Who’s Afraid of Fu Manchu?
This text was first presented to a public meeting of the Wellington Socialist Society on 7 February 2023.
Some of you may be wondering: who the hell is Fu Manchu, and am I supposed to know? No, not really, so let me fill you in.
He was the literary creation of a man called Sax Rohmer who despite his rather exotic name was an English writer born in Birmingham in 1888. He composed a large number of popular novels, plays and even film scripts featuring Fu Manchu in the nineteen thirties and forties of the twentieth century. His creation was the archetypal Chinese villain – sinister, mysterious and inscrutable – who spent his time threatening western civilization in general, and the British Empire in particular. In this he was aided by a number of vaguely described and shadowy bodies known as ‘the tongs’ who deployed drugs such as opium to break down the moral fibre of the British race. Despite being foiled by a succession of heroes – proto models for James Bond if you like – he always escaped his nemesis and emerged to threaten The Empire once more.
Rohmer’s writings were enormously popular in his time and held wide appeal for his audiences and readers at a period when the Japanese were similarly threatening the same Empire. He was, in fact, the representative of that long-lived figure – the Yellow Peril. We’ll come back to him in due course.
In the meantime let’s talk about another literary figure I first encountered at nursery school in the nineteen forties. His name was Chicken Licken. Now Mr. Licken had a predilection for walking in the woods and one day while he was doing so an acorn fell and hit him on the head. He immediately assumed that this was the sky falling so he ran through the woods frightening the other creatures with this terrible thing that was about to happen and causing them to become hysterical. That is until they encountered another literary figure named Fox Lox, who calmed them down by telling them he had a solution to this problem and if they would follow him to his den he would reveal it to them. Similarly I will return to the sad denouement of that tale in due course.
That was interesting but as I grew older I made a further discovery. The Chicken Licken story is a continuing feature in one form or another of our political landscape, and one with a long history. Jenny Shipley who was our prime minister for a bit in the nineties in one of her more lucid moments christened it ‘shroud waving’. I generally refer to it as the Chicken Liken Syndrome. Others of a rather more scientific bent who have studied it call it ‘moral panic’ which is the part title of a classic study of the phenomenon by the sociologist Nik Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics. That’s a study of the mods and rockers conflicts in early nineteen sixties southern England resort towns and how mostly these conflicts were mythical.
We had a significant moral panic of our own about the same time over teenage sexuality in the Hutt Valley. It makes in retrospect for hilarious reading although it was taken very seriously at the time and led to something called the Mazengarb Report. You’ll find an account of it in my book Shame & Disgrace which is a study of lost scandals in New Zealand. I promise you a good laugh if you can track it down
Moral panics are characterized by the creation of a stereotype who is then named as and becomes the focus of whatever is supposed to be threatening the community at that moment although it may often have nothing to do with it. It can be directed as a useful smokescreen by politicians of whatever stamp to draw attention away from what is the real reason for what has roused the panicked concern of the society, or even to create such a panic in the first place. The so-called gang phenomenon regularly conjured up by the law and order crowd in this country is an excellent example and case in point. They’re presently doing a variation on that theme called “a youth crime wave”.
Moral panic appears quite often in historical circumstances for one reason or another. One of the best of such I know involved a by all accounts very unpleasant man named Sir Francis Walsingham, later Lord Burleigh, who was spymaster to Queen Elizabeth the First of England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Tudor England was going through a period of massive change and social breakup at that time and this was causing serious social discontent. The authorities don’t like that sort of thing because it encourages people to start asking critical questions about the society in which they are living, and why it’s causing them grief. Walsingham was smart enough to know about the uses of moral panics (although he didn’t call them that of course) and to deploy one of his own.
This time around it was the Catholics, who he said were plotting to bring back their variety of religion to Protestant England. He deployed spies all over England and parts of Catholic Europe to find evidence of this, and if he couldn’t find any evidence he invented plots and alarms of every description. The upshot was that a number of Catholic priests and other gentlemen got tortured on the rack in Walsingham’s presence to extract confessions and then they were publicly burnt to death at the stake, usually protesting their innocence and loyalty. Over the centuries there have been many Walsinghams; we in this country have not been immune to the same tactic.
