John Pomfret writes commentaries on US-China relations. This is a selection of his latest pieces. John Pomfret has been a war correspondent for 15 years, covering wars large and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. Some of his earlier dispatches can be found under Archive.
In China, Following General Tso’s Imperial Recipe
July 14th, 2009from The Washington Post
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Most Americans have never heard of Gen. Zuo Zongtang, but when they hit the local Chinese takeout and order a greasy carton of General Tso’s chicken, they’re invoking his name. By 1878, Zuo, or Tso, marching west from his base in Shaanxi province with 120,000 troops, had extended China’s imperial reach deep into Central Asia. The boundaries set by Zuo’s campaign in a region called Xinjiang, or the New Territories, have remained essentially untouched to this day.
Chinese like to point out that Zuo’s victories in Xinjiang occurred just two years after Gen. George Armstrong Custer died at the Battle of Little Bighorn trying to corral members of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes back into their reservations. They compare their treatment of China’s minorities such as the Tibetans or the Uighurs — who speak a Turkic language, read Arabic script and are culturally if not altogether religiously Muslim — and the white man’s handling of Native Americans. See, I’ve been told countless times by Chinese friends, it’s not just the white man’s burden to bring civilization to the “natives,” it’s the yellow man’s burden, too.
The violence last week in Xinjiang between Uighurs and Han Chinese underscores two nettlesome issues for China. First, despite its world-beating economic growth rate, its maglev trains in Shanghai and its postmodern Olympic Village in Beijing, China is still an empire in the throes of becoming a country. And second, if this empire really is going to “rule the world” someday, as a recent book predicts, is its treatment of Xinjiang a harbinger of how it plans to deal with us? And are the violent reactions to China’s power something that will erupt not just on China’s streets but around the world?
After Tiananmen, China Wedded Force With Freedom (by John Pomfret)
June 7th, 2009from The Washington Post
Sunday, June 7, 2009
On June 14, 1989, I was in the Associated Press bureau in Beijing. I had just filed a story about the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in China’s capital. As the sun streamed through the office’s grubby windows, the phone rang.
“This is the police in charge of resident foreigners in China,” a male voice on the other end announced. “Are you Pan Aiwen?” He was using my Chinese name.
“Yes,” I replied.
“You are ordered to appear at our bureau immediately,” he said. Click.
Three days later, I was on a plane bound for Hong Kong, expelled from China. Officially, I stood accused of stealing state secrets and violating martial law provisions. My actual offense: I’d written about Tiananmen Square.
A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness (by John Pomfret)
June 7th, 2009from The Washington Post
Sunday, July 27, 2008; B01
Nikita Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury us, but these days, everybody seems to think that China is the one wielding the shovel. The People’s Republic is on the march — economically, militarily, even ideologically. Economists expect its GDP to surpass America’s by 2025; its submarine fleet is reportedly growing five times faster than Washington’s; even its capitalist authoritarianism is called a real alternative to the West’s liberal democracy. China, the drumbeat goes, is poised to become the 800-pound gorilla of the international system, ready to dominate the 21st century the way the United States dominated the 20th.
Except that it’s not.
Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper’s Beijing bureau chief, I’ve been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China’s becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China’s missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.
But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.
