Qin Hui, Ukraine 6

Qin Hui, “Appeasement and Collective Security:  Ukraine Series No. 6”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Qin Hui (b. 1953), who taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement, is a historian and one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals.  Translations of many of his writings, treating topics as diverse as Thomas Piketty’s Twentieth- First Century Capitalism, “China as seen from South Africa” and “Globalization after the Pandemic:  Thoughts on the Coronavirus” are available on this site.  Qin emailed me in early March, asking me to translate a series of texts he is writing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which are being published in FT Chinese.  I am delighted to do so, because Qin’s voice is certainly unique in China, and perhaps in the world.  I have since learned that FT is editing Qin’s texts, softening some of the rough edges and the implicit criticisms of Xi Jinping, and Qin has asked me to translate his original texts rather than the edited versions. At some point, I will compare the two versions and add footnotes to my translations, so that readers can get a sense of the editing process in the Chinese context.
 
The text translated here is a wide-ranging discussion of appeasement in the twentieth-century world, essentially trying to remind readers that “we have been here before and we know how this ends.”  In the modern world of deadly weapons, widely shared, collective security requires the great powers to step in to keep the peace, because once a war is launched by a totalitarian/authoritarian country, a certain dynamic sets in due to fundamental differences between democratic and non-democratic regimes.  Appeasement is often a natural reaction in democratic regimes, as citizens decide it is not in their national interest to lose lives in distant lands, and revoke support from leaders who champion such causes, while leaders in non-democratic countries do not have to consider public opinion even if casualties are high.  This gives a clear advantage to the reckless autocratic with a strong enough army to make victory in war possible, especially since autocrats often base their legitimacy on nationalism and military prowess—as evidenced by Putin’s repeated evocation of the glories of the military exploits of the Soviet Union during World War II, despite the heavy sacrifices incurred. 

Of course, once a war is launched, prompt engagement with the conflict can of course fan the flames as well.  Qin appears to believe that the tipping point has not yet been reached , and that with concerted action and a firm stance from Western allies, and third world war might be averted.
 
Translation
 
What is "Appeasement"?
 
Why did the Russo-Ukrainian war occur? Why did the war take the form it has? In my recently published essays in the Financial Times, in addition to condemning Russia's aggression, I have also noted the problem of Western appeasement. I also compared the annexation of the Sudetenland by the Nazis in World War II to the annexation of Crimea by Putin in the current war, the results of which I found alarming. But if we take a longer view, we will find that Western appeasement seems to be a chronic illness.
 
In the context of international politics, the Chinese word suijing 绥靖 is the translation of the English term “appeasement.” Strictly speaking, as with concepts like "feudalism" and "economics," the original meaning of the Chinese word is quite different.  While in traditional Chinese both of the characters "sui" and "jing" mean to “stabilize” or “pacify” something, the means employed by the two to achieve those ends are different.  Sui means to placate or conciliate, as in the compound suiyuan 绥远, meaning “to conciliate those who have come from afar.”  By contrast, jing means to calm something down forcefully, as in the expression fengtian jingnan 奉天靖难 [lit. “receive Heaven’s mandate to put down the rebellion], which means to go to war.[2]

When the two words fuse to become a compound, they mean to seek to stabilize or pacify something by “employing both armed force and words of comfort.”  In ancient texts, the term occasionally had the connotation of showing weakness, as in "Duke Wen was afraid, and pacified the feudal lords, so that the Qin army was able to return safely to Qin," but more often highlighted the showing of strength, as when Wang Mang, at the end of the Western Han period, "earned great merit for having pacified the realm 宗庙社稷," or when Zhang Gui 张轨 (b. 255) of the Western Jin Dynasty blamed himself, saying "I was there for eight years, but could not pacify the region."

