Confucius Institutes avoid discussing China’s widespread human-rights abuses and present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed Chinese territories. As a result, writes Peterson, the institutes “develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country”—and a major adversary. Confucius Institutes are a textbook example of soft power that causes universities in receipt of Chinese largesse to stay silent about controversial subjects like China’s use of forced labor to pick cotton
This is something to keep your eye on.
As I recall, before Covid, Dr. Kling labeled the Trump administration’s view of China as “China bad.” Now that there is what he calls a “respectability cascade” for the view that the virus probably escaped from a lab in Wuhan, can we acknowledge that there may have been some basis for the Trump administration’s view of China? And regardless of how the virus arose, can we acknowledge that there may be a cost to dependency on China based on the slogan “free trade”?
More generally, how do self-described libertarians square their principles with economic dependence on a country run by the CCP, even if one accepts for the sake of argument that outsourcing manufacturing to China is supported by the economic theory of international trade (which I don’t, by the way — I think that interpretation is simplistic, as other commenters have argued on this blog, but I won’t go into that issue in this comment)? The claim that opening up trade with China would influence China to liberalize politically is no longer tenable, but the claim was always naive (even before, but especially after Tiananmen Square) and, in my view, a “big lie” pushed by government and corporate elites to justify a policy intended to enable corporations to reduce their labor and regulatory costs and gain access to the Chinese market. In any event, as the article on the Confucius Institutes documents (and there have been many other recent examples, including the cover up of the Wuhan lab theory of the origin of Covid), there has been significant influence in the opposite direction — the US is moving in moving in a politically illiberal direction partly as a result of Chinese influence.
When, if ever, do the principles of political freedom and free expression ‘trump’ the claimed economic benefits of “free trade”?
I completely agree that ” The claim that opening up trade with China would influence China to liberalize politically is no longer tenable.” But, to be charitable, it was not something that people just pulled out of their ass. There had been substantial liberalization and substantial increases in trade during the last decades of the millennium. China itself had gone from the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution to Deng’s “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Of course, Chairman XI now very much cares about the color of the cat.
If it turns out that it was a lab leak, this doesn’t really change anything about foreign or economic policy re China (unless you count proscribing gain-of-function virus research under those categories). First of all, protectionism was, throughout this crisis, far more damaging to supply lines than our ostensible dependence on China, and (as Scot Lincicome showed here) most of our ‘offshoring’ to China was not at the expense of US industries, but rather a shift from importing from SE Asia to importing to China. Global supply lines are much more robust than protectionists think; countries are able and willing to replace one another in producing a good pretty rapidly.
I would also say that trade definitely pushes countries toward liberalization, just, in the case of China, not very much. It is an error of logic to assume that this means the opposite policy will work. That’s like saying, because chemotherapy failed, maybe arsenic therapy will work. People favoring greater confrontation with China never really explain how they imagine this will lead to liberalization. It hasn’t thus far certainly, as tensions only escalated during the last few years of tariffs. ‘CCP bad,’ fine, I don’t doubt it, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Short of going to war with them, all we can do is poke the Chinese government in the eye with a stick and make it angrier, which may be emotionally satisfying but is counterproductive.
And I don’t buy that illiberalism in America is in any way a product of China, it’s entirely homegrown. Whatever (if anything) should be done about Confucius institutes is orthogonal to whether it’s worth to impose a regressive tax on American consumers just to hurt China (by less than we hurt ourselves probably).
Here’s the link to the Lincicome piece I forgot to include: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/testing-china-shock-was-normalizing-trade-china-mistake#us-chinese-trade-amplified-costs. Figure 2 is the one of interest to my point.
“People favoring greater confrontation with China never really explain how they imagine this will lead to liberalization.”
Google “Cold War”.
You said “the claim that opening up trade with China would influence China to liberalize politically is no longer tenable”. How do we know it is time to throw in the towel? How do you distinguish between temporary backsliding or relapse from a new trend? What is the right denominator for calculating the moving average of measures and what are the right measures and what weight do you put on each?
Why not just apply pressure to increase freedoms within China? Use all the leverage available. I don’t believe maximum pressure has been applied. Splitting the world into 2 pieces seems to increase the risk of disastrous conflict in the distant future and so it might be hard to justify that approach just because you ran out of patience today.
