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The years of the dragon

Reading Noah Smith’s Invincible empire? I thought back to David Wingrove’s future history where China reigns supreme, Chung Kuo. In the 1990’s it felt like this was very speculative science fiction. After all, we all knew that China would become liberal democratic in a few decades.

I guess the joke was on us. The Chung Kuo series posits a technologically advanced, if stagnant, world dominated by a social system that recapitulates Neo-Confucianism. If not exactly a dystopia, reading it as an American in the 1990’s meant suspending disbelief. After all, we knew the future would be American.

In the 2000’s I was quite open to Gordon Chang’s thesis about the collapse of China. I know many people back then who were very skeptical, reasonably so, about China’s economic growth statistics and the sustainability of its model. It was all fake. Unlike the West, which is based on objectivity and truth. Those who I am still in touch with who were skeptics are skeptics no more. You can fake a lot of statistics, but finished goods exported to the world or energy consumption are harder to fake.

After 9/11 I felt many American international discussions always came back to the Middle East. That was our lodestar. In the 2020’s I think it will be all about the dragon. As Smith notes, China is already 40% of Asia’s GDP. It’s already huge, important, and its “gravitational pull” is hard to escape.

In private forums, I am on I sometimes ask: the dragon or our nihilist elites? I have no illusion about what China is. But I am also fearful of what our American intelligentsia is becoming. And I am not the only one. The 2016 great “Russia flip” shows ideological valences in relation to foreign actors can change fast.

This will be an interesting decade…

Note: If it is not obvious, I began 2020 as a reluctant “China dove.” I am not that anymore, but I am not sure what I am.

19 thoughts on “The years of the dragon

  1. I wonder what will happen to India in this world order where China dominates?

    I guess there is no hope for America. It lost its way.
    Just get rich and weather the storm.

  2. Everything will be fine. Yes, PRC is big and powerful and influential, but their nationalism and imperialism are becoming more and more toxic in the world. Maybe I say nonsense, but I think that the United States needs more politicians of Chinese descent and Asian in general, because the 21st century is already and will be the Asian century, to better understand a country like PRC.
    By the way, what do you think of Andrew Yang and his chances of becoming mayor of New York.

  3. “If it is not obvious, I began 2020 as a reluctant “China dove.” I am not that anymore”

    Why? I’m not aware that the Chinese have done anything since the start of this year they didn’t do before, so what caused this change?

  4. Very interesting topic, and so I will write probably-too-much in a rambling mini-essay comment in response (perhaps much of it speculative and Dragon “cope” 😉 ):

    Smith’s Invincible Empire? post seems to place a lot of emphasis on China’s ability to take on any one country at a time, due to being such and large and consolidated area, even if it never really surpasses much of the rest of the world in its economic productivity and population. In short when big China is fighting smaller other countries one by one, it can bring force to bear.

    That matters. It’s plausible. However, one flipside idea worth considering is the argument presented by Koyama, Ko and Sng’s idea that large imperial structures arise (at least in part) when facing a unidirectional threat, to bring an area’s force against that unidirectional threat (in China’s case, force of the populous Chinese river basins against the steppe). But these states have problems when multidirectional threats pull them apart as different regions face incentives to “Go it alone” to concentrate their resources on local, higher priority threats.

    China might be very powerful if it is facing single countries one at a time, but may have problems if it’s facing multi-directional threats which present a conflicting incentives to differnt factions in its huge society. Even if those countries don’t actually coordinate with each other and work together. I don’t think that could ever lead to the dissolution of the Chinese nation, with provinces going it alone, as the value on unity and national consciousness is just too high, but it might gum up the works quite a bit and negate some of that advantage of size (in ways that could be less functional than going it alone).

    Smith does goes into how many small countries can do something at the end of the article, but I think he perhaps overemphasizes binding intentional alliance with a dominant US heart and mind as necessary. I’m not so sure that everything is so hopeless without countries having effective coordinating mechanisms, rather than competive relationships. There may still fundamentally be a sort of multi-directional problem for China. (They may be more of a problem, harder to assess and balance, if they don’t coordinate?).

    To make my point about his theme of “one large vs many small”, Smith comments that: “(T)he U.S. used its massive productive power to overwhelm the Axis powers in World War 2.” One “Big US” vs lots of small countries. Yet that frame seems to gloss that Russia was pretty damn important to the defeat of the Axis (perhaps *the* main factor). More generally, would it be fair to say that a fairly equally common experience of the USA also seems to have been that, although it can bring its power to bear in any particular venue, this has not really always meant an overwhelming dominance in foreign wars, or any mission success even in the case of dominance?

