A New York Times op-ed by Stephen Wertheim, "deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University," includes this passage:
Citing China's "bankrupt totalitarian ideology," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heralds a new dawn for U.S. leadership. "Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party," he said in July, "is the mission of our time."
Is it? China is authoritarian and on the rise. But it is hardly Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. China is open for business, whether on fair terms or not; the world's largest trading nation makes a strange candidate for a totalitarian menace whose every activity closes off the earth. And unlike 20th-century rivals, China has long abstained from armed conquest. Though it threatens Taiwan, no one thinks it is about to invade U.S. allies like South Korea or Japan.
I don't find the second paragraph particularly convincing.
Nazi Germany was "open for business," too. As Joseph Kahn reported in the Times news columns back in 2000: "At least 50 American companies operated factories in Germany during the years that the Nazis were in power, which began in 1933. American companies continued doing business in Germany after war broke out in 1939. Some remained there until late 1941, when the United States entered the war....Ford, General Motors, Exxon-Mobil and Kodak are among a growing number of American multinationals that say they have found evidence that their subsidiaries used forced labor during those years." A Times book review in 2001 reported that under Thomas Watson, "I.B.M.'s world headquarters in New York conducted business with Nazi Germany from 1933 up to the American entry into the war, and that Watson, a rapacious profit-seeker, even received a medal in 1937 from Hitler for his friendship with the Third Reich -- which he later had to renounce amid considerable embarrassment. By the time war erupted in 1939, I.B.M. technology -- primarily punch cards and the Hollerith machines that tabulated them -- was widely in use by the Germans in the military, the SS, the railways and other key institutions."
The Soviet Union was also "open for business." The New York Times obituary of David Koch reported that his father, Fred, "made millions in the 1920s and '30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere." The New York Times obituary of the American businessman Armand Hammer reported that "he profited spectacularly from his dealings with the Soviet Union." Another American businessman, Donald Kendall, sold Pepsi cola in the Soviet Union.
The op-ed's claim that China is different from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union because China is open to international trade just isn't supported by the facts.
The claim that "China has long abstained from armed conquest" is also false. The New York Times reported in 1987, "China invaded Tibet in 1950 and effectively took control of the region in October of that year. ... A Chinese military headquarters was established in Tibet in 1952. In 1959, an incipient armed independence movement was crushed by Chinese forces, which imposed military rule. Over the next two decades, virtually every temple and monastery in Tibet was destroyed by the Chinese, and thousands of Tibetan monks were imprisoned." Chinese military domination of Tibet continues to this day and has been more recently extended to Hong Kong.
This is the second New York Times op-ed this month to airbrush Chinese Communism. An October 1 op-ed by Regina Ip argued "Foreign governments should not benchmark what happens in Hong Kong against standards that prevail in Western countries; those are governed by a political system entirely different from China's. Instead, they should benchmark Hong Kong against the rest of China." Ip wrote of the Hong Kong protesters, "The West tends to glorify these people as defenders of Hong Kong's freedoms, but they have done great harm to the city by going against its constitutional order and stirring up chaos and disaffection toward our motherland."