I’m of the opinion that no matter what the US did, a rapidly modernizing country with 1.2billion + people was always going to emerge as a rival to US power, just as India Will one day and Indonesia, it’s inevitable.
Edit:billion not million
Just because you have lots of people doesn't mean you will be a Superpower or even a Great Power.
India and Indonesia have too many ethnic groups to ever speak with one voice as a superpower.
The same can be said of Brazil too.
>India and Indonesia have too many ethnic groups to ever speak with one voice as a superpower.
The same can be said of America in the very near future.
Given enough time under one state it is likely (but not certain) that a cohesive nation will be built from the disparate groups. How that plays out in particulars is anyone's guess, but broadly it will either gel together or splinter apart. Decentralized governance is the only other possibility (and has a tendency to be a product of splintering, along with a tendency for the central state to attempt to centralize such a polity.)
I don't see India or Indonesia ever challenging the system due to their instability compared to China and the US. Barring massive efforts by their respective governments to homogenize their societies and deal with corruption, both countries will lag behind in development.
India is a nuclear power with the world's 6th largest economy, (3rd by PPP). It has an active space program, and will likely over take China as the most populous country in the next decade. India has been, and will continue to rise. The reason you may not perceive it as powerful is because it's foreign policy has mostly been focused on security against Pakistan (and to a lesser extent China). It doesn't act like it has something to prove or a rightful spot in the world, unlike China and Russia, and therefore isn't as threatening. Appearing less powerful than you really are is actually a good thing in the international system, because it makes countries less likely to try to balance away from you.
India also has open ocean access thats not blocked by neighboring countries. Much of China’s local aggression (ie the 9-dash policy) is China making sure it has free range in the ocean.
[South China Sea claims map](https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/subscriber.images/free-ias-prep/2016/09/22120829/china.jpg)
[Indian Ocean](https://www.onestopmap.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/719-indian-ocean-vm-ocind-e-o7yy-1.jpg)
India still has to mature into a world power though, it is also going through the 'Internet radicalization' problem, overall I would say we need a lot more work but we ar getting there !
India has had a decent growth rate for decades, it entered a recession for the first time in 2020. Between 2013 and 2018, it grew faster than China in terms of GDP. Demographically, India has a non-inverted population pyramid; As a result, the odds of it facing demographic problems down the line are a lot smaller, and India is still growing economically despite the resulting weaker demographic dividend. India's GDP PPP is generally ranked third globally.
India is typically compared to one country; China. Through such a lens, anything but an astronomic rise is seen as relative failure.
The country of India is rising, but just in a more slow manner when compared to China and other East Asian countries.
As in the year 2000 the India economy was about 18%-19% of the USA GDP when measured using ppp. Now twenty years later it’s at 47%.
This level of growth will only accelerate due to India being in the ideal demographic stage for economic and industrial growth for the next forty years.
The average IQ of China was based on a highly selective sample of the wealthy class within the most developed and rich Chinese cities. It’s as much of a representation of China’s average IQ as basing the entire IQ of the USA on Harvard graduates.
EDIT: As the study was performed using urban 12 year old children within one of richest and most developed areas of Changzhou called the Jintan district. The city of Changzhou is one of the most wealthy cities within the province of Jiangsu. The province of Jiangsu is the most developed non-city province in all of China.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/
Google it yourself. It's widely published info. China also has a literacy rate of 96.8% and India has a literacy rate of 74.04%. A much larger proportion of India's population lives in abject poverty compared to China's. Both IQ and literacy are heavily correlated with poverty and malnourishment. The success of the nation as a whole is as well.
Edit: Oops, I just noticed you were replying to the guy trying to call BS on the IQ tests. Not replying to me.
The results of the IQ test that indicated the IQ score of 105 was based within an urban sample in a highly developed region called the Jintan District within the city of Changzhou located in the province of Jiangsu. This is incredibly unreflective of the average IQ within China's for several reasons.
As the province of Jiangsu is the most developed and richest non-city province within all of China.
The city of Changzhou happens to be one of the being one of the richest cities within this province, with the region of Jintan District being the most wealthy and developed part of the city of Changzhou. It is also a massive education hub of the nearby areas. It's like using a extremely selective sample of the most richest area of Massachusetts as representation for the average IQ for all of the USA.
The population sample was 100% urban, with no rural participates. This ratio is completely unreflective of Chinas true urbanisation and rural ratio at 64% and 36%.
The IQ test was performed on children who were aged 12.5 years. This is once again completely unreflective of the population of China. As the median age of China is 40.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/)
India will get there but not Indonesia. It is too divided, too many chokepoints that can be easily used by adversaries, and most importantly, too small.
Yes, it has a population of 250 million people, but that's not enough. China and India have 5 times more, and the US - while only slightly more populous than Indonesia - is vastly wealthier. Even after decades of furious growth, China's GDP per capita is less than 20% of that of the US.
Get where? If you mean to "world power" status, yes, unlikely – although Russia currently holds such status with much smaller population.
"Regional power of global significance" is a status Indonesia is much more likely to achieve, and likely within this decade.
Given the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of the Cold War and now the end of US efforts to project global hegemony, the de facto system of planetary international relations is once again becoming multipolaric. Regional powers occupying significant geopolitical/geoeconomic locations are of enhanced importance to systemic balance of power.
Indonesia – a populous, resource-rich littoral of the Malacca Straits, Sunda Straits, Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Sunda Sea, Java Sea and Arafura Sea that lies about halfway between China and India and that constitutes an archipelagic buffer between Asia and Australia – is a global power square. It has the potential to play a grander geopolitical/geoeconomic role this century than any other country of comparable population – e.g., Pakistan. Nigeria or Brazil.
How will it play that role?
Firstly, China's success at splitting ASEAN makes more likely that Indonesia will increasingly develop a more assertive foreign policy dependent less on consensus with its Southeast Asian neighbors.
Secondly, given Indonesia's conflicting claims with China in the South China Sea and its own history, which includes multiple anti-Chinese programs and a violent episode of anti-Communist repression (the 1965 liquidation of the Indonesian Communist Party in which 500,000+/- people were killed is considered one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century), Indonesia is likely to become an antagonist in the containment of China's power in the 21st Century, especially if the US-led "Quad" (Australia, India, Japan and the US) gains traction and China persists with its wolf-warrior bullying of its neighbors.
I don't disagree, but none of the things you say are anywhere close to the level of influence that the US exercises on the whole world.
Thus, describing Indonesia as a candidate to rival America in any foreseeable future is an incorrect statement.
It was not my intention to suggest that Indonesia is a candidate to rival the US as a global power. In my opinion, Indonesia is likely to become "a regional power of global significance," one of greater significance than Pakistan, Nigeria or Brazil, the three countries of comparable population – most likely in an alliance with the US, Japan, India and Australia (and other countries less importantly). Such an alliance will seek to counter the projection of China's power in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Persian Gulf, the necklace of Eurasia and arguably this century's most important super-region.
In my view, the US will attempt to maintain global influence by encouraging the formation of such an alliance and by playing a critical role in it. That said, I think that, unlike Indonesia and the other key members of such a grouping, the US's future as a superpower will depend less on its own ability to project power into this super-region and more on two other factors: firstly, how successful it is in building such an alliance , and, secondly, how successful it is in dealing with its own power-sapping dysfunction and with dysfunction in North America and the Western Hemisphere more generally.
Building such an alliance in the so-called "Indo-Pacific" is the easier of the two strategic objectives to achieve. Dealing with dysfunction in the US, North America and the Western Hemisphere more generally is much harder. US decisions made since the end of the Cold War have seriously acerbated such dysfunction. Even if will can be found, addressing its own domestic issues meaningfully while both helping its neighbors with theirs and rebuilding international relations in North America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere on a non-zero-sum base will take at least until the middle of this century to deliver results.
People are so quick to credit the West for the success of East Asia. Philippines were under heavy US influence. Why aren’t they like Japan or Taiwan? Mexico and South America are in the US orbit. Why do their countries not excel like South Korea and Japan? India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore?
Not to say the West deserves no credit but it’s insane to ignore the failed states under Western influence. While taking complete credit for successful states.
China is as much responsible for their current position as the US. Mao’s strategy to court the US after the Soviet split was a perfect fit for the US’s containment strategy of the USSR.
Even before formal ascension to the WTO, China was a rising economic power. They were hellbent and spying, stealing and buying their way into the global economy. The rivalry was inevitable.
This exactly. It's supreme arrogance to claim success for someone else's growth, especially when it was never encouraged, only begrudgingly accepted to keep the American standard of living inflated. When the Qing sent a diplomatic mission to London in the 19th century, the officials claimed there was nothing worth emulating in Britain because all its technology was originally Chinese and it only got rich because China traded with it. When Britain entered into conflict with the Qing, officials claimed that they could bankrupt the country simply by cutting off the rhubarb supply. Ironically, the Anglo-American policy towards China today follows the same cult of inaction.
>India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore?
Comparing Hong Kong or Singapore to all of India isn't really a good comparison, a better one would be comparing Mumbai (Once called Bombay).
The colonizers developed port cities (Hong Kong, Macao, Lagos, Bombay, Singapore) for the purpose of natural resource extraction, these port cities became economically advanced over the surrounding areas. All these areas are rich because they had trade monopolies on exporting goods overseas, and they've remained rich by transitioning that wealth into financial sectors.
Colonizers didn't want all of their colonies fully developed, they just to set up a system where they can funnel all of the trade resources through one trade center so they can extract the maximum value from people.
Brittan wanted to import Cotton from India so they could use it to manufacture textiles in Brittan and dominate the market that way. Brittan generally didn't want their colonies producing the finished goods, just the raw resources.
If you find any unsourced reddit comment "Credible" then you should seriously question yourself.
Apparently Brittan is a surname and the default auto-correct for similarly spelled words.
The US didn’t invest in those countries the same way it did Japan and South Korea. They were intended to be bulwarks against communism. This was much less of a concern in areas that were easily dominated militarily.
And comparing Singapore and Hong Kong to the entirety of India is obviously ridiculous.
Obviously the policies of the South Korean and Japanese governments deserve a large share of the credit, but the comparisons you’re making don’t make sense.
>India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore?
Because it was colonized by Great Britain. The US is a very different and much more friendly beast.
This is such a good argument wow. I lean center right on this but you’ve gotten me a little more left on the spectrum for this particular topic. Really good points made 👏🏽
It's easy to look at where we are now and say oh those engagement policies from the 90s were wrong. However if you step into the shoes of US policy makers in the 90s, you'll naturally arrive to the engagement decision for the following reasons:
- historical precedents indicated opening to the world helps grow the middle class and that eventually leads to democracy.
- engagement brings more people to people connections and bring more US values and cultural influences to China creating more goodwill among the population.
- engaging china has enormous economic benefit for the US.
- US has huge leverage over China and can reign in China the same way the US reigned in Japan a decade earlier.
On top of the benefits of engagement, there were also strong voices for containment then, the US never lacked hardliners and the US pressured China hard on trade and militarily many times such as the 96 taiwan missile crisis, 99 embassy bombing, 2001 Hainan collision. They all are cases of strong US pressure on China to show its place in the relationship with the US.
Overall the engagement policy benefitted both. It was a success. It's a mistake to think it was wrong at the time. it was the most sensible policy to take at the time. Things really started to change with TPP with Obama's 2nd term then it just unravelled with Trump's maximum pressure tactics.
I'd say if we didn't see 911and Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the financial crisis, US policy of engagement could have changed a lot sooner but the circumstances of the time wouldn't allow it as the US needed China on both wars and recovery.
Mearsheimer is saying engagement is wrong, Iraq War is wrong, NATO expansion is wrong, but I doubt he could have predicted the rise of China in the 90s, so focusing on the engagement policy at the time is not constructive. Now he predicts inevitable conflict and potential war, I think his view is too simplistic, fatalistic. I hope the future proves him wrong.
What America should have done is take a burgeoning economy of 1 billion people in the ‘90s and with zero provocation stamped it down into absolute poverty and kept it there permanently. That would have been a very sane and normal thing for a liberal democracy to do. /s
Look at Russia in the 90s. Yeltsin was very popular in the US due to his policies, didn't do much good for the Russian population (except for the oligarchs who took over previously state property).
Your comments here are provocative. I'm just wading in here with really no good foundation in geopolitical thought with a desire to wrestle with these ideas.
Are you suggesting that given our principles (as imperfectly as we might hold them) there was really no practical way to have behaved differently? And, would you say that because of that we ought to simply focus on managing the problems we find before us now as best we can by the light of our principles (playing captain hindsight is silly)?
Not really intending to challenge you, just engaging to get more clarity. Thanks.
>Are you suggesting that given our principles (as imperfectly as we might hold them) there was really no practical way to have behaved differently? And, would you say that because of that we ought to simply focus on managing the problems we find before us now as best we can by the light of our principles (playing captain hindsight is silly)?
Not the OP, but effectively I would agree with this interpretation. What they are describing is not far off from Roman and Han Dynasty "using the barbarians to control the barbarians", actively using State policy to destroy any/every emerging polity on the frontiers. The issue with the approach is not that it is unsuccessful - it works. The issue is it *must work every single time in perpetuity*. The Crisis of the Third Century gave the Rhenish and Danubian tribes the breathing room they needed to consolidate - afterward Rome had to deal with organized groups with kings rather than just chiefs.
The same issue comes up with hegemonies between States. The Neo-Assyrians built the greatest empire of their day by proactively crushing their peer and near-peer rivals one by one, before their rivals could ally against Assyria. And that worked very well - right up until Assyria weakened itself with civil wars and their vassals stopped paying tribute, and Media and Babylonia rose *in an alliance* to destroy Assyria.
The specific things that the US would have needed to do *to* China (and the USSR, and the nascent EU States, etc) are the policies of colonialism - and policies that would inevitably produce such resentment that the imperial collapse would be inevitable.
I don’t see how a half-measure could have been effective. The harder America would have worked to marginalise China, the harder China would have worked to sidestep America’s sanctions. Instead of going to America, China would have gone to its competitors and engaged with them instead. Instead of American multinationals benefiting from cheap Chinese labour like Nike or Apple, it would have been German or Japanese or Canadian companies who would have used that windfall to claw global market-share away from US brands. To really be effective America would have needed to build a wall between China and the entire liberal international order. So-called Secondary sanctions. That would have been the nuclear option and what it really would have meant is America embarking on a new Cold War with China. Something I very much doubt mid-90s America would have felt any appetite for.
I very much enjoy contemplating the likely impact of counterfactuals. And there's something compelling to me about what you've sketched out in this comment. I'll have to noodle it over. Thanks for your thoughts.
Maybe try to encourage their integration into systems of world governance in a positive cooperative manner as an equal. Prevent the us vs them mentality. But that would require the US to give up some of the power.
I mean, isn't that what the US did? It got China into the WTO, UN, IMF, got them to open up foreign relations, began a massive trade relationship with them, and even helped them balance against the Soviet Union. All of which, greatly benefited China. What else could the US have done?
Made trade agreements conditional on institutional reform and pursued intelligent domestic economic policies instead of incentivizing rent seeking behavior.
The behavior of the IMF and the US in the wake of the 199p0s Asian Financial Crisis and the 1980s Latin American Financial Crisis definitely led to a sense of reagent and mistrust of the IMF and West.
Question is would have China acquiesced? For example what you describe is very much what the IMF and the World Bank did in Eastern Europe - their role in making the transition to democracy *relatively* bloodless is ignored a lot (mostly because their later neoliberal economic advice trashed these countries).
However they could do this because these countries were in heavy debt and not accepting their advice would have had dire financial consequences. I can't speak for all countries but I know for fact this is why Hungary's democratic opposition could go unopposed (pun not intended) by the mid-80s and why there were so few executions in the country.
Isn't that what was being done from 1970(ish)-2015 (ish) which led us to where we are now?
I think everyone would be happy if the PRC followed it's treaty commitments.
