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Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won't Fix America’s Economy
American society is angrier, more fragmented, and more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. We harbor deep insecurities about our economic future, our place in the world, our response to terrorism, and our deeply dysfunctional government. Over the next several years, Benjamin Shobert says, these four insecurities will be perverted and projected onto China in an attempt to shift blame for errors entirely of our own making. These misdirections will be satisfying in the short term but will eventually destabilize the global world that businesses, consumers, and governments have taken for granted for the last forty years and will usher in an age of geopolitical uncertainty characterized by regional conflict and increasing economic dislocation.
Shobert, a senior associate at the National Bureau of Asian Research, explores how America’s attitudes toward China have changed and how our economic anxieties and political dysfunction have laid the foundation for turning our collective frustrations away from acknowledging the consequences of our own poor decisions. Shobert argues that unless we address these problems, a disastrous chapter in American life is right around the corner, one in which Americans will decide that conflict with China is the only sensible option. After framing how the American public thinks about China, Shobert offers two alternative paths forward. He proposes steps that businesses, governments, and individuals can take to potentially stop and reverse America’s path to a dystopian future.
Shobert, a senior associate at the National Bureau of Asian Research, explores how America’s attitudes toward China have changed and how our economic anxieties and political dysfunction have laid the foundation for turning our collective frustrations away from acknowledging the consequences of our own poor decisions. Shobert argues that unless we address these problems, a disastrous chapter in American life is right around the corner, one in which Americans will decide that conflict with China is the only sensible option. After framing how the American public thinks about China, Shobert offers two alternative paths forward. He proposes steps that businesses, governments, and individuals can take to potentially stop and reverse America’s path to a dystopian future.
- GenresChina
232 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2018
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May 27, 2020Blaming China: I’m not convinced we are.
This book is part narrative and part monition, a mixed bag, but my chief criticism is the blame and outright ignorance he supposes to a citizenry. It is typically American to express the maxim “there are two sides to every story” and allow the other side to be heard. This implies a good measure of introspection and sense of fairness Benjamin Shobert fails to credit the Americans.
As to economics:
“We now feel China has been the main beneficiary of our policies since the peace dividend; however it is worth considering that our overall strategy was too heavily weighted toward policies that would help China and too lightly weighted toward those matters within our own country that would be shaped by China’s presence in the globalized economy” (p. 66), and
“the simple reality is that China is where it is today in no small part because it so closely followed the policies we asked it to” (p. 66). I would think there is little to disagree with here. None deny the spectacular economic boom of the PRC nor deny that in particular US good intentions and co-operation, and businesses pixelated by the promise of a huge, underdeveloped market as well as a ready source of low-cost supply, aided such boom. This is well-recounted in the book.
Characterizing pros and contras towards the PRC as Panda Huggers and Dragon Slayers makes a simple dichotomy but nevertheless, the sole result is this:
“One of the greatest miscalculations of our generation was that free trade, economic growth and the widespread adoption of the internet in China would produce a desire for more political freedoms. Instead, the PRC’s rising affluence has served to promote confidence in its own authoritarian political system and state-directed capitalism, and bolstered its will to ever more aggressively assert its values and abroad” (Spectator [USA edition], 12 October 2019).
“For many Dragon Slayers, the idea that China is ruled by despots fundamentally hostile to American ideals is already taken as truth” (p. 119); surely this is come real. Since Xi Jinping has become paramount leader and Xi Jinping Thought elevated to incorporation into all aspects of daily life, the term “despot” is not misplaced; his public pronouncements and those directed by the narrow camarilla around him are fundamentally hostile to American ideals. Recognizing so is not packaging up “America’s cumulative nebulous insecurities... and redirected toward another country that represents an economy, political system, and near-peer military power that is competitive with America” (p.140); it is recognizing the nature of the PRC under the CCP.
“America may well find itself at odds with Chinese power, but whether or not such a moment escalates into global war may have more to do with American political dysfunction than real aggression on the part of China” (p. 142). A big “if” but convenient to caricature Trump. As to Chinese aggression, “Beijing knew that each of these three countries (Russia, Japan, and the newly reunited Korea) has wronged it in the past, and as such a newly confident Chinese middle class was comfortable pushing around countries that had formerly been hostile to it” (p. 162). You think that as America is constantly vilified by a Party and state-sponsored news, the moral bar lowered again and again, that real aggression by the PRC is a less likely casus belli than American political dysfunction and popular dismay? Ya’ really think so? In 2019 Reporters Without Borders ranked China 177th “in a survey of 180 countries with respect to media independence, media pluralism and respect for the safety and freedom of journalists”. One of the most controlled and uninformed societies in the world yet increasingly capable of exercising dominance abroad will ignore its carefully-tended litany of wrongs and humiliations without acting for redress?
