China, Japan, Taiwan

Of course, China could still be “the bad guy” AND the U.S. might have less than perfect motives for acting the way it does towards China. These two things are not mutually exclusive.*
* I have committed the cardinal sin of informed comment and not actually read either of the two pieces linked to.

Both pieces are good — and I’m not as unsympathetic to Chirac’s notion of arming China with our technology rather than theirs (though they will soon enough have their own, regardless). The Johnson piece is best, however, because it paints the best picture of the situation.

Most important, to my mind, is Ash’s point that Iraq is a sideshow to the “China Problem” for the US and European economies. My grandfather (recently deceased) first went to China in the early 80s to teach graduate-level economics and continued to go back nearly every year until his last trip there in 2004. What he saw, and what I have learned over the course of two decades’ conversation with him, friends who’ve worked in China, and with Chinese, is that–barring major political catastrophe with peasants/itinerant working class (and there are more un- or underemployed Chinese than there are workers in the US)– China will quite easily be the superpower of the 21st century and that their emergence as such a power will have grave consquences for our environment, our economy (think oil is expensive now? just wait)and these haven’t even started to register in our political conversation–to our detriment.

There are difficult human rights issues in China, and the Taiwan problem is exceptionally sticky, but the fact that the US has been so stupid as to waste several hundred billions of dollars and almost all of our political credibility on Iraq has made it all but impossible for us to gain traction on China–and to use what force (military, economic, political, moral) we do have to make a reasonable transition to the Chinese Century.

Right away I’m worried and offended by what appears to be Chalmers’ acceptance of China’s view of Taiwan as a “breakaway province.” I’m also not sure where he gets the idea that “the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration.” I think he’s more correct in his assessment that the December 11

(Ack. Ignore my previous comment. I hit “Post” by accident.)

Right away I’m worried and offended by what appears to be Johnson’s acceptance of China’s view of Taiwan as a “breakaway province.” I’m also not sure where he gets the idea that “the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration.” I think that the the results of the December 11 legislative elections represented a desire to maintain the status quo rather than a desire to negotiate away the hard-fought freedoms that the Taiwanese people have gained over the years. No one I know here is eager to “reunify” with China and most people here don’t trust the PRC government (they just need to look at the situation in Hong Kong to see how “one country, two systems” has been carried out in practice).

I’m not a Bush fan in the least, but I agree with the administration that China’s “anti-separatist” law is a step in the wrong direction in terms of a peaceful end to hostilities between the two sides. Johnson also seems to have forgotten that the U.S. has a 25 year-old Taiwan Relations Act which states that it is U.S. policy “to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States”.

The assumption in the essay is that we don’t want China to be a rich and successful country. That is ridiculous. We don’t want China to be a militarily successful Communist or otherwise totalitarian country.

True. The only totalitarian countries we will tolerate are the ones that are militarily dependent on us.

It feels like your policy analysis is missing something. If I could only remember about the USSR I might be able to respond.

Many of our problems with India were a function of our problems with the USSR as expressed with playing China off of the USSR. Ignoring the USSR in terms of international relations in the 1950-1990 period is to fail to bother with useful analysis. But if US bashing makes you feel good, and it clearly does, have at it.

“In fact, as the US leaders are bestowing ‘God’s gift to humanity’, their rhetoric sounds much more totalitarian than anything I hear from China.”

Ok, run with the China is nicer than the US game. Whatever. China is much less authoritarian than the US. Of course. Brilliant. Funny that we are having this discussion on the internet–uncensored in the US, not so in China. But I suppose we should ignore that.

I think authoritarian and deeply socialist (with a strong acknowledgement of their terrible human rights record) would be an accurate depiction of China… and no question, the US should be pressing them on labor, environment, human rights, and Taiwan (not to mention, say, upholding the Basic Agreement). The problem is, the right-wingers who want to hold China’s feet to the fire are kettles calling the pot black.

