Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Sino-American friction continued throughout the rest of the year.
American officials responded to the anti-American riots in China by
leveling new charges of espionage against Chinese scientists living in
the United States. A loosely knit group of American researchers con-
cerned about China's ultimate strategic intentions gained considerable
influence with conservative representatives and senators in the U.S.
Congress. Known informally as the Blue Team, this group villified the
Beijing leadership and encouraged the U.S. government to pursue a
harder linewith China. Some Blue Teamers evenwent so far as to specu-
late that the running of the Panama Canal by the Hong Kong-based
harbor management firm Hutchison Whampoa Limited was actually a
Chinese Communist plot to gain control of Central America and deploy
nuclear missiles there aimed at the United States!
China had legitimate historical grievances against the Western world
and Japan; it would be impossible for reasonable people who review
China's modern history to conclude otherwise. The fear in some quar-
ters in the 1990s, however, was that China might eventually translate
its accelerating development and nascent historical resentments into a
confrontation, or perhaps even open warfare, with the West. Perhaps
China would even attempt to ally itself with other nations and civiliza-
tions hostile to the West in this cause. In his influential topic The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard scholar Samuel
Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, China's relations
with Islamic countries and Russia might well be “less conflictual,”
while its relations with the West will probably be “more conflictual”
(Huntington 1996, 245). Would a Sino-Islamic entente eventually
emerge to threaten or challenge the West?
During the 1990s an angry and xenophobic topic entitled China Can
Say No (a topic that drew the inspiration for its title and content from
The Japan That Can Say No by Japanese nativists) created something of
a firestorm of discussion and public debate in China. Other such shrill,
ultranationalistic topics soon became available in China, even in
respectable, mainstream bookstores. One of the most prominent of
these was China's Road Under the Shadow of Globalization (Quanqiuhua
Yinyingxia di Zhongguo zhi Lu; Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe,
1999) by Fang Ning, Wang Xiaodong, and Song Qiang. More than
a mere rant piece about the bombing of the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, their topic was a sustained polemic, a protracted diatribe,
against the government and people of the United States of America.
Loving China necessarily entails hating America, they argued. No
accusation against Americans was too fanciful or far-fetched for them.
The topic claimed that the United States did not care about its relations
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