“China will get older faster than any other rising power in the history of the world... China faces a serious problem relative to its aging population. Commonly referred to as the 4:2:1 problem, this denotes that each working Chinese adult must care for his or her two parents and their four grandparents” (p. 49), and so “China will grow old before it grows rich”. Predictions that the PRC’s trajectory continues ever onward and upward are just that, predictions, not expectations. If “China’s economic growth remains the primary vehicle of its (the CCP) legitimacy” (p.45) then the future is wobbly at best and dangerous as the PRC in traditional style looks to outside enemies and foreign threats. The regime is strengthening by casting the USA as the singular villanous threat which can only be countered by a united China under the leadership of the CCP. Those occasioned howls of discontent over local incidents quickly scrubbed from social media are as whimpers in the wilderness. COVID-19 gives example: Most mainland Chinese and many Chinese in SEA and recent mainland Chinese immigrants wholly maintain this virus originated in the USA, the situation in the PRC was heroically contained then reversed by the CCP under the personal supervision of Xi Jinping, and China has selflessly, charitably and massively given material substance and medical aid to a great number of countries as testified by grateful foreigners on WeChat, in stark contrast to the inept and selfish USA. Relentlessly vilifying the USA lowers the moral bar for any action the CCP calculates. And most mainland Chinese and not a few others say 活该, “serves them right”.
The Thucydides Trap is misrepresented by casting the US as the challenger. Benjamin Shobert claims, “it is easy to miss the point of his analysis: not that conflict is inevitable but that it is only avoidable when the challenger (in today’s world, the United States - my emphasis) is willing to make difficult changes that reflect the new reality” (p. 168). The Trap describes the danger of open warfare when a rising power rivals a ruling power, as shown in 12 of 16 cases over the last 500 years. Of the 12 examples many show that the rising power initiated the war; casting the US as the challenger and so becomes the antagonist most likely to initiate war is simply wrong. For instance, the rising power challenged the seemingly dominant power in the Franco-Prussian War, and the rising power Japan twice in 40 years initiated war against the ruling power Russia and then against the US.
Now comes the Beast. “The Trump administration is a proxy for something much worse yet to come: a willingness of the American people to turn their backs on every tradition, every norm, and every political principle in the pursuit of someone who will tell them how to make their anxieties and insecurities go away, and who can be blamed when these policies fail” (p. 147). Whoa! Such psychoanalysis is far-fetched, claiming Americans are unhappy, unmoored by traditions and norms of support, and so look to vent, to project, the instrument being a demagogue and the object is hating China. Those whose hate of Trump deadens sensibility may not understand but surely those supporting Trump do not see him as a Messiah, The Leader or somesuch that will deliver all from their nation’s woes, but as a President who finally looks to the country and citizens as his primary duty and acts in those interests, and says so through a means and in manner which is coarse, often rude and offensive, but plainly said. “We are much more likely to generate positive outcomes by focusing first and foremost on getting our house in order” (p. 177); I doubt any Trump supporter would find fault with this statement, and his election was its very expression no matter how distasteful to many.
I cannot understand the thread of excuses running throughout the narrative, e.g.
“China’s unwillingness to move faster in the areas of human rights and accommodating dissent is more a function of insecurity over its inability to make the jump from agrarian to modern economy that it is a fundamental predisposition to excluding the average Chinese citizen from the political process” (p 67). This is patently false. The CCP are Bolsheviks, an elite and enlightened cadre forming correct opinion, leading and guiding the masses forward (“Party, government, military, civilian, and academic; east, west, south, north and center, the Party leads everything” - stated by Mao Zedong and repeated by the recent 19th Party Congress) . This notion squares with traditional Chinese governance: Present and traditional governance in China is predicated on the official orthodoxy of the time, and exceptions are invariably regarded as disruptive heresies threatening state-directed order. The Chinese citizen is part of the political process only as a dutiful subject, not an elective being. This is the reality, and wishing otherwise is really wishful thinking. Nevertheless, the condition of human rights or protection of dissenters should not be the driver of Sino-US relations. Surely the US at every opportunity and when politically expedient should support liberal democracy, but working to change any country over in the image of US institutions is foolhardy and resented by those ostensibly picked to be enlightened. Moreover, a free and open society readily exposes the ills and faults of its institutions, and so outsiders see all that with jaundiced eye; asking them to adopt US institutions becomes well-nigh hypocritical as international forums express again and again.
