Chinese Democracy
Brad DeLong on China and Jeff Faux:
In general, we have a choice between policies. We can eliminate or sharply restrict trade with an odious regime—as we do with Cuba—in the hope that it will put pressure on it for reform. We can encourage the maximum possible trade with an odious regime—as we do with China—in the hope that the more economic, cultural, and political contact there is the more we strengthen the forces over there that we like. Which of these policies we follow will have impacts on domestic income distribution—but much smaller impacts than do our educational, social insurance, and tax policies which do much, much more to move wealth and opportunity down or up the American income distribution. I tend to be on the side of free trade abroad and social democracy at home. But I am not sure that I am right. I am sure, however, that painting the issues as Davos plutocrats (and their water carriers) and commissars-turned-capitalists on one side and America’s working people on the other doesn’t move us forward at all.
I don’t agree with Brad that ‘painting the issues as Davos plutocrats … doesn’t move us forward at all.’ The consonance between mainstream political opinion on China and the interests of American businesses hungry for access to the Chinese market surely reflects in part the efforts of think tanks and politicians who depend on aforementioned businesses for funding and donations. But I do agree that there’s more to the story. The most interesting piece I’ve read on this recently is James Mann’s long article (behind paywall) in the current issue of The American Prospect.
Mann’s piece is an extract from a forthcoming book, where he argues that U.S. officials “carry out policies based on premises about China’s future that are at best questionable and at worst downright false.” Simply put, he sees little evidence that China is ever going to liberalize its internal politics. The conventional wisdom is that increased trade with China will push China to ease up on domestic internal repression and perhaps eventually become a democracy. According to Mann, this became instilled as part of the US government consensus during the Clinton administration, when Clinton wanted cover for his decision not to use trade as a lever to improve human rights in China, and fixed upon the policy of “integration” and unrestricted free trade with China as an alternative. It was politically convenient rather than true (I’d be interested to read Brad’s response to this claim based on his time in the administration; I suspect that he disagrees strongly).
Mann says it is completely unclear how integration is supposed to lead to political freedom in China. This is a bit unfair – there is a widely accepted argument in the political science literature on the topic that economic growth plus a strong middle class make the transition to democracy more likely, and more easy to sustain when it happens. Still, it’s far less clear whether outside action is likely to help this happen or not. The best cases of democratic transition aided by strong external economic ties are arguably Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, and several countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In both cases, the key variable wasn’t so much integration into the global trade regime, as strengthening ties (and eventual integration) with an international structure (the European Union) that has both economic and political dimensions.
This leads to the second, and in my opinion, stronger, part of Mann’s argument. He claims, with some justification that the full integration of China into the world trading system is undermining international norms that would otherwise promote democratic transitions.
Will it have been a success for the U.S. policy of integration if, 30 years from now, the world ends up with a Chinese regime that is still a deeply repressive one-party state but is nonetheless a member of the international community in good standing? If so,l that same China will serve as a model for dictators, juntas, and other undemocratic governments throughout the world—and in all likelihood, it will be a leading supporter of these regimes. Pick a dictator anywhere today and you’ll likely find that the Chinese regime is supporting him. It has rewarded Robert Mugabe, the thug who rules Zimbabwe, with an honorary professorship, and his regime with economic aid, and, reportedly, new surveillance equipment. … If China maintains its current political sysem over the next thirty years, then its resolute hostility to democracy will have an impact in places like Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. … Thus, when America’s leading officials and CEOs speak so breezily of integrating China into the international community, listeners should ask: If China remains unchanged, what sort of international community will that be? Will it favor the right to dissent? Will it protect freedom of expression? Or will it simply protect free trade and the right to invest?
This is something that I’ve been worrying about for a while. The argument that more free trade etc are necessarily going to promote political liberalization doesn’t have much empirical evidence to my knowledge to support it. It’s a version of what Albert Hirschman calls the doux-commerce thesis. It may be true, but equally, it may not. There’s a second argument – that integration into an international community which involves both economic and appropriate political norms promotes democracy – which seems to me to have somewhat (but only somewhat) better empirical support. If you care about the spread of democracy, integrating China into the world trade regime without any political conditions attached is a bet that the first argument is right. It’s also a bet that a powerful autocracy well-integrated into the global economy isn’t going to use its position to disrupt efforts to apply economic pressure to nasty regimes. I’m more convinced by the second argument, which suggests that integration of non-democratic states into the world economic regime should go hand-in-hand with political commitments. Ideally, these would start with increased labour standards (specifically: protection of the right to organize, which is a key element of the creation of an independent civil society) and gradually work out from there to a broader set of political commitments. This certainly isn’t an easy populist solution, because it suggests that countries which are willing to make these commitments should be given full access to free trade, and ideally rather fuller access than they have under the current multilateral regime (the arguments that we’ve had in comments threads about Turkey and the EU are relevant here). But it seems to me the right call.
All right, all right, it moves us forward a teeny-weeny-weeny-teeny-weeny bit…
I demand that this post is retitled “Chinese Democracy“. In related news, Jamie makes a couple of good points about the potential effects on us and our money if China does become a democracy.
So, Henry, you approve of the trade embargo against Cuba until it allows private property, the formation of unions, and multi-party elections?
:-)
Brad
‘its resolute hostility to democracy’.
As opposed to whom, precisely?
I second #2. And I further demand that Harry’s minimum income post below be entitled The Notorious B.I.G..
>> If you care about the spread of democracy,
I don’t. And a goodly lot us don’t. But, we don’t have a choice, do we?
>> I’m more convinced by the second argument, which suggests that integration of non-democratic states into the world economic regime should go hand-in-hand with political commitments.
Why? Can’t you just pay (or get paid) for goods and services and be done with it? After all, the converse worked out well for the west. Political influence without commensurate economic advantages.
I learned a new term today: the “doux-commerce thesis”. It’s a thesis that I agree with, if I understand it, except that I believe that it applies much more to possible violent conflict between the trading partners than internal repression within any trade partner.
In other words, strong trade ties between China and the rest of the world may or may not promote political liberalization within China. But they very strongly discourage armed conflict between China and the rest of the world—too many people inside and outside of China have too much to lose. (You could call it the “make-money-not-war” thesis.)
As China grows in economic and military power, I don’t think one should discount this as a benefit of open trade, or as a potential cost of weakening trade relationships…
This post is a joke, right?
Let’s see, which nation is a bigger supporter of represive non-democratic regimes – China or the United States?
I mean, it isn’t really even close. The world would be a FAR better place if China was relatively more powerful internationally, and the United States less powerful.
I am sure, however, that painting the issues as Davos plutocrats (and their water carriers) and commissars-turned-capitalists on one side and America’s working people on the other doesn’t move us forward at all.
OK, we’ll just talk about that elsewhere, shall we?
Actually, it’s silly to paint Davos as so exclusive (as was done in the 2004 election). If Davos is so exclusive, why are there so many cheap package deals going there from the UK? Next you’ll be telling me Acapulco is a hip-hop-happening joint.
.
Not really disagreeing with you Henry, but has the political science literature on the democratizing consequences of economic growth really reached on consensus on the “growing middle class” thesis? My impression was that there is still some debate over the relative importance of genuinely “middle class” (professionals, small business owners, etc.) demands for democratization as opposed to working class organization. My sense is that for most cases of democratization, the evidence lends better support to the latter: ie that to the degree economic growth creates conditions conducive to worker organizing, the resulting organizations (unions and labor parties) push for and increasingly have the leverage to get democratization.
As I say, this is not to dispute anything in your post, so much as to point out that the failure of the US et al to incorporate the ILO core conventions in an enforceable way into (nearly all) trade agreements is itself a major reason why China’s economic liberalization may not generate political liberalization.
there is a widely accepted argument in the political science literature on the topic that economic growth plus a strong middle class make the transition to democracy more likely, and more easy to sustain when it happens
To second Rich Clayton above, the most obvious counterexample is Singapore. In fact it could be that economic growth is just used to “buy off” the middle class and the poor – get them to put less pressure on the government to democratize. Of course at least one necessary condition for this to be the case is that the growth trickles down to the masses and is not coopted by the party elites. But China (like Singapore before) seems to have been at least partly succesful at this, as evidenced by the emergence of the middle class itself.
And the post above about the world being a better place under Chinese rather than US leadership… oof… that’s when I wanna get my flyswatter out.
