarred the Chinese psyche. It was also the sheer brutality of the foreign powers themselves. For example, during the Boxer Rebellion between 1899 and 1901, when Chinese citizens rose up to protest the foreign occupation, a full 20,000 troops from an eight-nation alliance (including the United States) stormed into Beijing and crushed the uprising.
“In what newspapers of the time described as an orgy of looting, this German-led expeditionary force committed numerous atrocities; rape, particularly by French and Russian troops, was so prevalent that thousands of Chinese women committed suicide just to avoid it,” Navarro said.
“As a prelude to the atrocities committed in the 1930s,” he continued, “Japanese soldiers were likewise reported to be particularly skillful in the beheading of Chinese men suspected of being Boxers. Given this indelible history of humiliation, it should hardly be surprising that the China of today wants to develop a military force powerful enough to avoid the kind of wanton imperialistic abuses it suffered for more than 100 years.”
“But this homeland-protection rationale for China’s military buildup is not the end of our detective story—it is simply the beginning,” said Navarro, who is also a professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, in his balanced narration and exposition of historical events.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.