The fundamental tenet of personal relationships in Chinese society is reciprocity; it is that which binds together the all-important “guanxi”, touted even by newbies to the PRC. One can say the CCP had failed to exercise the grace of reciprocity towards US generosity and tolerance, but that is now of little matter as the patience and tolerance afforded the PRC for the last 40-plus years is at an end.
Chapter 5, America’s Economic Security, is the keystone to this book and explicates the basic premise: “The single most satisfying vessel to contain America’s rage and channel our collective economic security will not be technology; it will be a country, a race, a part of the world a long way away, whose differences beg to become caricatures of our own misplaced anger” (p. 80), which statement needs a leap of faith to accept. But, correctly, “... the economic insecurity of the American middle class today reflects long-standing unaddressed issues around rising costs of health care, housing, education, and childcare” (p. 81). Most Americans, judging from their internet comments, would not disagree, but neither do they blame China or any other country for these problems; rather the cause is ineffectual local government, a Congress riven by partisan interests,and the “swamp” that is Washington, D.C. It is a long leap to premise rage will be directed to China or any other outside actor for failures of Americans themselves, but Benjamin Shobert has done just this. He gives Americans short shrift of common sense about local problems, and seems to forget “all politics is local” as famously said Tip O’Neil. Rather, public ire against the PRC is specific, a consequence of 1) ripping-off US industries and technology, 2) constant vitriol which in volume and stridency far outweighs the PRC’s claims of US “China bashing” and “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”, and 3) the nine-dash line making the South China Sea a Chinese lake (first explained as architecture to make safe navigation, then developing “research facilities”, and finally despite Xi Jinping’s promise to President Obama not to militarize the region militarized it was to protect “traditional” Chinese waters from the US Navy now accused in turn of militarizing the region). Moving factories, machinery, and production to the PRC and elsewhere, outsourcing functions to other countries, all are a consequence of globalization, as was the decision to lower costs and increase profits by US corporations whose majority funding lies not through bank loans but with shareholders wanting a return on investment. The US worker understands this and well knows if it were not China, the rising star of the moment, then it is Mexico, Honduras, Bangladesh, Pakistan or elsewhere as shown on the labels of goods he buys. The US public does generally and wrongly assume low wages is the driver putting US workers out of work, and if this were so Bangladesh should be the most industrialized country in the world; instead the fact is, as COVID-19 touched the very nerve of truth, that the major part of the supply chain is already embedded overseas to the extent that divorce is almost impossible. This supply chain stretched outside the US is not peculiarly made in China.
China as an economic actor and the consequence of good intent:
Moreover, “we can now say with confidence that the benefits of globalization accrued more quickly to business than to people” (p. 179). Just so, which further tarnishes the supposed innate good globalization would bestow upon the world.
The book ends with a sincere question: “My question to my fellow Americans is this: will you allow yourselves to be distracted by China, to blame it for problems of your own making, or will you turn your attention to the changes we need to pursue first” (p. 185)?
I agree that the problems are indeed of our own making, for years have lain unaddressed through previous administrations and by a Congress riven by partisan and petty concerns, but however distasteful this President is to many his election is not a choice made by benighted people but an expression to get it right and get it right now. If Benjamin Shobert heartily believes in the American people and institutions to nobly rise to the occasion and do the right thing as he surmises in the closing paragraphs, then I would ask he place less faith in his own valuation of their popular will and election. In other words, no, we the people ain’t stupid.
My closing questions:
Can the US co-exist with a long-term adversary whose interests are often inimical to its own? The Russo-American experience says yes.
Can the US tolerate the rise of other powers of influence? The post-war experience says yes.
Can the US co-operate with a rising economic power or bloc that rivals or could surpass it? The example of the EU and Japan say yes.
Can the US accept a multi-polar world? It already has by acknowledging the limits of what it can do and the profound reluctance among the public for further foreign entanglements. There is a strong and stubborn streak of isolationism in US history and the public which too many critics discount.
Can America forgive and forget? Time and time again
Now let the PRC pose itself these questions and answer.
N.B. “But for Russia to be seen as America’s enemy would require of many partisan Republicans an acknowledgment that Russia acted on their behalf”(p. 140). This book was published before the Mueller Report.