China’s international behavior recently has been so much better – remarkably better – than that of the US, that the idea of a two-party system being somehow superior to one-party system seems completely ludicrous. Go ask around whose regime most people feel is more odious.
No actually it’s what you use to swat flies.
Well, you’ve got to hand it to Bushco, their feckless squandering of military and financial assets has brought that day measurably closer.
That is the only silver lining from the last 6 plus years.
dsquared – title changed, as per popular demand.
Brad – I’ve no principled objection to sanctions against Cuba to bring about democracy. Cuba isn’t the worst dictatorship in the world by any stretch, but it’s still a dictatorship, and one that isn’t particularly pleasant to live in. I get the sense though that the current US sanctions regime is less about democracy, and more about restoring property to the oligarchs who got kicked out way back when, which is something that I’m disinclined to support meself, for obvious reasons, but I blogged about my opposition to the EU’s decision to end sanctions against Cuba and contacts with the opposition a couple of years ago; this seemed to me to be pretty cynical.
larry m, I don’t know what planet you’re living on, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to mine.
Rich, radek – fair enough – I should have said something like “there’s fair support in the literature for this argument, but some countervailing points of view too.” Must dig out Przeworski and Limongi’s survey article, which I remember as being the best summary of the literature, albeit somewhat out of date now … The most interesting recent take on this is the Acemoglu and Robinson book, which I would like to do a review of one of these days when I have time and have sorted out my thoughts on it.
Dictatorship plutocracy is better than two-party bait-and-switch plutocracy because at least it’s honest: you know for sure who to hate and don’t end up hating half of your fellow countrymen – a neat way to absolve the plutocrats in power of almost any responsibility and pressure.
Henry,
the Przeworski article you might be thinking could be this:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/przeworski/papers/transwp.pdf
(democracy not more likely with higher per capita income, the history of the stability of regimes matters)
or possibly this:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/przeworski/papers/sisson.pdf
(only reason democracies have higher growth is because they tend to have slower pop growth)
I’m reading the Acemoglu and Robinson book right now and it is really realy good, though it takes’em a while to get going (at the beginning it seems like they haven’t made up their mind whether they want the book to be for a popular audience or for people with some background in the area).
There though it’s about cost of repression, inequality, the ability to coordinate a challange to the regime, middle class, how much of the economy is land based and most importantly the committment problem on the part of the elites in ensuring a more equal income distribution.
I think China though may be in a similar position as Singapore – low repression costs, the gov has solved the committment problem (through sustained broad based growth over the last two decades). The factors which could push for democratic pressures would be a growing middle class (but the effect of this is ambigous), the heavy reliance on land (but that has been partially solved) and perhaps growing inequality (but this paper
http://www.nber.org/papers/W8611
argues that inequality may not be growing as much as you’d think).
If there’s political pressures for a regime change (not necessarily for a democracy, but just the allocation of political power between various interest groups) it will probably come from the difference in goals/outcomes of the rural vs. the urban.
The Przeworski article I linked to above is essentially a follow up to the Limongi and Przeworski article Henry mentions.
Henry,
Hmm. Let’s try some metrics (in each case we are comparing the United States to China):
(1) Which nation gives more military aid to Undemocratic nations?
(2) Which nation gives more economic aid to Undemocratic nations?
(3) Which nation has more military bases in Undemocratic nations?
(4) Which nation has more troops in Undemocratic nations?
(5) Which nation is responsible for more causing more deaths outside their own borders over the past 30 years?
(6) Which nation has engaged in more agressive wars over the past 30 years?
I’ll admit that the last two aren’t strictly related to the question of support of “spead of democracy,” but on the broader question which nation is doing more harm in the international arena.
And I’ll certainly concede that domestically the United States is a far freer place, but then that isn’t the issue at hand.
But what’s truely depressing is the large number of people who “get it” with regard to the monstrosities of the Bush administration, but still believe in the United States “spreading Democracy.” Here’s a little clue – if you expect that the United States will do ANYTHING that will effect the “spread of Democracy” (in a positive way) in our lifetimes, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
What Larry said. I despise the corrupt, despotic Chinese government (and the US business interests that suck up to it so assiduously). That doesn’t change any of the facts about international behavior that Larry cited. Now, we’ll have to see what happens as their thirst for oil increases. But up till now, there’s no way any unbiased observer can possibly conclude that China is anywhere near in the same class as the US as a threat to world order and to other countries’ autonomy. As an American I’m ashamed to have to admit that, but it’s the honest truth.
Those are not relevant metrics. Even if they were:
(1), (2) might just, possibly, maybe, perhaps, have something to do with the fact that US is a developed nation and China is still a relatively poor nation which only recently went from being a net recipient of foreign aid to a net giver.
(3), (4) basically restate the fact that US is still more of a global superpower than China so it’s a circular argument. Presumably were China’s international power to increase you’d see 3 and 4 go up. And ummm, the US does have bases in the undemocratic countries of Cuba and Venezuela but does that really mean anything? Base in a country does not equal support for the country’s government. Even if, the number for US is pretty low, mostly a few middle east countries for strategic reasons like Egypt, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain (at least a few years back).
(5) Hmmm, yes, Tibet is within China’s borders. But again, this could be due to the fact that China is not yet a superpower, while US is. We’re comparing US as world policeman with China as hypothetical world policeman here.
(6)First again, “Aggresive” is a red herring here. What were the agressive wars of US in the past 30 years – Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, maybe bombing Libya, first Gulf, second Gulf… out of these Panama and Kosovo were definetly “pro-democracy”, Grenada was arguably “pro-democracy”, first Gulf was if not pro-democracy, it was pro-state-sovereginty and the second Gulf, well, that one was a total fup. Point is “aggresive” does not equal “anti-democracy” necessarily. But again this isn’t the relevant comparison. Think of what kind of aggresive wars China would wage if it wasn’t constrained by US militatry. Goodbye Taiwan, at the very least.
I can agree to the statement that China hasn’t caused THAT MUCH international trouble since the 80’s (aside from lobbying the occasional missle over Taiwan) but that’s probably more due to resource constraints and the fact that they are NOT the superpower yet- you’re reversing your causality.
Well, the US HAS been causing THAT MUCH international trouble since the Spanish-American War, so your special pleading is decidedly unimpressive.
To give a more precise answer to #2 and #3 above, the nondemocratic countries US gives aid (economic and military) to are
Egypt – slightly under 2 bill $, pretty much as a payment/bribe for Camp David Accords. Most of this is spent on French military equipment.
Pakistan – .7 bill $ or so, most of it military aid, for obvious reasons
Sudan – half a bill $ in humanitarian aid
Jordan – half a bill $, about evenly split between economic and military (see Egypt above)
and that’s basically it, except for a few poor African countries receving humanitarian aid that can possibly be described as “imperfect democracies” (the most imperfect being Ethiopia)
Now, for all those above, there’s either a damn good reason (they’re fighting a war along with US or as payment not to attack their neighbors) or its humaniterian aid. And the magnitudes aren’t that big given a US Gdp of 13+ trillion $. Obviously I’m leaving out Iraq.
To forestall the obvious rejoinder, of course it used its muscle occasionally in positive ways during that interval (WWII being the only completely unambiguous example) which hardly excuses the track record overall.
Your list of corrupt, undemocratic US clients is laughably incomplete since it omits past aid to countries like the Shah’s Iran (to namke just one there have been plenty more), as well as current military support for eg. Saudi Arabia.
Radek – Why on Earth do you think that the fact that the US is much more militarily powerful than other States provides any kind of mitigation of the harm it has caused? Do you, analogously, think that it is a legitimate plea of mitigation for someone who has just beaten a passer by to death with a big stick, that he was the only one with a big stick?
“The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Empires have much the same attitude in any era. Some have at least been less hypocritical about it than the US.
His question used the word “gives” not “has given”. Obviously cold war politics change the equation (it would’ve come out to about.9 bill$ per year for the Shah) as they did for China and USSR. Current military support to Saudi Arabia consists essentially of having military bases in Kuwait.
current US bases in non democratic countries:
Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Singapore, Qatar
until recently you could throw in
Kyrgyzstan (which democratized)
Uzbekistan (but US forces left after last flawed election)
and I’m obviously excluding Cuba. But like I said above this is essentially a silly criteria.