During the Chinese civil war, the Guomindang government set up any number of "pacification offices 绥靖公署," while the Communist Party explained this pacification policy as "the former reactionary government's disregard for reason and morality, which led the people to submit to violence and manipulation in the name of stability.”  “Appeasement" obviously refers to strength, whether we praise it or criticize it; for those who are in favor of appeasement, Chamberlain never engaged in it, while for those who criticize it, Hitler was the one who was “appeased.” 
 
In the context of international relations, however, what we call “appeasement” means a show of  weakness, meaning to engage in indulgence and accommodation for the sake of peace and harmony, which is in fact turns the original Chinese meaning of suijing upside down.  The Japanese translation as yūwa 宥和 (to resign oneself to asking for peace) is closer to the mark. I will nonetheless follow convention in this essay, and use suijing as an equivalent of appeasement.
 
After World War II broke out, British and French public opinion began to condemn Chamberlain and Daladier, saying that the appeasement at Munich had been a big mistake. But in reality, appeasement did not begin with Chamberlain, and even less did it end with World War II. In fact, Western public opinion did not start paying attention to appeasement with Chamberlain, but rather with the governments of Ramsay Macdonald and Stanley Baldwin that preceded him, and that were known for their appeasement efforts.  And since Chamberlain and Baldwin were Conservatives and Macdonald was Labor, appeasement was not necessarily a left or right issue either.  Instead, both left and right in a democracy can be guilty of the infantile disease of appeasement, just as either the "extreme left" or the "extreme right" in totalitarian systems can become are aggressive once they are truly strong or believe themselves to be so.
 
Appeasement is a human weakness that has existed since ancient times, in which fear of being bullied makes us resign ourselves to pleading for safety, but appeasement as used here is a modern concept related to "collective security.” It refers to a third party other than the invader and the invaded.  Even if the invader is as evil as Hitler, you can call him a tyrant but not an appeaser.  Even if the invaded party is as shameless as Wang Jingwei[3] (1883-1944), you can call him a traitor but not an appeaser.  Only when a third party (particularly a capable and strong third party) displays tolerance and weakness in the face of aggression can we talk about appeasement.
 
But since we are talking about a third party, why must it intervene in the situation?  Is declining to intervene denigrated as appeasement? This is the link to collective security.
 
Appeasement and Collective Security
 
In the original dog-eat-dog international politics of might makes right, there was no such thing as appeasement, and the "vertical and horizontal alliances 合纵连横" of the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) were mere power plays, with no value connotations.  Kant’s proposals concerning “perpetual peace” at the end of the 18th century and The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 on the rules of war and the peaceful settlement of international disputes mark the beginnings of the concept of collective security. At the end of World War I, the countries of the world keenly felt the disaster of the Great War, brought on by typical dog-eat-dog politics, so they adopted concepts like "world citizenship" and "a just peace" from Kant and others, to which they added notions like Wilson’s demand that “right triumph over tyranny,” and established the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference.

The core concept of the League of Nations was collective security, a system that guarantees the survival of all nations and the maintenance of international peace. In the "international community" (as the League of Nations is referred to in French and Spanish) shaped by this mechanism, each participating state considered a breach of peace to be a common challenge to all participating states, i.e., that your security is my security and vice-versa. All states were to collectively sanction aggressor states that violated this principle in order to maintain international peace and order.
 
However, the League of Nations was unable to put this concept into practice, and the result was the increasing aggression of the totalitarian states and the craven appeasement of the democratic states, which led to the outbreak of World War II.
 
The United Nations, the postwar successor to the League of Nations, faced the same problem. In the first few years of the Cold War, when ideas of "convergence" and "universal values" became popular, , the system seemed to function (an example being the successful collective effort to block Iraq’s attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1961), and the unity created by the European Union even made people dream of some kind of utopia. 

But the good times did not last. Consequently, problems of aggression and appeasement have once again come to the fore.  Not too long ago, people were wondering if a new Cold War was about to break out, and now the conflict in Ukraine means that we are reliving the crises of the Sudetenland and the attack on Poland from the prewar period, and Putin is already threatening the use of nuclear weapons, which means that in the blink of an eye, a new “hot war” seems to be at our doorstep!
 
