An attack on Beijing Castle during the Boxer Rebellion (wikipedia.org)
The U.S Demands Reparations from China
Another dimension of the informational rivalry between China and the U.S. is a “compensation” rhetoric. Until now, three Anglo-Saxon countries (the U.S, Great Britain and Australia) have been simultaneously demanding compensation from China for losses incurred as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Of course Washington needs to extend the groups of countries which will join the American compensation policy. For example, there were reports that Germany could join the demands, but it did not go further than publishing the article in a German tabloid “Bild”, demanding billions of dollars as compensation. Berlin avoids direct confrontation with Beijing. For this purpose, there were launched many different lawsuits in the different US states (Asher Stockler At Least Four Class-Action Suits Filed Against China, Seeking Trillions Over Coronavirus Outbreak in U.S.. April 16, 2020 // https://www.newsweek.com/china-class-action-lawsuits-covid-19-1498400). The American lawsuit seeks restitution and punitive damages. According to Attorney General Fitch Prepares from Mississippi, “There are ways to sue China under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) and “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.” (FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – April 22, 2020 “Attorney General Fitch Prepares to Sue China on Behalf of Mississippians, Asks Mississippi’s Congressional Delegation to Support Legislation to Ease the Way to Justice,” https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Attorney-General-Fitch-Prepares-to-Sue-China-on-Behalf-of-Mississippians.html?soid=1133764077238&aid=nc8uasIN3f0).
Thus, the U.S. gradually prepares grounds for international court action or, if it is not going to find an international response, Washington has one interesting option which actually is envisioned in FSIA. It is the expropriation (Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act // https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-legal-considerations/internl-judicial-asst/Service-of-Process/Foreign-Sovereign-Immunities-Act.html) of Chinese property in the U.S. All this is very much reminiscent of the reparation policies against Germany and its allies after two world wars.
It is already possible to hear the voices in China that such pressure on China can trigger the war. Mounting voices are also possible to be heard from both sides of the American establishment, which is the most dangerous sign. American main newspapers are approaching this confrontational rhetoric. American public opinion is already well reverberated to American aggressive stance towards China. According to PEW Research, a negative opinion about China became common in the U.S. around the Democrats (62%) and in the camp of the Republicans (72%) (Kat Devlin, Laura Silver and Christine Huang ,”U.S. Views of China Increasingly Negative Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” April 21, 2020 // https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/04/21/u-s-views-of-china-increasingly-negative-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/). It is a very high number for the American society.
It should be noted that the situation over the Spanish Flu in the XX century created an Anti-German hysteria and bigotry reached even greater heights across America in the late 1910s. This horrible flu struck terror into the hearts of people everywhere. It killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States alone, and claimed as many as 40 million lives worldwide before it ran its course in the second half of 1919. Many Americans believed that the flu originated as a biological warfare attack from Germany (Hillstrom, Kevin, “The Dream of America : Immigration 1870-1920,” Omnigraphics Inc., Detroit, 2009 p. 90).
The American-Chinese geopolitical rift is more than merely an economic or political confrontation which appeared all of a sudden in the XXI century. This confrontation has a very deeply rooted story which starts at the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century. It is a multidimensional phenomenon. First of all, it has racial and biological dimensions. The racial one is known in history as the “Yellow Peril” – which was for a while a part of American strategic culture – and the biological one is the American-Chinese discourse over the biological (germ) warfare which has deep history in Communist China.