From here
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/20040910_2004BaseStructureReport.pdf
Radek,
I could go on for pages on the flaws in your argument (like Kosovo for example – a pro democracy intervention? Oh, you slay me), but let’s just jump to the bottom line. Even you are forced to admit, grudgingly, that “I can agree to the statement that China hasn’t caused THAT MUCH international trouble since the 80’s.” But you just assume that that is all going to change when China gains more power. Based upon what, exactly? That we are the “good guys” and they are the bad guys? Get it through your thick skull – WE AREN’T THE GOOD GUYS.
And as for your unstated assumption that the United States is actually a force for good in the world – over half a million dead Iraqis would beg to differ. Oh yeah, they can’t – we murdered them.
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Engels, I was responding to larry’s comment in 9, which basically says China would make a much nicer world cop than US, which is to put it in academic terms, crazy talk. He was referring to today. Then he posted some criteria which I thought were not very good but even on which US doesn’t come out as bad as one would think (not much foreign aid to undemocratic countries, not many military bases in undemocratic countries, etc.).
This isn’t to deny or whitewash nasty stuff US has done in the past, mostly during the Cold War, mostly out of a mix of screw ups and the fact that for any nation sometimes “reasons of state” will trump humaniterian/democratic considerations. We can discuss US policy during the Cold War era (and I’m sure we disagree very much on it) some other time. But between the end of Cold War (1991 or so) and the present mess in Iraq it is crazy to say that US supported non-democratic regimes to a greater extent than China.
larry
But you just assume that that is all going to change when China gains more power. Based upon what, exactly?
Uh. The internal policies of the Chinese government with respect to dissent within their own country? The rhetoric of Chinese official and generals who can’t wait to be let off the leash with respect to Taiwan?
Well, Radek, I thought #9 raised two questions. (i) Who’s been a better “global citizen” up till now and (ii) should we fear the rise of Chinese power in relation to the US? If your argument is that although the US has had a poorer record, this is because of its having had much more opportunity for wrongdoing, this might be relevant to the second question, but it’s not relevant to the first.
It seems a little strained to take the point of #9 as being that China would make a “nicer World cop” than the US. A more natural (and charitable) reading would be that we ought to prefer a multipolar world in which US power is severely constrained by that of other states. That’s not “crazy talk” at all.
And you’re right, I think ‘a mix of screw ups and the fact that for any nation sometimes “reasons of state” will trump humaniterian/democratic considerations’ is a risible attempt at an apologia for US conduct in the Cold War.
Finally, I don’t get why you are talking about the US’s record in between 1991 and 2003? Is there any particular reason why you think we should zero in on these years?
(1) I had a long response on the world cop issue prepared, but engles mostly covered it. We don’t need or want a world cop, and China will never have the strength to be one. In fact, I think that we need to constantly hammer home the fact that the very concept of ANY nation being a global cop is an obscenity. And, yes, a multipolar world would indeed be much better.
(2) As for your answer to my question, it’s unconvincing to say the least. There is, as far as I can see, dubious beliefs about the peaceful nature of democracies to the contrary, no evidence that the internal characteristics of a government have any bearing on how they conduct themselves in the international arena. As for Taiwan, China (with some reason) sees Taiwan as part of their nation. There is no evidence – none at all – of Chinese territorial ambitions outside of Taiwan. Now in a perfect world I’d like to see Taiwan remain independent, both because I am obviously no fan of the Chinese government and because I detest war, but if I have my choice between China gaining Taiwan, and the United States continuing its immoral and destructive quest for world domination, well it’s an easy choice.
Ultimately this isn’t about any liking on my part for the government of China – it’s about the horribly destructive role that the most powerful rogue state in history is playing on the world stage. Please wake up, people.
Your answer = Radek’s last paragraph in #35.
And I’ll certainly concede that domestically the United States is a far freer place, but then that isn’t the issue at hand.
Nonsense. When comparing freedoms, the country with (by far) the highest rate of incarceration in the world shouldn’t be even allowed into the competition, let alone lauded as a ‘freer place’.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html
Surely any reasonable person would prefer accessing google thru proxy to being locked up in jail.
On the other hand, suppose we look at the part of the world China has had influence over so far. What about the treatment of Tibet or the Uighur, for instance, suggests a Chinese-dominated world would be one with more official commitment to fairness? Where is the message “we’d be better for the global environment” in projects like the Three Rivers dam?
The fact that something has spoiled in my refrigerator and smells bad is entirely compatible with and independent of the fact that the neighbors’ cat had a hairball on the steps outside and it smells not so good out there. No matter how thoroughly I deal with one mess, the other will still be there.
“China’s international behavior recently has been so much better – remarkably better – than that of the US, that the idea of a two-party system being somehow superior to one-party system seems completely ludicrous. Go ask around whose regime most people feel is more odious.”
I guess the currently ongoing genocide in Tibet doesn’t count for anything…..oh that is right you probably buy Chinese propaganda about that not being ‘international’. And in recent comments I had been worried that abb1 wasn’t totally nuts.
Ongoing genocide in Tibet, Sebastian? Yeah, spike it up, man, show ‘em, bastards.
What are we talking about here? There is no doubt whatsoever that China has been a remarkably restrained and responsible state, especially in the recent years; even most of the mainstream US commentators routinely admit that much. You would really have to drive yourself into Dick-Cheney-style frenzy to deny it.
And, yes, a multipolar world would indeed be much better.
Do you normally consider war to be better than peace as soon as you come across some clever-sounding euphemism for the word ‘war’?
The world has been multi-polar many times in the past: the result were not pretty, including the slave trade, both world wars, the holocaust, competitive imperial expansion, and democides too numerous to mention.
Do you have a mechanism in mind by which things would turn out better this time?
“Panama..definitely pro-democracy [intervention]”
Radek, can I borrow your fly-swatter?
As to aid to unfree countries, aid to Colombia might be seen as aid for unfreeing—it’s what the aid does as much as it is where it goes that ought to be measured.
“Nonsense. When comparing freedoms, the country with (by far) the highest rate of incarceration in the world shouldn’t be even allowed into the competition, let alone lauded as a ‘freer place’.”
I’m quite opposed to our war on some drugs, which is mainly responsible for our high rate of incarceration. However, it should be pointed out that the US does NOT have “the highest rate of incarceration in the world”. Not while there are countries out there, like Cuba, where to be a citizen is to be incarcerated… because the whole country is effectively a prison camp.
Can’t get higher than 100%, you know.
On the other hand, suppose we look at the part of the world China has had influence over so far. What about the treatment of Tibet or the Uighur, for instance, suggests a Chinese-dominated world would be one with more official commitment to fairness?
Suppose we look at the part of the world (Central America) that the US has had complete and total domination of for the last century, and see how it fares?
Overlooking the Death squads of the 70’s and 80’s, the civil wars of the 60’s, the Dictatorships of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, how are the fine people of these countries doing? are they well educated? reasonably well-off (how would their standard of living compare with that of any of Eastern European countries)? what is their life expectancy? what is their child mortality rates? how free are their peoples?
Looks like living a century or more under the American Boot hasn’t been all that great for them.
So how exactly is China supposed to be worse than the US?
There is a particular strain of foolishness endemic in this thread. A lot of people here appear to be motivated by white-hot hatred of the United States.
I despise Bush too, but the Chomsky-like picture of the US as a force of pure evil is even less accurate than simply thinking of the US as a shining city on a hill that can do no wrong.
And carrying water for despicable regimes like the one in China (remember the students in TS?) carries this hateful irrationality to absurd heights. You can loathe the US with all of the passion that some of the folks here do and still be able to see that a world dominated by China would be a truly nasty place. Or you can simply froth venom and believe that nothing can be worse than the Great Satan™.
Um, Brett, the word ‘incarceration’ has the meaning, you know. Throwing around phrases like “to be a citizen is to be incarcerated” or “ongoing genocide in Tibet” makes you guys, as Marc could say, appear to be motivated by some kind of white-hot hatred or something. Let’s be rational, please.
Marc: remember the students in TS?
Funny, though, that according to wikipedia:
Obviously there are many more urban workers than students and intellectuals, so, why don’t you hold your venom and think about this one for a few seconds.
Marc, I can see that you are pretty slow so I’ll put it in all caps. NO ONE HERE IS SAYING THAT A WORLD DOMINATED BY CHINA WOULD BE A GOOD THING. But that isn’t a likely prospect, to say the least, for a whole host of reasons.
