China defeated global communism (Tora Bora, Brzezinski, Type 56 rifles) | spiritual Americans (prewar, postwar, Third World War)
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Crates of Type 56 rifles, lifted out of a warehouse in Tianjin, shipped through Pakistan, unpacked in Tora Bora still coated in grease. People’s Liberation Army commandoes with four-character names controlled the Wakhan Strip. Before the Stinger, the HN-5 gave Hind pilots nightmares. At the CIA monitoring stations in Qitai and Korla, the crewcut boys would have told you, too: it was the Chinese that turned the tide in Afghanistan. Well. They trusted one another by then. It was Zbigniew Brzezinski that gave Deng Xiaoping the go-ahead to flood across the Vietnamese border in 1979. He had intelligence that the Soviets would not intervene. It was the Chinese that helped America defeat communism. It was the Americans that helped China defeat communism.
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When the students went to the Square, they asked for democracy, which means to live as Americans do. They erected for themselves a copy of the Statue of Liberty: the Goddess of Democracy. [When I was a student, I walked each morning to my lectures past a replica of the statue, tucked away in a niche by the Student Union Building. Her corroded face looked down on the Trotskyites, who came often with their placards proclaiming China a deformed Stalinist bureaucracy.]
The Americans were thrilled that the Chinese wanted to live as they did. They put out an invitation to those that claimed to be leaders of the movement. They smuggled them out and put them up in America, where they became the most American of Americans—entrepreneurial evangelical Christians. After a few years, everything was forgiven. Neither side wanted a grudge to get in the way of a good relationship.
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As the twenty-first century began, young Americans went to China. It was a place to do a semester of school or get a job that didn’t require a high school diploma. Europe was culturally moribund or too expensive. Japan needed a few more years to recover [and twenty years before it would be picked up by nostalgic Generation Z children]. South and Central America were too dangerous. The rest of the world was too hostile. Americans found in China an authoritarian country freer than their own, which means more American than their own. [Not freer in a frightening way, but freer in the sense that cigarettes cost a buck a pack and there was no last call. Freer in the sense that you could order McDonalds delivery at three o’clock in the morning. Freer in the sense that the Burger Kings sold beer. Freer in the sense that young people were not being strangled by a sense of their national dream dying.]
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Crouched in front of a plastic tub on a side street in Xinjiekou, a man sells VCDs. These reflect the private drives of his customers. There are Hong Kong and American action films and Japanese pornography. Tucked in the back are a few copies of Global War on Terror documentaries and some older Gulf War documentaries. Stitched together from foreign news footage and CCTV broadcasts, the voiceovers intone terrifying warnings about tyrannical Middle Eastern despots and religious extremism. They end with highlight reels of JDAMs hitting beige-on-beige cityscapes and F-16s eviscerating anti-air emplacements. Let us be more like America!
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This is the charge laid against Zhang Dongning: spiritually Japanese. This meant that she showed slavish devotion to a defeated empire. She traveled in Japan. She went to school there. Morbid fascination with Japanese culture led her to give up her healthy Chineseness. [The case was more complicated than anyone might read in English-language accounts. But I am using that simplified version.] “Spiritually American” is not applied in the same way. There are historical reasons for this: with few exceptions, America and China have most often fought on the same side, and the Americans never occupied Chinese territory. But the real reason is that nearly everyone is a spiritual American. To praise America is not a crime. To live as an American is not a sin.
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Let me remind you, when Jiang Qing finally got her chance to talk to an American journalist, she spoke most passionately about Greta Garbo being denied an Academy Award.
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China is a country run by spiritual Americans. Theirs is a leadership who learned the history of America, inheritor of Enlightenment values, joining the antifascist cause against the Japanese, who were fostered in a country that freed itself from the socialist bloc to fight alongside the Americans, who came of age in a nation that subsidized itself with a neoliberal joint venture with American capital… They went to school there, started companies there, or went on junkets. The “going abroad fever” of the 1980s was “going to America” fever. The elite got passports. They bought homes in Richmond, Bellevue, Markham, Irvine, and the San Gabriel Valley. The cadres had to make do with sending their daughters. America was the only place that mattered. America is the only place that matters.
It is true: you can be anti-American and still be a spiritual American. This is the most American of traits, to believe that your idealized America has been compromised by the project of craven usurpers, and to believe that an alternative is possible.
If they are nationalists, it is only because they are ashamed of their American programming, or because they know what America is capable of doing to them. [What America delivers with its moderate rebels and color revolutions is not the American way but its complete opposite.] The only way to be free of America is to be American. The only way to be American is to be free of America.
The true nationalists are nationalists because they fear the spiritual Americans as much as the genuine Americans, or because they are too young to believe in America.
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Only convergence is possible now, it seems. I might change my mind. This is what I see. This prejudice clouds my judgement: spiritual Americans run everything.
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This should only be an aid to your own thinking on certain problems. It’s not intended to displace completely a more nuanced understanding.
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