TOKYO—Chapter II of the U.S.-China row is set to become Donald Trump’s white supremacy against Xi Jinping’s Chinese hegemony.
By year’s end, Trump should have decided to raise tariffs on most Chinese goods to 25 percent on Jan. 1, 2019, following a rise to 10 percent on Sept. 24. But tariffs alone may not reduce American imports of Chineses goods as his threat has arbitrarily lessened the impact on prices because it had weakened the Chinese currency yuan’s value against the U.S. dollar, as well as American consumers’ voracious appetite for Chinese products not manufactured in the U.S., like Apple’s iPhones.
Next phase, Trump is likely to become even more aggressive toward China no matter what Congress and the public would have to say. It’s because he is first and foremost a white supremacist and nationalist.
No matter, Xi Jinping is expected to pursue his hegemonistic policy reminiscent of the days when China was ‘the Center of the World’ as his country’s name proudly reads. He will continue dispatching millions of Chinese to not only neighboring Asian countries but to far ends of the earth, arming them with money from government coffers to start Chinese restaurants jointly with Chinese entrepreneurs and then build social infrastructure.
That’s not all: Nov. 10, at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai, Xi announced that China would open further its markets for foreigners and imports to win the hearts and minds of foreign businesses. That meeting came after his one-on-one with Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, who Xi had shunned for months, making the meeting the first bilateral summit in years.
On the military front, Xi is standing pat on China’s control of South China Sea islands that had been claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam, the two countries that have been quiet in recent months presumbly in return for Chinese investments and other grafts.
So, China probably won’t waver on its hegemons, though it is giving hints of willingness to compromise with the U.S.
The one-on-one sovereign rivalry picture evokes what was happening between Japan and the United States and Britain in the run-up to 2ndWorld War: The popular view is that the U.S. and its allies fought against japan’s imperial military expansion in China and elsewhere in Asia to prevent Japan’s annexation of those countries.
The Japanese imperial military did expand into China, Korea, and as far as Singapore, Burma, South Pacific island nations. It was the time when developed nations around the world were continuing to strong-arm against each other for control of land for acquiring more colonies. Britain, the Dutch, France, Russia all did that as they attempted to acquire Japan during the mid-1800s.
The Japanese were the last to ride on the bandwagon of this WWII period colonial occupation obsession but their expansion into its neighboring countries was different from the West’s colonial policy: fighting against the white supremacy colonialism espoused by the western colonialist.
Historians say that the Japanese did not rule as the West did to indigenous peoples by using them as slaves or for manual labor. Instead, the Japanese rule was one based on symbiosis concept on culture, education and other policies.
Historians’ views on the Japanese expansion may be dubious but what China is facing now against the United States , under Trump’s policy, resembles what Japan faced during the war.
–Toshio Aritake