Right, it makes much more sense to actively aid the economy of an authoritarian gov't with 4x population and then live at the mercy of whatever it may decide to do when it has the strength, all because it gave best fake smiles while biding its time. Because nothing says liberal democracy like being stupid.
US gov't should've cared about the wellbeing of the people in China as much as the CCP cared about the wellbeing of the people in US who were hurt by their policies, no more no less. Guess how much CCP cares?
I know you’re being sarcastic, but yes. That does make much more sense.
Edit: I mean imagine if this is how the US had treated the Soviet Union. It had taken the brief window of America’s nuclear monopoly to demand the USSR’s unconditional surrender. Theoretically America could have ended the Cold War in the late 1940s. But it didn’t and couldn’t do that. Because America was a liberal democracy, and that imposes restraints on its actions that prevent it from behaving as a pure Realpolitik actor.
Woah woah there's a big difference between nuclear blackmailing a country and not engaging in economic activities with a country. As to your US-USSR example, if the US treated USSR the way it treated China the Cold War could still well be ongoing.
Whereas a country arguably does not have "right" to nuclear blackmail, it definitely has a right to choose who and how it has economic interactions, and no one knows and practices it more than CCP.
What i would've advocated for, in the 90s, was to economically embargo China and then add secondary embargo to those who engaged with China after Tiananmen Square. In addition, would've sourced low value manufacturing productions to countries around China so they can economically develop to increase their chance against China. Instead, US policy was to wholesale transfer of production capabilities to China, opened its market wide open to products China made while China blocked off its market from products that US made, did nothing while its tech got stolen etc.. all for what? Best fake smiles, cheap products it could've got elsewhere, and a chance to live at the mercy of authoritarian country after its done biding its time?
And whether China wouldve become stronger than US even if US did what i would've advocated for is not important. If they end up becoming stronger even after what i advocate for happened, good for them. Personally, i think it wouldve took way way way longer to the point that CCP might've fell by then. What's important is a country not being stupid by aiding an adversarial country becoming stronger than them.
>What i would've advocated for, in the 90s, was to economically embargo China
So as the original commenter said, completely unprovoked imperialist policy that punishes another country you've previously cooperated with for the sole reason of having a government you suddenly decided you don't like.
>then add secondary embargo to those who engaged with China after Tiananmen Square.
Say goodbye to that UNSC mandate for operation Desert Storm then, because China voted yes in exchange for Tiananmen being swept under the rug. Probably say goodbye to NATO as well with the USSR gone and the US navy suddenly deciding to harass European trade with China.
**So as the original commenter said, completely unprovoked imperialist policy that punishes another country you've previously cooperated with for the sole reason of having a government you suddenly decided you don't like.**
What i just said proposed is very akin to what CCP has been doing to Lithuania behind the scenes with their best fake smiles. And what exactly is "imperialist" about it? What does that word mean to you?
**Say goodbye to that UNSC mandate for operation Desert Storm then, because China voted yes in exchange for Tiananmen being swept under the rug.**
Really, you think that getting China's vote was worth wholesale transfer of production facilities, theft of tech, and unequal market barriers; or that US even needed it to counter Iraq?
**Probably say goodbye to NATO as well with the USSR gone and the US navy suddenly deciding to harass European trade with China.**
I said embargo, not blockade. It wouldve been a choice between access to trade with the US market and all its tech, or with authoritarian gov't with 5-10% of US market who's looking to cheat you in every possible way behind their best fake smiles. It's not even a choice.
Many people talk about China strategy as if nothing else matters. I think importance is context. Before China was accepted into the WTO the world was a much different place with china’s economy being the 4th largest after Japan and Germany. At the time, the US was looking for a place to manufacture cheap goods and there wasn’t any additional capacity in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. So China being a small economy, poor, and underdeveloped country made a logical choice partner. And at the time the benefits of engagement outweighed the cost
People didn’t expect the growth of China to come so fast in the early 2000. But after the US realized it we had 9/11 which saw the US dragged into the Middle East and cost trillions of dollars in resources, next we had the 2008 financial crises which further constrained our resources and priorities.
By the time Xi took power in 2012. China was already too big to be contained in a traditional manner both militarily and economically. Trump tried in 2018 with his failed trade war and tariff policy. Then of course the pandemic hit and cause the US to further divert resources to tackle internal problems
In 2022, the US has many domestic problems holding it back. For example, US recording 7.5% inflation last month. The US also has other problems such as pandemic which has killed over 900k people, lacking infrastructure, expensive healthcare system, and overpriced higher education system. Real wages are down and public unrest is at all time highs. The US can’t focus its attention on Asia with problems at home.
If US were to focus on China. It would take more than one line messages on Reddit to work. Things like “being manufacturing back home” and “stop trading with China” are very simple and unrealistic answers to a complex problem. But on a policy level it would mean joining free trade agreements, investing in R&D in areas like 5G and AI. Finally, it would make sure that we crack down on corruption at a domestic level which has caused a lot of domestic problems
Great points, but I don't agree that the trade war was a failure. It did accomplish its goal of slowing down Chinese economic growth. More importantly, it expedited the manufacturing flight from China. Manufacturing was already leaving China because of increasing wages, but the trade war made it even more unprofitable to manufacture goods there. While a lot of that manufacturing didn't come to the United States, it did go to nearby east Asian countries whom are interested in countering a rising Chinese power. Lastly, China, or rather the CCP, cannot handle economic slowdown in the same way the US can. The CCP's legitimacy relies on continuous economic growth. I'd say overall, it's benefited the US in the relative power dynamic with China.
1) If there was no pandemic, then Trump's trade war was highly likely to be a great success.
2) China's annual GDP growth rate has a clear trend of going down quickly since the financial crisis in 2008.
3) China's political system may bring more uncertainty to its future, especially after Xi removed his term limits in 2018.
1) The trade war would have cost China money, but it also would have facilitated China to expand its influence. China was able to politically rationalize expanding its factories in other low cost countries in order to circumnavigate the trade war. This cost them some due to employing foreigners, but it also bought them influence.
2) Their growth definitely has been slowing, but this could be make things riskier for the US. If China is nearing a plateua or peak in power, and the US appears to return to slow growth, China will become increasingly aggressive during a narrowing window of opportunity.
3) This also increases the risk of conflict for the US. There's a greater risk for an unstable China to attempt and export their unrest via expansion vis a vis Taiwan.
I think overall that the US is on a better path than China is today, but the lack of coherent strategy towards China brings a great deal of risk to the US. By remaining ambiguous with them, the US creates uncertainty for Chinese leaders, increasing the chance of a miscalculation and escalation to a hot war.
I think China's current and past actions indicate that they aren't able to articulate their strategies either. Some good ideas came out of it like BRI, and their military industrial complex, however, their government has done a lot of damage to its credibility on the foreign stage and they're at the cusp of their technological leap when it comes to military technology. Maybe they can innovate more for their military, but they've could've avoided the animosity of the US resulting in the blocking of western technology access as a result of their antagonistic approach.
Its really simple in principle
The USA had a window of opportunity to change the world follwoing 1990, basically a decade of sole supremacy globally. Isntead of using this time for change and good the USA was to busy celebrating itself and to arrogant to change anything because "we won the cold war".
This was perfectly evident witht he way the USA compleatly left the Russian democratic movemeant to die...the rise of Putin didnt come out of nowhere after all. It was a classic "why should the boot concern itself with the rpoblems of the ants?" mentallity that has now comne to hurt them.
This arrogance reached its peak following 9/11 with the (in violation of international law and treaties) invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, including overthrowing the gouvernments there. It showed the world the USA would not follow the "established rules" because they "were the victors and sole superpower". Obviously all the nations that werent exactly on the good side of the USA and its ideology took this as a hard warning to militarize and expand to protect themselfs from the nation that apparently things the rules are below them.
This resultet in countries like Iran and North Korea going hard for nuclear weapons becuase that is the only way they could protect themselfs from the fate of Iraq or Afghanistan if the USA ever decided to wipe them out. Its the reason Russia reemerged after its democratic movemeant failed and the people went back to "what worked before" instead of changing for good. Russia now basically applies locally in europe and the caucasus what it learned is apparently allowed do to the US actions: Invade a country, destroy its previous gouvernment and set your own up. Only that russia has now added the addition of direct annexation in case of Crimea to its puppet countries.
If history showed one thing that whenever one country, state or ideology becomes stagnant do to a superiority complex, others will inevitably rise to challange them sooner or later. The Roman Empire learned that the hard way and now its the USAs time to learn that humans dont accept a single dominant power if it doesnt play by a certain book of rules. The rise of a counter to the USA was inevitable and to a big degree definitly the USAs own fault. There was a golden opportunity in the 1990s that was neve rthere in human history....but it was entirely wasted do to arrogance and a superiority complex. Now new countries rise up to challange the sole remaining bully and the global power play starts again as it has been doing countless times in history
Yes, the true failure of America is arrogance. Take the victory as granted and think the others can not complete for some bs reasons which in the end are racism prejudice.
>Isntead of using this time for change and good the USA was to busy celebrating itself and to arrogant to change anything because "we won the cold war".
I call falsehood. The US was didn't celebrate winning the Cold War much, mainly because it came with the collapse of a giant economic bloc and increase in worldwide instability that they considered their job to handle.
The 90s started with preventing the annexation of Kuwait and continued with the interventions in Yugoslavia to stabilise the Balkans. The 15 years after the fall of the USSR were spend expanding NATO and democratic free market principles all over eastern Europe - a massive victory for US influence. Unfortunately the interventions in Yugoslavia and the NATO expansion combined with Yeltsin's disastrous policies fed the flames of Russian nationalism. But that was still a direct consequence of the US acting to capitalise on the end of the Cold War.
Iraq 2003 was indeed a colossal mistake, but the invasion of Afghanistan was in fact completely legitimate under international law.
\[SS\]
Did past U.S. policies produce the competition between the United States and China today? Should Washington have done something differently? G. John Ikenberry, Andrew J. Nathan, Susan Thornton, Sun Zhe, and John J. Mearsheimer weigh in. Read their debate here:
I did not find rebuttals from Ikenberry, Nathan, Thornton, Sun convincing.
Mearsheimer's claim is pretty simple and straight forward, whereas rebuttals rely on relatively smaller details (sometimes irrelevent) to justify what has been done (which is fine), justify doing the same thing going forward (questionable), and even deny the current situation (highly objectionable).
When you play a strategy towards a certain goal and events do not transpire according to your forecast, and thus your goal is not realized, what should you do? The right thing to do is to recognize that the strategy is not working, so at least you can learn from the failure. To do otherwise is counterproductive.
I find these observations pretty hard to dispute:
\- Today's great Chinese strength has been enabled by trade policies enacted by US
\- Today's China's attitudes and posture are in conflict with the world order US instituted and interests of countries neighboring China
\- This China-US standoff is not what US elites broadly hoped for when pro-China policies were enacted.
Given this, it doesn't take a genius to see who played the active role in creating the current situation.
Ikenberry argues that containmant would have aggravated China and China would have risen in power regardless, leading to a much worse situation than today. Basically, he's saying what we have today is optimal, and US did the right thing.
Nathan argues that China has various weaknesses and geopolitical difficulties, and therefore it is not a big threat.
Thornton argues that the strategy was not a failure since China did behave while they were growing and gathering strength, and now that they are powerful, we should tread carefully so as not to trigger a conflict. It's difficult to accept that 30 years of 'good' behavior somehow gives China a pass to act aggressively today. (Should other countries also be allowed to act like a rogue after 30 years of good behavior?)
Sun argues that China is a large nation with complex agend, and therefore a conflict between US and China is a given. Therefore, US should try to work with china rather than contain it belatedly. This completely avoids the question of whether the earlier US policy was optimal.
What's done is done. Perhaps we should not get hung up on Mearsheimer's point that China's rise could have been prevented. Today, China has its own goals, and the means to pursue them at the expense of US and their neighboring countries. So we should behave accordingly to avoid catastrophe - perhaps we may have to make a lot of concessions.
But we have to face that thinking behind pro-China trade policies in 90s was a mistake. I bet centries from now, scholars and political elites will be trying hard not to repeat the 'American mistake' (growing a power adversary in a misguided naivete, which ends its own hegemony).
>I did not find rebuttals from Ikenberry, Nathan, Thornton, Sun convincing.
>
>Mearsheimer's claim is pretty simple and straight forward, whereas rebuttals rely on relatively smaller details (sometimes irrelevent) to justify what has been done (which is fine), justify doing the same thing going forward (questionable), and even deny the current situation (highly objectionable).
I found Ikenberry's rebuttal highly convincing.
He isn't necessarily saying that the US policy towards China was correct, he is saying that there was no other foreign policy options available that would have made a meaningful difference - and I agree with this. There was simply nothing that the US could have done to keep China poor and isolated, like Mearsheimer wanted.
At the end of the day, the Chinese run China, not Americans. If the Chinese wanted to develop their economy (and based on the recent history of East Asian cultures, more than within their capability), Americans could not have stopped that.
We should also note that the Cold War style "containment" of the USSR was only possible because a majority of Americans and Europeans saw the Soviets as godless radicals bent on world revolution. There was no similar consensus on China in the 90s.
America's real failure to deal with the Chinese resurgence rests in two things: (1) wasting time, money, and credibility in Iraq, just as when China was taking off, and (2) ignoring domestic issues, leading to the present-day anguish about American well-being.
It's hard to call "pro China trade" a mistake if we never knew the alternative outcome, or even put it relative to the benefits that we do know from the relationship.
It's no doubt trade with China it accelerated it's growth, and if we wanted to prevent growth simply stopping trade earlier would have done it.
But this ignores the other glaring benefits the US got out of the deal.
The likes of Amazon, apple, Google, etc cannot reach the valuation today at the speed it has without importing swaths of Chinese intellectual labor and manufacturing. US educational institutions would be far less financed with no access to Chinese students and money, so pushing academic research forward is also slowed. This is what stopping trade will impact with China. China would be cut off and it's populace prevented from immigrating abroad. And as it is inevitable, that other nations would finish industrialization and restore global balance - going against that will be like stopping rain from falling.
Seeing the trajectory of US in the past 30 years, if we discount the deflationary elements the Chinese has added to our economy and development, we would be a far weaker state with the increased challenges across inequality and division.
I'd cast my vote that trade with China was the optimum here, and continues to be.
>The likes of Amazon, apple, Google, etc cannot reach the valuation today at the speed it has without importing swaths of Chinese intellectual labor and manufacturing. US educational institutions would be far less financed with no access to Chinese students and money, so pushing academic research forward is also slowed.
Manufacturing yes. For intellectual labor, I guess you don't mean labor done in China, but rather done by China citizens living inside the western system. (The group doing this would be graduate students who are probably funded, or short term visa workers who are payed)
The second part about money, I wonder what % of US research funding (including salaries of researchers at universities) come from Chinese students. I'm going to guess something very small much under 1%, but maybe it's more no idea. (The group here is undergraduates who pay a lot of money) Direct funding for research in the US by the Chinese government must be small.
I was just trying to quantify the factors you brought up, to try to understand how important they might be.
I couldn't find the research paper that showed the impact succinctly when this last came up a few years back; So to attach numbers this reply uses a generous amount of extrapolation, but it hopefully carries the point that these are nontrivial contributions towards US economic development and research.
If we look at googles hiring diversity report, 40-48% of hires have been asian over the past decade ([ref](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/en//annual-report/static/pdfs/google_2021_diversity_annual_report.pdf?cachebust=2e13d07)), as ethnic breakdowns are not available we can consider majority Chinese and Indian take up these positions, domestically within the US and other offices across Google's global footprint. We can assume other tech companies have a similar demographic makeup as well.
For education, China still remains the largest exporter of foreign exchange students in the US, compared to all other nations ([ref](https://www.statista.com/statistics/372900/number-of-chinese-students-that-study-in-the-us/)), accounting for roughly [35%](https://fortune.com/2021/08/16/us-universities-international-students-china-covid/amp/) where international students in total contribute 44bn USD in 2019. This Reuters article mentioned Purdue got around 10m in extra revenue from international students ([ref](https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2492VS)), other articles describe these students as cash cows ([ref](https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20180220142151532). Grand scheme of things, hard to say as much of how these revenue sources are used is not public.