    Nor that the USA has been that able to successfully bully or prevent economic development in other regions. For all that people talk about the power of US sanctions, they seem relatively toothless in preventing economic development compared to the power of human development and economic policy choices within a country. Country wealth tends to be predicted by education and where this diverges, it seems largely due to internal political and economic choices, not sanctions (e.g. Russia). Big countries that try to offer small ones “an offer you can’t refuse” in offering trade arrangements that blatently favour the bigger one seem to me to have often just tended to get noped and rejected, unless they literally practice gunboat diplomacy. (For all its pooled size, wealth and expertise, the US seems really unable to force an economic deal with Mexico that’s absolutely clearly in its favour, the European Union’s recent arrangements with smaller South Korea seem either equally beneficial to both or not clearly in EU’s favour, etc). And on economic development, the benefits of agglomeration and superscaling seem to me to tend to be fairly limited relative to the benefits of education and human development and national quality of legal institutions. Smaller states that can marshall less total resources on infrastructure but have equal human development do not really seem to perform more poorly in terms of economic development/capita?

    (Big Infrastructure Progressives like Smith or Yglesias seem really seem to tend to find very attractive these ideas that bigger countries with more ability to pool fiscal capacity can outperform the quality of their human inputs by more easily doing massive state investment and planning in building roads and housing and electrification and ports and so on. That seems to place a certain gloss on how they think about China (where it on some level inevitably becomes a sales pitch for these projects in their own countries). Even more tangentially this goes on to a lot of suspicion I have of the discourse of fairly “liberal internationalist” Progressive type on China; I can’t shake the suspicion that the defense of international institutions as a counter to China seems conveniently almost like a pretext to bring about a situation where a class of internationalist technocrats with large and broad economic planning powers can effectively evade democratic scrutiny because they work from a discretionary legal framework which is bound up in international treaty law that is exempt from any effective control or change through the mechanisms of democracy – “democratic deficit”. I find it very difficult to separate this suspicion from the arguments being made by these folks, and perhaps I treat them unfairly in response…)

  5. “If it is not obvious, I began 2020 as a reluctant “China dove.” I am not that anymore”

    Why? I’m not aware that the Chinese have done anything since the start of this year they didn’t do before, so what caused this change?

    1) Absent a big, explosive event, it takes time to change your mind but eventually the drip, drip, drip of illiberal actions by the CCP changes how you perceive it.

    2) Perhaps he has been reading Tanner Greer. Greer has been pointing out that Xi Jinping is very proud that the People’s Republic of China will outlive the Soviet Union. He also believes that the Soviet Union dissolved because it liberalized. It’s Communist Party didn’t “keep the faith”; it’s first mistake was denouncing Stalin! So he has pursued a deliberately anti-liberal policy internally and a foreign policy to remake the relatively liberal post-war American dominated order into one less liberal and focused on China. He has also very much pushed against the idea that liberal institutions bring peace and prosperity, positing instead a more authoritarian model, which (shockingly!) authoritarians and would-be authoritarians find tempting.

    Two posts at this blog The Scholar’s Stage which lay out a good deal of his thinking are The World That China Wants (Part 1): Why Intentions Matter and The World That China Wants (II): The Communist Case in Brief.

    A more recent post argues that China’s recent attempt to “punish” Australia is a big deal.

  6. Mr Khan, you are an American. It is inevitable that you will be pulled into your country’s negative campaign against the PRC.

    For the rest of the Third World, however, I imagine the question is a more straightforward one: Will China ever have the USA’s current coercive abilities. The obvious answer is no. For all the frenzy of Indians online, there are greater odds of the USA flattening New Dehli than China doing it.

    China world-historical role will be in forcing the West to return to an actual Westphalian world. They will be forced to revoke the veto of interference that was a habit formed by the weakness of the Ottomans and the apogee of Imperial Nations in the 20th-century.

    That places me firmly, and unapologetically, in the Sinotriumph camp. Those of us who see the economic attractions of the West and reject it out of distaste for parts of its culture deserve our own country. We are not anomalies to be subjected to ceaseless ‘be like us’ campaigns and subversions. Just. Leave. Us. Alone.

    China, and to a lesser extent, Israel, will make that attitude inevitable, methinks. That is why I support both!
    —-
    Mr Sweeney. Mr Greer is obviously forging a career in the American NatSec apparatus as a ‘China Hawk’. He is merely finding facts to fit a predetermined goal i.e that the PRC as constituted is fundamentally illegitimate. Some discount Scholar’s Stage probably does similar work for my country.