Germ (Biological) Warfare against China: The Cold War Informational Warfare
The Chinese officials claim that the coronavirus is a part of something more than simply a natural virus. It directly refers to the artificial nature of Coronavirus and means that it can be part of biological warfare which was launched for specific geopolitical purposes. It is not the only one China faced in her history. The most prominent is the “work” of the Japanese “Unit 731” from 1932 to 1944 in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Its operation was carried out long before Nazi Germany initiated such “scientific programs.” Japanese scientists conducted medical experiments for finding effective biological weapons. They built several facilities for the manufacture of germ warfare weapons in China (Hal Gold “Unit 731: Testimony” Tuttle Publishing, Berkley, 2011 p.53). The biggest ethnic groups which underwent experiments were Chinese and Soviet citizens. A Japanese doctor Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/10/foreignpolicy.usa). As Frank Jacob writes, for the Americans, the results of the experiment could have been valuable in a conflict against the Soviet Union (Frank Jacob, “Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence,” ABC-CLIO, 2018 p. 134). They hid the information about it during the War Crime Trials in Tokyo; otherwise they would have been forced to share it. The total number of victims of Japanese germ warfare in China is approximately 580,000, according to historical researchers. This is the figure that was presented and mutually agreed upon at the International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare (a conference held in December 2002 in the city of Changde, Hunan Province, on the subject of the Japanese bio-war attended by scholars and investigative journalists) (Berenblatt Daniel, “A Plague Upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan’s Biological Warfare Program,” Perennial, New York, p. 173).
Additionally, China again witnessed alleged biological warfare against it during the Korean War. China and North Korea accused the United States of using large-scale biological warfare against them. The U.S. Government from the very beginning denied such accusations. Yet, the Western scholars have partially accepted the allegations. China still acts on the belief that those allegations were true (McNeill J. R., Mauldin Erin “A Companion to Global Environmental History,” John Wiley & Sons, 2012 p. 489). Japan was simply an “antechamber for China”. China and North Korea claimed in their propaganda (under Soviet advisors’ supervision) that the U.S. used the aircrafts containing biological weapons in capsules (usually with insects infected by different diseases) or “epidemic germ shells”, delivered by American artillery (Anne Clunan, Peter R. Lavoy, Susan B. “Martin Terrorism, War, or Disease?: Unraveling the Use of Biological Weapons,” Stanford University Press, 2008 p. 129). The CIA even published a report on this in March 1952 (“Communist Charges of US Use of Biological Warfare”). In the report, the CIA emphasized that the Soviets and the Chinese were working on biological warfare. Despite the fact that after the end of the Cold War the former Soviet Ambassador to North Korea, V.N. Razuvaev stated that these were false accusations (Eric Croddy, C. Perez-Armendariz, J. Hart, “Chemical and Biological Warfare: A Comprehensive Survey for the Concerned Citizen,” Springer Science & Business Media, 2002 p.160).
Two Canadian specialists Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman wrote a highly controversial article “United States Biological Warfare during the Korean War: rhetoric and reality” (Stephen Endicott, Edward Hagerman “United States Biological Warfare during the Korean War: rhetoric and reality,” York University, 2002 // https://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/ReplytoColCrane.htm1]). Their main conclusion was that the U.S had used the biological warfare in Korea, but the results were disappointing – “The disappointment expressed by the U.S. military leadership in the progress of their biological warfare program by 1953 is consistent with Chinese reports of the results of what they took to be an experimental use of biological weapons in China and Korea. The experiments were unsuccessful in starting large-scale epidemics in the battle zone or along the enemy’s transportation lines. The official Chinese history of the Korean War states that the Chinese army suffered less than 400 casualties from the biological weapons attacks in 1952. This report, if accurate, tends to confirm the American feelings of disappointment with their efforts. Chinese accounts give many examples of civilian casualties as the result of what were considered to be germ war attacks on the general populace but no over-all figures. While American scientists and military engineers had been unable to achieve a lethal, easily disseminated, epidemic producing germ agent for use in battlefield conditions, the evidence suggests that for over one and a half years the US tried to do just that and still denies it. This is a black hole in US military history.” The even wrote a book (Stephen Endicott, Edward Hagerman “The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea,” 1998) after this article. The translation of this article into the Chinese language has triggered a serious discussion in China, because it is still a vulnerable topic in this country (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/67037298).