The serious question of how to keep humanity from going down the same—or worse—road again makes it necessary to revisit the history of aggression, appeasement, and collective security.
 
Of course, there are those who scoff at the idea of "collective security," believing that security can only be achieved by being "strong" and that others cannot be relied upon. Such a belief surely encourages self-reliance. We all know the saying "God helps those help themselves," and who would not “help themselves” and instead rely on the "international community?”  Especially in the old days before modern weapons, when military costs were roughly the same for everyone, if you did not stick up for yourself you were at the mercy of everyone else.  At that time, there was no “international society,” which meant that self-reliance was the only possibility.  Even today, self-reliance is still the basis for mutual assistance. This time, Ukraine did not repeat the mistakes of the Polish-Czech War of 1919, and it is also completely different from the useless Karzai regime in Afghanistan. Ukraine is an example of "God helps those who help themselves."
 
But competition based on “self reliance” will not build an “international order.”  Especially in modern times, when military costs are so high, how strong would small and medium-sized countries have to be in order to ward off the aggression of modern military power on their own? And if they achieved such "strength," would it not be a risk to other small and medium-sized countries? Would not such mighty Leviathans not endanger their own subjects? How can nuclear non-proliferation be maintained, especially in today's nuclear age, when every country is seeking to be "powerful?" If everyone has nuclear weapons, then is the world not on the brink of destruction?
 
However, in the absence of a "world government," collective security is primarily the responsibility of the "responsible powers.” When small and weak countries are invaded, whether other large and powerful countries can act as a “world police” and maintain justice becomes very important.
 
Of course, human nature has its self-serving side, and the great powers also have their own "national interests.” It is entirely possible (even extremely possible in pre-modern times) for those who police the world to turn into those who rob the world.  When the world police refuses to act in the name of justice, this is appeasement, and when the world bandit’s selfish schemes turn vicious, this is aggression.  The collective security of the contemporary world faces the challenge of aggression and appeasement. Of course, aggression is a crime, appeasement is wrong, and at some level there is nothing to be discussed.  But in real world terms, the two often produce one another: the aggressor's unscrupulous violence intimidates the appeaser, creating indulgence, and this indulgence in turn stimulates the aggressor's aggressiveness and arrogance.
 
National Systems and "National Interests"
 
The domestic institutions of the major powers actually have an important impact on all of this, something to which previous studies of international politics have not paid enough attention. The value preferences of those in favor of "democracy and peace" have led them to ignore another side of the story. The recent popularity of the so-called "Thucydides' Trap” goes further, and discusses international politics as if it were a value-neutral street fight, disregarding even basic logic and facts. I have previously pointed out that Thucydides himself had no “trap theory” insisting that "the great power must strangle the competitor.” 

People are by nature jealous, and it may well be the way of the world for the older brother to be unhappy when the younger brother surpasses him, but logically speaking, unhappiness does not necessarily end in a life or death struggle. A large number of facts, especially facts about the modern world, and above all facts about the United States itself, as it joined the ranks of the great powers in economic terms, becoming number two and then number one, without ever engaging in a serious conflict with the previous number one, disprove such notions.
 
In fact, states engaging in "international relations" and individuals engaging in human relations are comparable in some ways and not comparable in others.  What is comparable is that both are motivated by a combination of "selfishness" and an "idealism" that goes beyond a narrow sense of selfishness, which takes us into the realm of universal, transcendent moral responsibilities, beliefs, and ideologies.  According to Maslow, the pursuit of one's own moral satisfaction or ideal fulfillment is actually a kind of high-level "selfishness:"   since A's ideal may not be accepted by B, imposing A's ideal on B may actually result in consequences similar to or even greater than "selfishness." However, because it has the appearance of "self-sacrifice," "saving others," or "liberating mankind," it is also true that it is different from the narrow "selfishness" of an individual's desire for material things, sex, or power.
 