I think the points about US hegemony bear some merit: we’ve got a vastly worse record over last hundred years on this matter than China concerning other nations (while NOTHING in our country approaches devastation of 50s famines and 60s cultural revolution).

No need to fantasize about China to see that they’re going to bring a lot of pressure to bear on the US, on their part… and if we’re in a “Sputnik” moment now (and we are: names, anyone?), we should realize that China’s power will dwarf the Soviet Union’s–nor will what power it does have be based on a sham economy (just the interest on our debt to them runs to $25B/year and we’re in to them for fully 6% of our GDP, and growing).

If you were to run down the list of how the Chinese red government has offended Western values we’d be here all day. We could start with no appeals executions where the family of the criminal is charged the price of the bullet to retrieve the body (after its organs have been harvested of course). We could then move to Tibet where Tibetans are now a small minority to ethnic Chinese. Where Tibetan culture has been destroyed and Tibetan nuns go to jail for decades for praying in public. We won’t even mention the Tibetan slave camps. Of course we could then move to the capital of our beloved, much better than the US, China and wonder at the bureaucratic skill it takes to lock up millions of homeless and unemployed migrants into hastily put together prisons so that the streets of Beijing will be clean of human refuse every time there is a large international meeting there. We might even cover the military conflicts between China and Vietnam based over oil (no blood for oil, right?). But then we could end on Taiwan. Where simply for the sake of national pride, China is building up huge military power in an effort to subjugate or destroy what has to be one of the most Democratic countries on Earth. Nice.

Abb1 you are right. China is awesome and the US sucks. I think it was charging the families of executed prisoners the price of the bullet in order to reclaim their bodies that won me over.

And who in their right mind would want to contain this type of brutal monstrosity of a government? The US is absolutely insane to try to stop them. They rule. Shooting prisoners without appeals in insanely corrupt courts, that is AWESOME! Yeah China!

1. I don’t live in the U.S.
2. My politics are left-liberal.
3. I abhor Bush and most of his politics (in particular the domestic variety and how it affects his international policy).

Yet…

4. American international hegemony is clearly preferable to anything (given current circumstances in Beijing) that might emerge from a similarly dominant China.

P.S. Both my parents were born in China and most of my family still live there.

“Johnson also seems to have forgotten that the U.S. has a 25 year-old Taiwan Relations Act”

I rather doubt he did. The agreements that normalized relations with China all re-affirmed US recognition of Taiwan as part of one China (it just moved the recognized capital from Taiwan to Bejing) in 1972 and again in 1982, and the 1979 Helms-Kennedy TRA didn’t change that, it just lead to an arms build up on both sides.

I don’t see any reason for the US to do anything to change the status quo, independence escalates the confrontation and re-unification would threaten Taiwan’s political autonomy. If the US wants to improve human rights and democratic conditions in the region it could just reintroduce enforcement mechanisms for labour and human rights into the various trade bodies, never mind reverse its own slide backwards on those fronts.

Personally, I am tremendously excited to see what the brilliant millenia-old Chinese civilization will bring forth in the 21st century now that its creative energies are increasingly liberated from autocratic and oppressive government.

Time for an anecdote that comfirms my pre-existent beliefs.

A friend studied chinese, in china, has ties to china, goes to china, all that. He sez :

To the chinese, europe and the u.s. are already the midgets of the future. They don’t like us too much neither, specially the u.s. The past influence of european/u.s. power on their lifes is a most unfortunate aside of the fa

“The big point everyone is missing about this piece is that the chinese economy is not yet nearly as big as Mr Johnson makes it out to be, and that the Chinese influence is not yet nearly as big as either Japan’s or the US is.”

