Friday, August 05, 2022

The Contest for Discursive Supremacy With the Liberal Democratic Masses: Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the US House of Representatives) Versus Qin Gang (Chinese Ambassador to the United States)

 


 The contest for the control of the discourse about Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan rages--in the liberal democratic West.  It rages, as well, under the guidance and leadership of its leading press organs. These organs, of course, are closely tied to the complex economic structures of ownership within which they are nestled. To some extent, then decisions about amplification of voices, narrative centering, and legitimacy nudging reflects as much the insertion of these press elements into the discourse itself rather than as agents of reporting. It also serves their self interest, augmenting their role as gatekeepers and curators of information and its interpretation for the (sometimes educated) masses whose management is an essential feature of liberal democracy as practices in the United States. A sign of the importance of their role is the extent to which political figures seek to use and be used by such press apparatus to advance their agendas, make their cases, or curry favor with this or that group--including the relatively small and quite self reflexive collective clique of people who manage the great US press organs.  The role of the press, thus understood, is indeed, critical to the proper functioning of the complicated and diffused power systems of liberal democracy.

This is well known. 

It is well known enough for foreigners to seek to use the press as an outlet for participation in national debates. The efforts, of course, are meant to make their case, or to make the case for their vanguards, with the American people--and others in the liberals democratic camp.  At worst, it reflects the sort of direct projection of foreign views that in a Marxist Leninist context might be evidence of taboo black hand (黑手) foreign interference in international national affairs . But Americans are very broad minded about this--as long as one avoids too close an association with the voting process or elections.  The line is fairly murky though; clearer, in China than in the US.

Still, the temptation--for both foreigners, leading domestic political figures, and the Washington Post is too great to resist. And the press provides a well developed field on which the war, already commenced, may be fought on its discursive front lines.

Pix Credit here
And thus the great debate on exhibit in the discursive Colosseum that is the Washington Post between Nancy Pelosi (Why I’m leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan (2 August 2022)) and the response by Qin Gang, Chinese Ambassador to the US: Why China Objects to Pelosi's Visit to Taiwan (4 August 2022)). Together they suggest the great gulf that now divides the two imperial lifeworlds, a gap that makes it virtually impossible to communicate--if only because the definitions of a common vocabulary now are given sometimes quite different meanings and emphasis depending on whether they are used by the US or the Chinese side--a strategically useful set of incomprehensibility built into a common language. The object, of course is internal, language drift reflects the imperatives of growing ideological divides that are reflected in language and word meaning. But it is also instrumental--it is much easier to manage opinion if one can appeal to an opponent's masses using common language but in an uncommon way. If done well, even the most sophisticated cadres of the Washington Post and their political-class circle, will find it difficult to disentangle and can themselves be more amendable to directed curation. In this case, the temptation to evidence one's ignorance and strong sense of self was irresistible to the good people at the Post: The Post's View: Pelosi should go to Taiwan — when the time is right.  

One should be interested in the views of leading press organs--if only because they are important instruments of popular mobilization.  More important, though, are the opinions of leading figures in what is shaping up to the agreement by the United States and China that NOW is the time to more openly reshape the fundamental relationship between the imperial structures of the US and China, and that Taiwan will serve nicely as the inflection point for this pivot into the new era of pose-global empire and imperial redrawing of the global map. 

Pix Credit here
Make no mistake, one ought not to read with view for the truth or correctness of what is put in their respective text. Their factual verities are as solid as sand in the desert on a windy day; even as the ideological foundation on which this sand blows provides much more solid footing. That is hardly the point of either Mrs. Pelosi's argument, or Mr. Qin's reply.  Instead it is the atmospherics and discursive significations that make these short statements worth the read. Thus, their factual verities are useful only as a means to the identification of taxonomies of meaning and their underlying ideology--a grimoire of incantations in the form of rationalized systems of interpretation as applied ideology. These interpretive statements proffered up for consumption as fact vest a specific signification of key events that provide much richer clues about the distance between empires, their intentions, and the ideological chasm that may make any sort of resolution (other than status quo) impossible. Both statements are rich in that way.

In that context, sovereignty stands out.  One can understand Chinese frustrations--having spent the greater part of almost a century and a half making up for the decay and political failings of the imperial machinery in its twilight on the basis of 19th and early 20th century notions of hyper sovereignty, their history in that respect is thwarted precisely because much of the rest of the world has now moved on. The basis of their sovereign claims are strong--viewed from the vantage point of 1943. But in a world that has been transformed at the international level because of the institutions crafted after 1945, all of the ideology either becomes meaningless to the rest of the world or threatening to the post-global world order in which sovereignty has been fractured, divided and exercised in new and transnational ways. The Chinese will find this hard going.  That lesson may be learned in the Taiwan crisis; more likely in after action reports about challenges to the Belt and Road project. At the same time one can understand US frustration as well. 

The Americans find themselves on the defensive with respect to a system they appear incapable of making work in their own heartland. And their inaction in the face of direct and indirect challenges to what has been a clear ideological victory in the early 1990s, has now reduced the Anglo-European-US vision of an internationalized order grounded in free movement and an increasingly legalized system of human (and sustainability) rights (the "the rules-based international order" highlighted in the G7 statement), to a paridy of itself. That, compounded with debilitating internecine warfare (on personal, political. ideological, and cultural grounds) of its own entrenched nomenklatura and political elites (in the organs of public power, economic institutions and among the intelligentsia) have produced the pathetic spectacle of the necessity for the Speaker of the US House of Representatives to take the decisive action that neither recent Democratic nor Republican Administrations have been able to muster with some modicum of national solidarity. 

The Americans have lost their way in the present as much as the Chinese have gotten lost in the ideology of their recent history. That sense of being lost, of being swallowed up by forces now beyond singular control, that is what these interventions mirror back to us.  And that intensifies the danger of reckless adventurism, and miscalculation far more than any sort of clearheaded thinking.  The decisions have been taken; the trajectories are increasingly hard to modify; and their consequences will extend well beyond an island whose sovereignty has been transferred through the legitimating (for a long time) process of colonization, de-indigenization, and military victory by those who then had the power to make good on those acts and decisions (here, here, here, here, here).

 

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