Motivations of both the state and the individual are a combination of the above-mentioned "selfishness" and "idealism," and it is difficult to imagine them either as a pure angel or a pure devil. This is what the two share. But the differences between state and an individual are that, first of all, the "ideal" of an individual in interpersonal relations may turn out to be precisely the narrow selfishness of the state in international relations. For example, when an individual makes a sacrifice in the name of aggressive “nationalism,” this may be a selfless sacrifice in terms of the relationship between the individual and the state, while the external aggression of the state in question may be thoroughly selfish.

Second, and more important, the selfishness of the individual is singular. Each individual is a judge of their own interests. But the state is composed of countless citizens. Who decides the "national interest?"
 
The determination of the “national interests” in countries with different kinds of systems usually has little to do with the interests of those outside of those countries:  neither the interests of the U.S. president nor the interests of the American people are the same as the interests of the Chinese people. The self-interest of the U.S. president may be harmful to China, and the same may be true of the self-interest of the American people. But in domestic terms, the determination of what is the "national interest" in a democracy and in an autocracy may be very different: the "national interest" of a democracy is essentially that of the citizens of that country, but the "national interest" of an autocracy is essentially that of the "emperor."  This may be the case as well in terms of relations to the outside world, but it is not necessarily so.
 
Of course, the interests of politicians and the interests of the people in the foreign relations of democratic countries do not always align, just as the interests of this part of the population may differ from those of that part of the population. Why do democracies have anti-war movements? Because some people think they should not fight the war that the decision-makers think they should. That is, the interests of the decision-makers and the anti-war public do not coincide. But in a democracy, this inconsistency can be corrected. Everyone knows how big the anti-war movement was in the United States in the latter period of the Vietnam War, but in fact, at the beginning of the war, American public opinion was highly supportive, otherwise the war would not have been possible. Later on, once the U.S. military suffered more casualties and negative news came out, public opinion changed.
 
In fact, during World War I, World War II, and in all subsequent U.S. troop deployments overseas, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the same reversal of public opinion occurred. In World War I and World War II, American public opinion originally embraced "isolationism" and opposed joining in the war. Later, after German submarines sank American merchant ships and the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor almost wiped out the American fleet, public anger led to support for the war. The opposite was true for Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where the public was first pro-war and later against it. The tens of thousands of US casualties in Korea and Vietnam were much smaller than those of their opponents, and in fact did not damage the US war machine as a superpower at all. This is all the more true of Iraq and Afghanistan, where casualties were even fewer.
 
One might say that since at least the 20th century, the United States has never experienced a defeat in a military sense (meaning losing a war as a whole, setting aside certain defeats in local battles). For the United States, wars have never been abandoned because the military machine has been badly beaten and disabled (as in the case of Germany and Japan in World War II), but because of the loss of public support—the people no longer think it is in their interest to fight. So it was not the Viet Cong who defeated the U.S. military in Vietnam, but the American public that turned against the war.  The United States entered the war with the support of public opinion and withdrew from it when public opinion reversed itself, which is completely different from Germany's surrender after the fall of Berlin and Japan's surrender when its military capacity was destroyed by the atomic bomb.
 
I am not a "romantic democrat" and I know that different people have different levels of influence on public opinion.  Nor do I intend to argue that "the people cannot be wrong," or that any war supported by public opinion is right and one opposed by public opinion wrong. However, as long as public opinion is shaped by the principles of "recognition of differences, free expression, and majority decision," and diplomacy is determined by public opinion, there is no problem in concluding that "national interests" are aligned with citizen interests.
 
By contrast, there was no anti-war movement in Germany and Japan before the surrender (except for the "Hitler assassination" type of court conspiracy), just as there was no resistance movement after the surrender was announced. Was there no anti-war because the people were "patriotic?"  Of course not, otherwise why would there no resistance movement after the surrender?  In fact, the two things follow the same logic:  under dictatorship, the German and Japanese people did not have the right to define their own interests. Therefore, in terms of the subject who defines the interest, the "national interest" in Germany and Japan is actually the interest of the "emperor" (the dictator) of these two countries, just as the "national interest" in the United States and Britain is the interest of the British and American citizens.
 
