China is about tough choices and the long game
This week’s Courier Herald column:
My thoughts keep returning to a meme being posted and reposted on Facebook. It featured a picture of protesters in Hong Kong, waving American Flags. The words are simple on the surface but contain a haunting charge: Be the America Hong Kong thinks you are.
America’s self-image often differs greatly from how those in the rest of the world see us. As the last remaining “super-power”, there’s often a bit of arrogance projected from the domestic front. Here at home, however, we seem to be a bit insecure about our system of government.
It’s now an accepted truism that we are “a divided nation”. A large number of partisans refuse to accept the validity of a duly elected President. This is a bipartisan exercise, as the statement applied for the eight years prior to our last election, with different shoes on different feet.
Americans, by our electoral and economic systems, are notorious for a focus on the short term. The side losing an election decides their best strategy is to gum up the works and stop all “progress” until the next election, where too many believe they will then sweep and have unfettered abilities to enact all of their policies without opposition.
Our economic policies are too often dictated by short term metrics. Managers of publicly traded companies manage for quarterly earnings reports. Many individual investors look at their investment accounts with similar short term vision. Too many more are living paycheck to paycheck, with little long term planning for the eventual unplanned emergency or downturn.
China plays the long game. Americans attitudes toward longer planning time horizons was summed up by the economist John Maynard Keynes with “In the long run we are all dead.”
While we have mostly remained uninvolved in the China-Hong Kong situation, America is having a very public negotiation with China over trade practices. Some are even likening it to an economic cold war.
Too many are lining up with support or against America’s strategy based on support of the current occupant of the White House. They should note that we’re negotiating with a country that worked out the treaty with Great Britain over control of Hong Kong in the eighties, began the transfer of power in 1997, and pledged to maintain most independence of Hong Kong until 2047.
On the American side, we have too many looking at the standoff as if it were about tariffs, and the short term ramifications of them – most of which are negative. In an ideal world, we would have “free trade”. It is tariffs, however, that have brought the Chinese to the table.
It would be helpful if more people viewed China as a monopoly corporation with respect to trade policies rather than a sovereign nation. It is virtually impossible to distinguish between China the country and their state-owned enterprises.
The chorus of economists singing tariffs are always bad would never support unfettered monopoly power in a capitalist system. Yet China continues to use predatory pricing, theft of intellectual property, and a general disregard for environmental and labor regulation. No capitalist enterprise can compete fairly in these conditions. In the long run, all of these companies would be dead.
Anyone following US-China trade negotiations needs to think beyond this President, and even the next one. We need to think in a very un-American way and understand the long game here. We need to decide if we want to preserve capitalism, or let a totalitarian communist regime usurp an entire generation of technological advancement and economic power for the price of cheap electronics and textiles now.
Which brings us back to the Hong Kong protesters. They’re aware of the negotiations. They’re also aware of America’s history and our heart strings. They know our President wants a deal, but American popular opinion is easily swayed with graphic and striking images. They want us on their side, reminding us of the virtues we hold at our core.
They’re asking us to choose. We’ll have to support our national interest, or align with those seeking freedom in a remote part of the globe.
It’s a haunting choice. Whether we want to admit it or not, there is not an easy answer.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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Like the long game we’re playing with respect to global warming?
Few will dispute that unfair Chinese trade and other practices should be taken on, or that China’s admittance to the WTO has gone as well as it was anticipated.
There however is no trust in a President of low intelligence and character going it alone in taking on China based on his personal transactions and theatrics.
Is use of tariffs as a negotiating strategy necessarily bad? Not at all, if there were actually allies (who were dumped on out of the gate), and a coherent policy and strategy in there application. But there isn’t. Negotiations proceed on Trump’s day to day self-serving political requirements and whims. The guy trashing all norms and undermining predictability lacks the standing and sense to bargain for them.
Having to choose is zero sum mentality.
Wow, it’s almost like we spent years negotiating a wide-ranging, multilateral trade deal with nearly everyone in the Pacific Rim that would have re-asserted the United States’ position as the region’s hegemonic economic power; established trade rules and domestic laws largely favorable to the country’s economic interests; and put significant economic pressure on China to adjust its practices with regard to IP protections, working conditions, and environmental stewardship in order to continue to maintain meaningful access to its trading partners, only to abandon it at the doorstep because the Republican nominee was a literal imbecile and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party perpetually prefers the perfect to the realistically obtainable.