This book is part narrative and part monition, a mixed bag, but my chief criticism is the blame and outright ignorance he supposes to a citizenry. It is typically American to express the maxim “there are two sides to every story” and allow the other side to be heard. This implies a good measure of introspection and sense of fairness Benjamin Shobert fails to credit the Americans.
As to economics:
“We now feel China has been the main beneficiary of our policies since the peace dividend; however it is worth considering that our overall strategy was too heavily weighted toward policies that would help China and too lightly weighted toward those matters within our own country that would be shaped by China’s presence in the globalized economy” (p. 66), and
“the simple reality is that China is where it is today in no small part because it so closely followed the policies we asked it to” (p. 66). I would think there is little to disagree with here. None deny the spectacular economic boom of the PRC nor deny that in particular US good intentions and co-operation, and businesses pixelated by the promise of a huge, underdeveloped market as well as a ready source of low-cost supply, aided such boom. This is well-recounted in the book.
Characterizing pros and contras towards the PRC as Panda Huggers and Dragon Slayers makes a simple dichotomy but nevertheless, the sole result is this:
“One of the greatest miscalculations of our generation was that free trade, economic growth and the widespread adoption of the internet in China would produce a desire for more political freedoms. Instead, the PRC’s rising affluence has served to promote confidence in its own authoritarian political system and state-directed capitalism, and bolstered its will to ever more aggressively assert its values and abroad” (Spectator [USA edition], 12 October 2019).
“For many Dragon Slayers, the idea that China is ruled by despots fundamentally hostile to American ideals is already taken as truth” (p. 119); surely this is come real. Since Xi Jinping has become paramount leader and Xi Jinping Thought elevated to incorporation into all aspects of daily life, the term “despot” is not misplaced; his public pronouncements and those directed by the narrow camarilla around him are fundamentally hostile to American ideals. Recognizing so is not packaging up “America’s cumulative nebulous insecurities... and redirected toward another country that represents an economy, political system, and near-peer military power that is competitive with America” (p.140); it is recognizing the nature of the PRC under the CCP.
“America may well find itself at odds with Chinese power, but whether or not such a moment escalates into global war may have more to do with American political dysfunction than real aggression on the part of China” (p. 142). A big “if” but convenient to caricature Trump. As to Chinese aggression, “Beijing knew that each of these three countries (Russia, Japan, and the newly reunited Korea) has wronged it in the past, and as such a newly confident Chinese middle class was comfortable pushing around countries that had formerly been hostile to it” (p. 162). You think that as America is constantly vilified by a Party and state-sponsored news, the moral bar lowered again and again, that real aggression by the PRC is a less likely casus belli than American political dysfunction and popular dismay? Ya’ really think so? In 2019 Reporters Without Borders ranked China 177th “in a survey of 180 countries with respect to media independence, media pluralism and respect for the safety and freedom of journalists”. One of the most controlled and uninformed societies in the world yet increasingly capable of exercising dominance abroad will ignore its carefully-tended litany of wrongs and humiliations without acting for redress?
“China will get older faster than any other rising power in the history of the world... China faces a serious problem relative to its aging population. Commonly referred to as the 4:2:1 problem, this denotes that each working Chinese adult must care for his or her two parents and their four grandparents” (p. 49), and so “China will grow old before it grows rich”. Predictions that the PRC’s trajectory continues ever onward and upward are just that, predictions, not expectations. If “China’s economic growth remains the primary vehicle of its (the CCP) legitimacy” (p.45) then the future is wobbly at best and dangerous as the PRC in traditional style looks to outside enemies and foreign threats. The regime is strengthening by casting the USA as the singular villanous threat which can only be countered by a united China under the leadership of the CCP. Those occasioned howls of discontent over local incidents quickly scrubbed from social media are as whimpers in the wilderness. COVID-19 gives example: Most mainland Chinese and many Chinese in SEA and recent mainland Chinese immigrants wholly maintain this virus originated in the USA, the situation in the PRC was heroically contained then reversed by the CCP under the personal supervision of Xi Jinping, and China has selflessly, charitably and massively given material substance and medical aid to a great number of countries as testified by grateful foreigners on WeChat, in stark contrast to the inept and selfish USA. Relentlessly vilifying the USA lowers the moral bar for any action the CCP calculates. And most mainland Chinese and not a few others say 活该, “serves them right”.
