Chinese support for Syria’s demands for return of the Golan Heights illustrates a major shift in China’s policy. Traditionally isolationist, China increasingly embarks on global approach. In the world of competing empires, trade is intertwined with politics. Trade balance, oil deliveries, arms sales, and similar high-ticket notions exist in the framework of intergovernmental relations.
Huge empires like China traditionally tolerated lawlessness in their remote border areas. In the information society, border infringements are publicized, interpreted as weakness, and diminish reputation and endanger the affected state. Suddenly in the need to secure its borders, China has to cooperate with Vietnam, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and Central Asia – the earth’s trouble zone. Learning from the US blockade of Japan in WWII, China works hard to secure oil supplies and diversify its export markets. Chinese diaspora in many countries offers an opportunity to expand Chinese influence too tempting to forgo.
China will not attack the US. Japan, too, did not intend to invade the Continental US when it attacked the Pearl Harbor. China, like Japan before the WWII, is simply a great menace. Nuclear proliferation, arms sales, pragmatic foreign alliances without regard to consequences for other countries, oil and gas purchases from rogue regimes, circumvention of sanctions on pariah states, and institutional hostility toward America make China dangerous.
Still, the West finances China by doing business with it, provides China with access to international capital markets instead of cutting that lifeline, and most importantly allows China to steal Western products and technologies. Everyone knows that China engages in the worst form of robbery – pirating of hi-tech goods and technologies – but the West tolerates the theft. The West provides China with free access to the most valuable franchise – knowledge. Western parents and taxpayers finance universities and Western consumers pay for corporate research by purchasing new products. China obtains the fruits of Western theoretical and applied research for the price of subscription to scientific magazines.
The West’s lamentations over its inability to counter China’s massive theft of intellectual property are untrue. Though China cannot be sent to conventional jail as any other thief, it could be made a jail by economic blockade.