Great column.
We are facing terrible choices. We are almost always facing terrible choices, honestly. They’re usually not quite this visible, which is — of course — the point of using American imagery by the Hong Kong democracy protesters.
The Chinese argument for their own power has been persuasive to the Chinese people, and frankly to much of the rest of the world: accept the Communist (sic) Party’s totalitarian rule and mild corruption, and we will draw millions of Chinese out of poverty. China, today, is a country of 250 million people with Western consumption and technology access, tacked onto a country of about 1.2 billion of some of the poorest people on Earth. We effectively accepted this bargain when we started buying their inexpensive factory goods in the 80s.
If China can’t meet this bargain, its leaders believe the Chinese people will reject the party’s power, a consequence it fears in existential terms. Though China is uniquely oriented toward long-term planning, this short-term consideration overrides all others; a threat to the state has to be met immediately.
These are the conditions of blood.
“A large number of partisans refuse to accept the validity of a duly elected President.” Wrong. Stop whining about this absurd notion that it’s all about sore losing. We have a self serving, narcissistic grifter that spends endless hours in Twitter land insulting everyone that he psychotically imagines doesn’t like him. He lies to foreign leaders and brags about it. Anyone that dares question his inane schemes, or violations of ethics, is childishly attacked. Everything this idiot reprimanded of our last president, in foolish tweets,
he now hypocritically does. He claims victories from the prior administration actions. He has reduced America’s credibility in world affairs. The world sees his failure and the breakdown of our own Congress unwilling to do the proper checks and balances that our Constitution requires. I agree with your paragraph four, but remember which party squandered all chance of doing something decent for Americans when they had the majority in Congress. We do not have a valid, credible leader or Congress. We can continue our petty name calling and labeling each other, as if it mattered, but it doesn’t matter to the rest of the world. Our history and heartstrings are dead to the world. A few short years of constant lies and denial of accepted facts could affect America’s credibility, standing, and participation in the world economy for decades.
America’s corporate greed drove our assets overseas for cheap labor, and now mostly cheap quality. Retailers forced American companies to move production to China or face competition from a brand that could copy them and sell cheaper. We threw our own under the bus. Or is that “free trade.”?
Stop whining about this absurd notion that it’s all about sore losing.
But if you’re a Republican with any semblance of a conscience or common sense, you have to tell yourself the opposition would be just as vociferous and intransigent if Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush occupier the Oval Office. To admit otherwise is to open the door to the thought that maybe stumbling into a trade war with China in the middle of a quaalude bender isn’t the best idea; ripping kids from their parents and locking them in cages is morally wrong; and this rise in white nationalist terrorism can be attributed to the words this President uses. Realizations like that make it harder to enjoy those sweet sweet tax cuts, you know, the ones currently blowing a massive hole in the deficit.
So please, don’t attack Charlie and other Republicans for the lies they need to tell themselves in order to sleep at night. Lord knows if I’d voted for a man this mentally, emotionally, and intellectually unfit for the Office — let alone one that, from all readily observable signs, is a racist with a really bad sexual assault habit — all because I’d been brainwashed by talk radio to believe Hillary Clinton was the Devil incarnate, I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.
As I noted earlier, this guy ripped up a trade deal – one with bipartisan support – that would have hit China harder than anything he’s cooked up, because it had Barack Obama’s name on it. It’s been 2+ of governance by grievance and all it’s gotten us is a bigger deficit, slower job growth than the Obama years, and a looming recession.
In order to support a lifestyle dependent upon cheap consumer goods, we need China and we need a permanent supply of cheap manual labor. Our long view must include a look at the lifestyle choices we have made as a nation and a honest conversation about the true costs.
Yes. The long game should include serious thought over whether or not Americans are willing to pay our fellow Americans a decent wage to produce goods and services in America. Are we willing to pay more in order to support our neighbors ability to have basic life needs, pay for healthcare, insurance, save for college, buy a house, save for emergencies, and have enough to invest in our own retirement? If America so hates taking care of our own, in dire circumstances, we should be willing to pay forward so everyone has a chance to live the American dream. cue birds sounds and happy music