Why Does China Keep Rescuing the Empire That Wants It Dead?

China now faces an encirclement crisis of the kind that took down the Soviets.

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Most outlets critical of imperialism will serve you a feel-good story. Critical engagement with China’s foreign policy is heresy in these circles, verboten. Not at BettBeat Media. We genuinely try to find answers to the questions that concern Empire. And while we hold great love and respect for China, we are one of the few outlets that dare to question its puzzling posture toward an empire that no longer hides its intention to destroy it.

We want China to thrive. We want it to win, even, against an empire hellbent on burning this world. But for China to win, its actions that court defeat must be questioned. You are no friend of China if you applaud everything it does, including the suicidal.

If it is triumphalism you want, stop reading now. Ninety-nine percent of anti-imperialist commentary will give you exactly that. You have an abundance of choice.

China’s Silence

The president of the United States left a NATO summit in Turkey the way a fugitive leaves a hotel, hustled across the tarmac, by some accounts in a catering vehicle, and placed aboard a decoy plane while his cabinet officers and the traveling press were left behind as bait.

Empires end this way. Not in a single thunderclap but in small indignities, in farce, in the spectacle of a ruler who bets the lives of his underlings against his own and calls it statecraft. Bigly.

The war against Iran, sold as a swift act of chastisement, has become a slow public bleeding. The missiles keep coming, from factories buried too deep for the bombers to reach. The Gulf monarchies, who can read a wind shift faster than any intelligence agency, have begun writing their own insurance policies, signing defense pacts with Ankara and Islamabad that pointedly do not include Washington. Some suspect Washington’s hand behind these pacts, a buffer against Iran assembled at arm’s length, but even if true, it is the maneuver of a power that must now work through intermediaries because its own word carries no weight. Gasoline prices function as a pay cut imposed on every American worker. The Treasury, gorged on Pentagon debt and a speculative artificial intelligence binge, is reduced to propping up the Japanese yen the way a drunk props up the man he is drinking with.

Gerald Horne, the historian and longtime friend of BettBeat Media, is right. The old formula of violence and subterfuge that built the settler republic, that cleared the continent and filled the slave ships, no longer produces obedience. It produces humiliation and, more corrosive still, disgust. Disgust from a world that sees the emperor without his clothes, that watches the self-anointed beacon of human rights, the shining city on a hill, feed its addiction to mass murder in the open, without shame and without pretense.

And yet the strangest silence in this moment does not come from Washington. It comes from Beijing.

The one power on earth with the industrial depth, the financial reserves and the human talent to hasten the end of the American imperium behaves instead like a creditor terrified of offending a bankrupt debtor. It watches the wounded beast stagger and rushes forward, again and again, not with a spear but with a cushion.

Encircling China

Consider what is being prepared. Washington is stitching a cordon around China from Japan to India to Australia to South Korea, and courting Vietnam to close the circle. Gerald Horne reminds us that encirclement is not a metaphor. It is the strategy that broke the Soviet Union, which by its final decade faced hostile powers on every frontier and spent itself into the grave trying to answer them all. The darkest irony is that Beijing helped tie that noose. It aligned with Washington against Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s and told itself this was shrewdness. Now the same rope is being measured for its own neck, and its answer is a white paper on mutual benefit and ‘win win’.

How socialist can one be, I wonder, when one can imagine a win-win arrangement with the global hegemon of imperialist capitalism?

Richard Nixon, near the end of his life, worried aloud that his opening to China had created a monster he could not control. He need not have worried. The monster turned out to want nothing so much as the master’s approval. Here, perhaps, is the great unspoken wound in Chinese strategic culture: the belief, held with the fervor of a convert, that enough production, enough patents, enough patience will finally purchase admission to the club.

The journalist John Helmer said of Russia’s leader that “Putin doesn’t understand imperialism.” Putin believed for two decades that the West would eventually accept Russia as a partner, and not even sanctions, coups and war seem to have educated him out of that belief. There is every reason to fear the same naivety in Beijing. The Western imperial order does not take partners. It takes servants, and it takes targets. There is no third category, and wealth does not create one.

China’s Puzzling Passivity

China’s record of the last fifteen years reads like a ledger of abstentions. Libya was disemboweled in 2011 while China stood aside in the Security Council, evacuated its workers and issued its regrets. Syria endured a decade of proxy war, its cities ground to powder, and China contributed statements. Venezuela was strangled slowly, publicly, by sanctions designed to make its people scream, then its leader was kidnapped and its government handed to Washington’s caretakers, and Beijing responded with the usual passivity.

Each time the Empire devoured a state, the Chinese foreign ministry expressed concern, called for dialogue and went back to work. Each meal made the predator stronger and the next target lonelier. Passivity did not buy safety. It bought time, and the time fattened the monster.