    The USA is not a monarchy today because certain anti-monarchical social groups within it seized power. That was at a time when Republicans were rare. To the best of my knowledge, the monarchies did not set out to subvert them as fundamentally illegitimate.

    Why should the USA care what other social groups seize control in other countries as long as they do not declare war on the USA? The vast peoples of the world are not its toys to set in order! The CCP governs China because they won. They are as legitimate as Washington’s rebels, the Ayatollahs, Assad or the House of Saud.

    Are we now to be outraged by economic coercion after its deployment by the USA, EU and Japan? Come on! The Aussies can eat their pride, curb their tongue and keep their lucre or do the reverse.

    Westerners are so used to the rest walking on glass to please them that they think it is the natural state of the world. Well sometimes, the Rest can demand a customer’s privilege. Treat him as king or lose his custom. It is a free world.

  7. “China world-historical role will be in forcing the West to return to an actual Westphalian world.”

    I don’t have much sympathy for China’s system of government and I want steps taken to curtail China’s economic influence in my own country, but I tend to agree with that. A lot of Americans are severely lacking in self-awareness imo with their jingoistic outrage over China, totally ignoring how appalling America’s record has been over the last 30 years. China hasn’t been at war for 40 years, whereas the US bombs and sanctions at its pleasure and seems to regard sovereignty of other states as an obsolete concept. Saying China needs to be contained to preserve the “rules-based liberal order” is a misleading euphemism imo, in reality it is about permanent American global hegemony, which American elites feel entitled to, but which is slipping from their grasp.

  8. Why should the USA care what other social groups seize control in other countries as long as they do not declare war on the USA?

    1) What happens in one country will have effects in other countries. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 had profound effects on the United States. It would be short-sighted to only start caring when Germany declares war on the United States, December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor.

    2) The arc of history may or may not bend toward justice, but I would like to see people’s lives get better–whether here or abroad. Exactly how to do that is, of course, an enormous question.

  9. There was a post on Thomson Reuters earlier this week that I found disturbing, and then depressing in its accuracy: that Chinese firms would scoop up white male talent in North America and the Anglophone world, as the corporate sector and the institutions that prop it up (academia, NGO consulting, financial institutions, etc) push to make their ranks more ethnically and racially diverse, equitable, and inclusive, including remaking their workplace and all manner of hiring, promotion, and evaluative criteria in order to do so. “Corporate social responsibility”, that buzzword of the late 90s and 2000s, has turned into a political movement and an article of faith that is going to bring down all kinds of criteria we have used to judge the merit of firms.

    If you’re a 45 year-old white man, with a wife and a kid you’re hoping to get into a good school and keep living in a good neighborhood, why wouldn’t you jump ship at the chance to work for a Chinese firm that makes judgments on merit and productivity (just don’t criticize the CCP) rather than keep treading water at an American firm judging you based on how many diversity trainings you attend and what you are doing on your social media account to combat microaggressions, that will have to let you go within 5 years because they don’t need anymore old white men that cost too much and have too much privilege? No, you won’t be top leadership in the Chinese firm, that’s informally reserved for Chinese nationals, but the same is true in the American firms, where leadership is all but formally reserved for the diverse.

    Hard to see how Chinese firms, and China itself, don’t greatly benefit from this, judging on merit rather than race and all assorted idpol stuff, and American firms and markets suffer.

  10. @Roger Sweeny

    This smacks too much of R2P humanitarian interventionism, and needs to be bound by some kind of limiting principle. It will be an arbitrary point, one no less arbitrary than a formal declaration of war. At what point should the US have intervened against Germany? When the Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag during the Weimar era? When they were the second-largest party, the Communists being the third-largest, in the 1930 election? When they were the largest party, but still a minority, in 1932? When Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reichskanzler in January 1933? The November 1933 election, when other parties were all but formally banned from participating? Kristallnacht? Nuremberg laws? Night of the Long Knives? Remilitarization of the Ruhr? Anschluss?

    And remember that where you draw the line WILL be used against you. We have protests, including violent riots in the street now, about police shooting young black men with questionable justification. Do you want China or Russia using this as cause to step in to restore order/fight against racial persecution?

  11. @ Mekal I completely agree that there can’t be unlimited intervention to try to change what some country’s government feels is wrong in another country. When to do what and how is, in the words of my comment, “an enormous question”.

    More than anything else, I was taking literally the question, “Why should the USA care?” and trying to answer it.

    “Why should the USA care?” and “What should the USA do?” are, of course, very different questions.

