The Other Side of the Glass
I'm really in overwhelming agreement with what Fareed Zakaria's written below, but I thought I might alienate the audience by noting that while China panic genuinely "is largely a product of the right" one shouldn't let the left off here too easily. Liberals' problem has less to do with security concerns posed by China than by economic ones. It seems to me that if I were a Chinese official sitting around in Beijing listening to how some Democrats talk about the national and global economy, I'd be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that their international economic agenda was focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty. I don't think that's really what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to say as they race around the country denouncing trade deals left and right, but I'm pretty sure that is how they sound.
But beyond the narrow question of trade, it seems to me that a lot of folks -- on the left and the right, but primarily on the left because folks on the right don't really care -- interested in improving this or that aspect of American life have gotten into the bad habit of saying that we have to do something or other (more preschool! more college graduates! better infrastructure! faster internet connections!) in order to compete with China. Maybe this is helpful in a domestic context, but it's pretty misleading (better infrastructure and education would be good things no matter what happens in China) and, again, it's worth asking how this looks. What if every new initiative the Chinese government unveiled was wrapped in rhetoric about how the point of it was to compete with the United States, rather than to raise Chinese living standards? Well, we'd be freaking out.
Your comment really shouldn't alienate anyone. The talk about China and India now is a lot like the talk abou Japan in the 1980s. They were going to buy everything! We were all going to become slaves to their more efficient corporations!
It's not just the Democratic politicians, though. Tom Friedman has made quite a lot of money on this kind of rant which sometimes stikes me as racism in the form of praise. The guy comes back form book leave and writes a column about how the US has lost the "Asian values" of previous generations. Does the guy have en editor?
May 5, 2008 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I REALLY hate it when I leave a typo in a sentence that's supposed to read "Does the guy have an editor?"
Can we have a preview and edit function back, please?
May 5, 2008 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
OMG, is Friedman really going to write another book?
I thought he might be too ashamed, having pointed out that the world is now flat eight years after everyone else noticed.
I swear the guy could write a book called "Almost Every Country Has At Least One Farm" and get it published.
May 5, 2008 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
An excerpt from Friedman's latest:
"Though this didn't actually happen, I was in a cab outside of Bangalore and the Cab Driver, who was 12 years old, said to me, 'You Americans should watch out. I am driving this cab in between my biotechnology classes and am even studying for my final exam as I drive." He zigged and zagged through a traffic jam of rickshaws and then turned to me again, 'I am 12 years old and have never slept. But I have made piles of money that I plan to use to take over Microsoft someday.'"
May 5, 2008 3:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Matthew, you wrote:
"What if every new initiative the Chinese government unveiled was wrapped in rhetoric about how the point of it was to compete with the United States, rather than to raise Chinese living standards? Well, we'd be freaking out."
I agree completely. We would say that China was "trageting us."
When will we ever learn to think globally (in the best sense), and to understand that when economic conditions improve in other countries this is good for the world as a whole?
I'd disagree with destor23 in comparing the progress China and India are making today to Japan's seeming economic dominance in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, Japan's boom was based on a stock market bubble built on top of real estate that was hugely overvalued. Like our stock market bubble of the 1990s, it was bound to blow up.
At the time, Japan was a developed economy moving from success to excess.
China and India are developing countries that are trying to become developed countries. Along the way, there is the danger of excess--things will become overvalued, and after taking 3 steps forward, they'll have to take two steps back. Maybe 3 steps back.
But the Chinese govt, in particular, is trying to keep a lid on the economy so that it doesn't try to grow too quickly. At the same time, they have to create jobs for millions of people. And their environmental problems are huge.
If, rather than competing with China, or fearing China, we tried collaborating--particularly on environmental issues which are important to all of us, that would make much more sense.
It's not about being No. 1 anymore.
May 5, 2008 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
However it may sound to Chinese officials I agree with the trade policy that H and O seem to imply."Seem" since I fear that their actual intentions may really be for a policy not that much different than the status quo.
Our trade policy should take no account whatsoever of the well being of any particular class in any foreign country. It should be narrowly selfish.
Perhaps that would result in some liberalization
altho I'll repeat Keynes mature judgement when he abandoned his life long endorsement of the classical arguments for free trade:
He was
.....and clear that ownership of national assets by foreignors was more likely to lead to war than peace, continuing
When we decide to provide aid to any other country it should be something the whole nation pays for , ideally through a congressional appropriation. Not something borne by one group of american workers who see their jobs
disappear in the interests of doing good abroad.
