The Invisible Armada

2024/11/16

2- It is not for nothing that the white unconscious of Western democracy is regaining momentum in an era marked by the rise in power of China – in reaction to this phenomenon which determines the very form the age (époque)  we are living in. As in the configuration of obsessive neurosis, this unconscious has come today to exercise a real tyranny over speeches relating to China or, more precisely, to the Chinese threat – China only exists, according to the new discursive rules, as danger, threat, bad object. We have here an exemplary case of ascendancy, the effect of which is a brutal homogenization of discourses, a normalization (setting of standards) before which all ideological and political differences disappear. Certainly, China has always been the great Other of the West, on par with the Islamic world, perhaps, but in other ways – here it is not religion which is the operator of lasting divisions, but rather a mixture of color and culture.

Under these conditions, the name of democracy, constantly put forward today as the operator of separation and antagonism between “them” and “us” can hardly create any illusion. Today's China bashing , reintegrated into the longue durée, is never anything other than a resumption and an aggravation of immemorial practices of othering of the Chinese world, and whose horizon has always been the color and the disturbing strangeness of a culture so radically heterogeneous to that of the West. Today's unbridled anti-Chinese discourse is awakening ancient, if not immemorial, divisions whose root(s), foundation and reserve is and remains the war of species, the inexpiable struggle of races. 

The Western anti-Chinese consensus (to which the countries of the Global South are not following suit , despite all the efforts of the missi dominici of the total democracy of the Global North) is so compact, in the white Western world, for the good reason that it is welded and supported by dark forces which come from far away, which plunge their roots deep into the psyche of this world, which invest subjectivities and discourses in a surreptitious mode – it is obviously that, in this reenactment, it speaks in a state of narcosis , as in a waking dream or a delirium, old automatisms wake up, old folds resurface. What is being reinvented, in a mode adapted to present conditions and in today's words, is indeed a fixed idea – the figure of radical Chinese otherness as a threat to our integrity (that of the West), the vague notion of a danger of variable form - yesterday the yellow peril, today the excessive growth and power of the Chinese state and society - a vital threat, certainly, China presenting itself here as the only power in the making which is likely to challenge “our” planetary hegemony.

Whether the motive of the integrity of the race predominates (the nightmare of contamination of the white race by oriental races, the yellow race in particular), that of the defense of Christian civilization, that of the “free world” or as well, today, the promotion of democracy and Human Rights, it is indeed, in its archaic or regressive features, the same refrain and ritornello that we are talking about, and whose basis is invariant – the antagonism of colors and the vital separation of species that results from it. These continuities are so obvious, so massive, this permanence of the issue of race and color is  discernible to the naked eye; they can only escape those whose minds are smoked by this opium of thought and discourse which establishes them in this state of stupor or torpor in which they find themselves disposed to opine that what is at stake today in the confrontation between the Western bloc and China is the sacred issue of Human Rights.

However, there is no need to look far to see the smoke of this advantageous simulacrum disperse: in the face of the Covid pandemic and the frenetic Trumpist agitation which was grafted onto it, the promotion of Human Rights and democratic universalism in the face of Chinese autocracy showed its true face: that of hate speech against the “Chinese virus” and everything that is supposed to propagate it with its natural outlet: the hunt for  the Asian in the streets of "American" cities.

But perhaps this is only one part of the picture, perhaps an element of fascination or even attraction enters into the relationship that, in the long term, the white West maintains with the Chinese “Elsewhere”. Perhaps it would be more relevant to say: this fascination with the great Chinese otherness is reversed or corrupted into aggressive and emetic othering in historical and cultural sequences where European expansion is at stake or where, as today , the rise of China calls into question the forms of Western hegemony established after the defeat of Japan and Germany. In other phases where such direct power issues are not at stake, the perception of the Chinese world and the relationship of the West to China can take a very different turn - from the time when the Jesuits took up residence in the court of the Middle Emperor in the 1930s and 40s where “unfortunate” China, facing Japanese militarism and expansionism, attracted all the sympathies of the West – see on this point, for those who have the age of having been addicted to the Tintin albums, The Blue Lotus , a milestone like any other...8  

What we should therefore undertake is a genealogy of the contrasts and pendulum oscillations of the Western perception of the Chinese world, in their relationship to the issues of force and the conquering thrusts of the Western automaton : the Chinese, as a people, mass, peril, world, have never presented such an aversive and unheimlich profile as at the time of the Opium Wars, the Korean War or, even today, the supposed surge of  Beijing's "hegemonism". In other sequences where these games of forces experience more or less long respites, Western discursivity can change regime, China becomes fascinating when it awakens , enters into revolution, becomes, for Western intellectuals, the most fascinating other-spaces... (from Edgar Snow to Roland Barthes or Philippe Sollers, via Alain Peyrefitte in the French realm9).