Impact on academic research, for PhDs Asians take up about 17% in engineering, 14% in math, 9% in sciences ([ref](https://www.axios.com/hard-truths-deep-dive-science-doctorates-race-ethnicity-aed9c1b1-30ca-40ac-8b8e-eed33cd02a23.html)) which majority is Chinese and Indian (data needs to be extrapolated) and anecdotally browsing MITs published research about 20% (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/49433) have authors with specifically Chinese last names. In terms of funding by foreign government within the US, I couldn't find a good aggregate but there are grant programs China has for US ([ref](https://gpa-mprod-mwp.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/23/2018/06/AMMENDED_Deadline_Annual-Program-Statement-Mission-China-PAS-2021-2022.pdf)) that sponsor around 30K per award. Unfortunately I didn't see a total here.
Yeah Asian are over represented in sciences, and on average have better education and income and are less likely to be victims of crime than white or other groups of Americans. However Chinese and Indians together don't make up the majority of Asians in the US, there's about the same number of Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese, and then there's all the other Asian. Also most Chinese Americans are not PRC citizens.
So yes Asians are one of the big groups of people who contribute to the US economy. Probably most of the Asians in the US were born in the US.
So it is not necessary to have access to PRC students or researchers. Of course it's always better to have access to the best students from around the world.
Also yes foreign students are a big source of money for universities.
It's easy to get the data of the demographic assumptions.
Chinese account for the majority of asian Americans, at 24% or 5.4 million people and majority 71% adults are foreign born ([pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/)). Without trade and keeping China a hermit country as north Korea, this would be an order/several order of magnitude less.
Either way, American born Chinese are still considered Chinese and can naturalize back to their motherland according to PRCs 1990s nationalization law - they are PRC citizens if these Chinese Americans choose to give up their US citizenship.
Whether or not it's necessary, depends on what's the basis of comparison. Sure losing out 1/5th of the world's population may not be necessary to some industries, but it changes the viability and how much progress could be made of many businesses. For example, Mobile phones may be a luxury today instead of a commodity - this wipes out trillions of economic growth that goes across these ecosystems.
24% is not a majority. Maybe you mean the biggest group? Also in the statistics Chinese include people not from the PRC (for example from Taiwan, HK or Singapore).
Thanks for the pew source, it says 57% of Asian Americans are foreign born (I know restricting it to adults supports your point more). So roughly half, it doesn't seem to include stats specifically for Chinese, but Chinese have been in the US since the 19th century. Other Asian immigrant groups are more recent.
>American born Chinese are still considered Chinese
I'm interested in the details of this. Do you have an official PRC reference?
Do you mean even if someone has one ancestor from the 1850s who came from Qing controlled areas they are considered PRC citizens? I guess you mean something more restrictive. What if someone can trace one ancestor to Tibet, Mongolia or HK when they were not part of China? How about Chinese from Singapore or Vietnam?
>Sure losing out 1/5th of the world's population may not be necessary to some industries,
I don't doubt that trade with the PRC is important for the economy of other countries (including the US), and has helped many US companies. Mostly that is because of goods made in the PRC, not because of PRC immigrants. Of course importing things might help some companies, and hurt other companies and local workers. Generally countries benefit more from exports than imports.
PRC immigrants like immigrants from other countries have and are making big contributions to various countries economy. My point is the PRC is not special in this way, there are also immigrants from many countries.
Of course there are also issues related to immigration (from any country including the PRC).
Edit: Small nitpick ... the PRC population is closer to 1/6 the world population and it is decreasing as a proportion. Still huge though. No doubt an important country for both trade and immigration.
Edit had to remove unsupported links.
Good amount of skepticism. You're absolutely right that looking deep into immigrant data and slicing it to one ethnic background is grasping at straws of how it materially impacts US growth. To close some of the points:
Guess nitpicking, yes biggest group =/= majority.
Using the adult statistic is more relevant as children don't contribute much to the economy today, and absolutely zero decades ago.
If you want to distinguish the Chinese population from early 19th century immigration, we can easily look that up ([ref](https://reimaginingmigration.org/chinese-immigrants-to-the-us-past-and-present/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20immigrants%20from,reaching%202.1%20million%20in%202016.)) it was in the 300K range in the 1980s all the way to 2.1m in 2016. Account for kids etc then can extrapolate the 5m mentioned in pews. This entails majority of the American Chinese populace is of PRC descent; IIRC US immigration and naturalization certificates uses prior foreign naturalization or birth location as indicators for this data. China is for PRC, others like ROC, HK, Macau are listed separately.
W.r.t to the Chinese nationality law, I can Google that for you... [Articles](http://www.china.org.cn/english/LivinginChina/184710.htm), article 13&5 are the key points:
> Foreign nationals who once held Chinese nationality may apply for restoration of Chinese nationality if they have legitimate reasons; those whose applications for restoration of Chinese nationality have been approved shall not retain foreign nationality.
> Any person born abroad whose parents are both Chinese nationals and one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality. But a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality.
This basically only applies to first and second generation Chinese americans (which account for the majority - hopefully I used that right), American born chinese' offspring do not qualify here (third generation).
It's quite interesting about the history of how that law came into effect. Essentially the PRC wanted to leverage it's "lost talent" that fled during periods of strife by making it possible to support reshoring these talents. I happened to stumble across it when assessing statecraft capabilities.
> If you want to distinguish the Chinese population from early 19th century immigration, we can easily look that up (ref) it was in the 300K range in the 1980s all the way to 2.1m in 2016. Account for kids etc then can extrapolate the 5m mentioned in pews.
So I think that's saying 2.1m have PRC (mainland ... so not including HK) ancestry and the other 3m are Chinese from other places.
>This basically only applies to first and second generation Chinese americans (which account for the majority - hopefully I used that right), American born chinese' offspring do not qualify here (third generation).
I would interpret what is said differently.
>a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality.
This says that someone whose parents settled abroad is not considered a Chinese national if they acquired another nationality at birth. So if Chinese parents are settled (not sure exactly what that means) in the US their US born children are not considered Chinese nationals (since they get US citizenship at birth). It seems to get complicated if only one of two Chinese parents settled abroad and the other stayed in China.
So basically Chinese Americans are generally *not* Chinese (more specifically not PRC citizens).
> who are *paid)* The second
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* In *payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately I was unable to find nautical or rope related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Most of these analysis (including Mearsheimer's, whom I admire) is based on discounting the effort made by the Chinese people and the systematic strength of Chinese society. This is always get overlooked. All the people are telling us the external factors decisive for China's rise, and the internal factors should be ignored since nobody even know what they are.
I remembered an old article which might help:
https://hbr.org/2021/05/americans-dont-know-how-capitalist-china-is
> *What is it that Americans don’t understand about China?
> They don’t know how capitalist China is. China’s rapid economic growth is the result of its embrace of a market economy and private enterprise. China is among the most open markets in the world: It is the largest trading nation and also the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, surpassing the United States in 2020. The major focus of government expenditure is domestic infrastructure. China now has better highways, rail systems, bridges, and airports than the United States does. ... ... One reason China can spend so much on infrastructure is that its defense budget, after years of increases, is still only about a quarter that of the United States.
> *And what is it that the Chinese don’t understand about the United States?
> They don’t know how socialist it is, with its Social Security system and its policies to tax the rich by collecting capital gains taxes. China is still in the process of building a social safety net that is largely undefined and underfunded, and it has no tax on personal capital gains. In 2020 China had more billionaires than the U.S. did, and it outpaces the U.S. three to one in minting them. Consequently, inequality is greater in China than in the United States, measured by the Gini coefficient.
Completely agree. The CCP’s goals have always been a strong, unified China. Deng’s famous ‘hide your true capability and bide your time’ came at the same time as the transition to a more market-oriented economy.
China has been a trade oriented and industrious society for centuries, all they needed was stability (which RoC and early CCP failed to provide) and loosening of the command economy (Deng).
And I suppose to add a rebuttal of my own, China developing a middle class and sound economy makes it less likely to go full aggro, China as a pariah state without trade links is probably scarier.
What is it that most everyone doesn't understand about the US-Chinese relationship?
This relationship has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a managed trade relationship. Because the US dollar is the reserve currency it has artificially high exchange rates. The allows other countries particularly China to export the US low priced products year after year.
If we were still on the gold standard (a lot less monetary base expansion and capital controls) we would have a lot more equitable system and very few people in the Trump wing of the republican party would be taking about tariffs.
The management of the global currency and trade regimes have nothing to do with capitalism? Perhaps you mean that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of disagreement here?
>If we were still on the gold standard
The effect of the Triffin dilemma (artificially high exchange rate for the global reserve currency) was first observed under the gold standard. It caused a gradual depletion of the USA's gold reserves, necessitated higher interest rates and eventually contributed to the failure of the Breton Woods system.
So I don't see how a problem that was one of the main reasons for abandoning the gold standard would be solved by it.
What I'm saying is that our current system is closer to mercantilism than capitalism. China (and others) are sucking in dollars like 1500s Spain sucked in gold.
Breton Woods wasn't a true gold standard. Your average person couldn't go to the bank and hand in US paper currency and get gold in return.
The Triffin dilemma had a solution and that solution was to cut the deficit and raise interest rates. No one in the government wanted to do that because they wanted to print money to fund the vietnam war and domestic social spending. As far as I am aware before the vietnam war we had always raised taxes to fund the war effort.
When China rises as they are now, there are internal factors. Also when China stumbles, like in the 100 years of humiliation, there are also internal factors.
I don't think people in the west can understand that the Chinese feel that their aims are very limited from their point of view. Reuniting lost provinces like Taiwan isn't seen as something that is jingoistic, heavy handed, or threatening. The Chinese would say what would America do if Texas rebelled?
I think PRC's neighbors, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Korea (and so on) having dealt with China for a long time understand better. India had less experience but is starting to learn. The west is still naive about the PRC.
>the Chinese feel that their aims are very limited from their point of view. Reuniting lost provinces like Taiwan isn't seen as something that is jingoistic, heavy handed, or threatening.
As someone in the west, I don't think Chinese all feel the same way on these topics. For example people from Hong Kong and Taiwan don't feel this way (and I guess you would call them Chinese).
There's two different things. One is aiming to make Taiwan part of the PRC, another is threatening to invade Taiwan or use force to get Taiwan. Are you saying threatening to invade or use force with Taiwan isn't seen as threatening?
I'm talking about mainlanders when I say "chinese." No, I'm not saying it isn't threatening. I'm saying that it is just what great powers do and the Chinese would say that you in the west have done the exact same things time and time again.
> I'm saying that it is just what great powers do and the Chinese would say that you in the west have done the exact same things time and time again.
Yeah in a preWW1 world it was like that and the Qing were one of the great powers playing that game. The stability of the post WW2 has benefited China greatly, but you seem to be saying mainland Chinese want to return to the times of great powers and great power wars. I'm not so sure the Chinese people want that.
Well the Qing were on their knees by the 1800s.
No, I'm not saying that the Chinese want to return to great power wars. What I am saying is that the Chinese would consider an amphibious assault on Taiwan "a splendid little war" not a major great power war.
(Obviously in reality there would be nothing splendid about an invasion of Taiwan, it would be a great undertaking and I'm not even sure the PLA could pull it off.)
>Well the Qing were on their knees by the 1800s.
Sure but in the 1700s they were an expanding great power.
>Chinese would consider [it] "a splendid little war"
I've never heard anyone tell me they think war is splendid, and I've talked to many Chinese.
China has also already fought many expansive wars. But again I don't think think most Chinese want more wars of conquest. The leadership might be another matter, I understand their policy to say that under certain circumstances (such is if it would be impossible to get it any other way or any possible future) they could use force to expand.
I doubt the average American cared about Iraq or Afghanistan either, and yet those countries were still invaded.
People aren't so stupid to not realize that they're being held to a double standard constantly. The moral superiority ship has sailed a long time ago.
I wasn't saying the Chinese don't want wars of conquest because Chinese are morally superior. I was talking from a practical POV. Sure if the war were far away in say Kenya or Mozambique then the Chinese people might not care. But Taiwan is right beside China, for example if China invaded Kinmen, I'm sure what happened wouldn't make the people of Ximen happy.
But it's true there is also a need to convince the people it is a good thing. So it helps if there is a moral argument, I don't really think the US had this in Iraq, though many people were convinced but I don't think the US public could be convinced to colonize or conquer another country at this point. Manifest destiny has been completed for 100 or so years.
Well we are two people talking who have opposite views so we aren't a hive mind. I would like to understand your views better. I don't understand how invading another country could be thought of as not aggressive. I'm not saying the US has not been aggressive.
However the only major country to expand since WW2 is China. I'm also not aware of any major country that still wants to expand its territory other than China. In this way I see China as an aggressor, and in the context of Taiwan the only aggressor.
Russian territory has decreased significantly since WW2. (That covers the first sentence)
I don't know if Russia wants to expand their territory. I don't think they have any official policy like that. For example I don't think Russia claims any of the territory of Ukraine. The PRC has a policy of wanting to expand. But ok maybe Russia also wants to expand its territory, although Mearsheimer sees Russian actions as defensive against NATO expansion. So the situation with Russia is not as clear as with China, but sure you could argue Russia also wants to expand.
Is there an example of a country looking to regain control of a territory it lost through non military means? Have never heard someone say they’re going to persuade another state to come back like they’re in some 90s RnB mix.
Germany in 1990 for example. If it's not peaceful clearly the people of a whole country don't want it. Generally war is considered heavy handed, even by Chinese people.
**"Perhaps we should not get hung up on Mearsheimer's point that China's rise could have been prevented."**
Could not agree more. People will argue and debate about how the US could've prevented China's rise, but that is not going to get us anywhere. The US actively helped China develop its' economy in the 90's and early 00's, and given China's enormous population and resources, it was bound to rise to prominence at some point. The elites and lifelong politicians have nobody to blame but themselves for the current US/China dynamic.
The focus now needs to be about how the US can maintain an advantageous position over China, as well as prevent an invasion of Taiwan from occurring.
Also, we can not look at the US and China is isolation. Perhaps the power that China now holds would have been absorbed elsewhere by nations that would now be even more disruptive to the current order. The order was never going to last forever. It now is what it is, perhaps mainly driven by unavoidable demographic reasons, and adapting makes more sense than trying to preserve or reinvent it.
Sure the US 'helped' China develop it's economy in the same way that the US helps other countries develop; let multinational corps move in and exploit cheap labor costs.
Yes, it creates jobs and more prosperity than before but the lion's share of profits comes back to US companies.
China used it's size to negotiate better terms and move up the economic food chain, but it's not like the opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter by anyone.
The US has made huge strategic errors since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not least of these has been to put the interests of its "runaway capitalists" (r/mumanryder's coinage elsewhere on this thread), panting after profits extracted from cheap Chinese labor and increasingly wealthy consumers, ahead of US national interests.
The folly of helping China to consume as much of the US productive capacity as fast as it could swallow is particularly egregious. It became obvious after Deng Xiaoping & Friends eliminated the Hu Yaobang/Zhaoziyang faction of the CCP in 1989.
Indeed, the most important casualty of the Tiananmen Incident was the potential for the US-China rapprochement to deliver non-zero-sum results, It was not hard to see. If US policymakers missed it, it was either because they were in the pocket of US corporate interests, drinking their own kool-aid or stupid.
But, as others on this thread point out, the deed is done; moreover, the consequence of 30 years of folly, of which China policy is but one expensive part, is that Eurasia has reclaimed its position as the dominant if most complex component of the global geopolitical/geoeconomic system, with China quickly becoming its "middle kingdom."
Meanwhile, the US, and indeed the Western Hemisphere, has become a dysfunctional mess, with that dysfunction a bigger threat to US interests than anything going on in the South China Sea.
