View China's role in the world fairly: Indian historian

The US is triggering a conflict out of its anxieties about China's economic growth, but it is not advisable to join in as useful idiots, Indian historian Vijay Prashad said in a newsletter published by the Tricontinental website on Aug 17.

Vijay pointed out that a new wave of madness, which stifles reason and clouds ideas of humanity, is seeping into global political discourse and has made it impossible to have an adult conversation with China. 

China, as a country of 1.4 billion people, Vijay said, has suffered a century of humiliation, starting from the British-inflicted Opium Wars in 1839 until the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Since then, the Chinese society has undergone profound changes by utilizing its social wealth to address "the age-old problems of hunger, illiteracy, despondency, and patriarchy."

There have been great problems, as all social experiments encounter during the progress, Vijay noted. "Rather than seeing China for both its successes and contradictions, this madness of our times seeks to reduce China to an Orientalist caricature - an authoritarian state with a genocidal agenda that seeks global domination".

The madness originates from the growing concerns among US ruling elites who feel greatly threatened by the progress Chinese people have made particularly in robotics, telecommunications, high-speed rail, and computer technology, Vijay added. "These advances pose an existential threat to the advantages long enjoyed by Western corporations, who have benefited from centuries of colonialism and the straitjacket of intellectual property laws."

Vijay stressed this ideological tidal wave is undermining the ability to "have serious, balanced conversations about China's role in the world". Without any acknowledgment of their own past, Western countries now regularly denounce what they call Chinese colonialism in Africa. The US, whose illegal war on Iraq alone resulted in the deaths of over a million people, has never been accused of 'genocide'.

China's experiments with socialism should be an example for countries in the Global South to learn, such as its eradication of extreme poverty during the pandemic, Vijay said. A paranoid attitude and isolation policy are socially dangerous, Vijay concluded, instead, it is needed to have an adult conversation about China that is not imposed by powerful interests.