The Thucydides Trap is misrepresented by casting the US as the challenger. Benjamin Shobert claims, “it is easy to miss the point of his analysis: not that conflict is inevitable but that it is only avoidable when the challenger (in today’s world, the United States - my emphasis) is willing to make difficult changes that reflect the new reality” (p. 168). The Trap describes the danger of open warfare when a rising power rivals a ruling power, as shown in 12 of 16 cases over the last 500 years. Of the 12 examples many show that the rising power initiated the war; casting the US as the challenger and so becomes the antagonist most likely to initiate war is simply wrong. For instance, the rising power challenged the seemingly dominant power in the Franco-Prussian War, and the rising power Japan twice in 40 years initiated war against the ruling power Russia and then against the US.
Now comes the Beast. “The Trump administration is a proxy for something much worse yet to come: a willingness of the American people to turn their backs on every tradition, every norm, and every political principle in the pursuit of someone who will tell them how to make their anxieties and insecurities go away, and who can be blamed when these policies fail” (p. 147). Whoa! Such psychoanalysis is far-fetched, claiming Americans are unhappy, unmoored by traditions and norms of support, and so look to vent, to project, the instrument being a demagogue and the object is hating China. Those whose hate of Trump deadens sensibility may not understand but surely those supporting Trump do not see him as a Messiah, The Leader or somesuch that will deliver all from their nation’s woes, but as a President who finally looks to the country and citizens as his primary duty and acts in those interests, and says so through a means and in manner which is coarse, often rude and offensive, but plainly said. “We are much more likely to generate positive outcomes by focusing first and foremost on getting our house in order” (p. 177); I doubt any Trump supporter would find fault with this statement, and his election was its very expression no matter how distasteful to many.
I cannot understand the thread of excuses running throughout the narrative, e.g.
“China’s unwillingness to move faster in the areas of human rights and accommodating dissent is more a function of insecurity over its inability to make the jump from agrarian to modern economy that it is a fundamental predisposition to excluding the average Chinese citizen from the political process” (p 67). This is patently false. The CCP are Bolsheviks, an elite and enlightened cadre forming correct opinion, leading and guiding the masses forward (“Party, government, military, civilian, and academic; east, west, south, north and center, the Party leads everything” - stated by Mao Zedong and repeated by the recent 19th Party Congress) . This notion squares with traditional Chinese governance: Present and traditional governance in China is predicated on the official orthodoxy of the time, and exceptions are invariably regarded as disruptive heresies threatening state-directed order. The Chinese citizen is part of the political process only as a dutiful subject, not an elective being. This is the reality, and wishing otherwise is really wishful thinking. Nevertheless, the condition of human rights or protection of dissenters should not be the driver of Sino-US relations. Surely the US at every opportunity and when politically expedient should support liberal democracy, but working to change any country over in the image of US institutions is foolhardy and resented by those ostensibly picked to be enlightened. Moreover, a free and open society readily exposes the ills and faults of its institutions, and so outsiders see all that with jaundiced eye; asking them to adopt US institutions becomes well-nigh hypocritical as international forums express again and again.
The fundamental tenet of personal relationships in Chinese society is reciprocity; it is that which binds together the all-important “guanxi”, touted even by newbies to the PRC. One can say the CCP had failed to exercise the grace of reciprocity towards US generosity and tolerance, but that is now of little matter as the patience and tolerance afforded the PRC for the last 40-plus years is at an end.
Chapter 5, America’s Economic Security, is the keystone to this book and explicates the basic premise: “The single most satisfying vessel to contain America’s rage and channel our collective economic security will not be technology; it will be a country, a race, a part of the world a long way away, whose differences beg to become caricatures of our own misplaced anger” (p. 80), which statement needs a leap of faith to accept. But, correctly, “... the economic insecurity of the American middle class today reflects long-standing unaddressed issues around rising costs of health care, housing, education, and childcare” (p. 81). Most Americans, judging from their internet comments, would not disagree, but neither do they blame China or any other country for these problems; rather the cause is ineffectual local government, a Congress riven by partisan interests,and the “swamp” that is Washington, D.C. It is a long leap to premise rage will be directed to China or any other outside actor for failures of Americans themselves, but Benjamin Shobert has done just this. He gives Americans short shrift of common sense about local problems, and seems to forget “all politics is local” as famously said Tip O’Neil. Rather, public ire against the PRC is specific, a consequence of 1) ripping-off US industries and technology, 2) constant vitriol which in volume and stridency far outweighs the PRC’s claims of US “China bashing” and “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”, and 3) the nine-dash line making the South China Sea a Chinese lake (first explained as architecture to make safe navigation, then developing “research facilities”, and finally despite Xi Jinping’s promise to President Obama not to militarize the region militarized it was to protect “traditional” Chinese waters from the US Navy now accused in turn of militarizing the region). Moving factories, machinery, and production to the PRC and elsewhere, outsourcing functions to other countries, all are a consequence of globalization, as was the decision to lower costs and increase profits by US corporations whose majority funding lies not through bank loans but with shareholders wanting a return on investment. The US worker understands this and well knows if it were not China, the rising star of the moment, then it is Mexico, Honduras, Bangladesh, Pakistan or elsewhere as shown on the labels of goods he buys. The US public does generally and wrongly assume low wages is the driver putting US workers out of work, and if this were so Bangladesh should be the most industrialized country in the world; instead the fact is, as COVID-19 touched the very nerve of truth, that the major part of the supply chain is already embedded overseas to the extent that divorce is almost impossible. This supply chain stretched outside the US is not peculiarly made in China.