On the whole multipolar vs unipolar thing, that’s really all that defenders of the United States have left. Color me unconvinced. Corrolation does not equal causation. There are a whole host of reasons why, the actions of the United States apart, the number of wars occurring world wide has declined. I’d say the top two reasons are (1) the ease of asymetrical warfare (which obviously favors the defense, and hinder aggressive warfare), and (2) the fact that most of the countries that can afford to establish effective militaries (i.e., Europe), after two horrifc world wars, have decided that peace is better than war. As for this notion that the dominant role of the United States somehow keeps other nations from going to war, I’m just not seeing it. It’s just a fallback fiction to justify empire for those who are smart enough not to believe the obviously false shining city on a hill crap.
As for the whole “Chompsky vision is absurd” nonsense, one doesn’t have to buy into the whole thing, some of which is indeed exagerated, to see that the role of the United States in international affairs is monsterous. I used to buy at least some of the bullshit, but, if you apply the same standards to the United States as are applied to other nations, we have done horrible, horrible, unforgivable things. At base is the obscene notions that the rules are or should be different for the United States. Once you peel away that lie, it’s impossible to avoid getting fairly close to the Chomsky position.
A lot of people here appear to be motivated by white-hot hatred of the United States.
Whereas you appear to be motivated by a white-hot hatred of people who criticise the US.
Abb1,
I believe Marc’s point was that the actions of the Chinese government in TS were despicable.
Are you contesting that? Or merely accusing him of falsing representation the occupation of the people there?
Tom
This thread started out interesting.
It reminds me of that quip that when you meet someone claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte the last thing you wanna do is get engaged in an argument over cavalry tactics at the battle of Austerlitz, since that in some way legitimizes their claim to be Napoleon. It is my personal weakness that I enjoy talking about cavalry tactics in general too much.
Sure. And US was just as bad as USSR during the cold war and we’d all be better off if it was still a “multipolar” world with USSR a strong counterbalance to the evil imperialistic American devil. Ave Ceasar, morituri te salutant!
And abb1, your quoted statement doesn’t even make sense. I’ve defended Wiki in the past but there’s some topics where you gotta be careful. It appears contradictory. At best it says that the TS protests where… protest by “urban workers” who thought there was too much democratic reform…and the crack down came because the Party wanted to democratize more then the “urban workers” would let it…uh………….
that is the stupidest thing you’ve said since your claim that the people in Soviet gulags “deserved it”. Wait no. That was still more stupid.
I know a couple people who were actually present at TC at the time (they claim to have “grown up” since, which is probably how they managed to wind up here) and sorry, it was about democratic reform, straight up. The tactic of bringing in “urban workers” or “true proleterians” (i.e. paid thugs or released criminals) who are supposedly pissed off in the spirit of true working class conciousness bravely manifesting itself, at the trouble causing students and intellectuals or “counter revolutionary” goes back… well, in fact it goes back to the Ochrana days.
Just to further clarify, I’m more willing to believe that, occassionally but not usually, our motives in intervening are more or less “noble.” But in some ways that almost makes it worse. Look at Kosovo, for example. We exchanged one type of ethnic cleansing for another (there was a substantial number of Serbs living in Kosovo. Was. Well, there are still a few, but I wouldn’t want to be a Serb in Kosovo right now). And we didn’t exactly establish a Democracy. More like a Kleptocracy, and even that’s generous. And our methods? Pretty forthright bombing of civilian targets in Serbia. Very nice.
And that’s one of the more idealistic interventions.
Right now Americans – citizens, not just our leaders – are more likely to sanction torture and killing civilians than most nations. That says it all.
More willing than Chompsky, that is.
Radek – Please address the arguments people have actually made instead of the straw men in your head. Would the world be better off if there were a significant counterbalance to US power? It is not “crazy” to ask this question, and doing so is not analogous to declaring oneself to be Napoleon. If you think it is, then you really are an idiot.
I’m not going to join in this discussion because it’s just developed (or regressed) into one of THOSE kind of debates, but one tiny factual point:
‘Uzbekistan (but US forces left after last flawed election)’.
No. The Americans were kicked out: they did not leave voluntarily.
“Um, Brett, the word ‘incarceration’ has the meaning, you know.”
Yes, and a country which doesn’t permit people to leave meets that meaning, IMO. People don’t leave Cuba on rafts because it’s cheaper than taking a ferry, you know. They’re staging jail breaks.
What about a country that won’t let its own citizens visit their families in another country – Cuba, say? Would that country be “effectively a prison camp” too, Brett?
I think I’m with Bruce Baugh. You can take a very low, basically Chomskyan view of US foreign policy (don’t know if Bruce goes that far) without thinking China would behave better if they had our power. I’d expect China to behave very badly given their behavior in Tibet, plus the fact that they were buddies with Pol Pot and from recent reports, have started propping up dictators in Africa in time-honored Western fashion. Sounds a lot like us.
I also think Chomsky would expect a superpower China to behave badly, because that’s consistent with his general attitude towards empires.
Pure ideology in general is not a good a thing: pure liberalism, pure egalitarianism, pure nationalism – yeah, they are all despicable and irrational and all that. And that’s up to their people to figure it out and fix it.
Now, what’s really-really bad and despicable indeed, it’s when they become expansionist and militaristic, and start going around forcing others to accept their great ideas. And I just don’t see either China and Cuba doing it at the moment. Cubans used to do a little bit of it, but not any more, and they don’t have any resources anyway. And China looks very much like an introvert.
Donald – I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I don’t think there are many people here who think that a Chinese superpower would behave better then the US. That is not the same thing as believing that if China or any other country were more powerful in relation to the US that might be a good thing. I don’t know whether I believe this or not, but I don’t think you can settle the issue by labelling it “madness”, or by appealing to homespun wisdom about your neighbour’s cat.
But since you mentioned it
The fact that something has spoiled in my refrigerator and smells bad is entirely compatible with and independent of the fact that the neighbors’ cat had a hairball on the steps outside and it smells not so good out there. No matter how thoroughly I deal with one mess, the other will still be there.
Fine: but I still can’t help feeling there’s something distinctly whiffy about someone who always seems to be taking potshots at his neighbours’ cats, yet never seems to get around to cleaning out the old refrigerator.
China is a superpower. They have 1.3 billion people, nuclear weapons with ballistic missiles and a $10 trillion economy (PPP) (vs. USA’s $13 trillion). That’s a superpower, without a doubt. It’s just that they choose not to behave like a superpower. And that’s why it seems rather odious to call it “an odious regime”.
Okay, I should have said that nobody here apart from abb1 thinks that a Chinese superpower will behave better than the US. Also, I think most people here apart from abb1 probably agree that the current Chinese regime is odious.
“What about a country that won’t let its own citizens visit their families in another country – Cuba, say? Would that country be “effectively a prison camp” too, Brett?”
Nope.
abb1 – you’ve been responsible for some quite breathtakingly idiotic comments around here – this series is up there with them. I’m (somewhat reluctantly) banning you from commenting on my posts in future. Somewhat reluctantly, because I don’t think that you’re a classic troll – I imagine that you actually believe what you write, more or less. I did entertain the theory for a little while that perhaps your comments were an extended put-on by a right-winger – they’re so exactly a fit to a not very smart conservative’s mental model of a cliched lefty would say. But I think that you’re what you seem to be. So it isn’t because you’re insincere that I’m banning you – but the occasional comments where you have something interesting and useful to say are vastly outnumbered by the ones where you don’t – and endeavour through repeated comments to drag debate towards your agenda, which isn’t to my mind a very interesting or helpful one. Simply put, there’s a hell of a lot of noise, and not much signal. This isn’t a blanket ban at CT - you can still comment in other CTers threads if they’re willing to tolerate you. But I’m pretty tired of it myself. Enough said.
We at The Weblog welcome abb1’s comments.
Uh, abb1’s said plenty of questionable stuff, but there’s a whole brigade of right-wing/libertarian commenters on this site who routinely say far, far more objectionable things, and as far as I can tell, you have yet to publicly ban any of them yet.
