Chapter 20
The Drug Element in China-US Relations

Southern Niwan’s drug production and trafficking, Roosevelt’s tolerance; Zhongnanhai’s drug trafficking system, Biden’s helplessness — what does this indicate?

I. “China Experts” Are the Least Reliable

America’s think tanks on China policy are divided into two categories: China experts who are proficient in Chinese language and familiar with Chinese culture; Strategic experts without specialized China knowledge.

American China expert Ben Lowsen once wrote in The Diplomat magazine that U.S. policy toward China can be divided into four categories: dragon-slayers, diplomats, sinologists, and panda-huggers. The strongest are the so-called dragon-slayers, whose goal to contain China is clear, and who can use both hard and soft tactics. At the other extreme are the so-called panda-huggers who unconditionally comply with the Chinese government.

Another American scholar divided experts on China into two categories: China experts and strategic scholars. Recently, Hal Brands, an international strategy scholar at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a column on Bloomberg saying that in the face of China’s rise and challenge, China experts and sinologists often failed to make correct predictions, while those without specialized China knowledge, the grand strategy experts, accurately forecasted the strategic challenges brought by China’s rise.

He believes that “China experts” and “sinologists” often do not want China-US relations to deteriorate, while grand strategy experts without China knowledge are better at predicting the trend of a disruptive rising power. These great-power competition experts are more willing to take risks to defend US interests.

Brands said that those driving the US government to strategic competition with China are generally not China experts. Many “China experts” were accused during McCarthy’s anti-communist investigations of “losing China.”

When China brought disruptive changes that sparked US policy debates, the China experts and sinologists scattered across American universities, think tanks, and the State Department were often embroiled in controversy. Early US China experts“ advice sparked such great disputes that they became McCarthyism targets.

Early US China experts during WWII included General Stilwell, State Department officials John S. Service and John Paton Davies Jr., and famous sinologist John Fairbank of Harvard. They all showed varying sympathy and understanding toward the Communist Party’s authoritarianism in Yan“an and disdain for the Nationalist government’s democratic openness.

Communist agent John S. Service once praised the CCP as democratic reformers closer to European socialists than Soviet communists. The Nationalist government was labeled by him as “fascist,” “anti-democratic,” and “feudal.” But developments across the Taiwan Strait long disproved their lies.

At that time, US Ambassador to China Hurley accused Service of disloyalty to the US. In 1949, when the CCP took power, a debate over “Who lost China?” broke out. Hurley testified to Congress that the “China experts” sabotaged his diplomatic mission in China.

US China experts were blamed during McCarthy anti-communist investigations for misleading the American public, lacking awareness of Marxism and the Soviet threat, harming the Chinese Nationalist government, and causing America to lose its wartime ally, democratic China. Many CCP-backed China experts were purged from the State Department, and some pro-communist journalists and writers suffered career setbacks.

Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands said that in the post-Cold War era, grand strategy experts are often more accurate in recognizing and understanding China’s challenges. Many forward-looking articles are not written by China experts — they foresee that China will not integrate into the US-led global system and will become increasingly aggressive with rising power, challenging the whole system.

He believes most grand strategy experts are not China experts; they usually don’t speak Chinese nor have lived in China. They see China more as a global competitor rather than a unique ancient civilization. By contrast, American China experts who speak Chinese, are familiar with Chinese culture, have access to Chinese political elites, and have many Chinese social contacts are more easily bought or corrupted!

Therefore, even uncorrupted China experts, including some journalists who have lived in Beijing, have warned about competitive challenges from China. But Brands believes that overall, the most information on China’s geopolitical future comes from non-experts rather than from China research journals and magazines.

Brands himself has long published columns in Bloomberg such as “China’s Grand Strategy: Military Globalization,” “China’s Grand Strategy: Exporting Ideology,” “China’s Grand Strategy: Creating a New International Order,” and “China’s Grand Strategy: How the West Should Respond?” He warns China is striving to replace America as the dominant global geopolitical power.

He cites early warnings about China’s rise with far-reaching significance. As early as 1997, historian Robert Kagan wrote that China might challenge US leadership in Asia-Pacific, citing Germany’s rise 100 years ago challenging Britain.

In 2000, East Asia political scientist Aaron Friedberg wrote that “the struggle for dominance in Asia” was underway, but many China experts then dismissed his article. In 2001, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer predicted that unless China’s economic growth sharply slowed, intense Sino-American competition was inevitable.