Article

2015-03-29 China-Japan-Koreas

Spengler: How should America compete with China?

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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2015-03-29 14:23|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

#1 Move our leftist and eco-nuts to China.

Posted by 3dc 2015-03-29 16:49|| 2015-03-29 16:49|| Front Page Top

#2 Quit having everything made by Chinese. Make it here.

Posted by JohnQC 2015-03-29 17:26|| 2015-03-29 17:26|| Front Page Top

#3 And what 3dc said.

Posted by JohnQC 2015-03-29 17:27|| 2015-03-29 17:27|| Front Page Top

#4 Funny, NOT, the main point of his article seems to devolve to a comparison of American v. Chinese corruption....we lose.

Posted by AlanC 2015-03-29 17:27|| 2015-03-29 17:27|| Front Page Top

#5 Demand they import one American lawyer for every 1 million dollars in trade.

Posted by Procopius2k 2015-03-29 17:31|| 2015-03-29 17:31|| Front Page Top

#6 We were sold out to these bastids decades ago.

Posted by Besoeker 2015-03-29 17:33|| 2015-03-29 17:33|| Front Page Top

#7 Beso, I'm not sure that you're assigning the correct value to "bastids". You might want to consider that the bastids were the ones that sold us out. Can you blame the Chinese for accepting the offer?

Posted by AlanC 2015-03-29 17:36|| 2015-03-29 17:36|| Front Page Top

#8 Right you are Alan. Right you are !

Posted by Besoeker 2015-03-29 17:40|| 2015-03-29 17:40|| Front Page Top

#9 Sickens me to go to the Walmart, Taret, Gander Mtn, Cabela's, or elsewhere and buy merchandise made by Chinese slave labor.

Posted by Besoeker 2015-03-29 17:42|| 2015-03-29 17:42|| Front Page Top

#10 Nonetheless, as I wrote in Asia Times, “China is not planning to take over the world. It doesn’t want the world. It doesn’t like the world – that is, the world outside of China. Unlike Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and European imperialists, it does not want to plant its flag outside its borders, send its young men to conquer and defend new territories, or subject other peoples to colonial rule. Nonetheless, it may inherit the world, reluctantly and by default.”

While I agree with everything else he writes in this essay, this part shows that Goldman knows nothing about China's worldview. And as a generalist, he wouldn't - not without reading reams of Chinese history and the raison d'etat of Chinese rulers over time, objectives that go beyond mere survival and have remained a touchstone for all Chinese dynasties, the principal theme being that Chinese leaders who expand its territory are ranked among the greats, and those who don't are merely also-rans. And that is his Achilles' heel. Michael Pillsbury is an old China hand who probably understands that the Fu Manchu series merely caricatured a Chinese equivalent of then world-conquering Western imperialists. The West has given up its territorial ambitions. China hasn't.

However, I agree with his prescription - a Federal government commitment to basic science is key to continued technological supremacy. One commentator wrote the following about how art, unlike science, has natural sponsors in the private sector:

That is art and art is often at its height in tyrannical and radically fractured societies that have some cultural competition going on. Science isn’t. Even mathematics requires political stability and infrastructure because mathematicians are people, people need to eat and funding mathematicians is not a high priority for most societies. Art that pleases the tyrant on the other hand will get funded even if the peasants are starving.

The big achievement of the West is not some magically higher number of geniuses, it’s the culture of cultivation of geniuses. Godfrey Hardy used to say that discovering Ramanujan was his biggest achievement in mathematics. If he hadn’t dragged the guy out of India no one would know about his work. Hardy himself used to say that he didn’t want to do any “useful”, applied work because it could be used for war.

In England, these guys could get paid to work on their “useless” number theory which actually has found a lot of use and Hardy would probably be disappointed by how much of his innocent number theory is now used in cryptography and war. In just about any other society Ramanujan would have been dismissed as a freak and Hardy would have been considered useless. The culture that tolerates and supports an academic subculture that produces nothing that the rulers can even understand, that is a rare achievement.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 18:02|| 2015-03-29 18:02|| Front Page Top

#11 The West has given up its territorial ambitions*. China hasn't.

* I should note that this is after having conquered and settled four continents/equivalents - North America, South America, Australia and Russia east of the Urals, making up fully 1/2 of the earth's habitable land area. To rising powers in general, and to China in particular, the idea that current boundaries are fixed for posterity sound a lot like "Eff you, I've got mine", meaning that the West's past territorial gains are set in stone because they're set in stone - based on a tautology.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 18:16|| 2015-03-29 18:16|| Front Page Top

#12 Come to think of it, I don't think you have to be a China hand to understand why the current distribution of ownership of land on Earth might not be to any rising power's liking, let alone China specifically. They might view the West much as the West viewed the aborigines of the various territories annexed and settled over the past several centuries.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 18:22|| 2015-03-29 18:22|| Front Page Top

#13 If we look at the objective facts of what has transpired since the beginning of Western imperialism, I suspect any emerging non-Western power's view is that the Westerner's smug implicit (and perhaps even un-thought) assumption is "Having conquered half the inhabitable world, while holding on to Europe, we are now content to let current boundaries stand". That is the perennial complaint of the arriviste vis-a-vis the ancien regime.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 19:27|| 2015-03-29 19:27|| Front Page Top

#14 I remember when you were just Robert R....

Posted by Frank G 2015-03-29 19:55|| 2015-03-29 19:55|| Front Page Top

#15 I remember when you were just Robert R....

Those were the good old days. Tag teaming Mike Sylwester over Iraq. He was right for the wrong reasons. We were wrong for the right reasons. Given the human and financial costs to us, I'd rather have been right for the wrong reasons. What a goddamn waste.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 21:34|| 2015-03-29 21:34|| Front Page Top

#16 I remember when you were just Robert R....

I think we posit all kinds of reasons why various Muslim countries are more or less radical. I suspect, religion apart, a major motivating factor is that a significant number of them are located in places that look like the Star Wars planet Tatooine (filmed in Morocco) - they are either wastelands or at their Malthusian limits. China is 30% more densely populated than Europe. But half of China is desert and mountain wasteland or tundra. Which means its effective density might be triple Europe's. Add to that its traditional ethos of universal empire, the sense that the age of empires has passed it by and the rest is all too predictable. Fu Manchu was a caricature but the basic elements of the character's motivations wasn't too different from either Western imperialists of the time or the Chinese ones who conquered Tibet as recently as the 18th century.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 21:51|| 2015-03-29 21:51|| Front Page Top

#17 Re Malthusian limits - Syria's population has grown by an order of magnitude in the past 80 years.

Historical population
Year	Pop.	±%
1937	2,368,000	—
1950	3,252,000	+37.3%
1960	4,565,000	+40.4%
1970	6,305,000	+38.1%
1980	8,704,000	+38.0%
1990	12,116,000	+39.2%
1995	14,186,000	+17.1%

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 21:55|| 2015-03-29 21:55|| Front Page Top

#18 Syria's current population is 23m.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2015-03-29 21:56|| 2015-03-29 21:56|| Front Page Top

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