The Message of Tokyo’s Kowtow
Hubris will do it ever time.
The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder.
They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth.
A fortnight ago, a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese patrol boat in the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Tokyo released the ship and crew, but held the captain.
His immediate return was demanded by Beijing.
Japan refused. China instantly escalated the minor incident into a major confrontation, threatening a cut off of Japan's supply of "rare-earth" materials, essential to the production of missiles, batteries and computers.
Through predatory trading, China had killed its U.S. competitor in rare-earth materials, establishing almost a global monopoly.
The world depends on China.
Japan capitulated and released the captain.
Now Beijing has decided to rub Japan's nose in her humiliation by demanding a full apology and compensation.
Suddenly, the world sees, no longer as through a glass darkly, the China that has emerged from a quarter century of American indulgence, patronage and tutelage since Tiananmen Square.
The Chinese tiger is all grown up, and it's not cuddly anymore.
And with Beijing's threat to use its monopoly of rare-earth materials to bend nations to its will, how does the Milton Friedmanite free-trade ideology of the Republican Party, which fed Beijing $2 trillion in trade surpluses at America's expense over two decades, look now?
How do all those lockstep Republican votes for Most Favored Nation status for Beijing, ushering her into the World Trade Organization and looking the other way as China dumped into our markets, thieved our technology and carted off our factories look today?
The self-sufficient republic that could stand alone in the world is more dependent than Japan on China for rare-earth elements vital to our industries, for the necessities of our daily life, and for the loans to finance our massive trade and budget deficits.
How does the interdependence of nations in a global economy look now, compared to the independence American patriots from Alexander Hamilton to Calvin Coolidge guaranteed to us, that enabled us to win World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years?
Yet China's bullying of Japan is beneficial, for it may wake us up to the world as it is, as it has been, and ever shall be.
Consider.
China now claims all the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea, though Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei border that sea. To reinforce her claim, a Chinese fighter jet crashed a U.S EP-3 surveillance plane 80 miles off Hainan Island in 2001. Not until Secretary of State Colin Powell apologized twice did China agree to release the American crew.
China's claim to the Senkakus (the Diaoyu Islands to the Chinese) was emphasized last week. While these are largely volcanic rocks rather than habitable islands, ownership would give a nation a powerful claim to all the oil, gas and minerals in the East China Sea.
China has repeatedly warned the United States to keep its warships, especially carriers, out of the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. On the mainland opposite, Beijing has planted 1,000 missiles to convince Taipei of the futility and cost of declaring independence.
When the U.S. Navy launched exercises with South Korea after the sinking of South Korea's warship Cheonan by the North, China threatened the United States should it move the 97,000-ton carrier George Washington into the Yellow Sea between Korea and China. The carrier stayed out of the Yellow Sea and remained east of the Korean Peninsula.
In addition to her claims to sovereignty over all the seas off her southern and eastern coasts, China occupies a large tract of Indian land in the Aksai Chin area of India's northwest. Thousands of square miles were seized by Beijing in the 1962 war with New Delhi—and annexed.
In 1969, China and the Soviet Union battled on the Amur and Ussuri rivers over lands Czar Alexander I seized at the end of that bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Chinese civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion. Leonid Brezhnev reportedly sounded out the Nixon White House on U.S. reaction to Soviet use of atomic weapons to effect the nuclear castration of Mao's China.
China's claims to her lost lands in Siberia and the Russian Far East have not been forgotten in Beijing, and remain on Chinese maps.
How should America respond?
As none of these territorial disputes involves our vital interests, we should stay out and let free Asia get a good close look at the new China. Then explore the depths of our own dependency on this bellicose Beijing and determine how to restore our economic independence.
Ending the trade deficit with China now becomes a matter of national security.
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Entries(RSS)
"Leonid Brezhnev reportedly sounded out the Nixon White House on U.S. reaction to Soviet use of atomic weapons to effect the nuclear castration of Mao’s China."
Pat, please don't be so coy. You were part of the Nixon administration, the burn-the-tapes dude who opened the White House door for Abe Foxman.
Please give us the deets.
But the trade deficit has been falling. It was $700 billion a few months ago, and is falling below $400 billion now.
The only time US ever had a trade surplus was in recessions.
As it is, the trade surplus is often a sign of poverty and unemployment, which is reflected in the fact that Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria are all among the biggest exporters. By devaluing currency, giving preference loans to exporting corporations, and forcing huge import duties, higher exports and export taxes bring huge revenues to many governments, even when it leaves their general citizenry leaner and poorer. You can't eat, drink, wear, or use what you export, and wealth from exports means little when it comes in the form of lower purchasing power, due to everything being more expensive.
A certain Tsar of Russia understood this, which is why he was honest when he said, "Let us starve so we can export".