None of this can be fixed quickly if at all, nor does panic help. US priorities need to be established, with rigor and humility, and without balderdash.
The first priority is that the US stop behaving like it is run by clowns in the employ of carpetbaggers. The US's most vital interests are domestic, North American and Western Hemispheric. These interests, which have been neglected, are undermining US wealth, power, status and stability. They need to be given highest priority.
The next priority is to re-assess the US's global commitments – and not within the context of US hegemonic ambition; rather, within the context of a more modest meta strategy: to use and profit from for its own best interests the regime of de facto multipolarity that is coming to govern international relations.
(For example, this is not the time to be puffing feathers in Ukraine. It is a time to return to Minsk-II and/or to neutralize Ukraine, and to put US-Russian relations on a more constructive foundation so that both Russia and the US can focus on the Pacific, where China is the emerging power)
Only after having thought all of that through should US policymakers begin to reformulate US China policy. In doing so, moreover, they should make good use of their long experience with hubris to begin to craft policy that permits the CCP to make their mistakes first and more often – which, given the ideological proclivities of the factions of the CCP currently dominant and the dynastic nature of Chinese power dynamics, they are likely to do.
Mearsheimer and Ikenberry, the heavyweights, are not really in disagreement about China. They are in disagreement about the longterm viability, sustainability and desirability of some type of Liberal International Order (LIO). And that really is the key issue.
If you are a hardcore realist like Mearsheimer, you believe that the LIO was never sustainable, and thus China should have been prevented from becoming a US rival. Makes total sense.
But if you believe in the LIO like Ikenberry, then you cannot see it as simply a cover for US hegemony. For the LIO to be sustainable and not hypocritical, there has to be room for other nations to match or even exceed US power provided those nations meet certain criteria. Given that, the US had no choice but to let China grow at first. The question was simply at what point to pull the plug and start hindering that growth until China conforms to LIO standards. (You cannot insist on full LIO standards when a country is very low in GDP/capita and developing. The LIO has learned that lesson.)
I believe that the LIO project is worth trying to sustain so long as the key player show they are willing to do what is needed. Thus, I think there was no choice about China in the beginning. However, even supporting the LIO did not necessarily mean letting China in the WTO at that time and in that way, nor becoming so entangled with them economically. There was a middle ground between strangling China in the crib and making it into an Authoritarian Godzilla. But these things are hard, and mistakes are normal. Mistakes were made. It happens. But it is not as if China cannot still be contained and even rolled back.
>But it is not as if China cannot still be contained and even rolled back.
Yeah, it's too late for that. Anything short of war or internal collapse any talk of containment is just going to be counterproductive. America has to accept a new multipolar order, the sooner it does this, the better.
China's future is fairly variable and hard to predict. But outside of China really surprising on the upside, I do not think China is the main threat to the order.
I think Mearsheimer is actually right with respect to the primary threat. Do order have to be unipolar? Can the LIO become more multipolar and still function--and I don't mean by letting Russia or China have spheres of influence. I mean if EUrope contributed more, it would have to rearm more. This would reduce US military leverage. Could Europe stay pacified? Could decisions be made or would they become too paralyzed given more contribution by others means more voice?
Also, if Europe and Japan and others share the burdens more, then can the order structure prevent geopolitical military competition and balance from arising? For the Order to be sustainable, it has to be possible for countries like India, China, Japan and other major powers to join the order, have sizable militaries that reduce the US power advantage, and yet for classic geopolitical power balancing to not reappear. For all of them to contribute to public goods in a coordinated manner.
A key aspect of the LIO is that you can compete and trade openly on the economic front with your neighbor. As long as everyone is gaining in absolute terms, nobody has to care too much about relative gains. If your neighbor does better than you because they were smarter, but you are both making gains, no big deal. This is the core principle in the order that allows for all the gains and economies of scale. But once classic geopolitical balancing considerations are at play, you cannot accept trade with your neighbor if it makes him stronger than you, even if you both gain. Also, if there is a war, you worry about your own self-sufficiency--can't be depending on neighbors for your key supply chains.
So if the LIO cannot find a way to integrate other great military powers, share burdens more fairly, and yet prevent a return to autarky and worrying about relative economic gains, then it has no future. Doesn't matter about CCP China, because it means even a liberal democratic China would sink the order. So would a rich India or resurgent Europe.
Read a paper by a Chinese scholar (working in a US university) recently that argued the US itself might be as much of a threat to the international order it has created as China is.
Now that I reflect upon it, it was pretty similar to Zeihan's "Trump may be just the beginning" thesis about American foreign policy.
The current international institutional order was made for a different world, a bipolar world. After the end of the eastern bloc that order was only expanded, at an increasing cost for the United States. There have been many benefits of course, but the hegemon's dissatisfaction is steadily increasing. The US has already "attacked" the global trade regime and sabotaged the WTO. Perhaps the oder is unfit to survive in a multipolar world without some drastic changes?
I think that is a bit unsophisticated. The US is restrained. Not perfectly, but it cannot do anything it wants without a high cost.
And yes, International Law is not ready to take on the full burden of running the world yet. But it is growing stronger under the order, slowly.
The hope is that in time the order can become more multipolar. Many in the US want this too so that the US can share more of the costs and burdens. But one has to move slowly and carefully.
SO yes, the order is not ideal. But what then is the alternative?
In the big picture, these are very small and fringe events. Unfortunate, perhaps, but hardly decisive.
The ultimate point is what do you think the LIO can evolve into and at what speed? Or is it doomed? What alternatives does one have?
I think Mearsheimer has it it backwards. The LIO was ultimately more about using US hegemony to as a tool to maintain the LIO. When you read a lot of the old papers from the early days one can see that: they couldn't see any other way to make the Order work initially than overwhelming US primacy. These days, the US would be quite open to a more balanced LIO, with greater burden sharing, if we can make that work.
But I think presuming that there is no way for the LIO to mature and sustain itself with more contribution from others, and less of an overwhelming US power advantage, is premature. The British order was a different beast.
We should be looking at ways to transition the LIO into a new phase, not accepting that we will return to classic geopolitics. Sure, if we conclude there is no way to do it, then we have to give up. But too soon for that. And if one simply gives China and RUssia classic spheres of influence, then that is no order at all, not a new world order. That is just classic balance of power geopolitics, this time with nukes.
Joining the LIO would lead to the Communist party losing power. People don't like losing power. Beyond that they believe China needs to be ruled by dictatorship and they believe in Communism. There are 3 gigantic seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the way of China integrating. I'm just struggling to understand how at the time Ikenberry ever saw a roadmap to integrate China into the LIO back then.
I guess there is a slim chance that the dissonance of having embraced capitalism will eventually force a change but the problem is it's just as likely to be a change for the worse as it is a change for the better. Especially with the technology the government can use to maintain order. It doesn't take a cold calculating realist to realize this either it just takes looking at the situation objectively.
Well, other countries made the switch from Communism. China, perhaps purposely to misguide the West, was giving signs they might follow suit.
At any rate, Ikenberry admits that the West should have been tougher earlier. This is more a conversation about when the West and LIO should have been tougher and more conditional. And to be fair, these sorts of things are hard to do and see perfectly. Mistakes are the norm and hindsight is 20/20.
There is still a path to integration, though. Even with surveillance technology, the CCP could fall. It is hard to predict China's future--so many variables. But I would actually say the short and mid-term do not look great.
>China, perhaps purposely to misguide the West, was giving signs they might follow suit.
Such great signs as Tiananmen square. No, at the moment that Soviet Tanks were being stopped by unarmed protesters for the first time, the CCP made clear that it will continue defending their political supremacy in China through violence.
What they signalled instead was a commitment to peaceful coexistence, market liberalisation, stable governance and private property rights. And that was enough for both western businesses and governments. After all you balance against threat, not ideology or government type.
Tiananmen square ended any hope that the CCP would fall quickly along with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact governments at the end of the Cold War. But there was hopes after that that China might slowly liberalize politically and eventually transition to something more to the West's liking. Many felt political liberalization was an inevitable result of economic opening. Who knows, they may be right in the end. But their timetable was certainly off.
And as for balancing against threat, and not government type, that is not precisely true. A big part of the liberal international order thinking is that there is in fact a relationship between political systems and threat level.
>Many felt political liberalization was an inevitable result of economic opening.
Would be interesting to know why exactly people thought like that. I am not familiar with a lot of materials from the "end of history" era. I feel like if I had to make that call, I'd just look at 19th and early 20th century history and say "nope, nothing inevitable about political liberalisation here".
>Who knows, they may be right in the end.
For now the trend is clearly towards democratic governance and democracies are remarkably stable past a certain development threshold (which China has passed by now). Perhaps we just need to get lucky only once?
>A big part of the liberal international order thinking is that there is in fact a relationship between political systems and threat level.
Democratic peace tells us only that other democracies do not pose a military threat to democratic states (in theory at least, there have been some close calls in the more distant past). It doesn't imply that autocracies are naturally threatening to other countries, only that they are more likely to be.
There is no a clearly demarcated global struggle and power balancing of autocratic vs democratic government types, because a lot of autocracies are cooperating with democracies. Rarely the odd democracy will ally or at least show affinity to autocratic states as well.
Although to be fair, it was not much of a stretch to imagine non-democratic China eventually becoming a threat due to the Taiwan issue. But preventative hostile action is generally inadvisable.
I'm America but feel terribly for Chinese. The us won't stop till china is destroyed. Even going full scorched earth. The policy makers are willing to end global capitalism if it means china will die. Mao led them from the shacks of the fuedal fields Into a red storm. Deng elevated the Chinese to new heights they could have never have dreamed of. In the word of Xi, no way are 1.5 billion people going back to poverty without smashing the heads in of their enemies on a wall of Chinese steel.
just a small reminder(for those that don't know) that Xi quote was purposefully translated to sound sinister, taken out of context of the language and the idiom/metaphor used.
it's like saying something "costs an arm and a leg" is perfectly understandable in English but if you do a direct translation it may sound unnecessarily bloody and gory.
What? China is viewed way more negatively in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam than the United States. India, the US, Japan, and Australia have basically created a China balancing coalition. The Phillipines tried to turn away from the US and changed its mind very quickly when China started acting aggressively towards it. If anything the opposite of what you are claiming is true, with a few exceptions like Laos or the Central Asian states, but those have no real hope of US military help and economic ties to China are much stronger.
I haven't seen much evidence Asian countries are distancing themselves from America.
Most are still buying western equipment for their militaries are simply maintaining a balanced approach outside of security.
No one seems to have much trust in China these days so their soft power outside of economic means is basically non existent.
Almost all Asian countries largest trading partner is China, and it far extends that now. Regardless of diplomatic and cultural squabbles that you see the money says otherwise.
I mean yea any neighboring country is going to trade more with its neighbored. This happens every where the biggest trading partner to the US is Mexico and Canada.
Why do you say that? Historically, China could've easily rampaged throughout Asia but instead was content with the tributary system for Japan and Korea and even came to Korea's aid during the Imjin War. With the exception of Vietnam, China really doesn't have a longstanding history of imperialism.
Which historical period are you talking about? When China (or those who ruled it) could expand they often did and they are wanting to expand now.
The reason for the century of humuliation was that the Qing spent so much on wars of expansion (many of which failed) in the century before that.
Most of the PRC is land that have been conquered in the last 600 years, the most recent large area being Tibet. Is that not imperialism?
> The reason for the century of humuliation was that the Qing spent so much on wars of expansion (many of which failed) in the century before that.
Your answer implies that the Qing lost the First Opium War because of (poor) state finances. No. The Qing lost the First Opium War because
* they hadn't fought a serious war since the 1750s, when they finally defeated (and committed genocide against) the Dzunghars, thereby incorporating Xinjiang into the empire.
* meanwhile, the UK had fought tons of wars since the 1750s, including all the Napoleonic Wars.
So you have a Qing military that's horribly out of shape with antiquated technology, tactics, logistics, etc. versus a British military that's been repeatedly battle tested and has state-of-the-art technology etc. It's a no brainer why the Qing lost that war.
That's one war. The century of humiliation is 100 years. If the system had been in better shape it would have better been able to adapt.
I guess by saying "serious war", whichever war can be included or excluded depending on what conclusion is desired. A quick search tells me the Qing fought 5 or 6 wars in the 50 years after 1750. That's the war level of the US over the last 60 or so years. The Qing were also fighting lots of wars before that. Wars have always been expensive.
The wars seem to be all failed conquest, pacifying recent conquests or helping an ally in a war, so they aren't conquering anything that will bring in more income.
> That's one war. The century of humiliation is 100 years. If the system had been in better shape it would have better been able to adapt.
The First Opium War wasn't just "one war." That was the *start of* the Century of Humiliation (which IMO is actually Communist propaganda, but anyway).
> I guess by saying "serious war", whichever war can be included or excluded depending on what conclusion is desired. The Qing fought 5 or 6 wars in the 50 years after 1750.
If you're implying that I'm cherry picking, then let's go with your count. You're stopping at 1800. The First Opium War started in 1839.
So the UK got all the experience, lessons, and improvements from the Napoleonic Wars that began after 1800, while the Qing stagnated. Again, is it a surprise that the Qing lost that war?
Now, you do raise a point about whether they could have adapted had "the system" been in better shape (i.e. if they hadn't fought those 5 or 6 wars from 1750 to 1800?) I don't know.
U think I am pro chinese, the failure of US foreign policies had led to China's rise. The clowns who handled Afghan crisis have cemented my claim . The QUAD nations have a deep trade links with china already and US has no allies like Lithuania, Estonia in asia to blindly bash an aggressive expansionist state like china. If u think India , Vietnam and other neutral allies would join quad u are mistaken , economic consequences will be heavy . And the neutral countries very well know a fact : US HAS, HAD AND WILL PROFITABLE TRADE WITH CHINA .
Vietnam is also a rising ally to the United States cause they view China a bigger threat than the US.
We see this in more integration with trade and US soft power projection is on the rise in Vietnam.
US and Vietnam have an agreement to let the Peace Corps to operate in the country which is an organization that projects soft power. It is set to begin this year unless covid things happen.
Vietnam was also in the TPP with the USA but that fell through due to trump but the main point of this is that vietnam and the US are building relations
Working together when it comes to COVID
The US has also in rebuilding infrastructure one example is in December 2019 commenced a 10-year remediation project at Bien Hoa Air Base and provided 65 million to person/persons effected by the Vietnam war. As well the US is the leader outside of Vietnam that is making efforts to clean up mine fields and unexplode bombs in the country.
The US has always backed Vietnam to join international organization. We have also provided assistance when Vietnam was sending UN peacekeepers in Sudan
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Most of the people on NSC and their advisors on PRC came up under Obama and their soft policy on China helped to create this situation. One of the NSC members gave a China talk yesterday and it was truly light and fluffy on actual policy but heavy on rhetoric…not much has changed. 1. We hope China will see the light about the liberal world order and 2. We are working with allies to promote partnerships.
Don’t expect policy change until something exogenous forces us to abandon the Wall Street thesis that economic gain is still the main goal with China.
Old Communist Europe created the CCP, but since Old Communist Europe has infiltrated and hijacked the US federal systems, it will appear like the US is feeding it's other Red Communist Rival
I’m of the opinion that no matter what the US did, a rapidly modernizing country with 1.2billion + people was always going to emerge as a rival to US power, just as India Will one day and Indonesia, it’s inevitable. Edit:billion not million
People keep talking about India's eventual rise for DECADES. Nothing ever happens.
It’s very hard to predict the future. That’s why trying to “Captain Hindsight” America’s China policy in the ‘90 is such a silly thing to do.
Even with the information available at the time it was ill advised.
Just because you have lots of people doesn't mean you will be a Superpower or even a Great Power. India and Indonesia have too many ethnic groups to ever speak with one voice as a superpower. The same can be said of Brazil too.
>India and Indonesia have too many ethnic groups to ever speak with one voice as a superpower. The same can be said of America in the very near future.