For China, internal propagandist consumption and for international relations there were serious implications. Particularly, because both China and the Soviet Union blamed the Americans for the use of germ warfare and Americans had to react. To the Chinese leadership, these charges were etched upon their collective consciousness (Weapons of Mass Destruction: Nuclear weapons: An Encyclopedia of World Wide Policy, Technology and History, Volume I, ABC-CLIO, 2005 p. 176). In all allegations, the Chinese propaganda connected the Americans and the Japanese as some sort of continuation of anti-Chinese and anti-Russian warfare. Because both Soviets and Chinese thought that former members of Unit 731 were engaged in the Korean War under the same tasks as during the Second World War.
Conclusion
As it is possible to see, the topic of biological warfare between the U.S. and China has quite serious foundations. They can and will contribute to a future deterioration of relations. Especially, it proves for both that the idea of the “Yellow Peril” is deeply rooted in the American strategic culture. Even despite the years of total oblivion under the ideology of liberalism with a huge proportion of socialism, the idea has never died. With the coming of Donald Trump to the White House, it has taken on a new dimension as a superpower global rivalry. In the case of China, her strategic culture is partially built on the mythology that “Yellow Peril” and the “biological” warfare are crucial components of the American strategy against China. Almost the same deeply rooted mythology which is possible to be observed in the Russian strategic culture.
The recent letter of Trump to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, where he announced the plans to terminate the permanent membership of the U.S. in the WHO. It seems that the U.S. is ready to give up the post-1945 world international order, starting with the WHO. Of course, the WHO is not the most important organisation within the UN system, but such policy strikes the foundations of the UN. Trump is accusing the WHO in this letter, for its alarming lack of independence from China. The entire list of allegation is based on the pointing of the WHO’s wrong subjective policy towards China (The White House, Washington, May 18, 2020 // https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Tedros-Letter.pdf). In an ultimate form, Trump gives 30 days to the WHO to tackle the issue of “dependence from China”. He ended his letter with a very belligerent and bold sentence which plays against the U.S. – “I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.” The world used to see the U.S. as a universal power and its commitment to the world international order, of course under her leadership and hegemony, but the world will not be able to continue to perceive the U.S. with such global conduct. It all plays to Chinese advance.
For China, the idea of “germ warfare” use against her is not a simply propagandistic narrative and accusations against the United States and the West in general. The country with national pride has suffered greatly from foreign colonial invasions. Therefore, countries like Russia or China are quite sensitive to any possibility of any warfare use, including biological, against them. Both China and Russia nervously react to any theories, concepts, or ideas in the West, which directly indicate that their country can be destroyed. In the case of China, it is already the fourth time when the country is engaged in“biological” informational warfare, but this has never before reached the present scale. In this competition, the West is in a very disadvantageous position, attempting to lure their companies away from China. It’s one thing to declare such plans – another thing is to bring these companies home. Finally, and most importantly, the West has already forgotten what it is like to be an industrial country; neither ecological standards nor the young generation is ready for massive industrial work. The peoples of Northern America and Europe are not ready for such events.
It seems that the world will be divided into those who go along with the United States accusations and will demand compensations and those who will side with China. There will also exist “non-aligned” countries. But whilst during the previous Cold War, the West was united and had the greatest advantages such as advanced technology and economy, nowadays, it neither possesses such great technological or economic dominance, as was the case during the Cold War between U.S and the USSR. The upcoming superpower competition will have new rules and an unprecedented scale.
Thus, as before the Cold War in the XX century, we are approaching a period of the building of alliances, but China does not need them actually. China has three best allies: freedom of trade and multilateralism; a system of multipolarity; the social and ethnic monolith of China itself. This biological informational war is gradually evolving into different spheres and fields of global rivalry between China and the United States, yet it is clear now that a “biological” factor will remain fundamental and will be exploited by the West as a path for future confrontation.
Autor
Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Senior Analyst at Strategy&Future
Strategy&Future
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