But seen from today , it appears that the opening of the West to the Chinese world inaugurated in the 1970s by ping pong diplomacy and the progressive normalization of relations between China and the Western powers, prolonged by the growth of economic exchanges between these two worlds – all this would have been, one would say, only a brief interlude in the long term of a relationship placed, for the Western world, under the regime of systemic hostility, cultural dispute (différend) , rejection in decried forms of otherness - traditionalism understood as the plague of the Chinese world (unfortunate women with bound feet) the Chinese, a superstitious people, the imperial form of power as a mark of the incurable backwardness of China, rigid hierarchies as an obstacle to the evolution and progress of this society and its power apparatuses....

Today, after this short parenthesis placed under the sign of fascination and interest in this changing world, all this topos of China, intrinsically barbaric and dedicated to  despotism ("Emperor Xi") makes its great comeback. Empathy and curiosity fizzled. We come back to the condescending and hostile approach of China which fueled for more than a century the predatory approaches to China by the West – the spirit of the Opium Wars. But what is precisely exposed in full light in this reversal is obvious: it is because the West is launched at full speed into a new impulse of conquest, of expansion, of globalization, it is because this new thrust placed under the sign of the democratization of the world comes head-on with the new power of China that the discourse of hostility, of enmity is given free rein.

As such, all this discursivity adjusted to today's conditions (Chinese non-democracy, totalitarian and neo-imperial China, rather than the Yellow Peril) has above all the status of a symptom. It teaches us nothing about China in particular and everything about the present arrangements of Western hegemony.

China, unlike India, has always resisted its colonization by European powers – too big a bite to swallow. These imperialist powers had to be content with imposing draconian treaties on the Chinese Empire and nibbling away at its territory, particularly its maritime façade. When Japanese imperialism, in turn, attacked this piece, the Western democracies, by force of circumstances, adopted the side of China. The United States, even before Pearl Harbor, came to the aid of the Chinese nationalist government – a brief phase of Sinophilia and empathy for the martyred China and evidenced by an entire Hollywood cinema of the 1940s exalting Anglo-Saxon religious missions and other white heroes supporting the endurance and resilience of the Chinese people against the Japanese occupation 10.

The tide was to turn radically after the Chinese revolution of 1949.

In any case, despite all the humiliations inflicted by the white powers - the issue of race is constant and omnipresent in the conflicting relations between China in the age of European colonial expansion - the Chinese is singled out and depreciated because of its supposedly inferior race - China has never been a colonized country. With all the upheavals which have affected it (both internally and in its relations with foreign countries, notably Western countries), its cultural heritage, including the relations between those who govern and those who are governed, has remained in a certain state of continuity, it has experienced nothing comparable to the phenomena of acculturation which affected the Indian world under the effect of British colonization. What it has maintained in this way is less an immutable identity than its radical singularity. This is one of the components of the legitimacy of Chinese power today: it can say that, despite all odds, it is the heir and guarantor of this immemorial heritage; Confucianism has been able to be “recovered” by the post-Maoist leadership after having been vilified in the previous phase, the upheavals and brutal variations occurring at the heights of power as well as in the depths of society have not abolished this singularity.

China resisted its pillorying (its subjugation) by the conquering West, perhaps less through active resistance than through a combination of endurance and resilience and, perhaps also, because of the complexities of its geography, both physical and human. It is a massive, compact example of that: the conquest of “other worlds” by the European colonial powers, in the 19th and 20th centuries, remained unfinished . Huge territories, entire continents (Africa) were conquered, but in other spaces, European imperialisms encountered opposing forces which thwarted their ambitions and pushed them back – the Caucasus, Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia...

