Imagining the Post-American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole's <em>Ghost Fleet</em>

Abstract

Field Trip 13 Imagining the Post-­ American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole’s Ghost Fleet Yuan Shu If Chinese invasion fiction as a literary genre has been grounded in what Edlie Wong calls “counterfactual histories” and has served as a part of the Yellow Peril discourse,1 which historically informed and reshaped U.S. immigration laws and policies concerning ethnic Chinese exclusively, then Peter Singer and August Cole’s (2015) speculative fiction on the Third World War between the United States and China, Ghost Fleet, defines a new moment in the genre evolvement. Not only has the novel been noted for the two authors’ background and connection to the military, the intelligence , and Hollywood, particularly their “thorough research in defense technology with ongoing geopolitical developments” (Bearden 2015) but it has also been praised for its inclusion of nonconventional combatants for military leadership, such as women and LGBTQ individuals.2 However, while celebrating the vision of the authors on future wars and military technology, which encompasses utilization of rail guns and incorporation of cyberspace and outer space into war as new battlegrounds, even the most favorable book reviews cannot help raising questions on “why the war started” in the first place (Freeman 2015). And its detractors simply dismiss the novel as “another fearmongering piece written by another advocate for a bigger defense budget” (Frizzell 2016, 160) because the archipelago of U.S. military bases in the Asia Pacific is not even mentioned in the text: “If it is a plea for the administration to sit up and take notice of China as a threat, it does not do a good enough job of explaining why all the elements of U.S. national power supposedly are completely defunct” (160). Indeed, why would the Chinese military emulate the Imperial Japanese Army of the 1930s and launch a similar sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor after its discovery of a gas field in the Mariana Trench? Why does the novel render into oblivion the so-­ called hub-­ and-­ spoke system of bilateral military alliances between the United States and its allies, which has been implemented and sustained for more than seventy years (Twining 2007, 79), and the forward-­ deployed capabilities of the U.S. military installations in a region reconfigured as the “Indo-­ Pacific”?3 In this contribution, I read Ghost Fleet against what media critic Fareed Zakaria calls the “post-­ American world,” by which he means the “rise of the rest” vis-­à-­vis the West, and explore how the authors appropriate the 14 Field Trip historical interregnum in terms of a military threat posed by the rest—­in this case, embodied and exemplified by China in its technological advancement and military investment. Specifically, I argue that the two authors, by imagining the “aggressive act” of China as the logical consequence of its forty-­ year phenomenal economic development and as the effect of its possibly modeling on nineteenth-­ century American expansionism epitomized by Alfred Mahan’s notion of sea power, conflate the Chinese military with the Japanese war machinery of the 1930s, the first rise of a non-­Western power in human history, which failed because of its military aggressiveness,4 to highlight a possible similar fate awaiting the Chinese in their challenge to the U.S.-­ centered global order. What enables a defensive United States to triumph over an offensive China in the fiction is more than American cutting-­ edge technology and strategic alliances in the Indo-­ Pacific but the fundamental American values of individualism, innovativeness, and democracy compounded by the notions of diversity and multiculturalism. If the novel concludes with maintenance of status quo antebellum to nobody’s satisfaction, it affirms what I call a paradigm shift in the representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans from “cheap labor” to “high-­ tech” spies. 6 The Post-­American World: The Rest and the West In his 2008 book ThePost-­AmericanWorld, Fareed Zakaria announces from the outset that his work is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else” (Zakaria 2008, 1) and then articulates the present moment in terms of “the third great power shift of the modern...