For many decades the stereotyped villain deployed by the authorities here was a vague group of persons referred to collectively as ‘the communists’. They were never quite specifically defined, although they existed all right as a tiny political party and one or two left wing sects. But their very vagueness of definition made them ideal as villains and scapegoats, and the agents of our enemies the Russians and the Chinese. One of our other prime ministers, Robert Muldoon, regularly emerged from the woodwork, particularly if there was a political or economic downturn, shouting that communists had taken over the trade unions and were using their position to wreck the economy. He used to issue lists of names and did it so often that eventually a union colleague of mine complained that he was both a communist and a trade unionist, so why wasn’t he on the list?
Of course, those of us who lived through that time know that as far as threats to our society went the communists who did actually exist here weren’t even in the hunt. Far from being a threat they were either too busy fighting one another for ideological reasons, or left over from the nineteen thirties and almost too elderly to totter down the street to collect their pensions to have time for overthrowing the state by violent means. That did not of course prevent the governments of the five decades or so of the postwar era (known to us as ‘the Cold War although those states with Marxist Leninist governments didn’t use that term about themselves) from creating an enormous apparatus to track them down, and the fact that they never found anything just went to show how cunning these people were.
In fact, anyone who knows anything about the activities of in particular, our Security Service will be aware that they bear more resemblance to a Keystone Cops comedy than to anything which looks like a serious intelligence agency. Almost everything they attempted in the past blew up in their face although hope springs eternal and they are still at it with no more general success than they have ever had. I could but I won’t bore you with the details except to say that their piece de resistance to date was a failed attempt to prosecute Dr Bill Sutch for treason in the nineteen seventies. Bill, who I knew quite well, was the least likely traitor you would ever encounter. But more recently they’ve come across a problem – internationally the communists have largely gone away. You can’t have a moral panic without a villain to focus on. If the Chicken Licken game is to work the authorities had to find another scapegoat. Enter the Muslim jihad.
Why people should imagine that Muslims are a terrorist threat to New Zealand escapes me. If anyone is to be perceived in that role it is surely the French who until recently were the only people to actually carry out a terrorist act here when they blew up the Rainbow Warrior at its berth in Auckland. In fact our control agencies perceived Muslims as the primary threat because their United States counterparts, to whom they were an actual threat told them to. So it no doubt came as an almighty surprise to them when one of the few terrorist acts here in recent times was perpetrated against Muslims living here, by someone who was hiding in plain sight but who the SIS completely failed to spot. So that put paid to that.
They then made a half-hearted attempt to create a terrorist threat out of some Maori romantics playing at being armed insurrectionists in the Ureweras but they succeeded only in frightening some children, and when the moment came to launch prosecutions against the people they had arrested (which included the operators of a second hand clothes shop based in an anarchist collective about a block from where I live here in Wellington) the Attorney General whose consent was required to prosecute told them not to be so daft and to go away, although they did manage to pot Tama Iti for failing to own a firearms license.
The authorities and control agencies must have despaired because they seemed to have run out of scapegoats around which to build a moral panic when – lo and behold – the Chinese government signed an agreement of some sort with the government of the Solomon Islands and Chicken Licken was back in business. There must have been sighs of relief all around at SIS headquarters.
The Chinese make an ideal bogeyman. Not only is there the popular legacy and memory of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril to draw on but there is also an objective legacy of fear engendered by the Chinese in the nineteenth century of which Fu Manchu is symbolic. Many countries at that time took steps to discourage Chinese from entering their borders, or if they needed them, for example to build railways as cheap labour across the United States, or to exploit the goldfields of California and subsequently Australia and New Zealand, to discourage them from remaining once their usefulness came to an end. Most New Zealanders who have studied the era will know that our own record in that department isn’t too flash. Successive governments in this country took a number of measures to exclude Chinese and to discourage them from settling.
