Musings on China as Evil Other...

It is always intellectually fascinating to see that while things change much, simultaneously, remains the same. Take anti-communism, great power struggles, and nationalism, for instance. China, for instance, may be communist, if perhaps in rhetoric only, and the paranoid conspiracy theories of demagogues may continue to scare the masses by making threats of commie conspiracies dance in their socialised heats, in reality, however, China is predominately nationalist and bureaucratic, much like any other traditional, modern and postmodern nation the world has seen up to this point. China is, in other words, nationalist. It thinks of itself as a great nation and, given its economic, political, miilitary, cultural, demographic, and geographic power, it acts much like any of the great powers of the past and the present, particularly the nationalist great powers of the recent past, who were also stimulated by ethnocentrism in its traditional and modern nationalistic forms. Now this is not to say that nationalist entities aren't dangerous and that they don't engage in what some would call, to take one example, human rights abuses. Like the great powers of the past, including the great powers of Western Europe and the great power the United States, this mixture of ethnocentrism and economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic power can be and often is toxic and deadly to "dissident" others within and "inferior" others without. It simply means that some -isms, such as communism, socialism, and liberalism, often function as emotional identity markers of an us superior identity community and as sources of amnesia for the multitude of sins, including human rights abuses committed by the nation-state to which they believe they belong and with which they identify.