China’s spectacular stock market crash over the past several weeks has led the world to wonder: What caused such a panic sell-off?
While most analysts point to structural fault lines in China’s economic and political system as the ultimate culprit, many Chinese investors assign blame to a Western conspiracy in general and leading U.S. financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in particular as the root cause of the stock market woes — despite the fact that foreigners are generally restricted from investing in Chinese stock exchanges.
This is barely news in China. Reports assert that the United States is once again sabotaging socialist China through secret operations, this time in high finance.
But this is not surprising considering the preponderance of an unshakable Chinese habit — cultivated ever so arduously by the communist government for decades with its total control of all media outlets — of placing blame on the West for virtually all of China’s disasters.
Among all Western nations, the United States has been singled out for decades as the primary evildoer against the glorious socialist country, whose rise to prominence in the past two decades is said to have stoked profound fear in Washington. Beijing believes Washington is behind an elaborate and well-coordinated conspiracy and has been working to shatter the Chinese dream of restoring the Middle Kingdom to the historical and cultural dominance it held before the turn of the 19th century.
“The history of the aggression against China by U.S. imperialism from 1840 when it helped the British in the Opium War to the time it was thrown out of China by the Chinese people should be written into a concise textbook for the education of Chinese youth,” Mao Zedong wrote in 1949, providing a general guideline for decades of U.S.-bashing.
According to communist founder Mao, the U.S. plot is indirect because Washington wants to avoid a direct military confrontation with China, which has strategic depth, popular support and a superior political system. The covert method calls for an all-out political, cultural, spiritual and, most important, intelligence infiltration of China collectively known as a “peaceful evolution.”
“For a very long period,” Mao wrote, “U.S. imperialism laid greater stress than other imperialist countries on activities in the sphere of spiritual aggression, extending from religious to ’philanthropic’ and cultural undertaking.”
All post-Mao Chinese leaders are loyal subscribers to this Maoist theory of a U.S. conspiracy against China. In 1989, Deng Xiaoping blamed the United States for fomenting the momentous Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement through a mysterious “international megaclimate.”
A June 1989 Chinese Ministry of State Security report to the Chinese Communist Politburo stated that “China as a big socialist country has always been an important target of the U.S.-led Western capitalist countries’ peaceful evolution campaign. Successive U.S. administrations [since the Truman administration], including the current [George H.W.] Bush administration, have never relaxed the implementation of the principle of ideological and cultural infiltration of our socialist country.”
China’s miserable relationship with many of its 14 neighbors and ethnic tensions in Buddhist Tibet and the Muslim Xinjiang region also are blamed routinely on the U.S. conspiracy. “All the things that are happening around China, as well as those terrorist riots that occurred in the ethnic areas of China, are not isolated and accidental,” China’s much-heralded anti-U.S. strategist, Chinese air force Senior Col. Dai Xu, wrote in 2009. “They are all planned single-handedly by the U.S.”
Col. Dai was voted one of China’s nine most influential “public intellectuals” by tens of millions of Chinese Internet users for his near clinically pathological anti-U.S. sentiments.
With such a consensus among China’s ruling elites, all U.S.-generated engagements with China fall within the framework of an infiltration plot against China. The CIA and the FBI are natural suspects, but the list includes the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, the Albert Einstein Institute, even the George Soros Open Society Institute — all viewed as agents of a U.S. master plan to subvert China.
Evidence does not matter much to sustain such paranoia as long as China’s media remain monopolized by the state.
During the height of China’s stock roller coaster, the nation was gripped by a sensational June 23 report that nearly a half-million tons of “zombie meat” were confiscated by Chinese customs. Zombie meat is frozen beef, pork or chicken that is supposedly 30 to 40 years old and has saturated many of China’s supermarkets.
Where does this disgusting zombie meat come from to poison the Chinese people? The culprit is obvious: The official June 23 report said, without any evidence, that most of the zombie meat had come from the U.S. strategic reserve supply.
• Miles Yu’s column appears Fridays. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com and @Yu_miles.
• Miles Yu can be reached at yu123@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.