The so-called western media’s narrative about an impending US-China war are misguided as to the motivations for such a war. Experts falsely attribute forthcoming conflicts to a Thucydides Trap, where great power rivalry for dominance results in a clash for supremacy. Instead, the true culprit is the imposition of United States cultural, linguistic, and social dominance over Chinese, as has been done with other groups such as Native Americans and African Americans, and also the “transformational diplomacy” initiatives to reshape Arab regions to conform to American values. Instead of American dominance and worldwide transformational diplomacy, I recommend a radically pacifist and egalitarian solution: linguist diplomacy, as an alternative to Anglophone Hegemony.
Drawing on Regulation 1 of the European Union, instead of imposing dominance of American values, culture, and language worldwide, and framing international relations as a competition for dominance, that like the European Union, we look to establishing equality among the world’s member states. Here, this would mean changing organizational norms and practices to ensure equality, as in Regulation 1, between Chinese and English, and relying on a cadre of young linguists to spearhead person-to-person US-China relations.
As I wrote in previous articles, this ideal is virtually illegal as between the US-China, when it should be something virtually legally mandated instead.
The Problem
White House China expert Michael Pillsbury, and the rest of the Washington establishment rage that China misled them into thinking America’s transformational diplomacy goals on China would succeed, that China all along sought dominance. Therefore war is inevitable, the one Einstein said would reduce the survivors to being cavemen.
In my previous articles, I highlighted a serious problem brewing in US-China relations, and internally, that being a United States soft power colonization of China’s elites. That is to say, business, law, advisory, and academic elite are promoting an ideal that having US education and English language expertise is the mark of what makes someone superior. At the same time, PLA generals are writing numerous books about US hegemony from the perspective of populist China, as a peoples who are exploited. A review of neocolonialist academic literature, such as that of Homi Bhabha at Harvard or others focusing on China, like Kubota, says that the PLA’s narrative of US hegemony is correct, and that capture of local elites by global hegemonists is simply the natural order of things in relations between people.
So, the ordinary man in China has a right to be angry at the United States; that’s why in the US-Iran military confrontation, Chinese social media is seen cheering Iran. And China’s military and technology are getting really, really good. United States Navy wargames modeling the invasion of Hawaii by the PLA, show the United States loses to China. That should be very worrying to anyone in the United States.
While we as Americans don’t really think about it too closely, our country’s model of prosperity is essentially Jim Crow built on top of the infrastructure left behind by the British Empire. The best jobs are located on United States soil, and low cost labor is outsourced to places outside America. The immigration law system is not too different from South African apartheid, where privilege is obtained by restricting movement of people across borders. ICE officers raid, and remove, people trying to go to America for a better life, so that American citizens are protected from job competition. Easy access to cheap labor worldwide is facilitated by a model where everyone in the world learns English.
Phenomena like Hollywood, the Ivy League, and Big Tech are an American phenomenon with some British corollaries as well. Children of elite in China and other places like Vietnam and Malaysia, have for years been put on a path to master English, get American educations, American jobs, and American citizenships, eventually proudly declaring themselves white on the inside, Asian on the outside.
This sort of dominance of a particular territory, a particular culture, and particular language over society is not healthy, rather it is a driver of conflict. This shouldn’t need saying, instead I think it should be common sense, as even monkeys in the wild fight for alpha male status and who will dominate over others. The US-China relationship worries very much revolve around the possibility China may try to displace the United States as a dominant power. The Thucydides Trap theory says that two powers will come into conflict with each other as one threatens to pass another, leading to an inevitable war. But in the big picture, the competition for privilege and dominance is what leads to conflict in competition for what even animals crave: privilege and dominance.
The United States researchers have come to a conclusion, ironically enough, that the only way to ensure peace is for American values, institutions, and language to dominate throughout the world in perpetuity. My view is that asserting dominance, even in this way, inevitably leads to conflict because people occupying inferior positions will inevitably find a way to fight back and end their own inferiority, and until then they will resist in more subtle ways. In domestic politics, around the world, we also see in a multitude of nations various actions being taken to ensure one ethnicity enjoys privilege over another ethnicity. This happens absolutely everywhere, and very visibly in the United States historically and today. The person being pushed down does not like that, and could strike back.
Linguist Diplomacy
The solution to conflict is not more American dominance, but more equality. I call my solution for America to achieve that equality as “linguist diplomacy,” the notion of investing Americans with the ILR-rated competencies of a linguist and putting them to work shoulder to shoulder with people around the world. Their role is to show that America values people of the world, thus establishing a social practice of social, cultural, and linguistic equality. The idea is not new, Regulation 1 of the European Union establishes this as the law of the bloc, passed in the years following Hitler’s dominance and annihilation of Europe. Regulation 1 is a foundation for peace in the European Union, and it works, therefore it can be the foundation for peace for United States and its current rivals around the world. And especially China.