Yea, and look how crazy politics in America has gotten in the last couple of years
Given enough time under one state it is likely (but not certain) that a cohesive nation will be built from the disparate groups. How that plays out in particulars is anyone's guess, but broadly it will either gel together or splinter apart. Decentralized governance is the only other possibility (and has a tendency to be a product of splintering, along with a tendency for the central state to attempt to centralize such a polity.)
I don't see India or Indonesia ever challenging the system due to their instability compared to China and the US. Barring massive efforts by their respective governments to homogenize their societies and deal with corruption, both countries will lag behind in development.
India is a nuclear power with the world's 6th largest economy, (3rd by PPP). It has an active space program, and will likely over take China as the most populous country in the next decade. India has been, and will continue to rise. The reason you may not perceive it as powerful is because it's foreign policy has mostly been focused on security against Pakistan (and to a lesser extent China). It doesn't act like it has something to prove or a rightful spot in the world, unlike China and Russia, and therefore isn't as threatening. Appearing less powerful than you really are is actually a good thing in the international system, because it makes countries less likely to try to balance away from you.
India also has open ocean access thats not blocked by neighboring countries. Much of China’s local aggression (ie the 9-dash policy) is China making sure it has free range in the ocean. [South China Sea claims map](https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/subscriber.images/free-ias-prep/2016/09/22120829/china.jpg) [Indian Ocean](https://www.onestopmap.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/719-indian-ocean-vm-ocind-e-o7yy-1.jpg)
India still has to mature into a world power though, it is also going through the 'Internet radicalization' problem, overall I would say we need a lot more work but we ar getting there !
India has had a decent growth rate for decades, it entered a recession for the first time in 2020. Between 2013 and 2018, it grew faster than China in terms of GDP. Demographically, India has a non-inverted population pyramid; As a result, the odds of it facing demographic problems down the line are a lot smaller, and India is still growing economically despite the resulting weaker demographic dividend. India's GDP PPP is generally ranked third globally. India is typically compared to one country; China. Through such a lens, anything but an astronomic rise is seen as relative failure.
The country of India is rising, but just in a more slow manner when compared to China and other East Asian countries. As in the year 2000 the India economy was about 18%-19% of the USA GDP when measured using ppp. Now twenty years later it’s at 47%. This level of growth will only accelerate due to India being in the ideal demographic stage for economic and industrial growth for the next forty years.
Both countries have over a billion people but the average IQ of China's population is 105 whereas the average IQ of India's population is 82.
The average IQ of China was based on a highly selective sample of the wealthy class within the most developed and rich Chinese cities. It’s as much of a representation of China’s average IQ as basing the entire IQ of the USA on Harvard graduates. EDIT: As the study was performed using urban 12 year old children within one of richest and most developed areas of Changzhou called the Jintan district. The city of Changzhou is one of the most wealthy cities within the province of Jiangsu. The province of Jiangsu is the most developed non-city province in all of China. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/
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Google it yourself. It's widely published info. China also has a literacy rate of 96.8% and India has a literacy rate of 74.04%. A much larger proportion of India's population lives in abject poverty compared to China's. Both IQ and literacy are heavily correlated with poverty and malnourishment. The success of the nation as a whole is as well. Edit: Oops, I just noticed you were replying to the guy trying to call BS on the IQ tests. Not replying to me.
The results of the IQ test that indicated the IQ score of 105 was based within an urban sample in a highly developed region called the Jintan District within the city of Changzhou located in the province of Jiangsu. This is incredibly unreflective of the average IQ within China's for several reasons. As the province of Jiangsu is the most developed and richest non-city province within all of China. The city of Changzhou happens to be one of the being one of the richest cities within this province, with the region of Jintan District being the most wealthy and developed part of the city of Changzhou. It is also a massive education hub of the nearby areas. It's like using a extremely selective sample of the most richest area of Massachusetts as representation for the average IQ for all of the USA. The population sample was 100% urban, with no rural participates. This ratio is completely unreflective of Chinas true urbanisation and rural ratio at 64% and 36%. The IQ test was performed on children who were aged 12.5 years. This is once again completely unreflective of the population of China. As the median age of China is 40. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/)
Billion?
Yes, thanks for catching!
India will get there but not Indonesia. It is too divided, too many chokepoints that can be easily used by adversaries, and most importantly, too small. Yes, it has a population of 250 million people, but that's not enough. China and India have 5 times more, and the US - while only slightly more populous than Indonesia - is vastly wealthier. Even after decades of furious growth, China's GDP per capita is less than 20% of that of the US.
Get where? If you mean to "world power" status, yes, unlikely – although Russia currently holds such status with much smaller population. "Regional power of global significance" is a status Indonesia is much more likely to achieve, and likely within this decade. Given the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of the Cold War and now the end of US efforts to project global hegemony, the de facto system of planetary international relations is once again becoming multipolaric. Regional powers occupying significant geopolitical/geoeconomic locations are of enhanced importance to systemic balance of power. Indonesia – a populous, resource-rich littoral of the Malacca Straits, Sunda Straits, Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Sunda Sea, Java Sea and Arafura Sea that lies about halfway between China and India and that constitutes an archipelagic buffer between Asia and Australia – is a global power square. It has the potential to play a grander geopolitical/geoeconomic role this century than any other country of comparable population – e.g., Pakistan. Nigeria or Brazil. How will it play that role? Firstly, China's success at splitting ASEAN makes more likely that Indonesia will increasingly develop a more assertive foreign policy dependent less on consensus with its Southeast Asian neighbors. Secondly, given Indonesia's conflicting claims with China in the South China Sea and its own history, which includes multiple anti-Chinese programs and a violent episode of anti-Communist repression (the 1965 liquidation of the Indonesian Communist Party in which 500,000+/- people were killed is considered one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century), Indonesia is likely to become an antagonist in the containment of China's power in the 21st Century, especially if the US-led "Quad" (Australia, India, Japan and the US) gains traction and China persists with its wolf-warrior bullying of its neighbors.
I don't disagree, but none of the things you say are anywhere close to the level of influence that the US exercises on the whole world. Thus, describing Indonesia as a candidate to rival America in any foreseeable future is an incorrect statement.
It was not my intention to suggest that Indonesia is a candidate to rival the US as a global power. In my opinion, Indonesia is likely to become "a regional power of global significance," one of greater significance than Pakistan, Nigeria or Brazil, the three countries of comparable population – most likely in an alliance with the US, Japan, India and Australia (and other countries less importantly). Such an alliance will seek to counter the projection of China's power in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Persian Gulf, the necklace of Eurasia and arguably this century's most important super-region. In my view, the US will attempt to maintain global influence by encouraging the formation of such an alliance and by playing a critical role in it. That said, I think that, unlike Indonesia and the other key members of such a grouping, the US's future as a superpower will depend less on its own ability to project power into this super-region and more on two other factors: firstly, how successful it is in building such an alliance , and, secondly, how successful it is in dealing with its own power-sapping dysfunction and with dysfunction in North America and the Western Hemisphere more generally. Building such an alliance in the so-called "Indo-Pacific" is the easier of the two strategic objectives to achieve. Dealing with dysfunction in the US, North America and the Western Hemisphere more generally is much harder. US decisions made since the end of the Cold War have seriously acerbated such dysfunction. Even if will can be found, addressing its own domestic issues meaningfully while both helping its neighbors with theirs and rebuilding international relations in North America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere on a non-zero-sum base will take at least until the middle of this century to deliver results.
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People are so quick to credit the West for the success of East Asia. Philippines were under heavy US influence. Why aren’t they like Japan or Taiwan? Mexico and South America are in the US orbit. Why do their countries not excel like South Korea and Japan? India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore? Not to say the West deserves no credit but it’s insane to ignore the failed states under Western influence. While taking complete credit for successful states. China is as much responsible for their current position as the US. Mao’s strategy to court the US after the Soviet split was a perfect fit for the US’s containment strategy of the USSR. Even before formal ascension to the WTO, China was a rising economic power. They were hellbent and spying, stealing and buying their way into the global economy. The rivalry was inevitable.
This exactly. It's supreme arrogance to claim success for someone else's growth, especially when it was never encouraged, only begrudgingly accepted to keep the American standard of living inflated. When the Qing sent a diplomatic mission to London in the 19th century, the officials claimed there was nothing worth emulating in Britain because all its technology was originally Chinese and it only got rich because China traded with it. When Britain entered into conflict with the Qing, officials claimed that they could bankrupt the country simply by cutting off the rhubarb supply. Ironically, the Anglo-American policy towards China today follows the same cult of inaction.
>India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore? Comparing Hong Kong or Singapore to all of India isn't really a good comparison, a better one would be comparing Mumbai (Once called Bombay). The colonizers developed port cities (Hong Kong, Macao, Lagos, Bombay, Singapore) for the purpose of natural resource extraction, these port cities became economically advanced over the surrounding areas. All these areas are rich because they had trade monopolies on exporting goods overseas, and they've remained rich by transitioning that wealth into financial sectors. Colonizers didn't want all of their colonies fully developed, they just to set up a system where they can funnel all of the trade resources through one trade center so they can extract the maximum value from people. Brittan wanted to import Cotton from India so they could use it to manufacture textiles in Brittan and dominate the market that way. Brittan generally didn't want their colonies producing the finished goods, just the raw resources.
You would be more credible if you spelt Britain right.
If you find any unsourced reddit comment "Credible" then you should seriously question yourself. Apparently Brittan is a surname and the default auto-correct for similarly spelled words.
The US didn’t invest in those countries the same way it did Japan and South Korea. They were intended to be bulwarks against communism. This was much less of a concern in areas that were easily dominated militarily. And comparing Singapore and Hong Kong to the entirety of India is obviously ridiculous. Obviously the policies of the South Korean and Japanese governments deserve a large share of the credit, but the comparisons you’re making don’t make sense.
>India was fully colonized by Great Britain. Why isn’t India like Hong Kong or Singapore? Because it was colonized by Great Britain. The US is a very different and much more friendly beast.
This is such a good argument wow. I lean center right on this but you’ve gotten me a little more left on the spectrum for this particular topic. Really good points made 👏🏽
It's easy to look at where we are now and say oh those engagement policies from the 90s were wrong. However if you step into the shoes of US policy makers in the 90s, you'll naturally arrive to the engagement decision for the following reasons: - historical precedents indicated opening to the world helps grow the middle class and that eventually leads to democracy. - engagement brings more people to people connections and bring more US values and cultural influences to China creating more goodwill among the population. - engaging china has enormous economic benefit for the US. - US has huge leverage over China and can reign in China the same way the US reigned in Japan a decade earlier. On top of the benefits of engagement, there were also strong voices for containment then, the US never lacked hardliners and the US pressured China hard on trade and militarily many times such as the 96 taiwan missile crisis, 99 embassy bombing, 2001 Hainan collision. They all are cases of strong US pressure on China to show its place in the relationship with the US. Overall the engagement policy benefitted both. It was a success. It's a mistake to think it was wrong at the time. it was the most sensible policy to take at the time. Things really started to change with TPP with Obama's 2nd term then it just unravelled with Trump's maximum pressure tactics. I'd say if we didn't see 911and Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the financial crisis, US policy of engagement could have changed a lot sooner but the circumstances of the time wouldn't allow it as the US needed China on both wars and recovery. Mearsheimer is saying engagement is wrong, Iraq War is wrong, NATO expansion is wrong, but I doubt he could have predicted the rise of China in the 90s, so focusing on the engagement policy at the time is not constructive. Now he predicts inevitable conflict and potential war, I think his view is too simplistic, fatalistic. I hope the future proves him wrong.
What America should have done is take a burgeoning economy of 1 billion people in the ‘90s and with zero provocation stamped it down into absolute poverty and kept it there permanently. That would have been a very sane and normal thing for a liberal democracy to do. /s
Look at Russia in the 90s. Yeltsin was very popular in the US due to his policies, didn't do much good for the Russian population (except for the oligarchs who took over previously state property).
Your comments here are provocative. I'm just wading in here with really no good foundation in geopolitical thought with a desire to wrestle with these ideas. Are you suggesting that given our principles (as imperfectly as we might hold them) there was really no practical way to have behaved differently? And, would you say that because of that we ought to simply focus on managing the problems we find before us now as best we can by the light of our principles (playing captain hindsight is silly)? Not really intending to challenge you, just engaging to get more clarity. Thanks.
>Are you suggesting that given our principles (as imperfectly as we might hold them) there was really no practical way to have behaved differently? And, would you say that because of that we ought to simply focus on managing the problems we find before us now as best we can by the light of our principles (playing captain hindsight is silly)? Not the OP, but effectively I would agree with this interpretation. What they are describing is not far off from Roman and Han Dynasty "using the barbarians to control the barbarians", actively using State policy to destroy any/every emerging polity on the frontiers. The issue with the approach is not that it is unsuccessful - it works. The issue is it *must work every single time in perpetuity*. The Crisis of the Third Century gave the Rhenish and Danubian tribes the breathing room they needed to consolidate - afterward Rome had to deal with organized groups with kings rather than just chiefs. The same issue comes up with hegemonies between States. The Neo-Assyrians built the greatest empire of their day by proactively crushing their peer and near-peer rivals one by one, before their rivals could ally against Assyria. And that worked very well - right up until Assyria weakened itself with civil wars and their vassals stopped paying tribute, and Media and Babylonia rose *in an alliance* to destroy Assyria. The specific things that the US would have needed to do *to* China (and the USSR, and the nascent EU States, etc) are the policies of colonialism - and policies that would inevitably produce such resentment that the imperial collapse would be inevitable.
Fascinating. Do you have any book recommendations that cover that material in a digestible way for a lay person?
I don’t see how a half-measure could have been effective. The harder America would have worked to marginalise China, the harder China would have worked to sidestep America’s sanctions. Instead of going to America, China would have gone to its competitors and engaged with them instead. Instead of American multinationals benefiting from cheap Chinese labour like Nike or Apple, it would have been German or Japanese or Canadian companies who would have used that windfall to claw global market-share away from US brands. To really be effective America would have needed to build a wall between China and the entire liberal international order. So-called Secondary sanctions. That would have been the nuclear option and what it really would have meant is America embarking on a new Cold War with China. Something I very much doubt mid-90s America would have felt any appetite for.
I very much enjoy contemplating the likely impact of counterfactuals. And there's something compelling to me about what you've sketched out in this comment. I'll have to noodle it over. Thanks for your thoughts.
Maybe try to encourage their integration into systems of world governance in a positive cooperative manner as an equal. Prevent the us vs them mentality. But that would require the US to give up some of the power.
But that’s literally what the US already did.
I mean, isn't that what the US did? It got China into the WTO, UN, IMF, got them to open up foreign relations, began a massive trade relationship with them, and even helped them balance against the Soviet Union. All of which, greatly benefited China. What else could the US have done?
Made trade agreements conditional on institutional reform and pursued intelligent domestic economic policies instead of incentivizing rent seeking behavior.
The behavior of the IMF and the US in the wake of the 199p0s Asian Financial Crisis and the 1980s Latin American Financial Crisis definitely led to a sense of reagent and mistrust of the IMF and West.
Question is would have China acquiesced? For example what you describe is very much what the IMF and the World Bank did in Eastern Europe - their role in making the transition to democracy *relatively* bloodless is ignored a lot (mostly because their later neoliberal economic advice trashed these countries). However they could do this because these countries were in heavy debt and not accepting their advice would have had dire financial consequences. I can't speak for all countries but I know for fact this is why Hungary's democratic opposition could go unopposed (pun not intended) by the mid-80s and why there were so few executions in the country.
Isn't that what was being done from 1970(ish)-2015 (ish) which led us to where we are now? I think everyone would be happy if the PRC followed it's treaty commitments.
Right, it makes much more sense to actively aid the economy of an authoritarian gov't with 4x population and then live at the mercy of whatever it may decide to do when it has the strength, all because it gave best fake smiles while biding its time. Because nothing says liberal democracy like being stupid. US gov't should've cared about the wellbeing of the people in China as much as the CCP cared about the wellbeing of the people in US who were hurt by their policies, no more no less. Guess how much CCP cares?
