China and Nazi Germany

China's ascension shares some alarming similarities with Nazi Germany's rise nearly a century ago.

Members of the Uyghur ethnic minority held in a Chinese “re-education camp.”

One thing double-majoring in history and politics equips one to do, really the only thing it equips one to do, is to draw high-level historical analogies to the present day. Lately, I’ve been thinking about a very unpleasant but I think unavoidable analogy between today’s America-China relationship and the West’s orientation toward Nazi Germany in the run-up to World War II.

Let’s get this out of the way now: I’m not saying China is Nazi Germany or that the Chinese Communist Party is the German Nazi Party or that Chinese are Nazis. I am also not saying that we are destined to be involved in World War III with China. I hope that never happens.

What I am saying is there are alarming similarities between the behavior of the Chinese government now and the German government in the 1930s. And 2021 America and the 1930s West share a degree of distraction, exhaustion and, perhaps, a lack of geopolitical will.

Germany in the 1930s was an ascendant regional power open about its nearby territorial ambitions. Adolf Hitler rose to power by playing on grievances the German people harbored due to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which allocated formerly German territory to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. Hitler made no secret of his desire to regain that territory, and unite all German-speaking Europeans in a Germany that would also incorporate Austria, the country of his birth.

What Alsace-Lorrain was to Nazi Germany, Taiwan is to China. Taiwan, the small, independent island just off the mainland China coast to which anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek limped in 1949 after his army was routed from the mainland by communist forces under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Taiwan (officially the Republic of China, not to be confused with the mainland People’s Republic of China (PRC)) has had its own government ever since, and ever since, the PRC has insisted it has complete sovereignty over Taiwan. It considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory, and the maintenance of a separate government on the island to be an affront to its sovereignty.

The only thing standing between Taiwan and domination by the much larger and more powerful PRC in the 70-plus years since the end of the Chinese civil war has been the relative weakness of PRC military forces compared to those the United States could bring to bear in the region. Since 1954, the U.S. has been committed, to varying degrees, via agreements with Taiwan to protect it in the event it is attacked by the mainland.

With the gap in military capabilities between the U.S. and the PRC shrinking in recent decades, the PRC has felt emboldened to test the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan from attack. Over the past year, Chinese military aircraft have entered Taiwan’s airspace with regularity, and with increasing numbers of aircraft. In March, the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region predicted China would invade Taiwan within six years.

Meanwhile, 442 miles to Taiwan’s west, China is right now in the process of consolidating its control over another once-dispossessed territory: Hong Kong. Located on the coastline of mainland China, Hong Kong was governed as a British territory subject to a 99-year lease that ended in 1997, at which point it became formally Chinese-governed territory.

In 1984, in preparation for the handover, the United Kingdom and China entered into an agreement in which China promised to preserve the rights and freedoms, including elections, Hong Kong citizens had enjoyed under British rule. China, cracking down on pro-Democracy protests and interfering with elections, is in open breach of that agreement.

More troubling, China’s territorial ambitions and internal policies, like Nazi Germany’s, are imbued with a strong ethnic component. China’s dominant ethnicity - Han - which makes up about 90% of the country’s inhabitants, has its own nationalism. And that nationalism, along with the PRC’s obsession with control and conformity, has led to genocide in China.

The Chinese government is bent upon turning the Uyghurs, a Turkic, largely Muslim population that lives primarily in the sprawling Xinjiang province of northwest China, into dust. There have been, since 2017 between 800,000 and 2 million Uyghurs held in camps that the Chinese government first insisted didn’t exist, and now refers to as “vocational training centers.” The U.S. government, both the Trump and Biden administration, described China’s actions toward the Uyghurs as genocide.

The PRC is rapidly constructing camps like this one, in Dabancheng, Xingjang, China, to hold members of the country’s Uyghur ethnic minority. Image courtesy BBC.

There’s no evidence that the Chinese camps are death camps, yet, but neither were the Nazi death camps, until they were. The Nazis’ slaughter of 6 million European Jews was but the “final solution” to decades of brutal state-sponsored discrimination, including seizure of private property, ghettoization, and forced sterilization. The goal was to rid Germany of Jews and the tactics used to obtain that goal increased in severity until the most direct route - mass murder - was deployed.

China appears similarly bent on eradicating, or at least significantly diminishing, the Uyghurs as an ethnic group within its borders. The PRC has, reportedly, forced Uyghur women to undergo forced sterilization and abortion, while simultaneously relaxing its former one-child policy for ethnically Han Chinese.

Now, just because China is following a path similar in grievance-based territorial ambition and ethnic persecution to that of Nazi Germany a century ago doesn’t mean China is destined to follow that path to its end. There’s a difference between China wishing it controlled Taiwan and seizing it with military force. Detaining Uyghurs in camps, as ominous and horrific as that is, is not mass murder. We should hope that China’s Xi Jinping is more cautious, and less crazy and evil, than Adolf Hitler. That he will take care to avoid starting a war with America and its allies.

Unfortunately, though, there’s growing reason to believe China is not particularly concerned about offending or harming the rest of the world. The PRC, at the very least, took great measures to conceal the origin and nature of Covid, punishing Chinese doctors who talked about it on social media, and fatally delaying the international response. China continues to obstruct international efforts to determine whether the pandemic resulted from a Chinese government laboratory.

Less famously, China habitually launches rockets the 23-ton core stages of which fall, uncontrolled and with an unpredictable landing spot, to Earth. One landed on or around the Arabian Peninsula; one in the Ivory Coast. This recklessness demonstrates the Chinese government’s disregard for the territorial integrity of other countries, and like its response to Covid, its willingness to put human life at risk for the preservation or betterment of the state.

In the 1930s, Hitler found arrayed against him an exhausted, depression-racked and inward-looking West. Colonial powers like the United Kingdom were straining under the economic and political weight of decaying empires. America, after its foray onto European battlefields in largely futile World War I had turned its attention to its bread lines and social unrest at home. For everyone, the specter of the Great War and an intense and understandable desire not to repeat it loomed large. As a result, most of the West largely looked past Hitler’s earlier offenses.

Today, America is the only country with the military power to stand in China’s way, if deemed necessary. That the U.S. maintains a deterrent effect is evidenced by the fact that the PRC is not presently in Taipei. Yet, the U.S. finds itself once again distracted by, among other things, internal unrest and its traumatic and lethal experience with Covid. Americans who wish to can learn about the Uyghurs and the origin of Covid, but there is a reluctance to truly seize upon the import and consequences of what is playing out in Asia.

Congress is considering legislation intended to counter China’s rise and punish it for human rights abuses. Something like this is necessary but hardly sufficient. The likelihood increases daily that Americans will be asked to make real sacrifices to restrain the growing threat China poses to the U.S. and the world.

For that to happen, we need to understand the disturbing historical context in which we find ourselves. In the 20th century, the world learned the hard way the cost of overlooking the rise of an authoritarian, expansionary and ethnically motivated regime. We do so again at our peril.