Some people have talked about the "banality of evil," and have argued that at the outset, the German and Japanese people also were wildly in favor of war and joined in the persecution, that this is equally a kind of "public opinion," and that the pro-war marches in Russia after Putin's suppression of anti-war activists are a kind of "unfree democracy."  To my mind, such arguments lead to confusion. Banality can certainly be evil (as can nobility!), but banality itself is not evil, and it is precisely the characteristic of totalitarianism that banality is not allowed to force the “emperor” to display "nobility.” That banality can engage in mass evil (i.e., acts unlike killing someone in a fit of rage) under the incitement of the powers that be is like the so-called “public opinion” that is not allowed to protest—both are the result of the suppression of freedom. 

And "unfree democracy" is a false proposition. Both freedom and democracy are based on "the distinction of group and individual rights,” and if there is no individual freedom, then there is no collective democracy.  As for power-produced “mass hysteria,” this is something we see under the first Qin emperor in China and in medieval Europe.  It has nothing to do with democracy, nor does it constitute what we call public opinion—just like the fact that millions of Jews in Auschwitz entered the ovens “without contesting” says nothing about the “public opinion of the Jewish people.”  The afore-mentioned absence of anti-war protest and post-war resistance in Germany and Japan is evidence that Nazi "national interest" was in fact only the interest of the Nazis and not that of the citizens.
 
China’s Experience with Aggression and Appeasement
 
Of course, the above argument does not mean that democracies are necessarily noble in their external behavior and do not engage in hegemony, aggression, and bullying. Who are the “people?”  The people are us, neither saints nor demons, bearing both the light and the darkness of human nature. Like the emperor, they are also driven by desires, selfishness, and self-interest, and, of course, they may also have "noble ideals.” The justification for democracy is not that the people are more moral than the emperor, but that everyone's legitimate rights (including the right to self-interest that does not harm others) should be protected. To prevent the usurpation of the people’s rights, public power can only be conferred by these people. A state whose power is democratically conferred by the people will naturally represent the interests of the people of that country and will not, as in the case of a dictatorship, prey on the people in the interests of the “emperor.” 

But following the same logic, if the power of a democratic state is not conferred by the people of a foreign country or by the people of the world, and is not subject to the control of the people of a foreign country or the people of the world, then it is not impossible for such a state to violate and harm the people of a foreign country for the benefit of the people of that democratic country. It is of course even more common to value the interests of one's own people over the interests of the people of foreign countries. The former case produces the possibility of democratic foreign aggression, while the latter, more likely, case leads to appeasement by democratic countries.
 
Foreign aggression by democracies is usually limited to cases where the adversary is very weak; democratic wars of aggression against states of equal power are hard to get off the ground.  The British and French democracies practiced "gunboat diplomacy" as part of their policy of colonial aggression.  In the United States, known as being “democratic since its founding,” the urge to take land from Native Americans was more pressing than when the British king ruled the colonies, because the farmers, who constituted the bulk of the American population at that time, had a much stronger demand for land than the British king.

Even their demand for independence was related to the fact that the British king prevented them from taking land from Native Americans. In this sense, the United States was guilty of an "original sin," but it was not what we used to call ideological, it was not the original sin of the “capitalist” American rulers, but instead the original sin of the American people, which of course they have since thought deeply about.
 
But in cases of either aggression or counter-aggression, if war is needed, the costs and sacrifices of war are borne by the people, and in a democracy the people and their representatives make such decisions, weighing their own gains and losses. Dictators can use the people at will as cannon fodder for their own interests, as someone joked: "My mind is made up, and I’m unconcerned by your sacrifices.  Your job is to overcome all difficulties so that I can achieve victory.”  Democratic systems cannot do that. I am not talking about idealistic anti-war sentiment, because human selfishness is such that the people will support profitable aggression if the price is low.  But if the price is high, the support will not be there, and asking them to “make up their mind and not worry about their sacrifices to overcome all difficulties so that I can achieve victory” will not cut it.
 