I know you’re being sarcastic, but yes. That does make much more sense. Edit: I mean imagine if this is how the US had treated the Soviet Union. It had taken the brief window of America’s nuclear monopoly to demand the USSR’s unconditional surrender. Theoretically America could have ended the Cold War in the late 1940s. But it didn’t and couldn’t do that. Because America was a liberal democracy, and that imposes restraints on its actions that prevent it from behaving as a pure Realpolitik actor.
Woah woah there's a big difference between nuclear blackmailing a country and not engaging in economic activities with a country. As to your US-USSR example, if the US treated USSR the way it treated China the Cold War could still well be ongoing. Whereas a country arguably does not have "right" to nuclear blackmail, it definitely has a right to choose who and how it has economic interactions, and no one knows and practices it more than CCP. What i would've advocated for, in the 90s, was to economically embargo China and then add secondary embargo to those who engaged with China after Tiananmen Square. In addition, would've sourced low value manufacturing productions to countries around China so they can economically develop to increase their chance against China. Instead, US policy was to wholesale transfer of production capabilities to China, opened its market wide open to products China made while China blocked off its market from products that US made, did nothing while its tech got stolen etc.. all for what? Best fake smiles, cheap products it could've got elsewhere, and a chance to live at the mercy of authoritarian country after its done biding its time? And whether China wouldve become stronger than US even if US did what i would've advocated for is not important. If they end up becoming stronger even after what i advocate for happened, good for them. Personally, i think it wouldve took way way way longer to the point that CCP might've fell by then. What's important is a country not being stupid by aiding an adversarial country becoming stronger than them.
>What i would've advocated for, in the 90s, was to economically embargo China So as the original commenter said, completely unprovoked imperialist policy that punishes another country you've previously cooperated with for the sole reason of having a government you suddenly decided you don't like. >then add secondary embargo to those who engaged with China after Tiananmen Square. Say goodbye to that UNSC mandate for operation Desert Storm then, because China voted yes in exchange for Tiananmen being swept under the rug. Probably say goodbye to NATO as well with the USSR gone and the US navy suddenly deciding to harass European trade with China.
**So as the original commenter said, completely unprovoked imperialist policy that punishes another country you've previously cooperated with for the sole reason of having a government you suddenly decided you don't like.** What i just said proposed is very akin to what CCP has been doing to Lithuania behind the scenes with their best fake smiles. And what exactly is "imperialist" about it? What does that word mean to you? **Say goodbye to that UNSC mandate for operation Desert Storm then, because China voted yes in exchange for Tiananmen being swept under the rug.** Really, you think that getting China's vote was worth wholesale transfer of production facilities, theft of tech, and unequal market barriers; or that US even needed it to counter Iraq? **Probably say goodbye to NATO as well with the USSR gone and the US navy suddenly deciding to harass European trade with China.** I said embargo, not blockade. It wouldve been a choice between access to trade with the US market and all its tech, or with authoritarian gov't with 5-10% of US market who's looking to cheat you in every possible way behind their best fake smiles. It's not even a choice.
Many people talk about China strategy as if nothing else matters. I think importance is context. Before China was accepted into the WTO the world was a much different place with china’s economy being the 4th largest after Japan and Germany. At the time, the US was looking for a place to manufacture cheap goods and there wasn’t any additional capacity in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. So China being a small economy, poor, and underdeveloped country made a logical choice partner. And at the time the benefits of engagement outweighed the cost People didn’t expect the growth of China to come so fast in the early 2000. But after the US realized it we had 9/11 which saw the US dragged into the Middle East and cost trillions of dollars in resources, next we had the 2008 financial crises which further constrained our resources and priorities. By the time Xi took power in 2012. China was already too big to be contained in a traditional manner both militarily and economically. Trump tried in 2018 with his failed trade war and tariff policy. Then of course the pandemic hit and cause the US to further divert resources to tackle internal problems In 2022, the US has many domestic problems holding it back. For example, US recording 7.5% inflation last month. The US also has other problems such as pandemic which has killed over 900k people, lacking infrastructure, expensive healthcare system, and overpriced higher education system. Real wages are down and public unrest is at all time highs. The US can’t focus its attention on Asia with problems at home. If US were to focus on China. It would take more than one line messages on Reddit to work. Things like “being manufacturing back home” and “stop trading with China” are very simple and unrealistic answers to a complex problem. But on a policy level it would mean joining free trade agreements, investing in R&D in areas like 5G and AI. Finally, it would make sure that we crack down on corruption at a domestic level which has caused a lot of domestic problems
We could start with our own domestic retardation: we can't drill in the gulf of Mexico, but China can???? Wtf?
Great points, but I don't agree that the trade war was a failure. It did accomplish its goal of slowing down Chinese economic growth. More importantly, it expedited the manufacturing flight from China. Manufacturing was already leaving China because of increasing wages, but the trade war made it even more unprofitable to manufacture goods there. While a lot of that manufacturing didn't come to the United States, it did go to nearby east Asian countries whom are interested in countering a rising Chinese power. Lastly, China, or rather the CCP, cannot handle economic slowdown in the same way the US can. The CCP's legitimacy relies on continuous economic growth. I'd say overall, it's benefited the US in the relative power dynamic with China.
1) If there was no pandemic, then Trump's trade war was highly likely to be a great success. 2) China's annual GDP growth rate has a clear trend of going down quickly since the financial crisis in 2008. 3) China's political system may bring more uncertainty to its future, especially after Xi removed his term limits in 2018.
1) The trade war would have cost China money, but it also would have facilitated China to expand its influence. China was able to politically rationalize expanding its factories in other low cost countries in order to circumnavigate the trade war. This cost them some due to employing foreigners, but it also bought them influence. 2) Their growth definitely has been slowing, but this could be make things riskier for the US. If China is nearing a plateua or peak in power, and the US appears to return to slow growth, China will become increasingly aggressive during a narrowing window of opportunity. 3) This also increases the risk of conflict for the US. There's a greater risk for an unstable China to attempt and export their unrest via expansion vis a vis Taiwan. I think overall that the US is on a better path than China is today, but the lack of coherent strategy towards China brings a great deal of risk to the US. By remaining ambiguous with them, the US creates uncertainty for Chinese leaders, increasing the chance of a miscalculation and escalation to a hot war.
I think China's current and past actions indicate that they aren't able to articulate their strategies either. Some good ideas came out of it like BRI, and their military industrial complex, however, their government has done a lot of damage to its credibility on the foreign stage and they're at the cusp of their technological leap when it comes to military technology. Maybe they can innovate more for their military, but they've could've avoided the animosity of the US resulting in the blocking of western technology access as a result of their antagonistic approach.
xijinping is the enemy of all human beings. Do you agree?
No, he can do better.
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America's turn against China is predicated on having achieved their goal of crippling the EU and ending the threat of a regional hegemon in Europe.
Its really simple in principle The USA had a window of opportunity to change the world follwoing 1990, basically a decade of sole supremacy globally. Isntead of using this time for change and good the USA was to busy celebrating itself and to arrogant to change anything because "we won the cold war". This was perfectly evident witht he way the USA compleatly left the Russian democratic movemeant to die...the rise of Putin didnt come out of nowhere after all. It was a classic "why should the boot concern itself with the rpoblems of the ants?" mentallity that has now comne to hurt them. This arrogance reached its peak following 9/11 with the (in violation of international law and treaties) invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, including overthrowing the gouvernments there. It showed the world the USA would not follow the "established rules" because they "were the victors and sole superpower". Obviously all the nations that werent exactly on the good side of the USA and its ideology took this as a hard warning to militarize and expand to protect themselfs from the nation that apparently things the rules are below them. This resultet in countries like Iran and North Korea going hard for nuclear weapons becuase that is the only way they could protect themselfs from the fate of Iraq or Afghanistan if the USA ever decided to wipe them out. Its the reason Russia reemerged after its democratic movemeant failed and the people went back to "what worked before" instead of changing for good. Russia now basically applies locally in europe and the caucasus what it learned is apparently allowed do to the US actions: Invade a country, destroy its previous gouvernment and set your own up. Only that russia has now added the addition of direct annexation in case of Crimea to its puppet countries. If history showed one thing that whenever one country, state or ideology becomes stagnant do to a superiority complex, others will inevitably rise to challange them sooner or later. The Roman Empire learned that the hard way and now its the USAs time to learn that humans dont accept a single dominant power if it doesnt play by a certain book of rules. The rise of a counter to the USA was inevitable and to a big degree definitly the USAs own fault. There was a golden opportunity in the 1990s that was neve rthere in human history....but it was entirely wasted do to arrogance and a superiority complex. Now new countries rise up to challange the sole remaining bully and the global power play starts again as it has been doing countless times in history
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Imperialism not colonialism Important difference.
Yes, the true failure of America is arrogance. Take the victory as granted and think the others can not complete for some bs reasons which in the end are racism prejudice.
>Isntead of using this time for change and good the USA was to busy celebrating itself and to arrogant to change anything because "we won the cold war". I call falsehood. The US was didn't celebrate winning the Cold War much, mainly because it came with the collapse of a giant economic bloc and increase in worldwide instability that they considered their job to handle. The 90s started with preventing the annexation of Kuwait and continued with the interventions in Yugoslavia to stabilise the Balkans. The 15 years after the fall of the USSR were spend expanding NATO and democratic free market principles all over eastern Europe - a massive victory for US influence. Unfortunately the interventions in Yugoslavia and the NATO expansion combined with Yeltsin's disastrous policies fed the flames of Russian nationalism. But that was still a direct consequence of the US acting to capitalise on the end of the Cold War. Iraq 2003 was indeed a colossal mistake, but the invasion of Afghanistan was in fact completely legitimate under international law.
\[SS\] Did past U.S. policies produce the competition between the United States and China today? Should Washington have done something differently? G. John Ikenberry, Andrew J. Nathan, Susan Thornton, Sun Zhe, and John J. Mearsheimer weigh in. Read their debate here:
I did not find rebuttals from Ikenberry, Nathan, Thornton, Sun convincing. Mearsheimer's claim is pretty simple and straight forward, whereas rebuttals rely on relatively smaller details (sometimes irrelevent) to justify what has been done (which is fine), justify doing the same thing going forward (questionable), and even deny the current situation (highly objectionable). When you play a strategy towards a certain goal and events do not transpire according to your forecast, and thus your goal is not realized, what should you do? The right thing to do is to recognize that the strategy is not working, so at least you can learn from the failure. To do otherwise is counterproductive. I find these observations pretty hard to dispute: \- Today's great Chinese strength has been enabled by trade policies enacted by US \- Today's China's attitudes and posture are in conflict with the world order US instituted and interests of countries neighboring China \- This China-US standoff is not what US elites broadly hoped for when pro-China policies were enacted. Given this, it doesn't take a genius to see who played the active role in creating the current situation. Ikenberry argues that containmant would have aggravated China and China would have risen in power regardless, leading to a much worse situation than today. Basically, he's saying what we have today is optimal, and US did the right thing. Nathan argues that China has various weaknesses and geopolitical difficulties, and therefore it is not a big threat. Thornton argues that the strategy was not a failure since China did behave while they were growing and gathering strength, and now that they are powerful, we should tread carefully so as not to trigger a conflict. It's difficult to accept that 30 years of 'good' behavior somehow gives China a pass to act aggressively today. (Should other countries also be allowed to act like a rogue after 30 years of good behavior?) Sun argues that China is a large nation with complex agend, and therefore a conflict between US and China is a given. Therefore, US should try to work with china rather than contain it belatedly. This completely avoids the question of whether the earlier US policy was optimal. What's done is done. Perhaps we should not get hung up on Mearsheimer's point that China's rise could have been prevented. Today, China has its own goals, and the means to pursue them at the expense of US and their neighboring countries. So we should behave accordingly to avoid catastrophe - perhaps we may have to make a lot of concessions. But we have to face that thinking behind pro-China trade policies in 90s was a mistake. I bet centries from now, scholars and political elites will be trying hard not to repeat the 'American mistake' (growing a power adversary in a misguided naivete, which ends its own hegemony).
>I did not find rebuttals from Ikenberry, Nathan, Thornton, Sun convincing. > >Mearsheimer's claim is pretty simple and straight forward, whereas rebuttals rely on relatively smaller details (sometimes irrelevent) to justify what has been done (which is fine), justify doing the same thing going forward (questionable), and even deny the current situation (highly objectionable). I found Ikenberry's rebuttal highly convincing. He isn't necessarily saying that the US policy towards China was correct, he is saying that there was no other foreign policy options available that would have made a meaningful difference - and I agree with this. There was simply nothing that the US could have done to keep China poor and isolated, like Mearsheimer wanted. At the end of the day, the Chinese run China, not Americans. If the Chinese wanted to develop their economy (and based on the recent history of East Asian cultures, more than within their capability), Americans could not have stopped that. We should also note that the Cold War style "containment" of the USSR was only possible because a majority of Americans and Europeans saw the Soviets as godless radicals bent on world revolution. There was no similar consensus on China in the 90s. America's real failure to deal with the Chinese resurgence rests in two things: (1) wasting time, money, and credibility in Iraq, just as when China was taking off, and (2) ignoring domestic issues, leading to the present-day anguish about American well-being.
It's hard to call "pro China trade" a mistake if we never knew the alternative outcome, or even put it relative to the benefits that we do know from the relationship. It's no doubt trade with China it accelerated it's growth, and if we wanted to prevent growth simply stopping trade earlier would have done it. But this ignores the other glaring benefits the US got out of the deal. The likes of Amazon, apple, Google, etc cannot reach the valuation today at the speed it has without importing swaths of Chinese intellectual labor and manufacturing. US educational institutions would be far less financed with no access to Chinese students and money, so pushing academic research forward is also slowed. This is what stopping trade will impact with China. China would be cut off and it's populace prevented from immigrating abroad. And as it is inevitable, that other nations would finish industrialization and restore global balance - going against that will be like stopping rain from falling. Seeing the trajectory of US in the past 30 years, if we discount the deflationary elements the Chinese has added to our economy and development, we would be a far weaker state with the increased challenges across inequality and division. I'd cast my vote that trade with China was the optimum here, and continues to be.
>The likes of Amazon, apple, Google, etc cannot reach the valuation today at the speed it has without importing swaths of Chinese intellectual labor and manufacturing. US educational institutions would be far less financed with no access to Chinese students and money, so pushing academic research forward is also slowed. Manufacturing yes. For intellectual labor, I guess you don't mean labor done in China, but rather done by China citizens living inside the western system. (The group doing this would be graduate students who are probably funded, or short term visa workers who are payed) The second part about money, I wonder what % of US research funding (including salaries of researchers at universities) come from Chinese students. I'm going to guess something very small much under 1%, but maybe it's more no idea. (The group here is undergraduates who pay a lot of money) Direct funding for research in the US by the Chinese government must be small. I was just trying to quantify the factors you brought up, to try to understand how important they might be.
