Foreign Policy Category Archive

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American Excess, Chinese Success

Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China, Stephen Roach

John Derbyshire • February 27, 2014

• 800 Words • Leave a Comment

China forecasting is a mug’s game. The terrible example before us all is Gordon Chang, who in 2001 published a book titled The Coming Collapse of China, which predicted that within five to ten years the Communist Party would be chased out of power amid social and economic breakdown. (I reviewed the book here.) As... Read More

The Man Who Blew the Lid Off Maoism

John Derbyshire • June 20, 2013

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

I was slow on the uptake in understanding Chinese communism’s awfulness. I’d been a lefty in my student days without knowing anything much about China. Toward the end of those days, female Chinese author Han Suyin published A Crippled Tree, an account of her parents’ lives in early 20th-century China written from a standpoint of... Read More

Whistling Past the Graveyard

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, by Mark Steyn

John Derbyshire • November 1, 2006

• 2,900 Words • Leave a Comment

Is the world of today a better or a worse place than the world of 100 years ago? On all the ordinary indices of human felicity — health, longevity, security, hygiene, comfort, prosperity, equality, dentistry — the answer is of course that we live much better lives than our grandfathers did. That is not the... Read More

Selling the Rope

Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal, by Ethan Gutmann

John Derbyshire • April 14, 2004

• 1,100 Words • Leave a Comment

Ethan Gutmann lived in China for three years, from late 1998 to late 2001. He went there with the hope of making a TV documentary about how capitalism and globalization were going to democratize China. He came back much wiser and sadder. InLosing the New China he presents a cold-eyed look at the Beijing expat... Read More

Understanding Chinese Nationalism

China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy, by Peter Hays Gries

John Derbyshire • March 7, 2004

• 1,100 Words • Leave a Comment

It is an item of current conventional wisdom that the Chinese Communist Party, confronted with a population to whom communism no longer has any appeal, has resorted to an extreme form of nationalism to justify its rule over China. The principal message of Peter Hays Gries's fascinating book is that while this is true, it... Read More

Still Headed in the Same Direction?

Friendly Fire, by Elizabeth Pond

John Derbyshire • February 18, 2004

• 1,100 Words • Leave a Comment

Wars, of course, unify us in a common purpose, and this was no less true of the Cold War than of any other. There were differences of opinion within the Western alliance throughout the Cold War period, but the common threat from the Soviet Union, formidable in armaments and subversive in intent, kept those differences... Read More

China's New Left

China's New Order, by Wang Hui

John Derbyshire • November 12, 2003

• 1,100 Words • Leave a Comment

Americans are usually a bit surprised to hear that mainland China has a vigorous culture of political and social critique. The dictatorship imposes some constraints, of course, and the political weather blows cold now and then, but tianxia da shi — the large matters of the world — are keenly discussed among Chinese intellectuals, and,... Read More

Tibet's Long Agony

Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French

John Derbyshire • September 16, 2003

• 2,600 Words • Leave a Comment

I met the Dalai Lama once. This was at Central Hall, Westminster, close to the Abbey, in the summer of 1984. I was doing freelance hack work for the London newspapers, and had reviewed Heinrich Harrer's recent book Return to Tibet for the Daily Telegraph a few weeks before. My review had been sympathetic to... Read More

China vs. Foggy Bottom

The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States, by Ross Terrill

John Derbyshire • July 1, 2003

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

Thirty years ago — at about the time, in fact, that Ross Terrill published his first book about China — the catch-phrase in political science circles was that people who studied the Soviet Union hated the object of their studies, while people specializing in modern China loved the object of theirs. There was truth in... Read More

Dream On

The China Dream by Joe Studwell

John Derbyshire • April 14, 2002

• 1,100 Words • Leave a Comment

The dream of Joe Studwell's title is the dream of the China market: of 1.3 billion consumers just waiting to be sold clothes, medicine, cars, toothpaste, or whatever else the dreamer has to offer. As an English writer of the 1840s put it: "If we could only persuade every person in China to lengthen his... Read More

Finding Chinese Dissidents

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels, from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma

John Derbyshire • November 25, 2001

• 1,000 Words • Leave a Comment

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, the Chinese teach their children. They further instruct them that the rock that stands out from the river bank gets worn away by the current. In case the child still hasn't got the point, he will then be told that the tallest tree is the first to... Read More

A Vast Nation Scrutinized Closely

Treason by the Book, by Jonathan D. Spence

John Derbyshire • April 22, 2001

• 1,000 Words • Leave a Comment

Western enthusiasm for China waxes and wanes on long cycles. In the early 18th century it was waxing strong. "The constitution of their empire is the most excellent the world has ever seen," burbled Voltaire. The unfoxable Samuel Johnson scoffed at widespread popular conceptions of the "Chinese perfectly polite, and compleatly skill'd in all sciences."... Read More

China and Her Dupes

The China Threat, by Bill Gertz

John Derbyshire • December 4, 2000

• 1,200 Words • Leave a Comment

In the middle 1930s, as Hitler consolidated his power in Germany and began re-arming that country in earnest, the facts of the situation were duly reported back to the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon. However, Sir John, as one of his underlings later remarked, did not want to know "uncomfortable things." Still less did... Read More

Why We Ought to Fear China

Hegemon, by Steven Mosher

John Derbyshire • August 20, 2000

• 1,200 Words • Leave a Comment

Steven Mosher is a hero to those of us who hate and fear the current Chinese government. He has the honor of having been persona non grata in the People's Republic for twenty years — longer, I think, than any other American scholar. Mosher was the first social scientist from this country invited to do... Read More

Bolthole to Superstar

Strategy for Survival, by Chiao Chiao Hsieh

John Derbyshire • April 30, 1985

• 400 Words • Leave a Comment

An acquaintance of mine arrived in Taiwan (alias the "republic of China") in 1971, the week after Nixon announced his intention to visit Peking. The air was thick with anxiety. Those who had somewhere to go were preparing to leave, considering that, with the collapse of American support and the anticipated expulsion from the U.N.,... Read More

China from Inside and Out

Stones of the Wall, by Dai Houying
To Get Rich is Glorious, by Orville Schell

John Derbyshire • January 1, 1985

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

Since 1978 China has been settling down into an easy-going style of traditional oriental despotism, a re-tread of the old imperial order. For 30 years before that date, however, the country was a laboratory for experiments in chiliastic socialism. All the experiments were failures, of course; each one left behind a desert of abandoned marriages,... Read More

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