Actually, I would argue that we are underestimating China… it doesn’t take very much time with a napkin sketching out relative populations, productivity rates, resource-consumption, and so on to realize that unless a) the Chinese are utterly inept or b) suffer a huge catastrophe they are going to dominate the 21st C. economically (and, I would add, could do so in a way that is disastrous merely because of the scale to which they would grow). I see claims all the time that the Chinese can’t innovate (hint: they’re one of the fastest growing scientific communities in the world, both in terms of papers and patents, along with India and Iran) and that we’ll be OK here in the US because of our “innovation economy.” Crap. Our education system in the country sucks; the Chinese have a culture of ass-busting academic bureaucrats going back to when Europeans were beating each other with sticks. Compare our savings (read: investment) rate with China’s… you can go down the list and see a lot of pretty damning comparisons.

Personally, I am tremendously excited to see what the brilliant millenia-old Chinese civilization will bring forth in the 21st century now that its creative energies are increasingly liberated from autocratic and oppressive government.

It seems to me that supporting at least some form of Taiwanese autonomy is an excellent way of realizing this goal.

“the chinese economy is not yet nearly as big as Mr Johnson makes it out to be”

In terms of purchase power parity China’s gross GDP already it ranks second, they rank something like 94th per-capita. As a nation they’ve about caught up with Europe and the US and if and when they do they’ll have plenty further to grow.

“the Chinese were banging sticks together when the Europeans were discovering calculus”

Trolling bollocks.

“I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation
and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two
extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tshina (as they call it),
which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth.” –Leibniz, co-inventor of infinitesimal calculus.

That’s not trolling bullocks buermann, I was sardonically echoing Joel, pay attention please.
Purchasing Power is only how big China’s economy is to China, not how big China’s economy is to the rest of us. My point is only that Mr Johnson is acting as if China is a super power today, which it is not.

Let’s play a game, McManama. Let’s look at the list of Nobel Prize winners in physics say (because that’s the field I’m most familiar with) at the start of the 20th century. It’s Europe, Europe, Europe until 1907. Then Europe, Europe, Europe until 1923. Then Europe in 1927, then Europe until 1936.
The point is that, at that stage, when it was already obvious to anyone with eyes that the US was a giant, the society was still ramping up and sorting itself out.

It seems foolish to complain about the lack of Chinese scientific Nobel prizes at this point; the larger issue is what direction do the signs point. Both SARS and the rice genome were sequenced in China. A lot of applied solid state science (the sort of stuff that leads to better lasers, better disk drives and so on) is being done there. Basically the same pattern as Japan followed, and only an ignorant bigot (ie someone like you) would claim that Japan is not now doing interesting work in fundamental science.

Of course there are obstacles in the way of China. Like the US in the past, they face the sorts of problems that resulted in the creation in the US of the FDA or the EPA. Like the US in the past they currently live in an social-cultural-political environment that believes in progress and that chooses doers and enterprises over individuals, sentiment and the past. And, like the US in the 1800s and early 1900s, this is going to lead to a whole lot of mangled bodies, ruined lives and unhappiness for some, and a whole lot more wealth and choices for most.

Really the only difference, and the only concern, is the question of governance. The US system, in the end, survived its traumas, but it took the Civil War to do so, and the problem they were trying to solve was made a whole lot easier by the fact that they simply stole from and wiped out Native Americans and Mexicans as convenient. (cf Tibet/Taiwan). The Chinese leadership are some of the smartest politicians on the planet; they are well aware of the arc of history for the US, for Europe, for Russia, for Latin America and so on. They may well screw up, but, trying to juggle an awful lot of balls in the air at once to keep China going forward while not exploding from internal unrest, they have done astonishingly well so far.

Mr Handley, Why did you call me a bigot? I know a lot about research in Japan, I earned my Masters at Tokyo Institute of Technology. I speak Japanese fluently. I lived in China for three years. I speak Chinese semi-fluently. I know a lot about east asian issues since I lived there for seven years. I just believe that China is overhyped and I expect it’s economic growth to slow.
I think that you are ignorant to insult people you have never met and know nothing about.

People always like to predict the future by continuing straight lines (or even continuing exponential curves) into the future. This tends to ignore feedback mechanisms and non-linearity.

