Buddhistdoor View: All Against All—Empathy in a New Predatory International Environment?

FEATURES

Home » Features » Commentary and Buddhist Perspectives » Buddhistdoor View: All Against All—Empathy in a New Predatory International Environment?

Buddhistdoor View: All Against All—Empathy in a New Predatory International Environment?

By Buddhistdoor Global
February 8, 2025

The book Spoil (2024) by BBC reporter-turned-jade-carver Andrew Shaw looks at the highly emotive subject of the historical and cultural treasures that were looted from China by the West. Large-scale lootings occurred throughout the 19th century, such as during the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860 in the Second Opium War. But Shaw notes that during the frenzied climax and brutality of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, extensive looting was carried out at a systematic level by diplomats, soldiers, missionaries, and civilian nationals of the Eight Nation Alliance that stormed Peking (Beijing) and occupied what is now the Palace Museum.

The American presence in this historical drama was more ambiguous: there are records of American soldiers trying to stop their allied looters from looting. When one looks deeper, Sino-American relations could be said to have enjoyed greater warmth and higher ideals than one might expect, especially in today’s geopolitical environment.

Before the Boxer Rebellion, the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 had given Japan and other imperial powers the green light for the partition of the Qing Empire into economic zones of influence, and quasi-colonial territories of concession or leased land enjoying extraterritorial law. But the Americans, concerned that the Europeans and Japanese had intentions to actually carve up China politically, intervened with an Open Door Policy that, at least in theory, prevented the outright overthrow of the Qing (while strengthening America’s position in China).

Partly thanks to this, after the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese imperial court had a final spurt of relative competence and energy for a decade. From 1901–11, the Qing, for all its problems, laid the reforms for the modern China that would emerge. In addition, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) established the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program in 1908. Paid for with excess proceeds from the indemnity paid by the Qing according to the Boxer Protocol of 1901, the scholarship paid for the education of a generation of Chinese students in the US. Many of these became leading figures in Republican China. Finally, amid the devastation of World War II, the Americans negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) an end to their extraterritorial rights in China, and successfully pressured the British to abrogate the UK’s extraterritorial rights in January 1943.

It could be said that both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), familial titans among American politics and history, helped China to push forward into modernity. Of course, the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was undoubtedly launched by Theodore Roosevelt and continued by Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) in the name of self-interest: to define China’s reform according to US terms, to peacefully control Chinese development by cultivating its next generation of leaders, and to redirect Chinese interest in learning from Japan to the American model.

But back then as now, in every great power’s self-perception, there is usually some attempt in grand strategy to align capabilities (which are often unsavory) with higher aspirations: God, the Dharma, or another spiritual ideal. It is something that Buddhist monarchs have struggled with since Ashoka the Great.

In the postwar, postcolonial world, democracy became the grand aspiration, and this had its own problems and hypocrisies, many of them vast. But in the age of Donald Trump and the MAGA political movement, not even aspiring toward that aspiration seems in vogue. In fact, the world has reverted to a sort of “great power competition” that eerily resembles the imperial setting of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the “predatory international environment” that the Qing found itself in, as China historian William T. Rowe put it, “the empire had become merely one of many antagonists in a predatory international war of all against all.” (Rowe 2009, 287)

Trump, during his first presidency and now his second run, is an acolyte of this worldview. From the “all against all” perspective, since America is the world’s dominant superpower, the exercise, expression, and enforcement of power is itself a virtue, and any restraint of that power is an exception to the rule. Revenge can be a moral good, and the threat of force is no longer simply a necessity or last resort, but fair game (or at least a legitimate opening shot).

In this worldview, friendship only exists in the context of a give-and-take relationship with terms set by the US. Countries that operate outside of a specific paradigm of American self-interest must be punished before being made to make a deal that satisfies the US. Canada and Mexico have most recently experienced this. Denmark and other Western allies are likely to be next.

Meanwhile, the Sino-US trade war has kicked off in earnest again, partly because both the US and the People’s Republic of China are in a heated competition about who sets the terms of global trade and the projection of international power. Even Trump’s tariffs echo the struggle with national sovereignty that Qing China faced. The Treaty of Nanking in 1841 stipulated that the Qing could only adjust the rates of taxation on goods coming into China with the agreement of Britain. Tariffs are an expression of national sovereignty because a country must determine its own taxes on imported goods. Being unable to impose protective tariffs to nurture nascent industries, even as it was engaged in catch-up industrialization, proved devastating for the Qing. (Rowe 2009, 173) For better or for worse, Trump sees tariffs as a justifiable and patriotic weapon in his arsenal that must be wielded in the national interest.

In this new era that echoes the 19th century of “all against all,” are terms such as “global community” or “global citizenship” truly irrelevant and obsolete? Are the expression of pugilistic politics and the ability to set the terms of dialogue and negotiation the top priority? Are we in a geopolitical samsara that promises nothing but bedlam and unpredictability for everybody?

In the pugilistic environment of the 21st century’s boxing ring (with no figurative weight classes), there is one possible North Star to pursue. His Holiness the 17th Karmapa once noted:

Within this era of information I would say that now more than ever the suffering of other beings really becomes part of our individual experience. This is not merely an idea, but rather it describes the actual reality of the world that we live in now. As we continue in this age of information we can see that our world is getting smaller and smaller and all of us within it are becoming closer and closer to one another. And so it should be increasingly evident that the experiences of other sentient beings are in fact part of our own individual experience. (Kagyu Office)

Perhaps there is some brutal honesty, even a shedding of hypocrisy, in a world returning to the “law of the jungle.” This is a world where power exists to be deployed against others, and life is a war of all against all, like in the 19th century. But having more empathy or mindfulness of the Other’s experience or thinking is not just about being a good old fashioned, good person or country. It can also be a strategic call, made with the wisdom that no matter how impressive one’s will to power, an action always prompts a reaction, both from peer powers and weaker nations. This is the ironclad law of karma.

Even the powerful should keep this in mind, lest arrogance become a shortcoming that weaker parties, resentful and itching for reprisals, exploit or even unite to manipulate.

Cultivating mutual understanding will not return us to the pre-Trump era. But we have seen how China and the US made lemonade out of lemons, to put it mildly, in the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. Anything in a similar spirit, especially since the defining competitive relationship of our era is the Sino-American one, would be refreshing.