  12. @Roger Sweeny

    I appreciate your reply. I can agree with the sentiment that, yes, the USA should care about what happens in other countries. Countries that try to shut themselves off from the world entirely tend to fare poorly, which ironically is what China itself tried in the 1950s and 1960s to the point that society nearly self-destructed. But it really ends there for me, because so much of the question about “why we should care” has inevitably, and very quickly, in the US over the past 30+ years served as a lead for the follow-up “and here’s what we should do about it”. Call it cynicism or paranoia, but at some point you become suspicious of even simple, innocent, well-intentioned questions.

  13. Mr Sweeney,

    I say this with love, but if I had a time machine and one bullet, FDR would have been mysteriously murdered in his crib.

    1. American intervention in WW2 is the root of all your country’s self-righteousness. Well, FYI, if you invaded to prevent conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe and the rise of a European hegemon, you failed. The USSR ended up doing all that. Hitler and the Japanese were fools for prodding you into active intervention, but please, all that war actually achieved was extending American hegemony to Western Europe and the Pacific. No need for the righteous sheen. The Jews still died, weak countries were partitioned, Communism was crushed in western Europe and the Germans and Italians were the economic winners. I struggle to see much difference than in a Nazi victory.

    2. Americans tend to forget that if the rules of intervention you apply today were applied to your country, it would have been dismembered for any number of ‘humanitarian reasons’. Africa was partitioned, in part, to end the domestic slave trade. Well, guess who also kept up domestic slavery longer than all her peers? Your country lied to seize Mexican territory and invade the Philippines, where mind you, you conducted a campaign of repression to make a Xinjiang Party Secretary proud. One could go on. But considering your country’s history, why not let others’ history play out?

    The fact is that Americans are human. By many indications, you guys, despite the achievements of your ancestors, are barely able to govern yourselves. What do you know that ‘we’ don’t? Leave the world to go about their business and mind yours. We will all be fine.

    3. If better lives abroad were your true intent, then the CCP should be your best friends, no? But we both know it is more than that. There are aspects of American pride involved. That pride and the idea that it is America’s role, or should one say duty, to order the world is annoying, false, and for the rest of us Third Worlders, actively dangerous. It is incredible hubris to assume that America warning off the European powers from interfering in affairs in its hemisphere was cool, but others claiming a similar right is anathema. Care about your country, crush those who threaten it, but leave non-Americans alone.

    I fail to understand why otherwise nice Americans fail to understand this. How hard is it to say buy, or not buy, Chinese or Zambian goods without telling them how they should run their country? How is it hard to understand that the expected resentment from your interference will only drive you to further violence?

  14. @Prism – Not to take it too far, I have absolutely no doubt that I would not have enjoyed growing up as a Japanese slave. During the Vietnam War when it was fashionable for my generation to bad-mouth Americans, my father’s generation of Australian ex-servicemen all said things like: “The Yanks saved us in the islands, and don’t you forget it.” Likewise, I have no doubt that people in SE Asia and small Pacific nations still harbour a legacy of gratitude for a generation of incredibly brave US Marines who sacrificed their lives in the War in the Pacific in the face of an absolutely fearsome enemy who preferred to die rather than surrender, and who killed far more civilians than they did enemy combatants. Chinese people generally still have a higher opinion of Americans than vice versa.

    I don’t have much argument with your general gist, but let’s not forget that all of those young American men laid down their lives so that I and people like me could be born free, when they didn’t need to in order to defend America.

    Visit the American war cemetery in Manila some time – it stretches literally for miles, endless lines of white crosses interspersed with graves marked with the Star of David. It is simultaneously mind-blowing and heart-breaking.

  15. @Matt

    “Yet that frame seems to gloss that Russia was pretty damn important to the defeat of the Axis (perhaps *the* main factor)”

    People who say this seem to think that Axis powers only consisted of Germany, Germany and Germany. As if Italy and Japan didn’t exist. Soviets played no role in the Italian Theater and they joined the war against Japan a few weeks before its surrender. I don’t want to diminish the Soviet effort during war but is ridiculous to claim that they were the main factor in the defeat of Axis powers.

  16. @ John Massey

    Older Chinese opinion of Americans is also helped by the fact that the US treated China more fairly than European powers during their Century of Humiliation.

  17. Russia had little to do with the campaigns in North Africa, Italy, or the Pacific. However, they were the main factor in the defeat of Germany. Compared to the Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day was a sideshow.

    But it was terribly important geopolitically. Otherwise, Stalin would have conquered all of Germany and post-war history would have been quite different.

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