Beating up on the left-wingers while letting everyone else spout off about whatever they like, apparently to maintain some idea of balance, is deeply, deeply uncool.
as should have been apparent if you had read the comment, this has nothing to do with balance. It has to do with what I perceive as a minimal quality of comments and contribution (cf Chris Bertram’s post on our comments policy from a while back). My position is that if someone says a lot of stuff that I disagree volubly with, but has some interesting arguments, I’m disinclined to ban him/her for that unless he/she is obviously trolling. I’ve banned people on both sides of the political spectrum for doing this. If someone, of whatever political colour, consistently spouts off about stuff that they don’t know anything about, and makes ridiculous arguments that simply don’t accord with a minimal degree of knowledge of the facts (e.g. in abb1’s case, comments that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist, that an international organization that he acknowledges he knows nothing about is part of the Vast Capitalist Conspiracy, just because, and so on), I don’t see that there’s anything useful being added. And this nonsense has a marked tendency repeatedly to derail comments threads. This isn’t about balance – I don’t especially care whether abb1 is on the left or on the right. It’s about maintaining minimum standards of intelligent conversation.
We at Life and Times of Big Calabaza have no minumum standards of intelligent conversation. abb1, I encourage you to visit.
Brett Bellmore thinks that Cuba is a big giant prison. Abb1 thinks that China’s not odious and deserves major props for its restraint. Not clear why one or the other is a higher noise to signal ration—your comment, Henry, does seem to focus on the “you’re a conservative’s vision of a lefty”. (Whatever the merits of the thread and Abb1’s participation, its nice that someone gets US prison statistics up when freedom’s become an issue).
Outside of the second part of comment 48, it’s hard to see what you are calling breathtakingly idiotic about Abb1 in this thread, and even that is hardly more idiotic that assuming the Panama intervention was pro-democratic in intent. You may be right about the thread-hijacking, but its hard to know where to place the blame for that on this thread—and I know enough of the past history to understand your frustration—just saying, it’s not crazy to think it’s the left part that’s motivating the banning.
I’ll come to abb1’s defense too, if it will do any good. He says things I disagree with, but no more so than quite a few others and I like to see at least one person far enough to my left so I can pose as the moderate centrist who avoids the extremes of the center left and the far far left.
In this thread he’s said some interesting things, but takes his argument too far, IMO, for the reasons I already stated. But it’s at least arguable that if China had our power they’d be a bit more introverted and not as intrusive into other people’s business as we have been (though when they have stuck their noses in, the results have been things like support for Pol Pot and the conquest of Tibet). So maybe they’d do this sort of thing less often than us. I’ve heard others (real historians, I think) say that China has been an introverted power for most of its history.
But it’s not my blog.
I’ve always found Unfogged deeply politically un-agreeable. Either it’s upper class white folks talking about “those crazy religious people” or “my wonderful Hispanic nanny who I don’t think of as Hispanic at all” or “fucking left wing fucks! should just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop whining by way of puppets!”. No good I tell you, no good. Abb1, you are welcome at an und fur sich as well.
Wow. Party foul
!
This is Crooked Timber. Well, here it’s just ‘Well we are all intellgent, obviously the choice is to bomb!” and then after the bombing “Oh shit. Looks like I made a boo-boo. Better post something about how I was wrong, that should help!”
This from the grand poobah of a site where one of the contributors lived for years, happily one assumes, in a country where they arrest you for chewing bubble-gum. I won’t even go into examples of logic (on Israel for example) that people would want to dsipute.
How ironic that from being the one commentor on this site with actual ties to what used to be called the working class I’m now the only one actually involved in trade deals with china.
DeLong’s defense of passive economic internationalism in the face of chinese economic nationalism is absurd. As absurd as his defense of NAFTA. And as to whether “free trade” even exists, I go with Dean Baker on that one.
H. Farrell you’re being an idiot
Blog comment sections would be better if people banned more freely. The blogosphere as a whole is a free-speech zone, not each individual blog. The people who do the hard work to post have every right to try to keep the comment threads focused, interesting, and enlightening, and if that requires the occasional heavy hand of moderation, so be it. (And it need not be due to any single comment; the accumulated effect matters.) If the targeted commenters have something that simply must be said, let them put it on their own blogs.
Of course, now this thread is going to be about nothing but banning, which is too bad.
in case I get a come back on this point:
“actual ties to what used to be called the working class”
I can’t speak for anyone’s childhood, but I’m speaking about my adult life, and I’ll say my point stands.
It is a bit frustrating that the argument that tipped the scales toward the banning of abb1 was his/her effort to complicate a bit the standard issue US reading of the TS revolt and massacre.
But everything that I read – and I’m not an expert, just an amateur – indicates that the story of the June 4th Movement and the suppression of it was quite a bit more complex than “they wanted democracy, votes and Levi jeans, and the commies ran them over with tanks.”
From an interview with Wang Hui in One China, Many Paths (2003):
“In 1989, why did the citizens of Beijing respond so strongly and actively to the student demonstrations? It was largely because of the adventurist reforms to the price system that Zhao Ziyang had twice imposed, without any benefit to ordinary people. Their earnings suffered from the agreements they were forced to sign by factories, and their jobs were at risk. People felt the inequality created by the reforms: there was real popular anger in the air. That is why the citizenry poured onto the streets in support of the students. The social movement was never simply a demand for political reform, it also sprang from a need for economic justice and social equality. The democracy that people wanted was not just a legal framework, it was a compreshensive social value” (64-65).
Most everything that I’ve read on the subject heads in the same direction, or at least toward some picture of TS that is vastly more nuanced than the conventional wisdom over here would suggest.
So… those of you who’ve banned abb1… and those of you who’ve piled on vs. his / her “idiocy” aren’t just arguing with him / her, but with a fairly wide body of work on the subject….
I think this was a mistake. abb1, you’re also, of course, welcome over on Long Sunday, where I’ve just posted some of the above…
As a resident of China, I can attest that the lack of freedom here is a wee bit more insidious than having to use a proxy server to access Google. Even the most ardent pro-Communist Party Chinese person would admit that.
There’s always Kwangju.
And I was banned by Long Sunday ages ago.
It’s a point of pride for me
Henry,
Noam Chomsky has written a few articles about American academics’ responsibility for the evil things that the US does oversees. One of his central points is that US academics debate the merits of how the US exercises its power overseas to influence other nations’ political and economic system, and have quite heated debates about it, but they never question the USA’s right to do that. He is rather critical, I recall, of the position. You (and a few other people commenting in this thread) would be well served by reading some of those articles, thinking about exactly what you are defending in this post, and asking yourself what you are achieving.
As for banning the only commenter who bothered to bring anything resembling facts to the debate? Brilliant.
“Brett Bellmore thinks that Cuba is a big giant prison. Abb1 thinks that China’s not odious and deserves major props for its restraint. Not clear why one or the other is a higher noise to signal ration”
Well, for one thing, I DID point to the fact that people risk their lives on home made rafts on a regular basis to excape Cuba, because they can’t leave legally. In some places that would be considered “evidence”.
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/cuba1005/2.htm
Ok, Brett, let me put it another way: do you even give a flying fuck about the fact that Americans are being prevented by their own government from visiting their families in Cuba?
Even if Cuba is a giant prison, I’m sure that people can tell the difference between being in Cuba generally and being in a literal prison—you know, the kind where you’re kept in a smallish room.
If it’s not too late to comment on the original point, I am living in China and would like to read analysis and predictions that deal with actual conditions here, rather than trying to cram it into a political science model.
I strongly agree with “But they [increased international ties] very strongly discourage armed conflict between China and the rest of the world—too many people inside and outside of China have too much to lose. (You could call it the “make-money-not-war” thesis.)” From here in China, the idea of a war over Taiwan in the near future is laughable. Most of the factories I know are Tawainese owned and operated. Many others are American-owned (usually operated by Chinese proxies). In many respects, the saber-rattling over Taiwan seems really empty, considering the economic consequences if it was acted on militarly.
As for the larger arguement, could I be so bold as to summerize? There are two issues—China’s internal reform and its foreign policy. As the example of the US shows, a county can be very free internally and still not actively support freedom internationally.
Engels (way back) – I think it makes sense to focus on the period between the Cold War and the second Iraqi war because, obviously, during Cold War different rules applied. I’m not gonna bother spelling out for you why this was so. The other end point – I will happily concede, nay, even argue myself, that the Iraqi war was a prima facie case of “US behaving badly”. But I disagree with the Chomsky view of the world; take away Bush, take away the threat of the Soviet Union (and before Nixon, China itself) and the US looks like a relatively benign “empire” (which it ain’t in any case). And I think I’ve invested quite a bit of time in serious argument, replying to larry’s little list, to which he replied with snark.
