Ever since the gods of commercialization realized that China had so many people, the race was on to sell to them. For their part, the Chinese were not “buying it”. They considered foreign goods and people inferior and wanted no part in globalization.

After China fell hopelessly behind, however, it decided to change tactics. In the early 20th century, the Chinese realized that it was they who had nothing to offer the West and that the tide had turned. China looked to the “barbarians” in hopes of catching up.

This pattern continued throughout more than 100 of the past 113 years. Lacking indigenous ability and innovation, even the communist party came begging for help. Turned off by what communism stood for, the US rejected such offers and China isolated itself from the world.

In a resurgence of commercialism and corporate greed, American companies foamed at the mouth over selling to a market with 1,000,000,000 people. Companies knew that when the Chinese dragon awoke, it would rush to buy our goods and we would grow rich.

On the other hand, companies knew that Americans would be skeptical of China, after all it was communist, right? This was the same communism that we had been fighting against for decades. We were told that communism was a dangerous form of governance and should be eradicated, lest it eradicate us fist.

With this background and in order to profit from engaging China, corporations had to first convince us that China was not so bad. The talking heads began to soft pedal around the harsh realities of China. They began to exclude the word “communist” when talking about China and if forced to label its governance, they used the more benign term “socialist” in its place. They also began to say that we should work with China or engage them.









The China Lie

“In 2007, James Mann published The China Fantasy, a short book arguing that Western elites misrepresented the benefits of engagement with China and that prosperity and capitalism might not, as they claimed, eventually bring democracy to the PRC.” – Sinocism

It was at this point that corporate America began to sell us on the lie that engaging China was a good thing. We were deceived into believing that rather than ostracize China as we had successfully done with the Soviet Union, we should befriend them. The logic was that by embracing the communist country, we would teach them about the good of democracy.

We were told: “Of course China will want to be democratic, who wants to live under a dictator?” The Chinese, being reasonable people, would rush to boot out their communist overlords and along the way snark up our goods. It was a win-win solution.

Few bothered to consider how a country with 5000 years of one-party rule would embrace participation leadership which was inconsistent with their history and Confucianism (Devenny, on file with author). They also never explained to us the incredibly poor odds China would ever embrace democratic leadership. We were essentially told that democracy is good and the Chinese will want it, and being naive, we believed the talking heads.

By engaging in the “engage China” lie, corporations have sold us down the river for a few pieces of silver. Judas has kissed us upon the cheek and we are being led to economic slaughter, blinded by our own greed.

The fact is that engagement with China has enabled them to challenge us both militarily and economically and democratization is not in the cards, China has not, nor do they even desire to be a democratic country. So why have we been told this lie?