Some leading intellectuals tell me that they resent Chinese online influencers and social-media nationalists for the same reason I dislike Fox News: They’re opportunists, weakening their country with lies.
Chinese nationalists, leftists, economic liberals — it’s hard to find a Chinese thinker alive today who hasn’t been profoundly influenced by American society and culture. The United States has been a lodestar for China throughout its reform era, which began in the late 1970s and continues to transform the country. For those who visited the United States, often to study, it was typically the learning experience of a lifetime, nourishing a drive to make their own country more modern, stronger, better.
The revisionist history wielded by conservatives in both China and the United States threatens to bring back the fearful militarism of the original Cold War, with its coups and proxy conflicts. Americans tell ourselves that we won because we were the good guys, simplistic language that is being revived in Congress.
But we can only hope to remain the good guys by sticking to values like free speech, generosity and the confidence that our culture can withstand challenge. Sadly, those values are threatened when the Chinese American Representative Judy Chu’s loyalty to the United States is questioned by one of her congressional colleagues. They’re threatened when a bill is introduced to the Texas Legislature that would ban Chinese students from the state’s universities. And they’re threatened when we deepen ties with dubious leaders like President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines — son of the corrupt and brutal former dictator — and increase our military presence there.
We could win a cold war with China, yet still lose some of what makes us great. We toppled Saddam Hussein and crippled Al Qaeda, but at the cost of reduced freedom in the United States through extended powers for the N.S.A., the Patriot Act and the festering sore of Guantánamo Bay.
The United States can badger China about its flaws all it wants. But is our ultimate goal to score political points or to live in a peaceful world where we cooperate on real problems like climate change? America is strongest when it leads by example, by remaining open, generous and free.
My son, a product of these two great nations, was born in Shanghai in November. When I hold him, I wonder whether a war or other troubles might lead to our deportation or force painful choices on his American father and Chinese mother. China’s people are still welcoming; strangers sometimes approach me to say that they appreciate having foreigners in their country or to say things like “U.S.A., number one!”