Re: calling Panamanian intervention “pro-democratic” idiotic – this is the kind of delusion I was walking about. Before intervention Panama was non-democratic. Now it’s democratic. Is there point here?
re cr at 78: Alright, that makes more sense. Usually any mass anti-government movement will represent a wide variety of interests. Students and intellectuals might join because of lack of political and civil rights. Workers will join because of economic conditions. There will be pro-democracy leftists and pro-market liberterians (think of the Solidarity movement). None of this has a bearing on whether the Chinese regime was repressive at TS (and now) or not.
re:banning abb1. I actually like abb1, even though (or maybe because) he says crazy stuff all the time. And he, unlike some other people on here who say crazy stuff all the time, has a sense of humor. Don’t think he should be banned. In general I don’t like banning unless someone says some really messed up stuff.
david – the point of the not-very-bright conservative’s fantasy of a left winger analogy is that the arguments abb1 makes aren’t very good ones, nor do they seem based in very much in the way of actual political knowledge. We have had the occasional commenter who seemed like a left winger’s fantasy of a right-winger (e.g. most recently the rather hilarious aaron) – if any of them had hung around as much as abb1 has, I’d have banned them from my threads too (aaron seems to have disappeared, with some encouragement). Brett Bellmore is someone who very often makes hackish arguments, but sometimes has real ones. I’m prepared to tolerate the hackish ones, while being rude in response as I see it appropriate, for the good points. As Sean Carroll says, it’s the accumulation rather than the specific which is at issue here.
anthony paul smith – you seem to be engaged in an argument with the CTites in your head rather than the actually-existing ones. I’m sure you’re winning the fight though; one usually does under these circumstances.
cr – I’m banning abb1 for general lousiness of commenting over time, rather than for specific offenses in this thread (your ‘things are more complicated than they seem’ argument seems to me to be fair enough, but not where abb1 was going). The fact free stuff in this thread was his lengthy defence of the bogus assertion that China was recognized by most serious commenters to be a responsible and upstanding member of the international community, his hilarious assertion that the US wasn’t more free domestically than China was because of its domestic incarceration rates (hint: the reason that China’s prison population appears comparatively low is because the statistics they provide don’t cover a large chunk of their actual prison population) (I’m sure there are a few others). There are serious arguments that you can make against my claims – engels and larry m (in his later criticisms) seem to me to make such arguments – but these claims by abb1 aren’t serious, or useful, or at all connected to reality. That the US’s international behavior is often pretty nasty does not evidence provide that a grim autocracy, with pronounced revisionist tendencies in its local sphere of influence, is likely to behave any better – and China’s most recent policy initiatives of propping up a variety of extremely nasty dictators suggests to me that it would be likely to be worse if it ever achieved the kind of global position that the US has now.
seth – not for the first time, I’m not getting the connections that you’re trying to make. I’m happy to take it on faith that they exist and are important for you.
sg – things “resembling facts” is exactly right! Congratulations.
“China’s most recent policy initiatives of propping up a variety of extremely nasty dictators suggests to me that it would be likely to be worse if it ever achieved the kind of global position that the US has now.”
It won’t ever achieve that position. And the US has propped up plenty of nasty dictators, in the 70’s that number greatly outnumbered those supported by the USSR. The danger from the PRC is that it will become a version of Singappore on Steroids.
Singapore where John Holbo lived happily, or so I assume since I have no memory of him saying anything to imply otherwise.
But Singapore is a financial haven and nothing else and China has a much more complex economy and therefore a much more complex politics.
You defend intention. But courts consider only action at trial. Consideration of extenuating circumstances comes after the verdict.
the US has propped up plenty of nasty dictators, in the 70’s that number greatly outnumbered those supported by the USSR
Huh. 70’s you got Chile, Argentina, Paraguay (these three were US-backed but the amount of military aid was small), Guatemala (until Carter), maybe Nicaragua (definetly not after Carter), Persia, Jordan, Zaire, Pakistan, S. Korea, Indonesia, Singapore (if you’re gonna count it, West-allied but no military or economic support) (the last three experiencing very high growth in per capita incomes) – there’s a few iffy ones in Africa where both USSR and USA funded various factions, and maybe I’m forgetting something in Latin America.
This is more of a list of US-allied “nasty dictators” rather than US-propped up “nasty dictators” though.
On the USSR side you got Cuba, Peru, later Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Mongolia, Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Guinea, Sierra Leone, maybe Algeria, maybe couple other African countries and of course all of Eastern Europe (6 countries) which I’m not gonna bother enumerating. And that’s pretending that present day countries like the Ukraine, etc. don’t enter into the calculation.
I’d say about half of these are USSR-allied “nasty dictatorships” (Vietnam, middle east, maybe couple others) and half (definetly EE) are USSR-propped-up “nasty dictatorships”.
Add to that China, N. Korea and Albania and for sake of argument forget about Yugoslavia.
I’m not gonna add my comment, folks can draw their own conclusions.
This guy really should get some kind of a prize:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/coldwar1.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/coldwar2.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/communis.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/usaworld.htm
And since I’m commenting in sets of two:
People on this site expended a lot of energy defending the various Lancet studies. Has the leadership of the PRC done anything as irresponsible, destabilizing, stupid and simply destructive to human life as the current US administration?
Funny
I’l let someone else deal with Radek.As’ad AbuKhalil
“Right now Americans – citizens, not just our leaders – are more likely to sanction torture and killing civilians than most nations.”
Except, of course, China. Which is rather the point in this discussion. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that a nation which butchers religious dissidents and sells off their organs is being lauded for its superior incarceration policies.
The more general response is as follows: First, would adding a Chinese “pole” to international relations improve US behavior? Given that everyone appears to concede the America’s worst behavior arose during the cold war when it was faced with a rival power, it would appear not.
Would China’s behavior as a world power be better than the existing international influences it would displace? Judging by China’s existing internal (or “internal”) behavior in Tibet and Xinjiang and it’s external behavior in the Sudan, Zimbabwe, the worst bits of Africa generally, Iran and North Korea (just off the top of my head) it appears not.
Therefore an undemocratic China growing into a respected and powerful member of the international community would likely make the world a worse place, which is, I think, where Harry started.
Radek, I think you can reasonably make the point that “in the 1970s” should read “until the Carter Administration”, since there’s no doubt that Carter moved the US away from what had been a bipartisan policy of supporting dictatorships. That said, your list is so incomplete as to be useless. What about Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, for example?
The more general response is as follows: First, would adding a Chinese “pole” to international relations improve US behavior? Given that everyone appears to concede the America’s worst behavior arose during the cold war when it was faced with a rival power, it would appear not.
US behavior pre-cold war was nothing to brag about, does the conquest and occupation of the Philippines, the Sandwich Islands, the creation of Panama by ripping it out of Colombia or the various Banana Wars pre-WWII ring a bell?
Post Cold War, it seems that we have managed to bomb the Balkans, invade Panama, invade Iraq twice destroying it in the process, invade Afghanistan and it sure looks like Iran is in our sights.
The Cold War makes a good excuse for all sorts of deplorable foreign policy, but really it’s just an excuse, US foreign policy has always been pretty damn deplorable.
take away Bush, take away the threat of the Soviet Union (and before Nixon, China itself) and the US looks like a relatively benign “empire”
…and if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather. Why are you entitled to “take away Bush”? And of course you can’t ignore what the US did during the Cold War when evaluating its behaviour as a superpower. The idea that everything the US did during that time can be excused as legitimate defensive action in response to an external “threat”, from the USSR, belongs in the realm of Cold War ideology, not serious discussion. And what about US imperialism/expansionism prior to WW2?
As for your list, I’m not going to go through it in detail as I’m not sure what will be settled by totting up the number of “nasty dictators” on either side, but apart from the fact that it’s full of omissions (Brazil? Saudi Arabia?), and leaving aside your bizarre suggestion that GDP growth somehow makes up for large scale human rights violations (now where have I heard that one before?), you have failed to distinguish between allies of the USSR and allies of China. They may all be Commies to you, but for the purposes of IR, after the Sino-Soviet split, this is actually pretty crucial, so this alone makes your list pretty much useless.
Henry, good work completely ignoring my point. Your post read like a disagreement between neo-conservatives. “hmm, bomb or boycott? Me, I prefer the boycott.” Nowhere did you consider the possibility that the US simply doesn`t have the right to tell other countries how they should govern themselves.