As it is, America's "dependence" on Britain built all its railways. Had Britain ever ransomed America and forced its policies the way it wanted it to be?
Libertarians, globalists, and anarcho-capitalists just KNEW that if we built up China's markets, they'd transform from a nation into just another random collection of rootless consumers, like us.
But while we're dismantling the historic nation-state, China is growing in a different direction. Nationalism is strong there, and talk of the endless bounty of multiculturalism is unheard of.
We're playing paintball while our opposition is waging war.
Mr. Sanjay, I believe the idea is to curtail consumption, save, and invest savings into productive enterprise. An archaic concept, to be sure.
Perhaps Washington should issue another Proclamation;
"All Frivolous Consumption shall be Deferred for a period of one week while Government conducts an on-line Survey of the Population to Determine their Opinion of the Desirability of Future Enslavement to Foreign and Domestic Creditors."
Pat,
Are these the same elite GOP operatives that praised the peaceful virtues of free trade with China, as a means of getting the Chinese to see things our way, the very same operatives that recommended tougher trade sanctions against Iraq (and now Iran)as a preparation for getting them to see things our way? Sounds like the party should be split on the virtues of free trade and sanctions but I don't see this ever being discussed or debated.
As I understand the GOP catechism in its current edition it begins:
"Who made you?
Free trade made me!
Why did free trade make you?
To help line everyman's pocket against the winter storms of unlimited immigration,joblessness, endless war in the Middle East, and the absolute loss of meaning to the words, home and country in this life; And to be with other free traders forever in the next.
Or am I wrong?
Glad to hear someone else beating this drum. Beijing clearly understands both Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, while sometimes we seem to be channeling Neville Chamberlain.
Old Rebel, it is perhaps an insult to nationalism itself that nationalism be defined by material interests and industry. It's the people who carry the spirit of a nation, not the cars they buy, not the utensils they use, not the cement that makes their pavements, and so on.
"Economic nationalism" is rooted in greed and materialism, going back to the days when mercantilist France impoverished its poor while making its corporations rich, in the name of common good of France. As long as everything was much more expensive for French citizens, they should stomach it, because it benefitted corporations that happened to be from their country. Do we believe that? Even under protectionist conditions, what you can't afford to pay more for, you have to get less for the same price, and that's why French were poorly fed while evil cosmopolitan Britain had its citizens fed.
And if America is such a consumer nation, why does it have the largest stock of capital and savings in the world? Anybody?
Also, China is one of the most multicultural nations in the world, to the point that it has been a problem for both Communist China and imperial China. There are dozens of cultures, each with some notion of superiority to the others, and a great degree of incompatibility. There are even Russian Orthodox Chinese and Turkic Chinese too. But they have been there forever. Even apart from them, giant foreign expatriate communities have been there in Shanghai and Beijing since the 19th century. Foreigners have been living in China since days when Chinese were forbidden easy immigration in many western nations. This is the unfortunate result of trying to compartmentalize the world into categories, as China = nationalist and West = multicultural. Compartmentalizations are always oversimplifications.
Mr. Sanjay, the consumption and savings rates are measures of flow. Obviously a nation could have a very high, perhaps destructively high rate of consumption and also have a very large capital stock.
Whether the U.S. consumption rate is too high or not I couldn't say. Certainly it is not desireable to have large portions of the population constrained by crippling loads of personal debt, as may be the case. I think to the extent Americans eased up on buying Chinese consumer goods they didn't need, and used the savings to invest in local business or to purchase locally manufactured products, the effect would be largely beneficial with respect to local capital accumulation.
Prateek Sanjay,
"Multiculturalism" is the deliberate policy of slowly smothering the predominant culture by encouraging colonization by any and all others. The goal is a "tossed salad" of cultures, eventually ending up with a deracinated population completely dependent on a strong central government to impose order on a random collection of peoples now incapable of agreeing on anything.
The predominance of the Han Chinese in China, on the other hand, is assured by Chinese government policy. At this moment, Han settlers are displacing Tibetans, assuring their hegemony.
Old Rebel, I don't doubt that people have put a lot of serious thought in to what may be the possible motives for multiculturalism as a policy, but what may be plausible may not be what actually happened. Between two things that happen, there could be an unlimited number of cause-and-effect relations that could be there.
British journalist Douglas Reed said that Hitler was probably a shill for Britain, because some of his bad policies were ruining certain sectors of Germany. While Reed gave much evidence to the same before WW2 happened, nobody would seriously think now that Hitler was a British patsy or a bought man of Britain.
The same way, I have heard these speculations on the reasons for multiculturalism, and many of them are contradictory.
- "Multiculturalism exists to racially mongrelize Aryan peoples, so that they become too stupid to rebel."
- "Multiculturalism exists to enslave foreigners into slave labour for the domestic masses."