The democratic United States mistreated the Native Americans, who were primitive and backward and eventually too tired to resist, and they attacked weak neighbors like Mexico, Panama, and Grenada, but they are extremely cautious about going to war with countries which are somewhat stronger (even if they are still considerably weaker than the U.S.).  Not that it never happens, but the threshold is extremely high. War with a country as huge as China is unthinkable. Historically, the US has never formally been at war with China (The Korean War? If you’ve been to Panmunjom, then you know that the flags and signs—then as now—indicate that the negotiating parties are North Korea and the UN; the Americans were the authorized "UN" leaders, and the Chinese were the "volunteer" troops who went to help North Korea fight, and no matter who was actually killing whom, legally it was not a war between China and the US, and both countries do their best to avoid such a war).  

As for democratic England and France, after winning three limited wars against a weaker China, and securing a few more concessions in 1898-1899, the aggression stopped. Thereafter, their policy toward China was mainly to maintain their existing rights and interests, or to bargain over the return of these rights and interests, but not to make any further demands. Why is this? Among other reasons, once China had modern weapons, many more English and French soldiers would have died, even if the odds of their winning were still high, and in democratic systems the people would not stand for it.
 
Thereafter, those who have mistreated or tried to destroy China have been the Russian (Soviet) and Japanese dictatorships, acts of aggression by countries with “people to spare.”  In fact, since the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, these two autocratic evil neighbors have been the major players in aggression directed toward China.

This is especially true after 1900. Russia and Japan dominated the Eight Nation Alliance sent in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, in which “protecting our embassies and our expatriates” was merely an excuse, and Russia and Japan in fact entertained wild territorial claims and demands for exclusive rights and interests. Britain, France, and the United States were secondary figures in the conflict, and focused on revenge for the Empress Dowager's attack on the embassies and the massacre of the Christians (more than 95% of which were actually Chinese, but foreigners were also killed), but pressed no other claims beyond punishing the murderers and demanding reparations. Later on these countries all entered the stage of renouncing their privileges to China, some on their own initiative and others only when they had no choice. The only diehards were China’s two despotic neighbors.
 
More recent conflicts between the democratic great powers and China, aside from bargaining on the question of the return of China’s rights to China, should be seen less as “aggression” than as “appeasement.”  The landmark Paris Peace Conference of 1919-1920 was described by Mao Zedong as "a teacher mistreating his student," and supposedly led some progressive people in China to be disappointed with the West. In fact, "Western" mistreatment of China had come earlier (at a time when progressive people in China viewed the West as their “teacher”). 

At the Paris Peace Conference, the West did not seek to expand its rights and interests in China, but instead adopted a policy of appeasement toward Japan and did not help China in its fight to reclaim Qingdao (they corrected this mistake only three years later at the Washington Conference), and even Wilson, who generally militated for "right," on that occasion gave in to Japanese “might.”  At the Paris Peace Conference, the West was not the aggressor with respect to China, but the episode remains a sad and shameful display of appeasement.
 
Appeasement and Aggression between the Two World Wars
 
On a more macro level, even as the Paris Peace Conference led to demands for collective security, it also created the phenomenon of appeasement.  Subsequently, as aggression posed a growing challenge to collective security, we saw an endless stream of appeasement until collective security collapsed and the world was plunged into the turmoil of World War Two.
 
In East Asia, after Japan's invasion of Manchuria, the League of Nations sent the Lytton Mission to investigate, but although they declared Japan's actions to be in violation of international law and demanded Japan's withdrawal, Japan simply ignored this "noise" and withdrew from the League of Nations. The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the occupation of Shanghai the following year posed a serious challenge to Western interests in China, but the West continued to do nothing but utter idle threats. Britain even agreed in the 1939 Craigie-Arita Agreement that the Japanese army could enter the concession area to suppress the anti-Japanese activities of the KMT military intelligence agency, an agreement which was criticized as the "Munich of the Far East."

