Letters to the Editor
-
Treasury Bonds
Didn't China stop buying up U.S. Treasury bonds a few years back? I thought I read that somewhere.
(P.S.: "Intitating" is a cool typo.)
-
the flaw
China is a country pursuing it's own interests. We need to do the same. Your statement:
any negotiating stance that takes as one of its starting points the explicit desire to prevent China from becoming the equal of the United States is never going to go anywhere.
...is a strawman, and also besides the point. USA needs to focus on USA interests. First problem is not how to appease China, or how to appease Wall Street. The first problem is what are the most critical American interests?
We have allowed the corporatist and financial powers to offshore American productive capacity, because they made hundreds of billions off the global labor arbitrage, and damn the American worker.
Free-trade as a positive-sum game doesn't actually work if you are running a big and expanding current account deficit. We are losing our tradeables sector.
See http://interfluidity.powerblogs.com/posts/1163620201.shtml
(Steve Waldman):
I've done no study, but here's a conjecture: The countries where protectionism is becoming popular are those with both growing current account deficits and shrinking tradables sectors. A shrinking tradables sector is not the same as a declining industry. Declining industries are normal and good. Even the near extinction of manufactures as a whole is okay. But a shrinking tradables sector is not. A shrinking tradables sector means a decline in nation's capacity to produce goods or services of any sort that citizens of other countries want to buy, at competitive prices...
Ricardo is dead, and we live in a brave new world where, at least for a while, some countries are willing to trade persistently for debt not backed by expanding (if adjusting) tradables capacity on the part of the debtor. This is not a Ricardian paradise. This is economic terra incognito, and citizens are right to be spooked.
I think only aggressive posturing, threats, and a willingness to follow through will get anywhere with China. They need to stop mercantilist currency manipulation. If they don't, USA needs protectionism.
-
The inability to do everything is no excuse for the failure to do anything
Dear Mr. Leonard:
I agree with you that the United States cannot convert China into a country that respects human rights by isolating it. I agree with you that, even if the United States did have the power to isolated China, it would be counterproductive to do so.
But that is not the same thing as standing, watching, and doing nothing as a country ascends to the level of a world power.
The blunt fact of the matter is that, however reckless and stupid the United States has been in the past, in this day and age America's worst instincts are to a greater or lesser degree held in check by a desire to act in a benevolent fashion. We tried to turn Iraq into a democracy, for instance, as opposed to merely killing the local population in favor of American settlers (I am speaking of America now, not America in the past). Our centuries of mistakes, coupled with a free press, have earned us a degree of self-awareness that limits the speed at which our conduct degenerates when we are at our worst.
China has no such self-awareness. It has no free press. It has no tradition of civil or human rights. At its best, it resembles us at our worst. At its worst- which an ascendant China without anyone paying attention to its conduct would have every reason to be- it could and in all likelihood would do far more damage to its neighbors and to the world than the United States.
In short, an ascendant China, however inevitable, is by its nature a dangerous China. Too large to appease, too powerful to easily stop if run rampant. And that is worth paying attention to and doing something about.
Doing what, exactly? Well, that is the crux of the matter. We know we cannot cow them. We know we cannot isolate them. Going to war against them would mean nothing less than World War III.
But we can shame them, and help create the expectation in the Chinese people that it has the right to expect the kind of government that neither mistreats them or the citizens of the world. That means, first and foremost, calling them out for the things they have done wrong. And that is precisely what Nanci Pelosi is trying to do. We can present a better example under the Democrats than we did under the Republicans. We can remind the Chinese people of each and every injustice that the Chinese government has heaped upon, say, Darfur and the reporters that have been thrown in jail to talking about government activities. And we can show them that, however ascendant they become, they will be more so by playing nice than by acting... well, than by acting as badly as we have these past six years.
I fear that our silence would not accomplish even this meager feat, Mr. Leonard. Worse, it would lay the groundwork for our prostrate supplication in the face of Chinese aggression later. Remember that ascendant nations are far more likely to constitute military threats than any other kind. Sooner or later we may have to square off against China in any event, and it may be better to lay the groundwork for winning such a confrontation now (while taking every prudent measure to avoid it) than by pretending that Chinese bad conduct does not happen. This may not mean going as far as Nanci Pelosi would want, but it does mean going farther than Clinton or Bush have.
Remember, it is the right of those who have made mistakes to call out others who are on the verge of repeating them.
Sincerely,
Michael B. English
PS- I would also urge you to remember the disastrous example of Cambodia during the Carter Administration. It is true that we could not stop the existance of the Killing Fields after losing the Vietnam War. But how many innocents could we have saved indirectly by just acknowledging that a genocide was going on which we lacked the power to stop? Skillful diplomatic pressure might have saved hundreds, even thousands of innocent lives that were lost because we decided to do nothing out of fear of a second Vietnam War.