Richard Seddon as Prime Minister around the turn of the century is recorded as saying that he would rather see an outbreak of bubonic plague in the South Pacific region than a single Chinese land in Fiji. He was as good as his word; under his regime they were subject to a swinging annual poll tax which applied to no other ethnic group, they could not be joined by Chinese women so there could be no development of a settled population, unlike everybody else when they reached seventy they didn’t qualify for old age pensions, and they were not permitted to vote. If you think that’s harsh all I can say in exculpation is that the Australians were worse. If you don’t believe me google “Lambing Flat” and you’ll see what I mean.
And more recently of course they now had a communist government which put them completely beyond the pale. For the first three decades of the post war period we maintained the fiction, encouraged first by Britain and then by the United States, that the legal government of China resided on the island of Taiwan to which the previous Kuomintang regime had fled in 1949 following their defeat by the armies of Mao Tse Tung, pausing only to loot the contents of the National Museum to take with them. Thankfully we did away with that particular stupidity in the seventies under the Kirk Labour government. But we remained generally hostile to the Beijing regime for some further decades, and there continued to be a background static and fear mongering about the designs on our region of the Chinese government, generally cultivated by the United States, but also faithfully repeated by their lapdog agencies here. There were and are objective reasons surrounding that we can come back to in due course, but just set them aside for the moment.
Notwithstanding that China is now our most significant trading partner, and we no longer bark quite so enthusiastically as we used to when Washington pulls our chain, these smoldering concerns burst into flame when it was announced, as I mentioned earlier that China had entered into some sort of arrangement with the Solomon Islands in 2022, and that this involved “security” matters. Chicken Licken immediately raced to his keyboard to warn the world about this most recent bit of falling sky, assuming that this meant that the Yellow Peril was back, and the imminent establishment of a Chinese military facility such as a naval base in the Solomon’s was nigh. However he seems to have neglected to read the text of the agreement itself which specifically makes clear that “security” in this context refers to internal security only within the Solomon Islands and not to external matters. So what actually was going on here?
Well, anyone who is familiar with the South Pacific region (which appears not to include our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SIS although papers prepared by the External Intelligence Bureau got it right) will be aware that its business and commercial affairs are, for historical reasons, largely in the hands of ethnic Chinese. These latter, rightly or wrongly, are generally disliked and mistrusted by the indigenous peoples in the region, so whenever civil unrest appears and develops into rioting this is almost always accompanied by attacks on the local Chinese community and the looting and torching of their shops and other business premises. This happened recently in Honiara where the Prime Minister, a Mr Sogavare, is not of a democratic temperament and there is a great deal of opposition and unrest as a result. Notwithstanding that the Solomon’s is under its constitution a parliamentary democracy, this unrest was put down by the authorities with some force although not very effectively. This was because the local police, which were not constituted to deal with rioting on the scale into which it developed, could not contain it, and the Solomon’s authorities, who have no armed forces, called on the Australian and New Zealand governments for assistance.
Although this was forthcoming it also proved inadequate because we aren’t very good at that sort of thing, and the Aussies don’t have much scruples about shooting up civilian bystanders either. So when the local Chinese business community saw their property go up in flames yet again and some of their compatriots threatened with lynching, there was pressure on the government in Honiara to ask Beijing to intervene, which they did. This was the stimulus for the formalization of “security” in the subsequent agreement between the two countries, and the basis for attempts – unsuccessful I might say – to extend the same to a number of other South Pacific states where Chinese communities were also potentially at risk. The question is: is this apparent incursion and interest by the Chinese into the region (of which we are a significant part) something to be concerned about? No – not really.
