The Arab Revolutions as an Anti-China Scheme

Vitaly Bilan
New Eastern Outlook

We can, of course, find our own objective social and economic causes for any given process. Various analysts have already identified a great number for the so-called “Arab revolutions.” However, if we view the situation from a global standpoint, we see that the further things progress the clearer their anti-China bent becomes.

A new “Great Game”

Let’s start with a little history. The 20th century was an era of competition between the British and Russian Empires for control of Central Asia. Western historians know it as the Great Game. Tournament of Shadows was the term of choice in Russia under the light hand of the then Foreign Minister Count Nesselrode because matters never reached the point of direct military confrontation.

“Great Game” was popularized by the British author Richard Kipling in his novel Kim: “Now I shall go far and far into the North, playing the Great Game.” Times have now changed, however. If Kipling were alive today, he would probably say “East” instead of “North,” because the Anglo-Saxons’ chief geopolitical rival is China now, not Russia.

After all, in their enthusiasm for combating the Soviet Union and then in delight at their victory in the 1990s, the Americans missed China’s sprint from the Third World to superpowerdom. According to some forecasts, China could become the world leader in industrial production by 2015. Even before that—by 2012—the Chinese stock market will outstrip Wall Street and take the top spot in the world.

Incidentally, Beijing is also progressing ideologically. China currently is actually developing its own brand of “Eurasian” ideology that is gradually squeezing out communism, which is increasingly at odds with reality.

China’s ideological ambitions

The concept of a “single Chinese nation” was developed at the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in November 2002. That Congress also established a task of elevating and promoting national spirit that was made a strategic goal and, more importantly, a prerequisite for the survival of the Chinese nation and therefore the Chinese state.

We need to examine that concept more closely, because many of its provisions are very interesting from the standpoint of modern geopolitical public relations.

In particular, Chinese history goes beyond that of the Han ethnic group to include peoples who were Chinese subjects for at least a short time (for example, the Tuvans, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz), as well as peoples who conquered China (the Jurchens, Mongols and Manchus).

It’s the Chinese version of Russian Eurasianism!

Accordingly, modern Chinese historians ascribe China’s territorial acquisitions to conquests by non-Han states (for example Mongolia and Manchuria). Thus, China’s national hero is none other than Genghis Khan. In the age of postmodern ideologies, no one is interested in the fact that the part he played in China was actually that of a brutal invader. Reality is unimportant. What is important in China’s Eurasian ideologeme is that the Mongol Empire, which reached as far as the European Union’s current borders between 1300 and 1500, is now declared the Chinese state (the historical “hook” is that the Mongols officially founded their own Yuan Dynasty in China, which incidentally was overthrown by the Chinese in 1368).

This interpretation of historical “myth” allows China to have far-reaching plans for virtually all of Eurasia (and not it alone).

A new “conga line”

The White House, of course, knows that China’s economic success, which is underpinned by solid ideological myth, can bring about a change in geopolitical leadership. To prevent that, it appears that Washington has recently developed a new system of deterrence similar to the Soviet deterrence policy developed in the late 1940s by George Kennan and the famous anti-Soviet “conga line” of Cohen and Kissinger.

We can identify three key elements to the current Chinese deterrence strategy.

First, there is Russia, which is given a certain amount of carte blanche in the post-Soviet territory and which American strategists think of as a key component of the new anti-China conga line. Washington understands that the restoration of something like the former Soviet Union could present a more or less real threat to China, and the presence of such an enormous entity on China’s borders might make Beijing more manageable.

The games being played in the so-called “Turkic civilization” can be considered the second anti-China scheme.

In his famous article The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington, who was Director of Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, very prudently, cautiously and somewhat casually squeezed the “Turkic civilization” in among the Orthodox, Confucian and Islamic worlds. Incidentally, he contradicted himself by doing that: his primary criterion for defining civilizations was religion, and there is no Turkic religion.

As a parenthetical note, throughout the 1990s Ankara was enthusiastically engaged in remaking the post-Soviet Turkic world. Proclaiming itself the Turkic states’ elder brother (agabeylik), Turkish President Halil Turgut Özal declared that the Turkic world would assume a dominant position in Eurasia “from the Great Wall of China to the Balkans.”

That same year, Turkey’s Foreign Minister established the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency, which was responsible for all of Turkey’s relations with the Turkic states and the Turkic peoples inhabiting the former Soviet republics.

Apparently, we are now witnessing the formation of the third and perhaps main component of the anti-Chinese conga line—the Islamic element.

Dangerous games on the Eurasian chessboard

Zbigniew Brzezinski once expressed the thought that after destroying the Soviet Union the United States should arrange a war between China and Islamic fundamentalists for the post-Soviet legacy in order for the two sides to weaken each other as much as possible.

It would, of course, first be necessary to make it possible for fundamentalists to gain power. Paradoxical as it may seem, the main obstacle standing in their way is the authoritarian Arab regimes that, as a group, are loyal to the West.

Thus, by exploiting the objective social and economic problems in the region and removing the charismatic leaders from power under the guise of “revolutions,” the Greater Middle East can be destabilized and conditions created for the establishment of a new region of the world.

According to the plan devised by the Washington strategists, this “Islamized” region would initially join and then swallow much of the de-ideologized post-Soviet and Turkic world, and sooner or later it would inevitably come into conflict with the Chinese world for Central Asian resources.

With that they plan to kill two birds with one stone: weaken China and shift the target of the Islamic world’s aggression from the West to the East.

But is the West behaving too arrogantly on the “Arab street,” and will the anti-China geopolitical “golem” turn on its creator? That is the big question.
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Vitaly Nikolayevich Bilan is a Middle East expert. This article was written expressly for New Eastern Outlook.
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URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2011/05/02/the-arab-revolutions-as-an-anti-china-sc