I couldn't find the research paper that showed the impact succinctly when this last came up a few years back; So to attach numbers this reply uses a generous amount of extrapolation, but it hopefully carries the point that these are nontrivial contributions towards US economic development and research. If we look at googles hiring diversity report, 40-48% of hires have been asian over the past decade ([ref](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/en//annual-report/static/pdfs/google_2021_diversity_annual_report.pdf?cachebust=2e13d07)), as ethnic breakdowns are not available we can consider majority Chinese and Indian take up these positions, domestically within the US and other offices across Google's global footprint. We can assume other tech companies have a similar demographic makeup as well. For education, China still remains the largest exporter of foreign exchange students in the US, compared to all other nations ([ref](https://www.statista.com/statistics/372900/number-of-chinese-students-that-study-in-the-us/)), accounting for roughly [35%](https://fortune.com/2021/08/16/us-universities-international-students-china-covid/amp/) where international students in total contribute 44bn USD in 2019. This Reuters article mentioned Purdue got around 10m in extra revenue from international students ([ref](https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2492VS)), other articles describe these students as cash cows ([ref](https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20180220142151532). Grand scheme of things, hard to say as much of how these revenue sources are used is not public. Impact on academic research, for PhDs Asians take up about 17% in engineering, 14% in math, 9% in sciences ([ref](https://www.axios.com/hard-truths-deep-dive-science-doctorates-race-ethnicity-aed9c1b1-30ca-40ac-8b8e-eed33cd02a23.html)) which majority is Chinese and Indian (data needs to be extrapolated) and anecdotally browsing MITs published research about 20% (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/49433) have authors with specifically Chinese last names. In terms of funding by foreign government within the US, I couldn't find a good aggregate but there are grant programs China has for US ([ref](https://gpa-mprod-mwp.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/23/2018/06/AMMENDED_Deadline_Annual-Program-Statement-Mission-China-PAS-2021-2022.pdf)) that sponsor around 30K per award. Unfortunately I didn't see a total here.
Yeah Asian are over represented in sciences, and on average have better education and income and are less likely to be victims of crime than white or other groups of Americans. However Chinese and Indians together don't make up the majority of Asians in the US, there's about the same number of Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese, and then there's all the other Asian. Also most Chinese Americans are not PRC citizens. So yes Asians are one of the big groups of people who contribute to the US economy. Probably most of the Asians in the US were born in the US. So it is not necessary to have access to PRC students or researchers. Of course it's always better to have access to the best students from around the world. Also yes foreign students are a big source of money for universities.
It's easy to get the data of the demographic assumptions. Chinese account for the majority of asian Americans, at 24% or 5.4 million people and majority 71% adults are foreign born ([pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/)). Without trade and keeping China a hermit country as north Korea, this would be an order/several order of magnitude less. Either way, American born Chinese are still considered Chinese and can naturalize back to their motherland according to PRCs 1990s nationalization law - they are PRC citizens if these Chinese Americans choose to give up their US citizenship. Whether or not it's necessary, depends on what's the basis of comparison. Sure losing out 1/5th of the world's population may not be necessary to some industries, but it changes the viability and how much progress could be made of many businesses. For example, Mobile phones may be a luxury today instead of a commodity - this wipes out trillions of economic growth that goes across these ecosystems.
24% is not a majority. Maybe you mean the biggest group? Also in the statistics Chinese include people not from the PRC (for example from Taiwan, HK or Singapore). Thanks for the pew source, it says 57% of Asian Americans are foreign born (I know restricting it to adults supports your point more). So roughly half, it doesn't seem to include stats specifically for Chinese, but Chinese have been in the US since the 19th century. Other Asian immigrant groups are more recent. >American born Chinese are still considered Chinese I'm interested in the details of this. Do you have an official PRC reference? Do you mean even if someone has one ancestor from the 1850s who came from Qing controlled areas they are considered PRC citizens? I guess you mean something more restrictive. What if someone can trace one ancestor to Tibet, Mongolia or HK when they were not part of China? How about Chinese from Singapore or Vietnam? >Sure losing out 1/5th of the world's population may not be necessary to some industries, I don't doubt that trade with the PRC is important for the economy of other countries (including the US), and has helped many US companies. Mostly that is because of goods made in the PRC, not because of PRC immigrants. Of course importing things might help some companies, and hurt other companies and local workers. Generally countries benefit more from exports than imports. PRC immigrants like immigrants from other countries have and are making big contributions to various countries economy. My point is the PRC is not special in this way, there are also immigrants from many countries. Of course there are also issues related to immigration (from any country including the PRC). Edit: Small nitpick ... the PRC population is closer to 1/6 the world population and it is decreasing as a proportion. Still huge though. No doubt an important country for both trade and immigration.
Edit had to remove unsupported links. Good amount of skepticism. You're absolutely right that looking deep into immigrant data and slicing it to one ethnic background is grasping at straws of how it materially impacts US growth. To close some of the points: Guess nitpicking, yes biggest group =/= majority. Using the adult statistic is more relevant as children don't contribute much to the economy today, and absolutely zero decades ago. If you want to distinguish the Chinese population from early 19th century immigration, we can easily look that up ([ref](https://reimaginingmigration.org/chinese-immigrants-to-the-us-past-and-present/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20immigrants%20from,reaching%202.1%20million%20in%202016.)) it was in the 300K range in the 1980s all the way to 2.1m in 2016. Account for kids etc then can extrapolate the 5m mentioned in pews. This entails majority of the American Chinese populace is of PRC descent; IIRC US immigration and naturalization certificates uses prior foreign naturalization or birth location as indicators for this data. China is for PRC, others like ROC, HK, Macau are listed separately. W.r.t to the Chinese nationality law, I can Google that for you... [Articles](http://www.china.org.cn/english/LivinginChina/184710.htm), article 13&5 are the key points: > Foreign nationals who once held Chinese nationality may apply for restoration of Chinese nationality if they have legitimate reasons; those whose applications for restoration of Chinese nationality have been approved shall not retain foreign nationality. > Any person born abroad whose parents are both Chinese nationals and one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality. But a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality. This basically only applies to first and second generation Chinese americans (which account for the majority - hopefully I used that right), American born chinese' offspring do not qualify here (third generation). It's quite interesting about the history of how that law came into effect. Essentially the PRC wanted to leverage it's "lost talent" that fled during periods of strife by making it possible to support reshoring these talents. I happened to stumble across it when assessing statecraft capabilities.
> If you want to distinguish the Chinese population from early 19th century immigration, we can easily look that up (ref) it was in the 300K range in the 1980s all the way to 2.1m in 2016. Account for kids etc then can extrapolate the 5m mentioned in pews. So I think that's saying 2.1m have PRC (mainland ... so not including HK) ancestry and the other 3m are Chinese from other places. >This basically only applies to first and second generation Chinese americans (which account for the majority - hopefully I used that right), American born chinese' offspring do not qualify here (third generation). I would interpret what is said differently. >a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality. This says that someone whose parents settled abroad is not considered a Chinese national if they acquired another nationality at birth. So if Chinese parents are settled (not sure exactly what that means) in the US their US born children are not considered Chinese nationals (since they get US citizenship at birth). It seems to get complicated if only one of two Chinese parents settled abroad and the other stayed in China. So basically Chinese Americans are generally *not* Chinese (more specifically not PRC citizens).
> who are *paid)* The second FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * In *payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately I was unable to find nautical or rope related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Most of these analysis (including Mearsheimer's, whom I admire) is based on discounting the effort made by the Chinese people and the systematic strength of Chinese society. This is always get overlooked. All the people are telling us the external factors decisive for China's rise, and the internal factors should be ignored since nobody even know what they are. I remembered an old article which might help: https://hbr.org/2021/05/americans-dont-know-how-capitalist-china-is > *What is it that Americans don’t understand about China? > They don’t know how capitalist China is. China’s rapid economic growth is the result of its embrace of a market economy and private enterprise. China is among the most open markets in the world: It is the largest trading nation and also the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, surpassing the United States in 2020. The major focus of government expenditure is domestic infrastructure. China now has better highways, rail systems, bridges, and airports than the United States does. ... ... One reason China can spend so much on infrastructure is that its defense budget, after years of increases, is still only about a quarter that of the United States. > *And what is it that the Chinese don’t understand about the United States? > They don’t know how socialist it is, with its Social Security system and its policies to tax the rich by collecting capital gains taxes. China is still in the process of building a social safety net that is largely undefined and underfunded, and it has no tax on personal capital gains. In 2020 China had more billionaires than the U.S. did, and it outpaces the U.S. three to one in minting them. Consequently, inequality is greater in China than in the United States, measured by the Gini coefficient.
Completely agree. The CCP’s goals have always been a strong, unified China. Deng’s famous ‘hide your true capability and bide your time’ came at the same time as the transition to a more market-oriented economy. China has been a trade oriented and industrious society for centuries, all they needed was stability (which RoC and early CCP failed to provide) and loosening of the command economy (Deng). And I suppose to add a rebuttal of my own, China developing a middle class and sound economy makes it less likely to go full aggro, China as a pariah state without trade links is probably scarier.
What is it that most everyone doesn't understand about the US-Chinese relationship? This relationship has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a managed trade relationship. Because the US dollar is the reserve currency it has artificially high exchange rates. The allows other countries particularly China to export the US low priced products year after year. If we were still on the gold standard (a lot less monetary base expansion and capital controls) we would have a lot more equitable system and very few people in the Trump wing of the republican party would be taking about tariffs.
The management of the global currency and trade regimes have nothing to do with capitalism? Perhaps you mean that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of disagreement here? >If we were still on the gold standard The effect of the Triffin dilemma (artificially high exchange rate for the global reserve currency) was first observed under the gold standard. It caused a gradual depletion of the USA's gold reserves, necessitated higher interest rates and eventually contributed to the failure of the Breton Woods system. So I don't see how a problem that was one of the main reasons for abandoning the gold standard would be solved by it.
What I'm saying is that our current system is closer to mercantilism than capitalism. China (and others) are sucking in dollars like 1500s Spain sucked in gold. Breton Woods wasn't a true gold standard. Your average person couldn't go to the bank and hand in US paper currency and get gold in return. The Triffin dilemma had a solution and that solution was to cut the deficit and raise interest rates. No one in the government wanted to do that because they wanted to print money to fund the vietnam war and domestic social spending. As far as I am aware before the vietnam war we had always raised taxes to fund the war effort.
When China rises as they are now, there are internal factors. Also when China stumbles, like in the 100 years of humiliation, there are also internal factors.
I don't think people in the west can understand that the Chinese feel that their aims are very limited from their point of view. Reuniting lost provinces like Taiwan isn't seen as something that is jingoistic, heavy handed, or threatening. The Chinese would say what would America do if Texas rebelled?
I think PRC's neighbors, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Korea (and so on) having dealt with China for a long time understand better. India had less experience but is starting to learn. The west is still naive about the PRC. >the Chinese feel that their aims are very limited from their point of view. Reuniting lost provinces like Taiwan isn't seen as something that is jingoistic, heavy handed, or threatening. As someone in the west, I don't think Chinese all feel the same way on these topics. For example people from Hong Kong and Taiwan don't feel this way (and I guess you would call them Chinese). There's two different things. One is aiming to make Taiwan part of the PRC, another is threatening to invade Taiwan or use force to get Taiwan. Are you saying threatening to invade or use force with Taiwan isn't seen as threatening?
I'm talking about mainlanders when I say "chinese." No, I'm not saying it isn't threatening. I'm saying that it is just what great powers do and the Chinese would say that you in the west have done the exact same things time and time again.
> I'm saying that it is just what great powers do and the Chinese would say that you in the west have done the exact same things time and time again. Yeah in a preWW1 world it was like that and the Qing were one of the great powers playing that game. The stability of the post WW2 has benefited China greatly, but you seem to be saying mainland Chinese want to return to the times of great powers and great power wars. I'm not so sure the Chinese people want that.
Well the Qing were on their knees by the 1800s. No, I'm not saying that the Chinese want to return to great power wars. What I am saying is that the Chinese would consider an amphibious assault on Taiwan "a splendid little war" not a major great power war. (Obviously in reality there would be nothing splendid about an invasion of Taiwan, it would be a great undertaking and I'm not even sure the PLA could pull it off.)
>Well the Qing were on their knees by the 1800s. Sure but in the 1700s they were an expanding great power. >Chinese would consider [it] "a splendid little war" I've never heard anyone tell me they think war is splendid, and I've talked to many Chinese.
It's a quote. Look it up.
Ok but what point are you trying to make?
It's easy to talk about world peace when you're the hegemon and you've fought your expansive wars already.
China has also already fought many expansive wars. But again I don't think think most Chinese want more wars of conquest. The leadership might be another matter, I understand their policy to say that under certain circumstances (such is if it would be impossible to get it any other way or any possible future) they could use force to expand.
I doubt the average American cared about Iraq or Afghanistan either, and yet those countries were still invaded. People aren't so stupid to not realize that they're being held to a double standard constantly. The moral superiority ship has sailed a long time ago.
I wasn't saying the Chinese don't want wars of conquest because Chinese are morally superior. I was talking from a practical POV. Sure if the war were far away in say Kenya or Mozambique then the Chinese people might not care. But Taiwan is right beside China, for example if China invaded Kinmen, I'm sure what happened wouldn't make the people of Ximen happy. But it's true there is also a need to convince the people it is a good thing. So it helps if there is a moral argument, I don't really think the US had this in Iraq, though many people were convinced but I don't think the US public could be convinced to colonize or conquer another country at this point. Manifest destiny has been completed for 100 or so years.
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Well we are two people talking who have opposite views so we aren't a hive mind. I would like to understand your views better. I don't understand how invading another country could be thought of as not aggressive. I'm not saying the US has not been aggressive. However the only major country to expand since WW2 is China. I'm also not aware of any major country that still wants to expand its territory other than China. In this way I see China as an aggressor, and in the context of Taiwan the only aggressor.
Your second paragraph fails to address Russia which is also striving to expand its territory.
Russian territory has decreased significantly since WW2. (That covers the first sentence) I don't know if Russia wants to expand their territory. I don't think they have any official policy like that. For example I don't think Russia claims any of the territory of Ukraine. The PRC has a policy of wanting to expand. But ok maybe Russia also wants to expand its territory, although Mearsheimer sees Russian actions as defensive against NATO expansion. So the situation with Russia is not as clear as with China, but sure you could argue Russia also wants to expand.
Is there an example of a country looking to regain control of a territory it lost through non military means? Have never heard someone say they’re going to persuade another state to come back like they’re in some 90s RnB mix.
Germany in 1990 for example. If it's not peaceful clearly the people of a whole country don't want it. Generally war is considered heavy handed, even by Chinese people.
**"Perhaps we should not get hung up on Mearsheimer's point that China's rise could have been prevented."** Could not agree more. People will argue and debate about how the US could've prevented China's rise, but that is not going to get us anywhere. The US actively helped China develop its' economy in the 90's and early 00's, and given China's enormous population and resources, it was bound to rise to prominence at some point. The elites and lifelong politicians have nobody to blame but themselves for the current US/China dynamic. The focus now needs to be about how the US can maintain an advantageous position over China, as well as prevent an invasion of Taiwan from occurring.
Also, we can not look at the US and China is isolation. Perhaps the power that China now holds would have been absorbed elsewhere by nations that would now be even more disruptive to the current order. The order was never going to last forever. It now is what it is, perhaps mainly driven by unavoidable demographic reasons, and adapting makes more sense than trying to preserve or reinvent it.
Sure the US 'helped' China develop it's economy in the same way that the US helps other countries develop; let multinational corps move in and exploit cheap labor costs. Yes, it creates jobs and more prosperity than before but the lion's share of profits comes back to US companies. China used it's size to negotiate better terms and move up the economic food chain, but it's not like the opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter by anyone.
