Opinion | US-China conflict? Not really – with respect to freedom, both nations share a common heritage

Those calling for the Anglosphere’s resistance to China’s rise frame the matter as zero-sum battle for liberty, but the history of the idea is more complicated

On paper today, both countries accept equality and the people’s happiness as ideals; working towards those goals is more a matter of policy than ideology

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A Secret Service agent guards his post on the roof of the White House in 2011, prior to then Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:00am, 8 Oct 2021Updated: 5:33am, 8 Oct 2021

Those calling for Anglosphere resistance to China’s rise are framing the matter as a zero-sum battle for freedom, yet British columnist Kenan Malik, in a recent piece for The Guardian, disputes the notion that the “Anglosphere” was ever freedom’s flagship. As early as 1900, American historians imagined a nationalist contest between the English spirit of liberty and the dictatorial spirit of Slavic nations. He wrote: “A century later, it’s not Anglo-Saxon pitted against Slav, but the West against China.”

In the new Cold War, the Anglo-American media pit freedom and democracy against the Despotic Oriental, but, as Dr Malik warned, things are not so simple: “Only by reducing liberty to notions of the ‘free market’, ‘small government’ and ‘common law’ could the idea of the Anglosphere as the principal fount of liberty be imagined.”

Malik’s survey of English history showed that the free market doesn’t always promote democratic ideals. In fact, the free market demands austerity measures, but that fuels inequality, whereas Thomas Jefferson held that government should foster equality and the people’s happiness.

Inequality in turn, invites populist movements, and those movements have now claimed the word “freedom” for themselves.

George Monbiot explained: “After left-ish political parties fell into line with corporate power, the right seized the language they had abandoned . . . Now there has been an almost perfect language swap.”

And so Jair Bolsonaro’s fascistic party in Brazil now labels itself “pro-democracy”. So does the Republican Party in the United States along with its “Freedom Caucus”, despite the fact that the V-Dem Institute, which measures political parties against democratic values, ranks America’s Republicans alongside other authoritarian parties, such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.

Populist movements, such as that of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, have claimed the word “freedom” for themselves. Photo: Reuters