It was not until 1940, when Japan seized French Vietnam and began to formally endanger the Western colonial system in the Asia-Pacific region that Britain and the United States began to impose economic sanctions on Japan. But Britain still did very little, and even took advantage of China's urgent need for the Burma Road due to the closure of Vietnam's sea port to blackmail China into recognizing the so-called "1941 Line."[4] 

Roosevelt, however, was a serious advocate of supporting China against Japan. But mainstream public opinion in the United States was still "isolationist" (which translated into appeasement in East Asia), and were it not for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which finally woke the Americans up, who knows when Roosevelt would have been able to declare war on Japan.  This is why some people have always believed that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese sneak attack but deliberately ignored it in order to let the Japanese teach the American people a lesson about appeasement. This belief has no basis in fact, but it is true that the attack on Pearl Harbor put an end to the American people’s dream of appeasement.
 
Everyone knows about the appeasement of Germany.  After Hitler came to power in 1933, he repeatedly challenged the "Versailles system," violating the treaty by rebuilding the navy in 1935, breaking the demilitarization rules and entering the Rhineland in 1936, intervening in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, merging with Austria in 1938, invading the Sudetenland and subsequently annexing and dismembering of all of Czechoslovakia, occupying Klaipėda in Lithuania, and finally launching a full-scale attack on Poland in September of 1939.
 
During this period, several British and French governments, on both the left and the right, repeatedly gave in to Germany's advances, either offering only verbal opposition, or accepting Germany’s behavior as a fait accompli, finally even signing the Munich Agreement, which betrayed smaller countries. Following the German-Italian alliance, the British and French offered only verbal opposition when Italy sent troops to Ethiopia and Albania, and while they denounced them to League of Nations, they took no practical actions against them.
 
In the past, people only blamed Chamberlain and Daladier, but in fact, it was not merely their governments that engaged in appeasement, and Chamberlain's actions at the time were also approved by parliament and supported by public opinion. Churchill, who opposed appeasement and advocated resistance to Germany, denounced it as "one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last," but at the time, his was only "a voice in the wilderness.” Some people have said British democracy was a "bourgeois democracy" and that the voice of the proletariat could not be heard. Does this mean that was Churchill part of the proletariat?

I am also aware of the "revisionist" understanding of Chamberlain and others that has become popular in Western academia in recent years, the idea that it was “not wishful thinking, but buying time," that the appeasers had no illusions about Hitler, but needed to the time to strengthen their armaments because Britain was weaker than Germany.  But even if we accept this explanation, the question remains:  Who allowed a country that had lost World War I to get so powerful?  Was it not the tendency toward appeasement of the British people (and not merely Chamberlain)?              
              
When Hitler attacked Britain and France on the Western Front in 1940, the British and French people woke up from their slumber, and appeasement disappeared. Churchill's anti-German line finally gained full support. Later he wrote in his Memoirs of the Second World War:  "We could have prevented the Second World War. If Hitler's adventures had been crushed early on, and if there had been no policy of appeasement, there would have been no Holocaust." In fact, how is this not true of the scourge of war in Eastern Europe today?

Notes

[1]秦晖, “绥靖主义与集体安全：乌克兰系列之六,” published in FT-Chinese on April 19, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The reference here is to the early Ming period, when the Jianwen emperor sought to eliminate the risk of competing claims to the throne, only to be displaced by the Yongle emperor, who claimed to have “received the mandate of Heaven to put down the rebellion.”

[3]Translator’s note:  Wang Jingwei was a Chinese politician, originally part of the Nationalist/Guomintang regime, who headed a collaborationist government that cooperated with the Japanese invading army during the Sino-Japanese War. 

[4]Translator’s note:  This appears to relate to a dispute over the physical location of the border between China and Myanmar, which at the time was the British colony of Burma.