Can the United States win a new Cold War? Dmitry Shlapentokh predicts that China will win in the 'market of ideas' because its economic model is producing rising living standards.

• Author: Shlapentokh, Dmitry

In the increasingly evident discussion about a possible new Cold War with China, it is tempting to compare the current situation with the original Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Most Americans think that the United States won that war. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was not able economically, militarily and ideologically to compete with the United States. In the popular narrative, the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe wanted 'freedom', and 'freedom' in this case was denied by 'tyrants' obsessed with power, or who entertained an outdated ideology, a utopian dream which, instead of bringing about total happiness, brought nothing but misery and terror.

It was none other than Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist, who encapsulated this feeling in his essay on the 'end of history'. This essay made him famous, and launched his spectacular academic career. Since American capitalist democracy demonstrated its real superiority in all possible aspects to totalitarian socialist regimes, the people of these regimes must be afraid of the fresh wind of truth, American ideas. At the same time, the United States need have no fear of information from Red China, the last totalitarian dinosaur, destined to extinction due to its socioeconomic backwardness and outdated, clearly false ideology. It would not be a Cold War, a clash of ideas, but a triumphal march of a victorious army.

Even so, today members of the American elite have no such illusions about the new Cold War with China. Red China's ideas have been transformed into dangerous propaganda, which, as conservative politicians have implied, could tempt Americans to see Red China not as the embodiment of a totalitarian brutality, but rather as the template to follow, as the true 'end of history', more suited to the life of the majority than American capitalist democracy.

Propaganda danger

Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban emigres who had escaped Castro's regime, is especially vigilant in seeing anything from China as detrimental to the United States' internal stability. Even the Confucius institutes, created all over the world to teach Chinese language, culture and history, are seen as dangerous organisations, which spread poisonous propaganda. He implied that innocent American students would be exposed to Chinese propaganda and would forget that Red China is a monstrous, totalitarian state. He implied that these students could even be attracted to it and try to change the United States according to the Chinese template. All of this implied that instead of the triumphal march of 'truth'--the predominant discourse in the United States--'propaganda', the stuff of totalitarian China, could prevail. It also implied that the 'market of ideas' and prevailing discourse in the United States would follow the same path as the 'free market' of American goods.

For the last several generations, Americans have increasingly bought non-American products. In the beginning of the process, they bought foreign goods--and increasingly Chinese goods--because they discovered that their domestic goods were of modest quality and increasing prices. As time went on, they plainly had no choice: the domestic goods disappeared together with the factories which had produced them. At the same time, of course, statisticians faithfully reported the rise of the American economy, which had become an economy of 'service' and 'knowledge production'. Washington tried to solve the problem with mercantile tariffs and implicitly closing the border for competitors.

The same seems to be the plan for Chinese ideas. It looks as if in the 'market of ideas', Chinese ideological wares could prevail over 'freedom', 'liberty' and the 'rule of law'. How and why did American ideological products become non-competitive? Here, the first Cold War, and ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, could provide a helpful clue. It could explain why everything worked well for the United States, from the beginning of the Cold War to its very end, which almost coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it could also explain why the United States will most likely fail in the new Cold War with China.

Post-modernist puzzle

While dealing with information delivered by Chinese officials, the American mainstream media noted that it was absolutely different from what was dispensed by the mass media in the United States. In the view of contributors to American mass media, Chinese official information is nothing but a cynical, relativistic ploy aimed at brainwashing the public, to instill it with ideas pleasing to the Party and state. This is nothing but a lie. At the same time, US intellectuals dispensed nothing but truth, something fixed and immutable. Here, there is just a polarity of truth and non-truth, lies in this or that form.

If one goes back a few decades, when the Cold War with the Soviet Union was in full swing, the very notion of 'truth' as objective and immovable would be mocked by the cream of the crop of Western intellectuals, who were at that time under the strong influence of French post-modernism, mostly left-leaning. Imagine a group of French luminaries listening to some authors of the editorials of the New York Times pontificating on the sharp difference between 'truth', which, of course, one could find on the pages of their newspaper, and 'non-truth', plainly lies which one could find in Russian and Chinese propaganda...