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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| How China 'Woke' America |
| 2019-10-03 |
| [Townhall] In these times of near civil war, Americans agree on almost nothing. Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got "woke" on China. For years, our leaders had yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents. Almost every assumption Washington made, both by Democratic and Republican administrations, was logically flawed at best. And at worst, these calculations were a weird mix of conservative commercial greed, liberal political correctness and shared screwball naivete. American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited. It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or an EU nation. Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China's embrace of capitalist reforms -- as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law -- would lead to constitutional government. But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one's choice. Instead, all China did was auction off large sections of its new and more efficient economy to crony communist pseudo-capitalists and corrupt provincial officials in order to modernize the country, beef up the military, warp the international trading system -- and make itself very rich. Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China? Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated. Once American businesses got hooked on mega-profits, the Chinese government slowly started stealing their technology, infringing on copyrights and patents, dumping their own merchandise on the world market at prices below production costs, running up huge trade surpluses and manipulating their currency. But by then, American corporations were so addicted to laissez-faire profit-making that they turned a blind eye and paid their hush money. Universities cashed in too, both by setting up lucrative satellite campuses in China and admitting tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. These Chinese students paid full tuition (and sometimes premiums and surcharges), turning once cash-strapped campuses into profitable degree mills. Most college deans and presidents simply ignored the dreadful human rights record of China, not to mention occasional expatriate espionage rings designed to steal engineering and high-tech research. ...The domestic winners in the appeasement of Communist China were the two American coasts -- the New York financial industry, the Washington political lobbying nexus, Silicon Valley's high-tech companies, and the coastal mega-research universities such Harvard, Stanford and Yale. Suddenly, the intellectual and informational classes could sell their wares in a new global market, and they profited enormously. Few cared about the "losers" in the now-hollowed-out Midwest and in rural America. For corporate America, domestic muscular labor could be easily and cheaply replaced by millions of Chinese workers. Outsourcing and offshoring pulled investment capital out of America and put it overseas, as Chinese-assembled products brought far greater profits. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #9 When Loral gave the Chinese MIRV technology in 1998 I realized we were being screwed by our own |
| Posted by: TzSenator 2019-10-03 22:48 |
| #8 Ruprecht, great analysis. Also, it was just the neocon con that the Chinese will stop being Chinese if they are rich. China has always been hegemonic, with or without money. Why did they call themselves the Middle Kingdom? |
| Posted by: SR-71 2019-10-03 22:23 |
| #7 I think folks believed to strongly in the J curve, that once wealthy enough nations become democracies. There examples of this happening are numerous. So we let China get away with murder to avoid war, and with the hope we would win in the end with a massive democratic Chinese market ready for American goods. They assumed the J-curve was some kind of law when the fact is all of the examples were in the Western Sphere already and Communist China isn't. then we continued the same game plan long after it was a failure because we had no better plan and because of massive inertia of corrupt-o-crats making money off the whole thing.. |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2019-10-03 10:18 |
| #6 Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got "woke" on China. As a smelly, deplorable Wal-Mart shopper, one started noticing Chinese crap @WM long before 2019. It just wasn't until Trump came along that we thought we could do anything. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2019-10-03 08:46 |
#5  Ref #4: With the victory of Barack Obama in the November 2008 presidential election, Miscik returned to Washington for a short stint, working on the intelligence transition.[8][9] In January, 2009, she was named Vice-Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc.[10]She never left the klingon circuit. Very few of them do. They embed themselves and follow the money. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-10-03 02:39 |
| #4 Here's a typical bio of one of the sleek fools who've botched so much of our foreign policy for over two decades and then landed in fields of gold post-Langley. After helping Tenet botch the Iraq intel, this one landed nicely in a series of exec roles at Lehman (!) and Kissinger Associates, and is now raking in the $$$$ while sitting on the boards of Morgan Stanley, GM, EMC and other globalist entities that have helped China become a deadly global rival to us. |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-10-03 02:27 |
| #3 Ditto for open borders and mass illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America. Madness. Impossible to explain other than with simple corruption. Does anyone remember when then-VP AL Gore tried to shut down Ross Perot's critique of NAFTA by promising the nation that the trade deal would REDUCE illegal immigration? How on earth did our political class go from defending American workers - or at least trying to mount a defense of US workers - to this unbelievable stage where literally everyone in DC (except maybe a few oddballs such as Trump, Sanders, and Sherrod Brown) believes that native-born US workers are despicable lowlifes who deserve not only to be made poor but also to be castigated as inferior to supposedly hardworking, upright "God's people" in the form of illiterate peasant indios from abroad? What the hell happened to this country? How did we get saddled with such a shitty, stupid, thoroughly corrupt political class? And No, I don't agree that "we get the political class we deserve." No one in his right mind would vote for these greedy, cynical, incompetent fools. How did this happen to our nation? |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-10-03 02:02 |
| #2 Well said Lex. Very well said. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-10-03 01:55 |
| #1 The only possible explanation - the one that future historians will almost certainly agree upon - for such an unbelievably self-destructive policy as prostrating ourselves before China and enabling them to go from near-subsistence to our only global rival is corruption. Kissinger has made a killing in China, as have hundreds of lobbyists. Investment banks have made a killing advising Chinese firms. Hedge funds have scarfed up a total of trillions in Chinese assets under management, pocketing many billions in management fees. CEOs have shaved costs and increased their profits by outsourcing most of our manufacturing supply chain to China. Where does our shitty political class head when they're done with Washington? To lobbying/PR and consulting firms such as Kissinger's. To Goldman and other Wall Street trading houses. To the big banks, the hedge funds and private equity funds. To the boards of publicly-traded Fortune 500 companies. All of them have lined their pockets with golden crumbs from China's table. None of these bastards is suffering what over 100 million Americans have had to contend with for the last 30+ years: shit wages, zero job security, sideways home equity if they even have any, shitty schools for the kids. And all of it surrounded by the constant drumbeat of an insane mantra of globalism, global citizens with global virtues creating a new "flat" global order that will reward the supposedly "superior" and more "productive" Chinese and other third worlders instead of supposedly lazy, drug-addled, above all, racist Americans. Screw these morons. What they have done with their insane China policy is criminal. It reads like something out of the history books about the follies and madness of the German Foreign Office that led to WWI, or the foolish miscalculations that led to the Peloponnesian War. And they call Trump mad. Damn these fools. |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-10-03 01:52 |