We wouldn't send , say, $100 million dollars to the Liberia National Bank and fund it by special tax on Iowa corn farmers. Nor should we ask them to sacrifice so we can help the poor Liberian farmers.
When our self interest requires we enter into an agreement that does disadvantage some sectors on behalf of the country as a whole that should be a clear eyed decision accompanied by a serious attempt to assist those sectors.
Not BTW by "job training" ,chiefly a sop for the national conscience since middle aged workers are incapable of being trained so they're competitive with younger ones (can someone give an example to disprove me?). Quite apart from the cruel hoax of training laid off steel workers of any age for jobs that still haven't appeared in 25 years.
As for the supposed need for increased competition to benefit consumers , there are 300+ million americans to do that except for the sort of competition provided by desperate workers on starvation wages. That we should do without
May 5, 2008 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with this is that the Chinese nation does roll out every new government initiative wrapped in the rhetoric of politics - they employ the same tactics that our government does and so do/have all governments from time immemorial. The Chinese official isn't thinking anything remotely like you claim he is - he's well aware of the fact that China holds much of our debt and produces much of our consumer goods, he knows full well that this is campaign rhetoric manufactured for domestic consumption because he engages in the very same political tactics.
So what do we have here? We have one pundit, Zakaria, feeding the other pundit Yglesias, both of whom assume, falsely, that Americans are fearful of China and Russia, when all the polls say something quite different. Now, the other pundits are racing to congratulate each Zakaria and each other and reinforce the fear driven punditry that fears the fear that isn't there in the first place. It will, though, become a cultural meme, because the punditry, too afraid to appear disagreeable or point out the fallacy upon which another pundit has structured his book, cannot bring themselves to tell the truth.
That's why pundits like David Reiff and Barbara Eherenbreich can make comments such as Gore is a "panderer" or "it won't make any difference who is elected" in 2000 or Fareed Zakaria claiming that "the big difference [between Gore and Bush] is that Bush appears to view foreign policy from the pragmatic, problem solving perspective and Gore has a somewhat messianic approach..." or "George Bush seems to believe that the Clinton administration has been too arrogant...trumpeting American military might...there is a sense in the Bush camp that this has become counter productive and produced a backlash...I think this derives from the elder Bush."
So now we have Zakaria making the claim that Americans are fearful of China and Russia, and he's fearful that we're "developing a maximalist view" of the world, when it is more than obvious from every poll taken in the last few years, that Americans don't fear foreign countries, they don't believe that all other countries that disagree with us are "evil" and they have far different worries and concerns than "maximalist views". So here we are, once again reinforcing completely wrong perceptions of Americans and projecting the fears of the pundits upon all America. The great majority of Americans don't give China and Russia a thought, they're too busy trying to keep their heads above water.
May 5, 2008 5:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. I agree the americans don't have any inherent belief that other countries are evil.In fact don't think about them at all unless prompted by the government.
They do have an inherent belief in US exceptionalism. I'm not sure how much , if any,
harm that causes altho clearly it is a factor in their rejection of the idea of government involvement in health.
May 5, 2008 6:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
But the American people don't reject universal health care. In fact, by a two to one factor, Americans favour universal health care. This is exactly what I'm getting at Flavius - how many times have we been told by the press and the pundits both on the left and the right that the majority of Americans don't want universal health care? How many times has it been repeated today that Americans are fearful and concerned with security and terrorism when the numbers say that for Americans that isn't a concern unless prompted by the interviewer? So what is going to happen? In a week's time, Newsweek and Time will be running stories that Americans fear other nations, see them as evil and think that security is their number one concern. And all because of one little question reporters fail to ask about Zakaria's book - what do Americans really think and what do they really fear and worry about.
What Zakaria is telling us is that his class, his cohort has no idea as to what Americans really worry about and fear, the economy, the war in Iraq and health care, because it doesn't occur to them that these issues worry anyone else - it doesn't worry them, they have jobs, they were complicit in disseminating the propaganda of the administration and they have health care.
"What, me worry?"
May 5, 2008 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right about the polls.I forget that and am overly influenced by the callers to the NPR talk shows who take as a given the pundits' caricature of foreign health systems. Which Joe and Mary Lunchpail have ignored to their own benefit.