When I worked in corporate legal matters on things like trade secrets and fraud, I constantly ran across China-office communications complaining about the discrimination against Chinese staff, and their inferior position. Individuals also told me directly. The idea that the Chinese group is on a lower hierarchy to the Americans, that being non-white they are seen as lesser, and that Chinese must put in the effort to learn English, all very powerfully instilled the idea that to be Chinese is to be inferior to being white.
Chinese professionals in New York say “I am called ‘that Asian girl’ by the boss” and in Shanghai they say, “British look down on us, they think we are inferior,” emphasizing that the UK and Australia play a critical role here, too. Or, they say, “We always have to meet on a convenient American time to accommodate the Americans, which discriminates against us.”
Previously as you might have heard, I defended Chinese organizations against allegations of terrorism. When exploring those cases on the defense side, I asked individuals, “What do you think might motivate a Chinese person to facilitate terrorist bombings to attack American civilians?” Rather than hearing that would never happen, what I heard was the “century of humiliation” and other past ethnic humiliations, drive anger among even normal, decent people. That there would no doubt be people similarly angered out there, who would use their resources to support terrorism against the United States. What the CIA and Lee Wollosky falsely advised Obama and Trump, was that there is some kind of “communist conspiracy” to use terrorism to bring down the United States. They even distorted General Qiao Liang’s book to make that point. All of that is absolutely false, actually all those cases found zero evidence of Chinese support for terrorism. But we can learn a thing or two about why Chinese social media is cheering on Iran; being humiliated angers people.
George Wallace once said “segregation forever” is the way of the United States, which while it has been dismantled, has nonetheless remained a default American mindset for social interactions. Today, US-China economic relations are very much based on segregation, enforced by immigration law mostly, but through how corporate hierarchies are structured and which language and culture dominates.
This only recently caused alarm in the USA and China when the number of students going to China to study plummeted, leading concerns about the collapse of American knowledge and understanding of China, that will lead to dangerous miscalculation. However, United States use of colonial-era techniques in engaging China, specifically a hierarchical pyramid of White-on-Top-Chinese-on-Bottom in China and elsewhere (Malaysia, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil), and Chinese internalization of that hierarchy, is responsible for the collapse.
And this extends to countries like Korea, where few Korean students are going to China to study. I asked staff from a chaebol entity based in Shanghai, and they said the companies also set a Korean-on-Top hierarchy, the Koreans not speaking Chinese and instead Chinese who learn Korean are privileged in the company. Japan’s colonization and Japanese language policies should remind us that every ethnicity tries to achieve dominance. The chaebol workers in Shanghai, further, say that Korean and Korean-adjacent workers steal credit for Chinese workers’ achievements. In theory at least, China pushed back on this by urging that its 56 minorities and their languages, are all equal, but this is an official policy, not human behavior.
For an international student to engage with China, they need to occupy that higher space in the social hierarchy, which means you need to be a middle aged white male. However, the ideal time for learning Chinese and about China is actually in the late teens or early 20s, when language learning is fastest and career obligations are fewest. As I wrote in depth covering other aspects in previous articles, American (and British/Australian) students can see the writing on the wall and simply decide against going to China to study at all.
Contrary to what the Chinese media has said about the impossibility of foreigners to learn Mandarin to a professional level, the science reviews say that China has established an extraordinarily effective set of Mandarin teaching programs. For example, suppose you have an economics student in the United States with a minor in Chinese and a summer program at Middlebury. They then spend a year at IUP, and then do a master’s in economics at a program like John Hopkins Nanjing.
The outcome ILR proficiency levels for graduates are 3+, whereas most Chinese master’s graduates to the USA are returning with ILR2+ and some better ones ILR3, due to the self-isolation of Chinese abroad students from the local population. I tracked numerous graduates of these programs on LinkedIn, and found that only a tiny percentage use any Mandarin or China knowledge in a job role. They simply changed fields.
While many Americans did find work helping localize Chinese brands for the USA, most of the problem is concentrated in American (and British) subsidiaries in China. Here, there is generally no role for Americans who have learned a lot about China to have a role at those organizations. Companies are typically sending staff from US headquarters who have a significant amount of institutional knowledge about the company, to connect the management better. And those offices, to accommodate those US staff, also need to be fully English-speaking. Thus, knowledge of Chinese would be disruptive to those American offices because the US colleagues need everyone speaking in English, though recently being done more remotely and many offices in China reverting to Chinese-speaking offices, creating more distance, cross-cultural tension, and isolation.