China’s economic expanision is creating large disparity between rich and poor; at some point this might threaten social cohesion. China’s expansion is largely being funded by U.S. consumers. A lot of people point out the ill effects on the U.S. and how this can’t go on forever; well it can’t go on forever for China either. China’s demographics – because of its one-child policy – will make it, like Japan, a seriously old society by (?) mid-Century. (I’m not an economist, but it seems that something of China’s economic expanision can be explained by its low investment in the future by not having enough kids. Lots of workers, no kids.) China will have a lot of problems ahead to continue as it has done, not least of all that if its economy continues to grow as it has, there may not be enough oil around (which, of course, will be bad for all other economies…)

Also, I’m firmly of the belief that, while totalitarian governments can do better than democratic governments in the short-term, in the long-term they should do more poorly. A totalitarian government may get “lucky” and follow a policy which happens to be best, but eventually the mandarins will make a mistake and, because they cannot be booted out of office, commit the most basic human error – of not admitting a mistake and just compounding it. So either China will become non-threatening because it is less totalitarian, or it should stumble.

Andrew Boucher wrote: “So either China will become non-threatening because it is less totalitarian, or it should stumble.”

Well, yes — I think that’s generally true. The question is: to what extent can China be considered Totalitarian (as opposed to authoritarian, and what degree/consequence at that), and what is the sustainable trend there? No doubt, that’s a BIG question (especially concerning, as I noted earlier, peasant/itinerant worker class).

Andrew McNamana: I’m not concerned to call you a racist–though I did put in the bit about sticks to counter, proleptically, the “Chinese can’t innovate like us,” a sentiment I gather you share: they’re certainly capable of it. They’re also capable, as my own brief experience with a joint-venture in early 90s showed me, and many friends have relayed in their China experience, of exceptionally comic lassitude/disaster-making face-saving behavior (“Will that order be done?” “No problem!” “Is that order done?” “No problem!” “No–no order IS problem.” “No, no order not problem–make X unhappy IS problem,” where X is someone on our side and Y is now angry customer.)

I’m not concerned that the US is going to become a third world country (though, there, Buffet’s shantytown economy isn’t a bad metaphor for our direction), but rather with a) the environment and b) the US middle class’s further downfall as China (and the rest of our global competitors) continue to get better and better at doing both basic and value-added labor (and we become, relatively-speaking, more and more unhealthy, uneducated, etc–also read: less productive).

I’m not A. Sen, but I think if you look at worldwide population/resource/geography distribution, and have any reason to think that humans are all more-or-less equally capable by the billions, you have to be concerned with how both global economy gets distributed and the attendant resource consumption as it grows to US-like rates–as well as concerned by the concommitant trends in the US regarding education, health care, aging, debt, etcetera.

With respect to China, if China only grows at a 7-percent rate to our 4-percent, it will surpass us in about 60 years… if they continue at their 9.5 rate, it will be in 35. Regardless of the rate at which this happens, they ARE four times larger than US in population: do we really expect, ad infinitum, to remain four times more productive (assuming EQUAL economies)–or even, as US population grows (and it should, relative to China, given our respective geographic holding-capacity), will we remain even twice as productive? What if the US continues with its debt and wars and educational decline and becomes less productive? What does global pollution/energy problem look like if China is even, say, 50-percent the size of the US–and India 25-percent?

The massive structural pressures put on the US from the answers to these questions dwarfs the Iraq problem, and even, per the original article that opened this thread, the military problem concerning China. How many MiGs they have or whether they develop a carrier-based navy seem like pale questions compared to “What does world oil consumption look like when China achieves economic parity with US?”

It’s grossly wrong to call the current PRC government Totalitarian. Back in Mao’s day? More or less all aspects of life were supposed to conform to or serve Party purposes. Nowadays, there are substantial real personal freedoms in China. It’s still very authoritarian, corrupt and undemocratic. Nationalist-Authoritarian would seem an apt description.