The pattern extends to oil. A serious rival would understand that the American war machine floats on cheap energy and calm markets, that every panic at the pump is a tax on the Empire’s legitimacy. Iran and the Arab resistance now fight the monster alone, and I watch with wonder as Beijing taps its own reserves to soothe the very markets whose convulsions would do more damage to Washington than a fleet of frigates. Iranian resistance does the bleeding. Chinese refiners do the saving. The Empire does the breathing.

So appreciated was China’s abstention that Trump took the trouble to say thank you in public. “I want to thank China because I asked China not to get involved with Iran,” he announced. When the emperor is grateful, the vassal should worry.

My bewilderment extends to China’s relationship with Israel. Here is a state that functions as the attack dog of American empire in West Asia, the instrument of a genocidal war conducted before the cameras of the world, and China’s answer has been commerce: port terminals, technology deals, trade volumes that climbed while Gaza burned.

A country that calls itself socialist might be expected to remember what internationalism once meant, when volunteers crossed oceans for Spain and Cuban soldiers helped break the back of apartheid on the battlefields of Angola. Where is that spirit in Beijing’s Palestine policy? Where is it in Caracas? Solidarity has been replaced by commerce capitalism.

And the empire has noticed the vacancy. Its answer to Chinese restraint abroad is subversion at home. While Beijing celebrates its cooperation with Israel, that same Israel and its imperial patron spent years training Uyghur fighters in the Syrian war, organized, armed and kept in reserve like a knife laid quietly on the table during a negotiation. This is the oldest imperial trick in the book, the cultivation of a wound inside the rival's own body. A power that refuses to contest the Empire in Damascus will eventually meet it in Kashgar, on terms the Empire has chosen.

Imperial Illiteracy

The deeper failure is internal, and it is a failure of the mind. China has built the world’s most formidable engineering culture but neglected to teach its people what imperialism is. The children of its elite are shipped to Harvard and Yale like tribute. Hollywood is adored. The economics departments of great Chinese universities teach the neoliberal doctrine.

A population that has never been given the intellectual tools to see imperialism will not recognize it when it arrives, and will mistake its flattery for friendship and its universities for neutral ground.

Nowhere is this blindness more painful than on the question of race. Schools across China advertise for “Caucasian” English teachers, as if whiteness itself were a credential. Whiteness is flattered. Chinese netizens recite anti-woke catechisms minted in the Empire’s culture war furnaces, apparently unaware that the racial hierarchy they are applauding files them beneath the same boot, that the yellow peril posters of the last century are being reprinted with better graphics.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who spent his ninety-first birthday honored in Beijing, understood that the color line and Empire were a single system, two names for one machinery of domination. The country that once feted him seems to have forgotten what he taught.

This is what comes of believing that STEM and GDP constitute a civilization’s defense. Engineers cannot decode hegemony. Quants cannot read a proxy war. A nation that builds fusion reactors but starves its critical social sciences, that treats sociology and history as decoration rather than armament, will be outmaneuvered by a rival that mints storytellers, image makers and foreign intelligence officers by the tens of thousands.

Gramsci understood that power rules first through the stories people accept as common sense. The Empire’s most successful export to China was never soybeans or semiconductors. It was common sense.

The Predator’s Prey

So we arrive at the euphemisms. Read any Chinese statement on the wars, the sanctions, the carrier groups off its coast, and you will find the same ghostly locutions: certain countries, some forces, relevant parties. The United States is the unnamed weather in every forecast. But naming is the first act of resistance. Every colonized people has known this. A state that cannot bring itself to say the word adversary has surrendered the power to define its own situation, and a diplomacy this patient begins to shade into something suicidal.

There is a saying, coined of all people by an American white supremacist, that to learn who rules over you, you need only find out who you are not allowed to criticize. He understood domination from the inside, the way a jailer understands locks. Apply his test to Beijing's communiqués and the verdict is immediate. The one power never named, never criticized, never confronted in plain language is the one power working openly toward China's destruction. The silence is deafening.

The bitter joke of this moment is that the Empire has rarely been weaker. Iran exposed its military limits. Its treasury is a bonfire. Its client regimes in Latin America are a retreat dressed up as an advance, the reflex of a power falling back to its own hemisphere. The door out of the American century stands open. And China, brilliant, industrious, sleepless China, stands before that open door rehearsing courtesies, checking its trade balances, waiting for an invitation that will never come.

The Soviets also believed time was on their side. They believed the correlation of forces was shifting, that patience was strategy, that the encirclement was manageable. Their flag came down anyway. Empires are not appeased into decency, and they are not outlasted by those who refuse to see them. They are named, confronted and stopped. The men in Beijing still believe they can be the exception, the rival that is finally forgiven for rising. History has a word for powers that hold this belief, and the word is prey.

- Karim

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