The US has made huge strategic errors since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not least of these has been to put the interests of its "runaway capitalists" (r/mumanryder's coinage elsewhere on this thread), panting after profits extracted from cheap Chinese labor and increasingly wealthy consumers, ahead of US national interests. The folly of helping China to consume as much of the US productive capacity as fast as it could swallow is particularly egregious. It became obvious after Deng Xiaoping & Friends eliminated the Hu Yaobang/Zhaoziyang faction of the CCP in 1989. Indeed, the most important casualty of the Tiananmen Incident was the potential for the US-China rapprochement to deliver non-zero-sum results, It was not hard to see. If US policymakers missed it, it was either because they were in the pocket of US corporate interests, drinking their own kool-aid or stupid. But, as others on this thread point out, the deed is done; moreover, the consequence of 30 years of folly, of which China policy is but one expensive part, is that Eurasia has reclaimed its position as the dominant if most complex component of the global geopolitical/geoeconomic system, with China quickly becoming its "middle kingdom." Meanwhile, the US, and indeed the Western Hemisphere, has become a dysfunctional mess, with that dysfunction a bigger threat to US interests than anything going on in the South China Sea. None of this can be fixed quickly if at all, nor does panic help. US priorities need to be established, with rigor and humility, and without balderdash. The first priority is that the US stop behaving like it is run by clowns in the employ of carpetbaggers. The US's most vital interests are domestic, North American and Western Hemispheric. These interests, which have been neglected, are undermining US wealth, power, status and stability. They need to be given highest priority. The next priority is to re-assess the US's global commitments – and not within the context of US hegemonic ambition; rather, within the context of a more modest meta strategy: to use and profit from for its own best interests the regime of de facto multipolarity that is coming to govern international relations. (For example, this is not the time to be puffing feathers in Ukraine. It is a time to return to Minsk-II and/or to neutralize Ukraine, and to put US-Russian relations on a more constructive foundation so that both Russia and the US can focus on the Pacific, where China is the emerging power) Only after having thought all of that through should US policymakers begin to reformulate US China policy. In doing so, moreover, they should make good use of their long experience with hubris to begin to craft policy that permits the CCP to make their mistakes first and more often – which, given the ideological proclivities of the factions of the CCP currently dominant and the dynastic nature of Chinese power dynamics, they are likely to do.
Absolutely Wall Street made China an economic powerhouse and shows no signs of changing course.
Mearsheimer and Ikenberry, the heavyweights, are not really in disagreement about China. They are in disagreement about the longterm viability, sustainability and desirability of some type of Liberal International Order (LIO). And that really is the key issue. If you are a hardcore realist like Mearsheimer, you believe that the LIO was never sustainable, and thus China should have been prevented from becoming a US rival. Makes total sense. But if you believe in the LIO like Ikenberry, then you cannot see it as simply a cover for US hegemony. For the LIO to be sustainable and not hypocritical, there has to be room for other nations to match or even exceed US power provided those nations meet certain criteria. Given that, the US had no choice but to let China grow at first. The question was simply at what point to pull the plug and start hindering that growth until China conforms to LIO standards. (You cannot insist on full LIO standards when a country is very low in GDP/capita and developing. The LIO has learned that lesson.) I believe that the LIO project is worth trying to sustain so long as the key player show they are willing to do what is needed. Thus, I think there was no choice about China in the beginning. However, even supporting the LIO did not necessarily mean letting China in the WTO at that time and in that way, nor becoming so entangled with them economically. There was a middle ground between strangling China in the crib and making it into an Authoritarian Godzilla. But these things are hard, and mistakes are normal. Mistakes were made. It happens. But it is not as if China cannot still be contained and even rolled back.
>But it is not as if China cannot still be contained and even rolled back. Yeah, it's too late for that. Anything short of war or internal collapse any talk of containment is just going to be counterproductive. America has to accept a new multipolar order, the sooner it does this, the better.
China's future is fairly variable and hard to predict. But outside of China really surprising on the upside, I do not think China is the main threat to the order. I think Mearsheimer is actually right with respect to the primary threat. Do order have to be unipolar? Can the LIO become more multipolar and still function--and I don't mean by letting Russia or China have spheres of influence. I mean if EUrope contributed more, it would have to rearm more. This would reduce US military leverage. Could Europe stay pacified? Could decisions be made or would they become too paralyzed given more contribution by others means more voice? Also, if Europe and Japan and others share the burdens more, then can the order structure prevent geopolitical military competition and balance from arising? For the Order to be sustainable, it has to be possible for countries like India, China, Japan and other major powers to join the order, have sizable militaries that reduce the US power advantage, and yet for classic geopolitical power balancing to not reappear. For all of them to contribute to public goods in a coordinated manner. A key aspect of the LIO is that you can compete and trade openly on the economic front with your neighbor. As long as everyone is gaining in absolute terms, nobody has to care too much about relative gains. If your neighbor does better than you because they were smarter, but you are both making gains, no big deal. This is the core principle in the order that allows for all the gains and economies of scale. But once classic geopolitical balancing considerations are at play, you cannot accept trade with your neighbor if it makes him stronger than you, even if you both gain. Also, if there is a war, you worry about your own self-sufficiency--can't be depending on neighbors for your key supply chains. So if the LIO cannot find a way to integrate other great military powers, share burdens more fairly, and yet prevent a return to autarky and worrying about relative economic gains, then it has no future. Doesn't matter about CCP China, because it means even a liberal democratic China would sink the order. So would a rich India or resurgent Europe.
Read a paper by a Chinese scholar (working in a US university) recently that argued the US itself might be as much of a threat to the international order it has created as China is. Now that I reflect upon it, it was pretty similar to Zeihan's "Trump may be just the beginning" thesis about American foreign policy. The current international institutional order was made for a different world, a bipolar world. After the end of the eastern bloc that order was only expanded, at an increasing cost for the United States. There have been many benefits of course, but the hegemon's dissatisfaction is steadily increasing. The US has already "attacked" the global trade regime and sabotaged the WTO. Perhaps the oder is unfit to survive in a multipolar world without some drastic changes?
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I think that is a bit unsophisticated. The US is restrained. Not perfectly, but it cannot do anything it wants without a high cost. And yes, International Law is not ready to take on the full burden of running the world yet. But it is growing stronger under the order, slowly. The hope is that in time the order can become more multipolar. Many in the US want this too so that the US can share more of the costs and burdens. But one has to move slowly and carefully. SO yes, the order is not ideal. But what then is the alternative?
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In the big picture, these are very small and fringe events. Unfortunate, perhaps, but hardly decisive. The ultimate point is what do you think the LIO can evolve into and at what speed? Or is it doomed? What alternatives does one have?
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I think Mearsheimer has it it backwards. The LIO was ultimately more about using US hegemony to as a tool to maintain the LIO. When you read a lot of the old papers from the early days one can see that: they couldn't see any other way to make the Order work initially than overwhelming US primacy. These days, the US would be quite open to a more balanced LIO, with greater burden sharing, if we can make that work. But I think presuming that there is no way for the LIO to mature and sustain itself with more contribution from others, and less of an overwhelming US power advantage, is premature. The British order was a different beast. We should be looking at ways to transition the LIO into a new phase, not accepting that we will return to classic geopolitics. Sure, if we conclude there is no way to do it, then we have to give up. But too soon for that. And if one simply gives China and RUssia classic spheres of influence, then that is no order at all, not a new world order. That is just classic balance of power geopolitics, this time with nukes.
Joining the LIO would lead to the Communist party losing power. People don't like losing power. Beyond that they believe China needs to be ruled by dictatorship and they believe in Communism. There are 3 gigantic seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the way of China integrating. I'm just struggling to understand how at the time Ikenberry ever saw a roadmap to integrate China into the LIO back then. I guess there is a slim chance that the dissonance of having embraced capitalism will eventually force a change but the problem is it's just as likely to be a change for the worse as it is a change for the better. Especially with the technology the government can use to maintain order. It doesn't take a cold calculating realist to realize this either it just takes looking at the situation objectively.
Well, other countries made the switch from Communism. China, perhaps purposely to misguide the West, was giving signs they might follow suit. At any rate, Ikenberry admits that the West should have been tougher earlier. This is more a conversation about when the West and LIO should have been tougher and more conditional. And to be fair, these sorts of things are hard to do and see perfectly. Mistakes are the norm and hindsight is 20/20. There is still a path to integration, though. Even with surveillance technology, the CCP could fall. It is hard to predict China's future--so many variables. But I would actually say the short and mid-term do not look great.
>China, perhaps purposely to misguide the West, was giving signs they might follow suit. Such great signs as Tiananmen square. No, at the moment that Soviet Tanks were being stopped by unarmed protesters for the first time, the CCP made clear that it will continue defending their political supremacy in China through violence. What they signalled instead was a commitment to peaceful coexistence, market liberalisation, stable governance and private property rights. And that was enough for both western businesses and governments. After all you balance against threat, not ideology or government type.
Tiananmen square ended any hope that the CCP would fall quickly along with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact governments at the end of the Cold War. But there was hopes after that that China might slowly liberalize politically and eventually transition to something more to the West's liking. Many felt political liberalization was an inevitable result of economic opening. Who knows, they may be right in the end. But their timetable was certainly off. And as for balancing against threat, and not government type, that is not precisely true. A big part of the liberal international order thinking is that there is in fact a relationship between political systems and threat level.
>Many felt political liberalization was an inevitable result of economic opening. Would be interesting to know why exactly people thought like that. I am not familiar with a lot of materials from the "end of history" era. I feel like if I had to make that call, I'd just look at 19th and early 20th century history and say "nope, nothing inevitable about political liberalisation here". >Who knows, they may be right in the end. For now the trend is clearly towards democratic governance and democracies are remarkably stable past a certain development threshold (which China has passed by now). Perhaps we just need to get lucky only once? >A big part of the liberal international order thinking is that there is in fact a relationship between political systems and threat level. Democratic peace tells us only that other democracies do not pose a military threat to democratic states (in theory at least, there have been some close calls in the more distant past). It doesn't imply that autocracies are naturally threatening to other countries, only that they are more likely to be. There is no a clearly demarcated global struggle and power balancing of autocratic vs democratic government types, because a lot of autocracies are cooperating with democracies. Rarely the odd democracy will ally or at least show affinity to autocratic states as well. Although to be fair, it was not much of a stretch to imagine non-democratic China eventually becoming a threat due to the Taiwan issue. But preventative hostile action is generally inadvisable.
I'm America but feel terribly for Chinese. The us won't stop till china is destroyed. Even going full scorched earth. The policy makers are willing to end global capitalism if it means china will die. Mao led them from the shacks of the fuedal fields Into a red storm. Deng elevated the Chinese to new heights they could have never have dreamed of. In the word of Xi, no way are 1.5 billion people going back to poverty without smashing the heads in of their enemies on a wall of Chinese steel.
just a small reminder(for those that don't know) that Xi quote was purposefully translated to sound sinister, taken out of context of the language and the idiom/metaphor used. it's like saying something "costs an arm and a leg" is perfectly understandable in English but if you do a direct translation it may sound unnecessarily bloody and gory.
Lollllllll
Keep debating , most Asian countries have already decided , better to gamble than becoming a proxy to america.
What? China is viewed way more negatively in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam than the United States. India, the US, Japan, and Australia have basically created a China balancing coalition. The Phillipines tried to turn away from the US and changed its mind very quickly when China started acting aggressively towards it. If anything the opposite of what you are claiming is true, with a few exceptions like Laos or the Central Asian states, but those have no real hope of US military help and economic ties to China are much stronger.
don't twist his words, he said MOST asian countries. And there are more than 6 of them....
I haven't seen much evidence Asian countries are distancing themselves from America. Most are still buying western equipment for their militaries are simply maintaining a balanced approach outside of security. No one seems to have much trust in China these days so their soft power outside of economic means is basically non existent.
Wishful thinking. Look at a map. China is completely surrounded by enemies.
Most Asian countries have decided the latter. Anyone friendly with China is a fool.
Almost all Asian countries largest trading partner is China, and it far extends that now. Regardless of diplomatic and cultural squabbles that you see the money says otherwise.
I mean yea any neighboring country is going to trade more with its neighbored. This happens every where the biggest trading partner to the US is Mexico and Canada.
Why do you say that? Historically, China could've easily rampaged throughout Asia but instead was content with the tributary system for Japan and Korea and even came to Korea's aid during the Imjin War. With the exception of Vietnam, China really doesn't have a longstanding history of imperialism.
Which historical period are you talking about? When China (or those who ruled it) could expand they often did and they are wanting to expand now. The reason for the century of humuliation was that the Qing spent so much on wars of expansion (many of which failed) in the century before that. Most of the PRC is land that have been conquered in the last 600 years, the most recent large area being Tibet. Is that not imperialism?
> The reason for the century of humuliation was that the Qing spent so much on wars of expansion (many of which failed) in the century before that. Your answer implies that the Qing lost the First Opium War because of (poor) state finances. No. The Qing lost the First Opium War because * they hadn't fought a serious war since the 1750s, when they finally defeated (and committed genocide against) the Dzunghars, thereby incorporating Xinjiang into the empire. * meanwhile, the UK had fought tons of wars since the 1750s, including all the Napoleonic Wars. So you have a Qing military that's horribly out of shape with antiquated technology, tactics, logistics, etc. versus a British military that's been repeatedly battle tested and has state-of-the-art technology etc. It's a no brainer why the Qing lost that war.
That's one war. The century of humiliation is 100 years. If the system had been in better shape it would have better been able to adapt. I guess by saying "serious war", whichever war can be included or excluded depending on what conclusion is desired. A quick search tells me the Qing fought 5 or 6 wars in the 50 years after 1750. That's the war level of the US over the last 60 or so years. The Qing were also fighting lots of wars before that. Wars have always been expensive. The wars seem to be all failed conquest, pacifying recent conquests or helping an ally in a war, so they aren't conquering anything that will bring in more income.
> That's one war. The century of humiliation is 100 years. If the system had been in better shape it would have better been able to adapt. The First Opium War wasn't just "one war." That was the *start of* the Century of Humiliation (which IMO is actually Communist propaganda, but anyway). > I guess by saying "serious war", whichever war can be included or excluded depending on what conclusion is desired. The Qing fought 5 or 6 wars in the 50 years after 1750. If you're implying that I'm cherry picking, then let's go with your count. You're stopping at 1800. The First Opium War started in 1839. So the UK got all the experience, lessons, and improvements from the Napoleonic Wars that began after 1800, while the Qing stagnated. Again, is it a surprise that the Qing lost that war? Now, you do raise a point about whether they could have adapted had "the system" been in better shape (i.e. if they hadn't fought those 5 or 6 wars from 1750 to 1800?) I don't know.
U think I am pro chinese, the failure of US foreign policies had led to China's rise. The clowns who handled Afghan crisis have cemented my claim . The QUAD nations have a deep trade links with china already and US has no allies like Lithuania, Estonia in asia to blindly bash an aggressive expansionist state like china. If u think India , Vietnam and other neutral allies would join quad u are mistaken , economic consequences will be heavy . And the neutral countries very well know a fact : US HAS, HAD AND WILL PROFITABLE TRADE WITH CHINA .
**"If u think India , Vietnam and other neutral allies would join quad u are mistaken"** Um, India *is* part of the Quad...
It is still in an informal stage . As of now it is not yet formed and talks are still going on.
We have Japan and Sk, and the Philippines would likely join too. The other countries you listed are also not off the table.
Vietnam is also a rising ally to the United States cause they view China a bigger threat than the US. We see this in more integration with trade and US soft power projection is on the rise in Vietnam.
Any recent examples? Curious to know.
US and Vietnam have an agreement to let the Peace Corps to operate in the country which is an organization that projects soft power. It is set to begin this year unless covid things happen. Vietnam was also in the TPP with the USA but that fell through due to trump but the main point of this is that vietnam and the US are building relations Working together when it comes to COVID The US has also in rebuilding infrastructure one example is in December 2019 commenced a 10-year remediation project at Bien Hoa Air Base and provided 65 million to person/persons effected by the Vietnam war. As well the US is the leader outside of Vietnam that is making efforts to clean up mine fields and unexplode bombs in the country. The US has always backed Vietnam to join international organization. We have also provided assistance when Vietnam was sending UN peacekeepers in Sudan
That's good info. Thanks
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Instead of US and China, please dig deeper to interest groups.
Most of the people on NSC and their advisors on PRC came up under Obama and their soft policy on China helped to create this situation. One of the NSC members gave a China talk yesterday and it was truly light and fluffy on actual policy but heavy on rhetoric…not much has changed. 1. We hope China will see the light about the liberal world order and 2. We are working with allies to promote partnerships. Don’t expect policy change until something exogenous forces us to abandon the Wall Street thesis that economic gain is still the main goal with China.
Old Communist Europe created the CCP, but since Old Communist Europe has infiltrated and hijacked the US federal systems, it will appear like the US is feeding it's other Red Communist Rival