My recommendation to solve the issue would be to simply subsidize Chinese-speaking American staff, i.e. the students who could be coming but are not, to work in local Chinese-speaking office environments. China actually does have a lot of tax credit and subsidies for any foreign worker in China, but otherwise has discouraged Mandarin language learning or knowledge of China. Qualification should be based individually and organizationally, needing a combination of ILR5 in English and ILR3 at minimum in Chinese, and also annual learnings verification to see they are actually using and improving in skill. This should also not be China specific, but also extend to any kind of State Department defined critical needs language where feasible, for example Korean.
Qualifying workers in subsidiary offices abroad, should be expected to use genuine professional skill, local language, and interact with local colleagues in the local native language, as part of teams. Rather than imposing English language on the entire office for the convenience of expat placements, they should be able to interact with local staff as cultural equals, and more, learners of local language and culture. By doing so, those staff would show that they think Chinese things, Chinese language, and Chinese culture are valued by Americans, and moreover intrinsically valuable.
Furthermore, although not a best practice because it has not really been tested, those American staff still remain culturally American and can still serve as a valuable link between headquarters and regional offices. They are still socialized to the American way of doing things, can be taught the corporation’s institutional culture relatively easily especially with rotations, and by respecting and understanding local Chinese culture, can legitimize headquarters business practices through critical thinking and not authoritarian fiat.
Finally, they can serve a role in business organizations that is poorly understood but necessary. In China, it’s very common to hear from local staff that the organization’s beliefs and specific marketing campaigns are inappropriate to China, and want to do things the “China way.” We also hear that they are often correct, but also that more junior local staff have misconceptions about marketing best practices and oppose it out of ignorance, and that headquarters is often right. American corporate members who have studied Chinese closely, would have a perspective closer to the middle ground, more fully understanding their colleagues’ Chinese practices, while also being native to headquarters practices. The same applies to a variety of other critical language needs countries. In the full variety of day to day work, they would be an effective bridge to ensure consistency in the organization’s way of doing things, but also allowing critical thinking into why the Chinese way might be better.
As noted by the State Department, Americans with regional knowledge provide a huge benefit to diplomacy and regional insights. International engagement is a two-way street, but for decades has been very one-sided. The United States’s interactional model has revolved very much around wealthy international student families sending kids to be educated in the United States, then sending them back home to work in corporate positions. Dragged kicking and screaming to America by their parents, they resisted learning about America or very much English, associating with only other Chinese students and speaking only Mandarin. This injected a huge amount of foreign families’ funds into English speaking countries educational systems in exchange for good corporate jobs back home. Academic standards fell because students, as a funding source, could not be failed or expelled for cheating, and today in our universities there is an outright epidemic of cheating.
“Rich kids buying global elite status” is not a good model for American international engagement, and only causes resentment among ordinary working families in those countries. For funding a genuinely beneficial program, I say look at the Peace Corps program. The cost of sending a Peace Corps volunteer abroad costs on average $56,000 per year, and the positive effect of sending those Americans abroad has been considered invaluable. This program was particularly valuable for the US when most of the world was economically undeveloped, but in an economically developed world, it is not the path to peace. How much would it cost in tax credits to make it sufficiently worthy of consideration for a corporation to hire Americans well educated about China to work locally? Their salaries won’t even need to hit $56,000 per year, especially given local cost of living.
I have doubts that cost was ever really a barrier for corporations, rather than business culture. In recent decades’ American business culture, offices with expats need to be English-speaking to accommodate executives. Local staff saw English as a valuable tool to connect with those executives, thus would discourage American expats from learning Chinese. Over time, what was originally a recent post-colonial phenomenon became entrenched into world business culture and expectations. However, today, businesses have plenty of local highly qualified executives and the need for expatriate executives is greatly lessened.
The ”white executive” dominance’s effect on culture and relations is reflected in how I learned all my Chinese in the United States, not China, because Mandarin Chinese is discouraged in China but paradoxically encouraged in the United States. Everyone always said that once you go to China, people will fight to stop you from speaking Chinese, which is definitely true in my experience. As a result, I developed an awareness that a good outcome in life for a person like me would require staying outside of China’s borders. The local international students and expatriate workers in the United States, being so burned out from the overwhelming alienation and discrimination, and having already “made it” professionally as far as English would be needed to be taken, are quite eager to use Mandarin.
As a cross-cultural social interaction dynamic does, this is not just undesirable, it’s perverted. The only reason these dynamics exist is imposition of superior social statute and prestige of Americans over Chinese. Moreover, asking people to live in these social conditions where one race of people is so explicitly held high over the other, where American cultural dominance over Chinese, will only lead to resentment and conflict.
I asked several workers based in China how they feel about the above environment, and the general consensus is “discriminatory” and “degrading”—the perception of a relationship with us Americans is that humiliation must be endured due to a power balance. When asked, “how can this be solved,” and hearing the above solution, people on the ground thing “this can work.”