- "Multiculturalism exists to pit ethnicities and races against each other, and increase divides in society."
- "Multiculturalism exists to make people into uniform bolus of unformed mass, and decrease divides in society."
- "Multiculturalism is done to take advantage of global labour arbitrage, and empower the capitalists."
- "Multiculturalism is done to create an inroads against families and what they own by having foreign voters expand the state."
- "Multiculturalism is the work of a naive ivory tower elite, and not a deliberate plan."
- "Multiculturalism had unintended effects, but the political class still welcomed the new problems as an opportunity."
I don't doubt there is a serious message of social cohesion in there, but it is buried under a pyramid of nonsense, and the anti-multiculturalist crowd is mixed in with the very stupid and the very intelligent. And even being very intelligent means that your speculations can become more intelligent and plausible and not necessarilly reflecting of what actually happened.
Sanjay
I dont know if it started out that way, but now I believe multiculturalism is being used as a battering ram to break down what group cohesion we have left, making us into rootless, interchangeable consumers divorced from not only race, but family, country and religion. I do not make claims of some grand conspiracy going back decades, but this is what the mass media and politicians support.
So the question is, as a liberal, do you think any of this matters, or is worth preserving? The best I have seen from liberals is that culture is worth it, but yet they fail to realize (or care) that culture is inseparable from the people who made it. If we were to replace the entire population of Texas with the population of one Indian state, would it really be the Texas everyone knows anymore? You seem to agree yourself with this when you say "...It’s the people who carry the spirit of a nation, not the cars they buy, not the utensils they use, not the cement that makes their pavements, and so on."
I did start having a change of mind, when people recommended Jean Raspail's The Camp of Saints.
It's about the entire population of India crowding itself into France.
While earlier, I would simply not have had an opinion, now I'd say that there really is something to it. I realized there was something seriously wrong with the argument that Mexicans came to America for a better life, because a little more money and a little more sustenance has absolutely nothing to do with a better life. What I doubt is whether many Mexicans even have a better life in the US, or whether that's even a real argument. If being under a roof and having food in the belly was all there is to a better life, than we should assume man has no cultural existence and that cultural existence has nothing to do with happiness. What would America have to offer to Mexicans? Nothing, because they are not Americans. There's no way to airlift Mexico's forests, mountains, churches, and cities into America, and American culture will not serve their appetite. It will leave them hungry in a different sense, and leave them in want of getting what they can for some short-term satisfaction, and life will be about scavenging and getting what one can to go on to the next day.
But I don't have a solution. People on Chronicles have suggested radical measures, like deportation of Muslim immigrants on short notice if they commit a crime, or otherwise. I could put some thought into the matter, but out of a sense of boundary, I feel an American problem should be discussed by Americans. Immigration is not the problem here; hunger is. While here, many of the less fortunate don't have a cultural existence beyond eating and drinking to stay alive, the same should not be imposed on the West as a problem that they should also handle, by sending them our weak and poor, until feeding and clothing people is the only meaning of life for locals or others. As sort of happens in Camp of Saints.
I am starting to see a vague connection - if we see murder as wrong, then life matters. But then what makes life matter, which is very complicated to put in words, is what should also be protected, whether it is culture or social life or whatever. Like, if sending a child to a public school was about giving him a better life, does he have a better life staying in that prison-like place all day long?
Otherwise, most of the talk of a multicultural conspiracy to change the geopolitical situation of the world is silly.
#3. Mexicans are here for the same reasons everyone else got here. There is more capitalism here than there. In the early years the narrative was Dickensian. Now it the "Scareface". That it is culturally disruptive there is no doubt, but it was in earlier times as well.
Pat is a bit out on a limb here, by turning the argument on its head. China is hardly a threat to anybody. The Korea-China-Japan rivalries go back thousands of years, so for instance Japan claims Dogodo Islands, while they belong to Korea at this time, while many other islands are claimed by all three and Taiwan as well to boot. A fishing vessel collided with a patrol boat in the middle of nowhere, give me a break. This does not sound like a Chinese provocation, but rather the other way around and China had no other way to respond.
As for rare metals argument, this is also rather flimsy. If they are so rare, the market is an oligopoly or a cartel and whoever is in, is in already forever and cannot be pushed out they way it is suggested in the article.
Most likely this is just a bit of fun they are engaging in before they all sit down at a conference and construct a system to share in the wealth jointly.
To Daniel Maxwell I'd say, If you don't believe there's been a conspiracy in this country to set ethnic group against ethnic group, race against race, young against the old, women against men, and along every other classification imaginable, you ought to read Dr. Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique". To my way of thinking, only the worst kind of cowardice recoils from the truth in the name of tolerance.
To the other Dan,
I mean as one, giant, grand conspiracy from all levels as some believe.