The phrase "Who lost China?" entered American political discourse in 1949 and never really left.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2116143519605645632
The phrase "Who lost China?" entered American political discourse in 1949 and never really left.
Sit with the grammar of it.
Not: China chose its own government.
Not: the Chinese people ended a civil war on their own terms.
Who. Lost. China.
As though China were a set of keys misplaced by an inattentive administration.
As though a country of 500 million people were an object that could be possessed, managed, and through negligence, dropped.
That grammar is not a metaphor.
It is a precise expression of how American foreign policy thought about the world. And still does.
Countries are not sovereign actors making their own choices.
They are positions. Assets. Pieces on a board.
And when a piece moves in a direction Washington didn’t choose, someone must have lost it.
The possibility that no one lost China, that China simply decided, remains, in certain American foreign policy circles, genuinely unthinkable.
posted by Satish Sharma at
15:07
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