William R. Hawkins is Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

The CNA Corporation is a non-profit organization that is best known for operating the Center for Naval Analysis, which for over 50 years has worked closely with the U.S. Navy to develop strategies and weapon systems to defend American security.  It opened a new China Study Center on March 27, which seems like a natural evolution of its work given Beijing’s rise as a global geopolitical rival to the United States.  China has the world’s third largest shipbuilding industry and its rapidly expanding its navy.  However, by choosing devoted Beijing apologist Chas Freeman to deliver its inaugural lecture, it raised doubts about the direction its research will take.  

Chas Freeman was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the first term of the Clinton Administration, and had been Director for Chinese Affairs at the State Department at the end of the Carter administration.  In between, he had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President George H. W. Bush.  He is Co-Chair of the United States-China Policy Foundation, a group “founded to ensure the continued improvement of U.S.-China relations.” Freeman embraces this mission, even though he was the diplomat chosen in October 1995 by Chinese General  Xiong Guangkai to convey a threat to use nuclear weapons against the United States over Taiwan.  

Freeman is also on the board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that has helped broker a cross-investment agreement between major Chinese and Brazilian oil companies; set up joint ventures for American firms in China; and has provided advice to Chinese venture capital funds.  In his remarks to CNA, Freeman stressed business over any other consideration in China relations.  He argued, “Contrary to repeated forecasts, the many imperfections of China's legal system have neither prevented it from developing a vigorous market economy nor inhibited foreign investment – of which China continues to attract more than any other country, including our own.  China's failure to democratize and its continuing censorship of its media, including the Internet, have not stifled its economic progress or capacity to innovate, which are increasingly impressive.  China's perverse practices with respect to human rights have not cost China's Communist Party or its government their legitimacy.  On the contrary, polling data suggests that Chinese have a very much higher regard for their political leaders and government than Americans currently do for ours.”

If Freeman was polled, he would say the same.  Indeed, his speech was filled with criticism of the United States along side praise for China, taking on bizarre dimensions at times.  He claimed, “At the birth of the United States of America, what some then called ‘the Celestial Kingdom’ loomed large in our imagination....We knew little of China itself, but we had inhaled the European idealization of it as the most ethically advanced and orderly, as well as the most populous, realm on the planet.  As they designed our system of government, the brilliant political engineers who were our founding fathers drew on Leibniz' and Voltaire's musings on the secrets of the good society China exemplified to its Jesuit admirers.”

In Freeman’s view, “our founding fathers' ambitions to build a better system of government than those in Europe” led them to look to China for guidance! What an absurd notion! While there is mention of several European states in The Federalist Papers, there is no mention of China, which for all its opulence and stability, was ruled by a Emperor far more brutal than the British monarch against who the Founders rebelled.  The musings of the foolish Voltaire should be swept into the same dustbin as those of Hollywood dimwits like Shirley MacLaine, who once gushed over the blood-soaked reign of Mao Zedong for creating a more egalitarian and happy society than America.

But it is China’s future which beguiles Freeman.  “China had a couple of bad centuries, but it is back, and it is on the way to the center of global affairs.  As China restores itself to wealth and power, its leaders display a resolute confidence in the future,” he proclaims.  And in what should be a warning, he intones with optimism: “Our country came into being as the age of Atlantic dominance and the industrial revolution began to eclipse China and India.  Americans therefore have no experience with the more normal condition of human history, in which Asia was for millennia the global center of gravity.  One way or another, in the 21st Century, China and its neighbors will determine what the resumption of Asian leadership in more and more fields of human endeavor means for an emerging post-industrial world, including for us Americans.”

Anyone who might think there is danger ahead for the United States is treated disdainfully by Freeman.  “Sometimes, for example, in the matters of Taiwan, Tibet, or the democracy movement in Hong Kong, Americans are enlisted by lobbyists acting on behalf of separatist or dissident movements in greater China.  Those who wish America to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy can always find one worthy of our attention there.  China has become a screen on which Americans can project both our reveries and our nightmares,” he says.

On the question of China’s “authentic aspirations,” which Americans need to understand, looms the national security issue.  Freeman told his audience, “No one still dismisses the PLA as a ‘junkyard army.’ China's recent anti-satellite test, growing participation in UN peacekeeping missions, and near tripling of defense spending since 2000 mark its emergence as a considerable military power.” Yet, we should not react to this.  Indeed, he urged the CNA, whose job it is to worry about such things, to reject “our apparent nostalgia for the aggressive expansionism of our now inconveniently vanished Soviet rivals” and to avoid “writing narrowly focused and highly tendentious reports mandated by Congress to justify the single-issue agendas of our military-industrial complex or, for that matter, our humanitarian-industrial complex.”

He believes China is behaving as a “responsible stakeholder.....This is already the case with respect to the world monetary system, in which the Renminbi yuan is poised to emerge as a major trading and reserve currency within the coming decade.” This assessment flies in the face of reality.  Beijing sets the value of its currency by fiat, undervaluing it by 40 percent or more to gain competitive advantages in world trade.  It is not a convertible currency like the dollar or the euro.  China has built up a trillion dollar hard currency reserve through its trade surpluses, but maintains control of these funds for purely national purposes.  

“I am optimistic,” Freeman proclaims. “China's leaders are trying hard, in connection with the 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress to be held this fall, to develop a restatement of ideological principles that emphasizes the imperatives of societal and international harmony and the sinicization of Western-originated theories of innovation in science and technology.” Toward that end, the U.S. should not try to restrict the transfer of technology to Beijing, but welcome China’s further success.

Freeman seems to have fallen into that school of dissident thought that is looking for a foreign alternative to what his liberal sensibilities find distasteful about American preeminence.  

In a speech to other retired diplomats in February, he launched a marathon assault on every aspect of American policy and society.  “We have sought to exempt ourselves from the jurisdiction of international law.  We have suspended our efforts to lead the world to further liberalization of trade and investment through the Doha Round.  We no longer participate in the UN body charged with the global promotion of human rights.  We decline to discuss global climate change, nuclear disarmament, or the avoidance of arms races in outer space.”

His talk was in accord with his position as head of the Middle East Policy Council.  His twisted view of that region of the world matches his view of Asia.  He denounced the U.S. provision of “military support and political cover for Israeli operations entailing intermittent massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza.”  No mention is made of the China-Iran-Hezbollah terrorist connection that is pushing Lebanon towards civil war, and which not only Israel and the U.S., but also most of the Arab world, are trying to contain.

Freeman also told his audience, ”There will be no American imperium.  The effort to bully the world into accepting one has instead set in motion trends that threaten both the core values of our republic and the prospects for a world order based on something other than the law of the jungle.”  Freeman is hopelessly deluded, however, if he thinks China’s rise under its current Communist regime will not continue to be conducted by the law of the jungle.  That is the nature of both economic and geopolitical competition, which Beijing’s leaders know very well from China’s long and violent history.

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