The question that arises today is an abrupt one: what white colonial expansion could not achieve in the previous two centuries, will the crusade intended to place the entire planet under the regime and conditions of total democracy (and of the market which is the double and the foundation) succeed in achieving it? This is, fundamentally, what is at stake in the resumption of hostilities against China.

The battle of the Angel and the Devil, the promotion of ideals, values and principles in the face of the most threatening of autocratic regimes, of the most arrogant of pretenders to world domination – all this is only a puppet show. Fantasmatic images are projected on the walls of the cavern whose vocation is to make undetectable what is at stake in the current confrontation: the disappearance of this solid lock (China) which keeps closed the door giving access to complete globalization placed under the leadership of total democracy conceived as a projection of the white world on a planetary scale; of a civilization whose watchwords are the freedom of the market, the government of elites mediated by the institutions of public democracy, consumption and mass culture and the maintenance of order with an unwavering hand.

We must have no illusions: the hubris which today supports the claims of total democracy to impose its conditions on the planet is no less tyrannical and unwavering than that which, in the second half of the 19th century animated the colonialist and imperialist appetites of European powers. It is a blind push, an impulse emerging from the darkest depths of the white world (with everything that is gathering around it today and snowballing – it is true to say), an impulse of conquest and domination (of destruction and chaos too) which, distinctly, follows on from the previous projections of white power on other worlds and which, in the circumstances of the present and in the tone of the time, takes on, not in Prada but in Human Rights11.

For this “force qui va” 12(straight ahead and eyes wide shut ), China is the major obstacle on the path to normalization of the entire planet under the conditions of total democracy. Creating the conditions for a confrontation whose outcome would be the fall of the regime that emerged, against all odds, through the tortuous paths of contemporary Chinese history, from the revolution of 1949, is what has become today the fixed idea of this strategy of relaunching conquest 13. From this point of view, the conflict in Ukraine, as it focuses public attention in the Global North in particular, is a sham, just as Putin is a puppet, a “front”. This confrontation only matters insofar as, in the perspective of Western leaders and particularly American ones, it is the circuitous path which leads to the primordial scene of the confrontation: behind Putin, vacillating despot, the otherwise formidable shadow now of Xi and Chinese power; the conflict in Ukraine only ever appears as a dress rehearsal for the real confrontation in which questions of life and death will be at stake – and whose promised theater is the China Sea. This is what we can read every day in Taiwan's bellicose press: Ukraine is just a prelude, it is in our area that the real problems will be resolved.

3 - Interlude

It is a topos that is so ubiquitous in so many  westerns of all brands, eras and styles, and which gives rise to infinite variations: white people, as a pioneer and conquering species (in the West and the South of the United States in formation) appear, at the beginning of history, in the greatest of states of division. This can take shape under all kinds of appearances: it can pit a representative of law and order (a marshal , or even a bounty hunter) against an outlaw ; Federates against Confederates in the context of the Civil War and its aftermath; transhumant breeders to landowners devoted to barbed wire; hunters, trappers, miners to farmers or other competitors; settlers established on land that they have seized to newcomers;  people from the West to people from the East; the enriched and achieved by people of little means, the plebs of the conquest of the West;  Puritans to women of bad habits; civilians to soldiers, of course...

In this new world in perpetual and rapid change, the foundations of order are anything less than assured, the sources of disputes and conflicts innumerable and the use of force and expeditious and violent means a permanent temptation. The specter of division among the pioneers and settlers themselves looms over the conquest of new territories. The reign of law remains to be established in this world governed by the balance of power. From this table emerges the stature of the marshal (rather than sheriff, as we commonly say “in Anglo-French”), a figure that is both central and ambiguous. The marshal is in fact the character who has the task of shifting this society in fusion from one state to another: the former where forces confront each other, without mediation, where pure violence dictates its law, to the latter in which a state of law is emerging. Now, this “leap” the marshal is called upon to impose from nothing or almost nothing: he is never, in the beginning, anything other than a guy who is brave enough and at whose jacket a star hangs (not always even). He is above all the character who gains the upper hand because he is an expert in the handling of weapons – the six-shooters first of all. What distinguishes him from other gunslingers is that he is driven by a certain feeling of justice and/or subjected to the pressure of a community frightened and exasperated by the reign of violent and rogue  armed men. The state, as source and guarantor of law, foundation of legitimate order, is too far away to have the means to assert its authority or mandate the man of good will, (equipped with his courage, his gun and his star ), in due form.

