Trump should reject China’s phony demand for mutual respect
by Miles Yu · The Washington TimesOPINION:
As President Trump embarks on his much-anticipated trip to meet with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Beijing has predictably amplified its familiar demand for “mutual respect” as the foundation for U.S.-Chinese engagement.
The phrase sounds reasonable, even noble. However, it functions as a demand for silence, acquiescence and moral surrender.
More fundamentally, when the CCP demands “respect for China,” it commits a deliberate conceptual fraud on multiple levels.
First, it deceptively implies that the root of tensions in U.S.-Chinese relations lies in American “disrespect” toward China rather than in Beijing’s own conduct and enmity against the U.S. That includes destructive trade practices, massive intellectual property theft, cyberwarfare against U.S. infrastructure, and fentanyl precursor supply chains fueling mass deaths in America.
There is also the rampant espionage, election and misinformation operations and harassment and transnational repression inside the United States, along with enabling any of the world’s leading anti-American regimes — all pursued with an ideological hostility toward the American political system, all part of a long-term strategy to displace U.S. global leadership.
In this sense, the CCP’s demand for “mutual respect” is not mutual at all.
Second, the CCP falsely equates itself with China and the Chinese people, implying that criticism of the CCP is hostility toward China itself, but the CCP is not China.
The party has no political or cultural legitimacy. It is an alien imposition on the Chinese people through a radical Western communist ideology that aims to eliminate indigenous Chinese tradition and cultural sinews while institutionalizing the indoctrination of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Advertisement Advertisement
Third, by portraying itself as the victim of a disrespectful “American hegemony,” the party weaponizes China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of foreign imperial powers to demand sympathy and obedience from the world. Yet the greatest humiliation inflicted upon China came not from foreigners but from the CCP itself.
It took place in the century since the CCP’s founding by Vladimir Lenin’s Comintern agents in Shanghai in 1921, not the century since the Opium War in the 1840s. Ironically, there was indeed a long-standing, subtle form of disrespect toward the CCP from many Western leaders, usually the friendliest ones.
For decades, Washington treated communist China not as a serious power with independent agency but as a geopolitical “China Card” to play against other threats. Beijing was courted first to counter the Soviet Union, later to restrain North Korea, and later still to stabilize global markets. This was not genuine respect. It was paternalistic instrumentalization.
Paradoxically, it was the Trump administration that first abandoned this Orientalist “China Card” mentality and openly treated the CCP as a primary strategic adversary and peer competitor. For the first time in half a century since President Nixon, Washington recognized Beijing as a central force shaping the global order.
In an odd but real sense, this was genuine respect accorded to a serious rival whose ambitions must be confronted and defeated for self-preservation.
Advertisement Advertisement
Yet recognition as a major power does not confer moral respectability. No regime deserves international respect while systematically disrespecting the world.
The CCP presides over the world’s largest polluting state despite endless promises about environmental responsibility. It remains one of the world’s most aggressive violators of intellectual property rights, stealing technology and trade secrets on a vast scale. It empowers some of the world’s most dangerous regimes, providing diplomatic and economic lifelines to rogue regimes, especially North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Russia.
A regime can be respected only if it respects its own people. No outside empire killed more Chinese, destroyed more Chinese culture or shattered more Chinese families than the CCP itself.
The Great Leap Forward produced the deadliest famine in human history. The Cultural Revolution destroyed temples, traditions, scholarship and social trust in a frenzy of ideological barbarism. The CCP presents itself as the savior of China while being the principal architect of China’s modern suffering.
Advertisement Advertisement
At least 70 million people died under communist rule after 1949, not counting hundreds of millions of unborn children lost under coercive population control policies. Today, the CCP operates the world’s most advanced Orwellian surveillance state, committing atrocities against minorities while censoring dissent, imprisoning journalists, persecuting religious believers and criminalizing free expression.
A government that fears truth and brutalizes its people so profoundly cannot credibly lecture the world about “respect.”
Nor does the CCP show respect toward its neighbors. Beijing threatens Taiwan, pressures South Korea economically, clashes with India on the Himalayan border, bullies the Philippines in the South China Sea, coerces Vietnam and antagonizes Japan.
Countries that criticize Beijing routinely face retaliation or punishment. Since its founding, the communist regime has fought more wars and engineered more regional conflicts than any other postwar government in Asia. Today, the CCP commands the world’s largest military force under the control of the world’s largest Marxist-Leninist party, led by a ruler whose “China Dream” openly envisions Chinese dominance of the global order.
Advertisement Advertisement
The CCP’s predatory economic system does not deserve respect either. Beijing distorts global markets through massive state subsidies, forced technology transfer, selective market closures, currency manipulation, and the weaponization of supply chains and rare earth minerals.
Yet the regime continually portrays itself as the victim of “Western hegemony,” especially American power. The CCP claims victimhood while victimizing others and condemns foreign interference while conducting industrial-scale cyberespionage and global influence operations.
The proper response is not hostility toward China or the Chinese people. The greatest victims of the CCP are the Chinese people themselves: citizens denied free speech, independent courts, uncensored history, religious liberty and basic human rights. The world must distinguish clearly between the Chinese people and the authoritarian party-state ruling over them.
The best way to “respect” the CCP is not to flatter it or indulge its manufactured grievances but rather to pressure it to behave respectably. Democracies should confront CCP leaders openly, challenge false narratives directly and verify every promise through action rather than rhetoric.
Advertisement Advertisement
The world should stand decisively with those bullied or silenced by Beijing, including neighboring nations and the Chinese people themselves. Trust cannot exist without truth. Respect cannot exist without reciprocity. Mutual respect cannot be demanded by a regime that systematically denies it to others.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.