The American Empire

This year I've been teaching a class on Western society, which is pretty much just a class on the US and the UK, but more on that later, and during one class I talked about US foreign relations and policy. At the end of the class I posed the question to my students, "Do you think America is an empire." It can be hard to get a real answer out of students for a couple of reasons. The average Chinese person tends to be pretty nationalistic and quick to take offense at any slight to their county and I think they imagine that I am the same way. I try to tell my students that I don't mind them saying negative things about America, in fact some times I pose questions in just such a way as to get negative responses, but I don't know if they listen. Also classes tend to take one opinion and hold to it. It's partially a truism that with any group of people one person is not inclined to speak up against the consensus but it's more so in China where going along with the group is considered a virtue the same way individualism is in America and on issues where they've never discussed or come to consensus the first person to speak tends to carry the class. So when I asked them if they thought America was an empire each class tended to give one response.

Some classes said no comparing it to places like the British Empire which conquered a fourth of the word. Some also said no as they thought that the word empire had inherently negative connotations, which is more true in a country like China were the government will constantly remind people of their weakness during the war with the British Empire called the Opium War. Some classes said yes though. Actually truth be told I had more or less set up the class to come to an answer of yes. I had talked about the size of the American economy which is not only the largest in the world by a large margin but if you discount city states and countries with tiny populations the US has essentially the highest per person wealth in the world as well. I talked about American military spending which is almost equal to that of every other country in the world combined and some seven or eight times larger than China's spending, which is second highest in the world. And finally I talked about American culture how many of them had seen American movie to TV shows, how many knew American songs, and played American games. I compared this to other countries with large economies who they knew almost nothing about.

Some classes at the end asked me what I thought. I've thought for a while that America is an empire though one more based on culture than conquest. One of the things which it's really only possible to see form outside the US is the extent to which American culture effects all the others. Almost every aspect of Chinese culture is somehow touched by American culture. Being in China makes this easier to believe as well. In China everything American is regarded as important and interesting. I taught a class on the west with no better qualifications than being from there. And the number of jobs open just because I can speak English is enormous. For every time I feel like a monkey just brought around to entertain people there are a dozen times I feel like a diplomat given statues just because of where I'm from. American may be and empire or not, in the end it probably doesn't really matter what you call it so much as what it is, but in China just being from America makes you important which is a truly odd feeling.