This is the whole difference between the police, as it functions as an institution, in an organized state, and the marshal whose authority, in the beginning of his action, relies upon  himself, alone or almost against all abusers and bandits of all kinds – and who, nevertheless, will establish himself as the founder of the rule of law on the scale of a village of pioneers in the great West or on the borders of this other world more or less anomic that is the great Latin South, not to mention the uncertain areas (mountains, deserts, forests...) where Indians abound...

Originally, he is only an expert of the trigger who switches to the side of the law, of a state which, in these spaces, is still only a virtuality, of a legality whose own is, precisely, that it is up to him to lay the foundations. The marshal is, if he emerges victorious from clashes with the violent, a gunslinger on whom fortune will smile, to the extent that he knew how to stand at the crucial moment on the side of a state which, in the places where it operates, does not yet exist. It is his capacity to anticipate a future order which is rewarded, as long as it involves him in a founding, instituting and constitutive action. This is, of course, an infinitely fragile, revocable position. The marshal is the first interposing force that presents itself between the many protagonists of the Wild West for whom might makes right. His intervention suspends the permanent state of violence, whoever the agent - a highwayman robbing stagecoaches, a rustic and vindictive clan, a rich breeder behaving like a tyrant and with complete impunity, a professional cheat, a bank robber, an unscrupulous adventurer – male or female...

But what is immediately striking is that this legitimate order which is taking shape and which the marshal somehow brings out of nothing, has a distinct color – it is white . Others do not have access to it or, if they are included, it is in an eccentric, unequal, subordinate position. This is, for example, the symbolic meaning of the exclusion of Indians from this communal and convivial space par excellence that is the saloon – this under the pretext that, being bad drinkers, they regularly become uncontrollable there. Others can be tolerated in the space now marked out by the law that the marshal embodies , but on the condition that they remain in their place – that of the servant or the subordinate – the mestizzo, the Mexican, the Chinese, sometimes , or even the African-American, barely out of his slave condition and generally confined to the domestic space.

The color divide is not, in this emerging order, a simple element of fact resulting from the diversity of those who populate it. It takes on a clearly instituting and constitutive character, as the following moment shows: as soon as an imminent and vital danger arises for Whites, considered as a species and racial community - a danger generally embodied by the violent irruption of the superlatively enemy race, the Indians - white unity reforms itself beyond all existing divisions, infallibly and as if by automatism. No matter then the reasons, good or bad, for which the Indian tribes return to the warpath (and the western often suggests that these reasons might not always be bad), the fact is that the sacred union of the whites is inevitably reformed. This erasure of intra-white divisions sometimes goes through all kinds of detours and twists and turns; it can happen both in the moment and, in other configurations later, in extremis, but in all cases, in the face of the racial Other, the most poisonous conflicts and disputes disappear, a united front is reformed, facing the risk of death, in the sharing of weapons and the ordeal of combat.

Racial solidarity then appears as a categorical imperative, the spirit of racial unity takes precedence over all other considerations, prevailing over any reservation or ulterior motive. This movement is a pure reflex, it obeys an irresistible impulse, against the backdrop of a fight to the death where enemy species are brought to conflict whose incompatibility then comes to light. It is in the hour of danger that the community in its most archaic dimension is reformed, that all quarrels die out, that all disagreements are suspended. In this very sense, the confrontation to the death with the Indian is, in its condition of paroxysm of violence, a powerfully refounding moment 14.

It can be argued that, in this crucial moment, it is the racial unconscious that speaks. This image of the white gathering facing the Indian peril (the ultimate non-white and, as such, the exterminable as a mortal peril) is an integral part of the primitive fund (foundation)  of the American nation in the same way as that of the marshal who, in making the powder speak, lays the foundations for the reign of law. As such, and in its very condition of archaic topos , we have here an image which is equivalent to the most sacred of the founding texts of "democracy in America", texts tirelessly invoked and summoned by the proponents of providentialism and exceptionalism of destiny of the United States. This image says everything about the racial foundation of this power, of the order that founds it. The besieged white community gathered to fire against the colorful, feathered Indians, prancing and uttering wild cries is the dreamed or fantasized ancestor of the nation, of the people understood as a common body. Subsequent developments and additions change nothing: the primitive image of the American community remains intrinsically white.