Opinion | Why the West should stop projecting its fears onto China and cultivate a more mature relationship

In the West’s black-and-white telling, China has been either good or evil in the past 70 years. The West swoons when it sees China becoming more liberal, but demonises Beijing when it stirs up Western fears of techno-surveillance

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A security guard stands near surveillance cameras on a lamp post at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 1:00am, 30 Sep 2019Updated: 1:08am, 30 Sep 2019

In the 70 years since its founding, the People's Republic of China has transformed from an impoverished country wracked by civil war into a power that awes and frightens the West. Modern China is unabashed about striving for supremacy and rigid control, and many Americans and Europeans fear they’re witnessing the birth of a techno-dystopia. But such anxiety says more about the West’s fears about its own future than about what’s happening in China.

The root of the problem is that Western attitudes to communist China have been black and white throughout its existence. Sympathetic stories like American journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China accompanied its birth; McCarthyite narratives of the “Red Peril” took over in the 1950s, and then US president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972 for what he modestly called “the week that changed the world”.

The love-hate relationship continues to this day. Basically, the West swoons when it perceives China is becoming more liberal and capitalistic – Beijing’s party for the world at the Olympic Games in 2008 was billed as a high point – and demonises it when China shows its repressive ferocity – Beijing’s suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989 was the low point.

China is either good or evil; such a bipolar view leaves no room for the grey tones that make up the world. In the West’s most recent telling of the “good China”, the Beijing Olympics were a celebration of a finally open and liberal China. Beijing’s reform-minded leaders eagerly promoted that view – but also saw the Games as an opportunity to demonstrate China’s new strength.

For Beijing, the Olympics were a carefully stage-managed display of freedom. China beckoned the world with pledges of openness, but when Western journalists came and tested them, they triggered the state’s repressive reflexes all too quickly.

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