May 5, 2008 9:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
The same thing could be said that Americans didn't give Iraq or Saddam much thought. But we can be certain the same folks who did are itching to get us through with Iraq, move on to Iran and Syria, and then turn our attention to Russia and China, all while we're too busy trying to keep our heads above water to really notice.
May 5, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, they didn't give it much thought until the press acting like the administration's echo chamber, repeated the claims of the administration over and over until Americans did come to believe it. Certainly after 9/11 no one thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for that tragedy, but after being told how true the claims were by the press, they certainly came to believe it. So what is happening now? Zakaria makes this false claim based on something he knows to be false - there is no way that McCain can enforce this policy, given the structure of the G8 and the United Nations, and all of the pundits rush to reinforce it. Who is doing the fear mongering here?
May 5, 2008 7:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
All the issues releative to China and other non-U.S. manufacturing centers is about the profits of U.S. corporate interests and other global conglomerates. Shifting production to other nations is only feasible because such things as labor costs and energy subsidies make those locales attractive alternatives to producing products in the U.S.
The reality is the U.S. could have long ago adjusted import taxes and more properly taxes on corporate profits that would make that alternative a non-starter. If there existed a condition whereby there was global equity in the cost of producing goods and the profits those goods generated there would have been no need for so many U.S. jobs to have gone away. The only reason this has occurred is because the government of the United States and especially the executive and legislative branches have been unduly influenced by their relationship with corporate America. Rather than adjust import taxes and taxes on profits to create a condition of equity in global manufacturing, our lawmakers abandoned the U.S. workforce to gain political advantage and to line the pockets of their campaign donors. And just to further understand how this is being globally manipulated, China and India for instance, which are subsidizing energy costs, are doing so at the behest of these same global financial interests while the workforce of these offshore countries are in fact finacing the subsidies. The major beneficiaries of this energy subsidation are again the same corporate interests who have so thorougly compromised our lawmakers and have raped U.S. consumers with record fuel prices while generating record profits.
The reality is that the U.S. workforce has been the whipping boy of corporate America and our lawmakers have been party to the beating we have taken. American labor is in fact subsidizing the corporate profits being generated in other countries while simulatneously being raped by those same corporations by way of consumer unfriendly practices that are the product of corporate lobbyists having a level of access to our representaives that the average citizen can only dream about.
We should not be afraid of China or any other nation. Given a chance, and allowing for the fact it costs serious money to live in freedom, American workers can compete with any other nation on earth.
We should be afraid of our own congresspersons. They can control this if they so desire but they have chosen to represent a scant one or two percent of the citizens of this country and have decided all the rest of us can go to hell.
I think we need to give the bean counters and finacial types throughout corporate America a new job. Instead of conspiring ways to screw Americans and their global customers we need to have them figuring out the calculations necessary to make the cost of producing goods consistent across the entire global manufacturing sector. That way we would alleviate an awful lot of the incentive for countries to try and screw their global neighbors and likely have a lot fewer wars as well.
May 5, 2008 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes and no. Corporate America is the main reason.
But powerfully assisted by those "elitist" economists who drank the kool aikd of classical free trade dogma while living in a world that was unimaginable to Marshall or even the Austrians.
Statisticians would routinely dismiss this as extrapolating beyong the range of the data what these brilliant economists do as a matter of course.
Let us assume the rest of the world suddenly disappeared. How would this country fare with its uniquely favorable location, spanning a continent and several climate zones ? Do you doubt the US could feed,cloth and care for itself ? Certainly with some life style , or technological, changes to compensate for example for the reduction in energy sources.
As we essentially did during WW2.
In the less unrealistic scenario that the rest of the world still existed but we sheltered behind a
no-imports policy , what then ? Surely it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to selectively
tweak that policy to obtain those things in which we weren't self sufficient in exchange those we had in excess. Corn for example.
Free trade presented itself to 19th century economists as the logical solution for a group of small squabbling states trying to cope with a northern European climate. Which it was.
If those wordly philosophers had been good old
19th century americans the idea would ever have occured to them. The conclusion that Keynes finally reached after freeing himself from the dead hand of his illustrious forbears would have been, for them, intuitively obvious :
May 5, 2008 10:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry Maynard about the quote. Smoot and Hawley
were my interjection, not yours.
Where are they ,by the way ?Last I saw of them was when Al Gore put them on the table in his
debate with Ross Perot. Who was right about the "great sucking sound".
May 5, 2008 10:37 PM | Reply | Permalink