Don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t like to give you the impression that the Chinese are bunch of benign Buddhists who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and that their president Xi Jinping is an avuncular old darling who has been traduced by the wicked capitalist press. Not even the Communist Party of China is deluded enough to think that. In fact, in the real world even when he smiles, which he doesn’t much, he frightens the children. As well he might – you don’t get to the top in one of the world’s most powerful authoritarian states by taking up embroidery or ballroom dancing. He and his fellow leaders of the Beijing government have played for high stakes in the power game, and are as ruthless as those of any other world power. And it is important to be aware that throughout its history the Chinese state has had just the same imperial designs on those around it as any other bunch of imperialists.
For most of the last two thousand years however, their efforts have been directed to their neighbors to the north and west, and not to the south. Whatever dynasty was in power and except for a brief period under the Ming, their entire concern was to ensure that the administrative skills of the Tibetans and the wealth of the trading oases along the Silk Route were kept well away from the horse warriors of the steppes to prevent their making plans to invade their Han neighbours. The Chinese were not always successful in their attempts to prevent that happening. They were several times over-run most notably by the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the twelfth century on our timelines, and then by the Ch’ing in the fifteenth century. These latter were in their turn replaced by the Republic in 1911 and following the usual period of civil war when one dynasty overturns another in Chinese history, by the current regime in Beijing in 1949. That regime has been no different in many respects to its predecessors, and their foreign policy has had nothing much to do with communism. They spent some time subduing Tibet and are currently engaged in doing the same in Xin Jiang to their north west. But as their post Maoist economy has developed they have been much more interested in finding markets to their east and south – something they call The New Silk Road; as part of that, and like quite a lot of countries in our region, we have become quite closely involved with them for legitimate trade reasons. They are, for instance, now our largest export market and we were the first country to negotiate a free trade agreement with Beijing as a result in 2008.
Not unnaturally the United States was not keen on this general development in Pacific trading relationships, particularly as China has begun to rival them as an international centre of finance. The worst nightmare of the Federal Reserve in Washington is that the yuan will replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and more particularly as the currency for the citation of oil prices. That’s a fairly distant prospect at present but not so remote as be comforting, if you are aware that the United States has moved in recent years from a creditor to a debtor nation in its trade relations with China. But even more important than that China is now the world’s largest bilateral lender to other governments. This is a major worry to some people because it challenges the monopoly international position of the United States in that regard.
That position was established at the end of World War Two by the creation of the International Monetary Fund arising from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 because the Allied nations wanted to avoid what had happened in the thirties when the German economy fell apart and opened the way for the Nazis to gain power. What was supposed to happen was the IMF would be an international emergency lender to nations in financial difficulties and a resultant political crisis of democracy, and would be then seconded by the World Bank which would follow in its wake to sort out the economy in question on a more permanent basis.
It didn’t, however, quite work out that way because both institutions quickly became dominated by the United States through its predominant position in the world economy, and increasingly from the nineteen seventies and eighties the IMF developed a political agenda, and one which suited Washington. This meant that if you wanted the IMF and World Bank to bail you out of difficulties there were political strings attached. They would, for example, insist that you water down or abandon any welfare state you had established (and potentially replace it if at all with private provision by individual insurance), and that any publicly owned assets should be privatized (which meant they could be snapped up by private financial interests – mostly United States owned or controlled – at bargain basement prices).
However much those involved might twist and turn and try to escape these conditions, in the end they would have to be accepted because there was nowhere else to go.
But now such nations have the alternative of turning to China for loans without policy strings attached. Of course those entering into such arrangements are well advised to beware, because there’s an old Scottish saying that if you sup with the Devil make sure you take a long spoon. Those looking to the Chinese alternative for a bail-out have been widely warned that this may simply be what is known as “debt trap” diplomacy by making unaffordable loans to such countries, but it is most clearly seen in the United States in particular as a challenge to the international status of the IMF and through it of US dominance in the international economic sphere. The United States has therefore expressed its anxiety over this situation by polishing up its military capability. This means that it can show its teeth whenever it needs to remind other nations that it is militarily able to crush them if it wants to, and to encourage those in longstanding alliances to stay where they are and not to think of abandoning ship.
