Certain Western politicians have recently escalated their panic selling about the so-called "China threat." The latest example is U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken who made a baseless assertion on Sunday that China is acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad.
In a "60 Minute" interview on CBS News, Blinken said China was acting like "someone who's trying to compete unfairly and increasingly in adversarial ways."
Such an accusation against China, which is simply not true, shows that some Western politicians have overstated China's strength. They like to emphasize that China will "dominate the world" or put forward the "Chinaphobia" arguments. Some scholars and experts have already pointed out such worries are invalid.
The panic about China's strength is unlikely to prove constructive, said Brookings Institution's Ryan Hass, a former security advisor under the Obama administration.
"An alarmed focus on degrading China's strengths risks causing the United States to focus too little on the more essential task of bolstering its own. Any attempt to use the China threat to spur domestic reform or overcome domestic division is likely to do more harm than good," Hass wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.
The U.S. hard-line approach against China concerns the world because it may lead to "a new Cold War."
In another article in Foreign Affairs, Thomas J. Christensen, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, warned, "If Washington unilaterally adopts an anachronistic cold war stance toward China, the United States will alienate allies that are too economically dependent on China to adopt entirely hostile policies."
"The voices calling for a cold war containment strategy toward China misunderstand the nature of the China challenge," Christensen noted.
Regarding the so-called "China challenge," some have called on Uncle Sam to adopt an objective and rational view of China's rise.
"China has been a major country for thousands of years. And in different historical epochs. And so, the recovery of China should be not surprising," former U.S. Secretary of State and long-time diplomat Henry Kissinger said in a recent interview published by Business Insider.
The veteran diplomat said it remains the need of the United States to coexist with a country of China's magnitude.
The future of China-U.S. relations depends on whether the United States can accept China's peaceful rise and whether it recognizes that the Chinese people have the right to pursue a better life.
The Chinese wisdom goes that "a country practicing hegemonism is doomed to fail," rather than "a country will definitely seek hegemony when growing stronger."
A growing sense of panic about China's strengths, as some Western politicians have, will only lead to a bout of their own insecurity.