Has it occurred to the commenters foaming at the mouth about China that the people of China might have other priorities in their development? Has it occurred to any of you that the rest of the world might have a different view of US “liberation” than you do? How do you know the Chinese even want your help? Or that your “help” will ever truly “help” them? Has it occurred to you that the Chinese might hate the US precisely because of its imperialist history more than they hate their own government, and that they may not be wrong?
Can I assume that when China becomes a bigger economy than the US, and its elite start talking about intervening in the US political system to liberate its gulags, protect the world from global warming, prevent further meddling in the middle east, or assure equality for blacks, you will all applaud and it won`t even occur to you that the Chinese don`t have the right to interfere?
Didn`t think so. Do you think black americans would have welcomed Chinese intervention in the 50s to end segregation? Doubtful. Why assume any different from the Chinese? To do so marks you with the same arrogant American exceptionalism which characterises your political opponents. How do you think the rest of the world refers to “American exceptionalism”? Not politely, I can assure you.
Again, look up the The Kwangju massacre.
sg – given that I’m a non-American who didn’t mention at any point, either directly or indirectly, “US liberation” and who is substantially unenthusiastic in general about US interventions abroad, I would recommend that you stop talking smack, and actually engage in, like, arguments that are in some way remotely connected to the discussion, rather than posing daft rhetorical questions and then answering them entirely to your own satisfaction.
Engels,
“leaving aside your bizarre suggestion that GDP growth somehow makes up for large scale human rights violations (now where have I heard that one before?)”
Probably here,
“Has it occurred to the commenters foaming at the mouth about China that the people of China might have other priorities in their development?”
Don,
I don’t think your list of post-cold-war atrocities provides a useful comparison with atrocities during the cold war, but in any case it ignores the burden in this discussion. Those who favour the growth of an undemocratic China suggest it will perform an affirmatively useful counterbalancing role – that requires that they show either that China itself will do good things in that role, or that US behaviour will be improved by it. Demonstrating, even had you successfully done so, that the US is always bad doesn’t clear that hurdle.
A side note – a read a lengthy article about the musical version of Chinese Democracy in a Hong Kong newspaper, allowing the journalist to make a lot of “it is never going to arrive”-style statements that would have been impossible had he been talking about the political version.
A long way up in this post, soru posed a good question – one that I think is more realistic than the hypothetical that China is going to be the world’s only superpower and how would we feel about that. Myself, I think a multipolar world would be better in every way, but Soru is right that the Cold war was no model of peace and bounty. I think we can throw out the slave trade and other examples from a time before being a world power actually came with the technology to be one.
At the moment, China is certainly abetting the U.S. in its lone power role – I think we would have been out of Iraq in two years if it weren’t for the Chinese central bank. But China has traditionally been astonishingly uninterested in areas beyond its traditional ambit. That is changing in some ways. Myself, I think that’s great – it is great, for instance, that China can operate as a balance against the suspicious U.S. stance against Iran, for instance. Still, I think soru’s right that the models of past multipolar worlds doesn’t give us much to work with in the way of the environmental tasks ahead, the need for real disarmament by all nuclear powers, cooperation on bringing affluence to ldcs, etc. It looks like huge changes in the way we live are just ahead of us – forced upon us by what is, practically, the seizure of the atmosphere by the great polluting powers. But the current models are dead ends.
But Roger, do you actually see China, governed as it presently is, acting as a positive force for environmentalism, disarmament or equitable distribution of wealth? It’s internal record on each of those fronts is terrible, and, as the original post mentioned, its external overtures seem to have been almost universally self-serving and objectively harmful.
I’m not sure what “balancing America’s suspicious stance on Iran” does to offset any of that. Are we talking about suspicions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or suspicions that they can’t be trusted with them? Where does disarmament fit in?
Auto emissions standards for new cars in China are at what will be Clifornia’s level in 2020.
try this too.
Ah yes Seth, how could one forget the “Model Village Project”, which for some reason reminds me of a similar project in medieval Russia.
As for the auto emissions, I’m tempted to rely on outcomes rather than “glorious comrade leader declares clean air for all in five year plan” style propaganda releases. Here are the outcomes:
“Fuel consumption of China’s auto products is 10-30 percent higher than comparable products from overseas. The emission of pollutants from automobiles made in China is about 15-20 times greater than comparable foreign vehicles.”
You’ll want to remember that one of the key aspects of that whole “not a free country” thing is that you can’t believe everything they say. I don’t doubt you remember that in relation to US government press-releases, so why the free pass for the People’s Daily?
In response to sg’s comments on Chomsky’s views on the responsibilities of US academics: I note that the explicit reasoning behind Chomsky’s focus on US wrongdoing is that he, as an American, should criticise his own country and let others criticise theirs. This division of labour appears to have broken down a little in respect of, well, almost every other country in the world, and particularly in relation to China.
“Ah yes Seth, how could one forget the “Model Village Project”, ”
What an asshole.
The woman behind those projects lives in NY. I met her years ago. She’s no more cynical about China than she is about the US. But yes, the government of China is more serious than the Bush administration, in almost every way. They’re scared about the environmental situation. Bush doesn’t give a shit.
I’m not defending the PRC from anything other than cheap generalizations.
Paul, I think trying to make a nation wholly good or wholly bad is a habit that has come out of WWII and the Cold War, but that really doesn’t fit most nations or situations. I think that in the multipolar world, one can have a self-interested, even evil motive for checking an action by another nation that should – from the point of view of justice – be checked. Environmentally – China is in a place where, on the one hand, it is tempting to shuffle costs onto the environment to grow – like the soviet union did, or like the U.S. did unthinkingly until the seventies – but, on the other hand, it has the most to lose too. I can’t imagine that the Chinese leadership dreams of a china in which each person uses as much energy, on average, as each american – I think they know they can’t afford that system. Again, I don’t think this is cause the Chinese leadership is good, but they might be in a situation where they have to opt for the good, defined as the more environmentally responsible. Same with India.
I think these are topics that make the multipolar world worth looking at. At the same time – paradoxically – I think the international system is crazy in trying to enforce a uniform set of rules regardless of geography or level of development. I think Jeff Faux is totally right to emphasize that, much more than China, the U.S. should be concentrating on Mexico, even to the extend of trading privileges that would cut down the percentage growth in trade with China and shift trade advantages to Mexico. In the same way, I think the people in the EU countries are right to want to limit the growth of the EU. I don’t take the multipolar world as a synonym for the fading away of the nation.
Henry you said
which might as well just be “I have no principled objection to spreading starvation and sickness if it will make people in other countries think just like me”.
Exactly how is this different to the neo-con model of spreading democracy?
But he has a principled objection to even an academic boycott of Israel even though Israel can “never be a full democracy” as I’ve been hearing it argued for years bcause of the need for a jewish state.
That argument comes from its defenders
sg – come off it. If you want to fight it out over who gets third prize in a schoolboy debating competition, I could just as easily accuse you of having no principled objection to millions of people being killed or dying of starvation thanks to their own leaders – as long as it’s their own dictators who are doing it to them. Not to mention your presumed oppposition to sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa.
And seth – even by your own ever decreasing standards of incoherent argumentation and straw-man bashing, this is a fatuous claim. My objections to the academic boycott of Israel were and are pragmatic – they don’t hurt the people who are actually carrying out the building of settlements etc. Go back and read the post. Properly, this time. And while you’re at it, perhaps you can start to boycott yourself (or tell your customers that they should boycott you), as you are a US-based ‘artist’ who clearly hasn’t done enough to stop the Bush administration launching its war. By the standards you’re setting, you clearly are responsible – and deserve to shoulder your full share of the blame. Go to it!
Assuming that the thread is not dead already, I’d point out that referring to Cuba and China in abstract terms i.e. in the way it is being done here, as if they were two comparable “odious regimes” which America and/or the West have just happened—by some unexplained historical vagary—to approach differently, is glaringly disingenuous.
Cuba was a de facto American protectorate that fell into the sphere of influence of its biggest rival. The punitive character of the trade embargo and the consensus around it can only be fully understood against that backdrop. At the height of McCarthyite lunacy and hubris there was some talk of “having lost China” to the red hordes, but never during its long period of weakness in the 19th and early 20th century was China as closely tethered to the US as Cuba.
I’m pointing out the obvious, yet again. But it’s funny that nobody mentions that.