One of the outcomes of this has been a recent report to the US Congress assessing United States defence arrangements in the Pacific area. This concluded that it was only the efforts of the US navy since the end of the Second World War that has assured free and open access by sea to the world’s markets in our area, thus accounting for the era of prosperity and peace which pertained until recently. One of the keys to this has been the establishment of major US military facilities on the island of Guam and of naval bases in Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines. This describes an arc around Southern China. There is also a base in the Indian Ocean on Diego Garcia (which was set up when this was a British possession by simply deporting the entire island population without their consent), and the 5th Fleet on permanent station in the Persian Gulf.
But the report also went on to point out that the Chinese navy was now the numerically largest in the world in terms of overall tonnage, and thus American hegemony was being threatened. This statement, or at least the first part of it, was true but highly misleading because a very high proportion of Chinese naval vessels are for patrol and support purposes only, whereas the bulk of US naval vessels are fighting ships in the strict sense, comprising many more destroyers, amphibious assault ships, guided missile cruisers, and above all eight times more nuclear attack submarines than any other navy in the world. For its part China has a submarine force but it’s relatively’ obsolete and still runs on diesel. It also only has two aircraft carriers (one of them dating back to 1985). There’s another one under construction but it has yet to be commissioned. The US on the other hand has eleven, all of which are twice the tonnage of the Chinese vessels. A straight out naval conflict between the two navies would be no contest, but that wasn’t the point of the report, which was intended mainly to frighten the Congress into maintaining defence expenditure, but that’s by the by.
Nor does this preponderance of power prevent the US navy from conducting well publicized major naval exercises which include allied vessels (yes – that includes us despite the fuss over our anti-nuclear policies in the eighties which saw us allegedly excluded from ANZUS) just to remind folks out there of their military superiority. In February 2021 for example the US conducted naval exercises involving two aircraft carrier groups in the Taiwan Strait, and in August of the same year they assembled a fleet of 38 allied ships for naval exercises in the Pacific. Since 2015 there have also been a series of deliberate incursions into the waters of island groups off the China coast by US vessels, which can only be described as provocative. And finally they have now been joined by Japan which has recently altered its constitution to allow it to have a fully-fledged navy and which immediately doubled the percentage of its GDP devoted to military expenditure.
All of this has led at least one commentator, Tom Stephenson, a highly regarded defence specialist, writing in the London Review of Books in September 2022 to conclude that the Chinese navy is a regional force only and that what is at stake between China and the US “is not global pre-eminence by China but the tightening of the shackles that the US has constructed around China: and what he calls this ‘defence perimeter’ around the East and South China Seas, is at some points just a few kilometres from the Chinese coast.” He finally remarks that a claim from within the Trump administration in 2020 that China was attempting to build a maritime empire in the Pacific region “ought to have elicited general laughter”.
Given all of this it is understandable that the Beijing government should feel rather nervous or even under threat, especially when Washington continues to make Blimpish references to the dire consequences which will flow if Beijing attempts to invade Taiwan. I should say by the way in respect of this last that there is little evidence to suggest that the Chinese may be about to do so; they aren’t quite as silly as that – at least I hope not.
So if there isn’t any real prospect of conflict between the respective navies of the two countries when the outcome i.e. the complete destruction of Chinese naval capabilities in the Pacific, is obvious to anyone who knows anything about it why is the Washington administration so intent on laying heavy emphasis on their hegemony in the Pacific Ocean? Let me try to answer that by having recourse to another question.
Who can tell me what is Palikir? I’ll shout the first person who can give me the correct answer a glass of wine afterwards. They can then get a further drink by telling us what purpose it actually serves.
It’s the capital city of the world’s thirteenth largest state by geographical area, the Federated States of Micronesia. As a pivotal place Palikir, has existed where it is since at least the year 700BC and probably significantly prior to that. The Federation of which it’s the nominal capital overall comprises 607 islands of which the most important are Guam and the Marshalls, and while its overall territory is not much bigger in aggregate than the city of New York its enormous extent means that it’s potentially extremely wealthy in terms of fisheries and other raw materials such as seabed rare minerals and metals which are crucial to the manufacture of electronic communications devices.
