US urged to cease hostility to China

The time is now for the United States government to abandon policies that promote hostility toward China and avert "major power conflict", according to experts and peace activists in the US.

"I want to say with absolute certainty that what we are witnessing right now is a march toward war with China," warned Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Washington-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

Verheyden-Hilliard said the US government is reorienting its foreign and military policies to prioritize what's referred to as "major power conflict", a phrase she described as "a euphemism for world war", and demonization of China is "part and parcel" of it.

Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, agreed that the US strategic approach to China is designed to portray China as a force that's adverse to US interests. An example is the current campaign to demonize Chinese students and scholars coming to study and do research in the US, he said.

"We have a rising tide of hate crimes against Asian Americans and Chinese Americans in this country," said Verheyden-Hilliard. "The FBI is carrying out investigations in every state. Chinese students are being targeted, and academics and scientists of Chinese descent are under attack."

She said it's important for the US public to understand that this is a replication of the pattern that played out in that last major power conflict of World War II, when Japanese Americans were demonized, subject to extreme racism and stigmatized as agents of Japan.

Another example of the US campaign is its interference "distorting the realities of life in China, interfering in places like Tibet and Xinjiang, promoting public unrest and dissent in Hong Kong through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and imposing its own military standards, including the so-called freedom-of-navigation provocative voyages in the South China Sea," said Hammond.

Julie Tang, retired San Francisco Superior Court judge, said the US Congress currently has 100 bills pending－all targeting China with sanctions for how China governs its people and how it deals with its domestic problems.

"These bills sound morally righteous－based on the premise that America has the duty and moral authority to dictate to China and other countries how to govern their own country," she said.

In the case of the US Congress issuing sanctions against Hong Kong in response to the National Security Law for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Tang said there were 2.9 million Hong Kong residents who signed a petition in support of the law.

"These signatures carry the hope of the Hong Kong people that some semblance of peace can be restored to Hong Kong after murder, destruction and rioting by protesters that rained terror over Hong Kong for the entire year of 2019 and continuing," she said.

But Tang said those facts are largely unknown to people in the US because the mainstream media only report negative things about China.

"Americans have never viewed China more negatively. ... This kind of sentiment carries huge implications for a climate ripe for war with China, which should be a great concern for all Americans," she said.

Hammond also stressed that seeing China as an adversary or enemy is not in line with China's actual conduct and behavior in the world.

The reality in China is rather different from how the US government portrays the nation, he said, adding that China has always articulated positions of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for territorial integrity.

China has concentrated for the last 70 years on its domestic development and enhancing the lives of its own people, and it has focused primarily on the elimination of poverty, said Hammond, adding that lifting more than 800 million people out of poverty into a better life has been the greatest campaign of improvement in human livelihoods in history.

In contrast, "it is the United States that has a globe-spanning network of military bases, including bases circling China", Hammond said. "It is the United States that has sought, especially since the end of World War II, to impose its own norms on the global community in terms of business operations, financial interactions, even technologies, as the conflict over Huawei and 5G technologies symbolizes today.

"The United States has arrogated for itself for a long time the right to police the world to enforce American interests and American ideas about a properly ordered world on peoples all around the planet," he said.

He also said people in the US should see China's rise as a moment of opportunity and seek to collaborate with the Chinese, rather than to allow the "political elites and media pundits to drive a wedge of hostility and anxiety" between the two peoples.

"China is emerging once again, returning to patterns of being a major player in its region, a center of productivity, a center of cultural and intellectual efflorescence, and we should welcome them," he said.