In more general terms, it is to be noted that the extension of political asylum to dissidents from other countries has traditionally been the prime tool used by sovereign states to indicate to other sovereign states that they are deemed to be unsavoury. It was not just a Cold War thing, e.g. the Mexicans received a lot of refugees of the Spanish Civil War and nobody holds it against them in Spain today.
Other stuff was (is) more paternalistic in tone and was (is) reserved for the swarthies.
Assuming that you’re just a soul whose intentions are good, the provision or withdrawal of aid are not necessarily illegitimate tools. Aid. Trade is a more complicated matter altogether.
BTW, shouldn’t those Chinese labour standards be ideally discussed at the WTO, rather than in the morally clear (nay, crystalline), bilateral fashion that seems to be assumed here?
Soru makes a very important point: a multipolar world order is fraught with dangers. But it is going to happen (or it’s already happening, even) at any rate. I guess that re-establishing prudence and the search for stability—no more “destructive chaos”—as guiding principles of international politics would be a good idea. Giving to all important players a voice in international fora—said fora would have to matter two shits—- wouldn’t hurt. Insisting on stronger and more accountable international financial institutions would be necessary too.
That’s all terribly generic, simplistic stuff, of course. But we’re still gazing at the mess which the Bushite rampage is leaving.
This would be bound to have some influence, however modest, on China’s internal political evolution. I can imagine that the development of a civil society in the Middle Kingdom could be hampered by the fact of always having been at war with Oceania…
I’d also like to give props to abb1 for being a consistently entertaining poster.
And what’s with this disdain for trolls? Aren’t we entitled to our mountain caves, to the occasional morsel of mucilaginous abuse? “Good” trolling i.e. covering oneself in shit for one’s own and other people’s entertainment, is a fine art indeed and the only creative endeavour I’m capable of.
“as you are a US-based ‘artist’ who clearly hasn’t done enough to stop the Bush administration launching its war.”
Oh lovely. I’m a citizen just like any other. I argue and I vote, and I’ve marched and will again. I have an FBI file, thanks to my parents, and I’ve been a tradesman not an academic for my adult life (not art but construction work.) Now I’m an importer, among other things, with a hobby.
You banned Abb1 because he pisses you off, but you want to argue that you did so for reasons objectively beyond reproach. People don’t buy it and that bothers you. Like DeLong, you want to be part of the “reality based community” that has never and will never exist. You have biases like everyone. You slip from “reason” to your definition of “reasonableness” without noting the difference. You have a variety of Lieberman’s Disease and rather than trying to understand why it’s so common, (it’s epidemic these days) you pretend you’re immune as Lieberman does. But no one is. You protest too much, that’s why some people think you’re American.
That applies to your arguments on Israel as well. I counted 5 posts at CT on the boycott. Read the comments on the others.
The largest obstacles to a boycott are the strong professional and social connections between Israeli and western academics:
social proximity. You know the concept.
You accuse me of oversimplifying by oversimplifying my arguments. You accuse me of making intellectually vulgar arguments by resorting to them.
John Q, you’re right that I missed some. For one, SA definetly belongs in there. Greece democratized in the early 70’s so it slipped my mind. Brazil went back and forth but I don’t think there was a significant level of US involvment there. Ditto for Turkey (we’re not talking Truman here). But maybe. On the other hand I don’t think you can lay the blame for Franco and Salazar at the US’ feet (France and England if anything). However even if you add all those in, the statement to which I was responding:
the US has propped up plenty of nasty dictators, in the 70’s that number greatly outnumbered those supported by the USSR
is still blatantly false. More to the point “propped up” implies that the regime in question would not have been able to survive without substantial US aid, without substantial use of US military force, or the threat there of. Otherwise the definition is being stretched to the tautological point where any non-leftist regimes is de facto being “propped up” by US.
I think Shah’s Iran, Guatemala, SA, possibly S. Korea qualify for “propped up”. Later maybe Grenada. But Pinochet, Argentinian and Paraguyan Juntas, Turkish generals, Greek colonels (again we’re not talking about Truman), Franco, Salazar and most of the others ran the show on their own while the US turned a blind eye (this is related to the point raised above about whether trade and aid sanctions are legitimate ways of excercising pressure). When these dictatorships fell there was no US tanks in the streets of Buenos Aires or Athens. The US was perfectly happy to work with democracies which replaced right wing dictatorships as long as these democracies were not trying to become clients of Moscow.
On the other side of the ledger you got Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, etc. (yes I know all those weren’t in the 70’s. But the “threat there of” definetly was). Quite obviously, when the USSR fell it took pretty much the whole show down with it (some exceptions like Cuba aside) which very strongly suggests that these regimes were “propped up” rather than USSR merely turning a blind eye. Of course this is just plain common sense and knowledge.
The bottomline in regards to other posters on this thread is that if you seriously think that during the Cold War US was the bad guy, or “just as bad as USSR” you’ve got serious problems, willful ignorance being the least of them. Civility precludes me from enumerating others. (Note this isn’t addressed to John Q)
Same thing, to a lesser degree, applies to people who view the present situation with China and US in an analogous way.
Radek, your argument doesn’t make much sense. Just as bad is relative to … what? If you lived in Brazil – and here is the tape showing LBJ’s complicity in the coup that overthrew Brazil’s democratically elected government in 1964 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/ – you’d have every reason to think the U.S. was worse. If you lived in Prague, you’d have every reason to think the U.S. was better. But of course it isn’t even that simple – the rich in Brazil loved the Americans, the communist bureaucracy in Czechoslovakia loved the Russians, etc. The better or worse argument can’t be relative to such a universal standard that it includes nobody, and if it is to a statistical standard in which you add up countries and casualties (oh, we overthrew less democracies! we are the winner!), then of course we get into questions of governance – like who votes on this standard? Who gave LBJ the right to decide he’d sacrifice a few thousand Brazillian lives in the noble struggle against communism – or the tens of thousands of lives in Columbia, a country which has rightwing paramilitaries with whom the U.S. has been involved since the fifties? I don’t think they had a vote on it in Brazil. I don’t think they even voted on it in the U.S.A.
The level of abstraction of these arguments is a symptom of their futility. List of countries and casualties counts disguise the question, why, making it appear some kind of chess game. In reality, American self interest in Latin America was supporting coups and overthrows long before the communists – there was a whole freebooter culture in the 1800s – and the threat of communism was, when looked at in terms of time and place, most often the threat of unionizing a severely harrassed and underpaid work force (as for instance in Guatamala in 1956) or other threats to American investment.
If American hyperpower is nearing the end of its cycle, if there is a multipolar world coming, lets try to avoid the Manichean rhetoric that killed so many people the last time.
Roger, sure, 1964. Also I do agree that making these kinds of lists disguises these questions, hence the second part of my post. I’ll stick by my assertion however that USSR was worse on pretty much any serious scale one can establish.
Also, for what it’s worth here’s Wiki
Recently declassified CIA documents provide evidence that not only was there U.S. knowledge of the coup even prior to its occurrence, but also that the U.S. positioned military ships off the coast of Brazil ready to engage in the coup if the Brazilian military found itself in need of support in a program called Operation Brother Sam. Such support was not needed as the military had little difficulty in ousting Goulart on its own. [1] [2] Extensive preparations by CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had included training of Brazilian right-wing officers at the School of the Americas, and promises of military equipment and funding post-coup. Additionally, the CIA had funneled money into several hundred anti-Goulart political candidates beginning as early as 1962. Audio tapes of presidential meetings during the administration of John F. Kennedy show that Kennedy began planning for such a coup by mid-1962.[3]
Ironically, the military junta would eventually enter into talks with the Soviet Union concerning possible plans to improve Brazil’s infrastructure in exchange for preferential relations.
The two sentences I highlighted are pretty much the reason why I was weary of including 1970’s Brazil in the list of US-”propped up” regimes. And yes, I’ve read other sources than Wiki.
As an additional aside, I have no problem with a multipolar world. But I think it’s important to ask what kind of a multipolar world. If Europe decided to up its military spending, coordinate its members and act as a balance to US interests that might (probably would) be a positive development for the world as a whole though it may hurt narrowly defined US interests. I even wouldn’t be that bothered if Japan shed off its pacifism and decided to play more of a role. But Europe and Japan are democratic, fairly non-belligerent states with a good record on human rights (again Europe, post Colonial period). China is a different story.
Henry