It’s also grossly wrong to call what’s happening there a free market economy, even in those sectors which are not still nationalized. Private property does not a free market make. It does make for crony capitalism, which is private profits ensured by unfree markets.

Really, the PRC seems to have wandered from Communism into a kind of non-explicit low-grade Fascism. Authoritarian, collectivist/communitarian, nationalist, moderately private propertyish and intensely crony capitalist. (People think that the Fascists and Nazis were free marketeers, but they weren’t, not by a long shot. They weren’t even that keen on preserving private property.)

DeadHorseBeater is right – more of less. Except that their economic system is sort of a free market, limited free market with a certain set of rules, like any free market system. And the thing is that authoritarian capitalism that exists in China is much more effective as an economic system than social democracies that exist in the US and Europe.

Democracy is incompatable with effective capitalist system, because people will inevitably vote themselves a safety net and it weakens the economic engine.

As long as China has authoritarian capitalism – it’s a threat to the US economic domination.

The US should try to develop a more authoritarian system for itself or democratize China or both.

You know, the Chinese are such an authoritarian government that the U.S. should definitely not allow them to buy our t notes.

Thanks, Roger; that needed saying. The highminded grandstanding about China’s human rights records would be more convincing if it weren’t for the fact that they’re basically subsidizing our own fiscal irresponsibility.

I sorry I called you ignorant and a bigot I get bothered by these flame wars for some reason. (-_-,)

Back to my point about China’s economy when it grows 10% that would be $140 billion to the world’s growth, not 10% of $5.7 trillion (PPP GDP). The difference between these numbers is $430 billion or about the size of Spain’s economy. If the US grows 3% that is $330 billion to the world’s growth. That’s why purchasing power is only important to the Chinese. It’s not important to world economic growth which is what people outside of China care about. How much a meal in a restaurant in Guangzhou costs or how much a flat is in Nanjing shouldn’t be important to people who don’t live there.

That’s all. Sorry if I offended anybody.

This may be a bit off-topic, but there is a must-read critique of Garton Ash’s project for those interested here.

After some time, I think I now have a better idea why I think the pessimists are wrong.

(1) “Exponential growth can’t last forever.” True, but, as the examples of Japan/South Korea/Taiwan show us, it can last for a long time — long enough.

(2) “An authoritarian regime is bad for the economy.” As a blanket statement this is clearly wrong. There are authoritarian regimes that are economic disasters (Zimbabwe, Myanmar, maybe — not clear yet — Venezuela). There are also those that have done reasonably well (Indonesia, Malaysia, white South Africa) to very well (South Korea, Taiwan). It may perhaps be true that, averaged over all cases, blah blah, democracy does better, but that’s a very different statement. Given the evidence so far, China looks a lot more like South Korea/Taiwan than it looks like Myanmar.

(3) “All hell will break loose as the country gets richer/as a result of uneven wealth distribution”. This one is more problematic — as I have repeatedly stressed, the question is governance. However, on the positive side we have the following points
* Taiwan is perhaps the closest model we have to China, and they made the transition OK (bloodily, but not as bloodily as South Korea and, as these things go, pretty well). The point is that it would seem, a priori, unreasonable to argue that there is something in “Chinese character” that is hostile to rule of law or that accepts and encourages corruption.
* The biggest problem with a dictatorship giving up power is the fear of those at the top of retribution. As far as I can tell, there’s no long much of anyone in power in China who can be considered a bona fide war criminal Pol Pot/Milosevic type, so this fear for one’s life is not an issue. (Sure Hu Jintao has some pretty nasty marks against his name for Tibet but, as I have pointed out earlier, sadly this is analogous to the US behavior against native Americans, behavior that didn’t seem to much dent the political popularity of people like Andrew Jackson.)
So, I suspect, like the Soviet Union and like white South Africa, the issue of democracy will hinge on the wealth and comfort of those in power now — at some point they will make the calculation that leaving power with at least some of their goodies and retiring comfortably will be more pleasant than the discomfort and deprivation of a sagging economy and sullen undeclared civil war.