After the Second World War and the expulsion of the Japanese who had been exercising a general hegemony over some, but not all, of the islands of the now Federation, they were grouped by the United Nations as a Trust Territory and handed to the United States to administer. One of the islands in the area, Bikini Atoll, was the site of nuclear testing in 1954; none of this happened with any reference to the indigenous inhabitants, and there was initially no machinery set up to consult them in the future or to ensure that they had any control over their own affairs. If the United States wanted to take initiatives under the Trust mandate they were free to do whatever they wanted, although the locals now have a sort-of democratic government, although one which remains firmly under the United States’ thumb. Theoretically, of course, they could raise any concerns that had in the past with the United Nations in faraway New York, but until 1986 when the Trust arrangement terminated they had no avenues for doing so. The United States for its part has ensured that their effective sovereignty in Micronesia continues by negotiating prior to but operative post 1986 what is called a Compact of Free Association.
Under this compact Micronesia, which is more or less on the equator and almost equidistant from China, the United States and Australia, continues to be the central pivot of the whole United States military strategy in the Pacific, based on their massive base at Guam, which is off limits to all Micronesian citizens unless they actually work there. One commentator, Helen Sullivan who is something of a specialist in Micronesian matters, has likened the relationship between Washington and the Micronesians to that pertaining between black and white in South Africa under apartheid.
The key to understanding why the United States is so intent on reminding everyone of its hegemony on the Pacific region is because the agreement between the Federated State of Micronesia and the US government expires this year. Clearly the United States do not want the current arrangement, which is central to their entire Pacific strategy, to be interrupted and so their military posturing in the region contains a clear message to China: they’re saying that this is their back yard and so other nations, and especially China, should stay away from any prospect of entering into any alternative sort of arrangement with the Federation – or else.
It’s a part of that message to make the Chinese look as threatening as they possibly can as an alibi for maintaining the United States overwhelming preponderance of naval strength in the region. In this country at least, in doing that they appear to enjoy bi-partisan support in Parliament and in those agencies of government which give our politicians advice on such matters, along with the almost total and complete co-operation of our media, and the concurrence of most of our academic establishment.
Washington is only too aware that there is rough weather ahead. It isn’t just a matter of facing a major challenge to its economic dominance of the world economy. Its military strategy in the Pacific region is by no means secure, and they along with the rest of us are beginning to have to face the political and economic consequences of global climate change and the turmoil that will bring, as well as a possible economic downturn in the wake of the Covid pandemic. We, for our part, have firmly nailed our colours to their mast, albeit in an inferior position, because our policy makers and advisors assess that as leading to our best prospect of survivaI when problems in the region come to full fruition.
I’m not however, as certain as some others that that is the case. I invite you to consider the denouement of the Chicken Licken story. The creatures who accepted Fox Lox’s invitation to take shelter with him were never seen again, and all subsequent researchers could find was a little pile of bones. We should not be too ready to listen to the blandishments of those such as the United States who offer us security when we’ve been panicked by false claims of a Chinese threat.
So am I afraid of Fu Manchu? Certainly not, and not least because he is a phantom. As currently presented he does not exist and so he cannot constitute a threat to me or to you or to New Zealand. But that doesn’t mean that we can safely ignore China which is a real place separate from the Fu Manchu version, as it becomes increasingly a Pacific presence. What it does mean is that in our perception of the government in Beijing we need to take a more nuanced approach to our foreign relations than we have done for the past few decades if we are to follow the poet Alan Curnow’s advice and “learn the trick of standing upright here”. Meanwhile, we should recall that the Swahili speaking peoples of East Africa have a saying which may help us in that regard and which translates as: “When elephants dance, the wise mice keep to the wall.”
Tony Simpson
January 2023.