China as an economic actor and the consequence of good intent:
Moreover, “we can now say with confidence that the benefits of globalization accrued more quickly to business than to people” (p. 179). Just so, which further tarnishes the supposed innate good globalization would bestow upon the world.
The book ends with a sincere question: “My question to my fellow Americans is this: will you allow yourselves to be distracted by China, to blame it for problems of your own making, or will you turn your attention to the changes we need to pursue first” (p. 185)?
I agree that the problems are indeed of our own making, for years have lain unaddressed through previous administrations and by a Congress riven by partisan and petty concerns, but however distasteful this President is to many his election is not a choice made by benighted people but an expression to get it right and get it right now. If Benjamin Shobert heartily believes in the American people and institutions to nobly rise to the occasion and do the right thing as he surmises in the closing paragraphs, then I would ask he place less faith in his own valuation of their popular will and election. In other words, no, we the people ain’t stupid.
My closing questions:
Can the US co-exist with a long-term adversary whose interests are often inimical to its own? The Russo-American experience says yes.
Can the US tolerate the rise of other powers of influence? The post-war experience says yes.
Can the US co-operate with a rising economic power or bloc that rivals or could surpass it? The example of the EU and Japan say yes.
Can the US accept a multi-polar world? It already has by acknowledging the limits of what it can do and the profound reluctance among the public for further foreign entanglements. There is a strong and stubborn streak of isolationism in US history and the public which too many critics discount.
Can America forgive and forget? Time and time again
Now let the PRC pose itself these questions and answer.
N.B. “But for Russia to be seen as America’s enemy would require of many partisan Republicans an acknowledgment that Russia acted on their behalf”(p. 140). This book was published before the Mueller Report.
September 12, 2018
A very good read and excellently timed!
The author’s intent is not policy minutia for China watcher’s rather it is to frame China relative to the current political environment in the US and what this could mean for China. Specifically, China’s emergence and American deindustrialization and the political chasm that brought on the election of Donald Trump and where the US-China relationship could be heading.
For anyone who simply think's Trump is a “crass mistake” by middle-America, rather than a brick-through-the-window-of-the-Freightliner that is Washington DC, this book will prove enlightening. Certainly, the author demonstrates their seasoned perception of China throughout and how that US-China represent an indispensable relationship for the future.
As preview, the following are but two nuggets:
“America has traded away its superiority to China. Not just because the United States has lost jobs to China’s inexpensive labor-no, because in the pursuit of profit, American businesses willingly looked the other way while China’s Communist Party lined its pocket and ensured its future, all at the hands of a naïve American public.”
“This period also marks a moment when America’s political class demonstrated a spectacular lack of imagination and vision over how China’s entry to the world’s system of trade would impact American workers and the domestic economy.”
The author’s intent is not policy minutia for China watcher’s rather it is to frame China relative to the current political environment in the US and what this could mean for China. Specifically, China’s emergence and American deindustrialization and the political chasm that brought on the election of Donald Trump and where the US-China relationship could be heading.
For anyone who simply think's Trump is a “crass mistake” by middle-America, rather than a brick-through-the-window-of-the-Freightliner that is Washington DC, this book will prove enlightening. Certainly, the author demonstrates their seasoned perception of China throughout and how that US-China represent an indispensable relationship for the future.
As preview, the following are but two nuggets:
“America has traded away its superiority to China. Not just because the United States has lost jobs to China’s inexpensive labor-no, because in the pursuit of profit, American businesses willingly looked the other way while China’s Communist Party lined its pocket and ensured its future, all at the hands of a naïve American public.”
“This period also marks a moment when America’s political class demonstrated a spectacular lack of imagination and vision over how China’s entry to the world’s system of trade would impact American workers and the domestic economy.”
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