Review Essay Red Phoenix: No Longer with Just a Fan

C China has gone through almost two bad centuries. Now, it is back! This time, it has returned not as Mao Zedong's Power grows out of a barrel of a gun. Rather, it is Deng Xiaoping's To get rich is glorious. It is this economic situation-in which China has gone through two decades of double-digit growth-that led Will Hutton to write The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy. This urge for Western writers to see China in a dichotomous manner is nothing new. The dichotomy of friend or foe has been the prevailing foreign policy of Western nations and their allies toward China since the first British ships destroyed the Chinese armada in 1839 simply because the Chinese refused to allow opium into their country. It was illegal drugs that fueled western imperialist ambitions in China at the time.