–“Why not just apply pressure to increase freedoms within China? Use all the leverage available. I don’t believe maximum pressure has been applied.”–
It doesn’t seem that you have much confidence in the “trade leads to liberalization” thesis since you pivoted to applying pressure/leverage to force China to change.
But what leverage does the US really have?
China has undertaken fairly extreme persecutions of its Uighur population and those belonging to Falun Gong. Christians also are to some degree persecuted in China.
China has been able to get away stealing all sorts of American IP. It has allowed a large trade of illicit fentanyl to persist which has killed a large number of American citizens. For all we know, China covered up a lab leak which let the COVID-19 crisis spiral out of control – they certainly aren’t going to let us investigate to see what happened.
If we had leverage, why wouldn’t it have been used already (esp. by the aggressively anti-China Trump Administration)?
China has the world’s largest population and economy by PPP. It not only has hundreds of nuclear weapons but it also has conventional military superiority near its territory. America is dependent on China for the production of all sorts of important goods. Is China dependent on the US for anything?
My sense is that historical “trade leads to broader liberalization” might have been a function of the relative dominance/influence of the British Empire and later America, as both were fairly liberal societies.
In the past, China’s leadership has responded to its opponents by slaughtering them, such as when the Kangxi Emperor ordered and orchestrated the genocide (killing) of the Dzungar Mongols, who lived in what is present day Xinjiang province. China’s leaders are not responding to their opponents with that kind of violence today, and that is substantially more liberal than China’s rulers have been in the past.
Yes. What matters is what you measure and how long you think it takes to see progress and how you de-noise the data.
I did not pivot.There is no inconsistency in advising patience to people who in retrospect had overly optimistic expectations and wanting to apply more pressure going forward. It’s like: “you should revise expectations and by the way more could have been done”.
The reason more leverage hasn’t been applied is because the previous administration mostly wanted a trade deal to raise their re-election probability. The priorities were set at the top and the guy at the top didn’t care about freedom of speech for anybody but himself. To have leverage you actually have to want to make progress more than you want your daughter’s handbags to be trademarked in China.
Don’t have U.S. leadership advising that Uighur persecution was absolutely the right thing to do. Don’t elect an authoritarian wannabe as a model for the rest of the world that picks a guy to mess with the USPS in an socially distanced election year and gets rid of the SecDef while planning a coup in the transition period. I’m not saying that all of China’s backsliding or relapse is connected to the previous U.S. administration but I think there was an effect.
The fentanyl problem is not even an Opium War and why would anybody want to compile a list of bad behaviors of either side when it’s all backward looking and everybody would come out looking horrific. There is no statute of limitations on that activity and nobody is 100% the same person they were yesterday.
Brian, I was listening to you and then came that third paragraph and, wow, it’s now hard to take you seriously.
It’s hard to imagine that during the Cold War we would have ever had Lenin Institutes attached to American universities to “educate” American students about Soviet and Eastern European history. (Maybe, some individual faculty were close substitutes, but that’s a different matter.)
Amazing how many people either are unaware or have forgotten how we won the Cold War. It’s not so much that they argue that This Time Is Different: that certain aspects of our winning approach during the Cold War won’t work with China. They act as through there were no last time. Add this to the Great Forgetting. Apparently, the 20th Century never happened, and Time began somewhere around 2010.
Confucius lived almost two thousand years before Marxism. It is a lot easier to market a Confucius Institute as being about culture and history than it would be to market something named the Mao Zedong Institute. (Russian history doesn’t really have a Confucius-equivalent, though I’m sure some creative historian could have found one by telling a good story.)
But the big difference between the post-WW II period and now is that the mechanisms that purged Nazis and Nazi-thought and Nazi-adjacent thought during the War were switched over to Communists after Stalin went full Stalin after the War. People were used to it and mostly accepted it. That’s not true today.
China’s leadership has more or less embraced a market economy, they do a lot of trade with the rest of the world, they send hundreds of thousands of students abroad every year to study in foreign universities, their economy is far larger than the Soviet economy ever was, their GDP per capita is higher as well (around $20K USD PPP in 2020), etc., etc. This time is different in all sorts of ways. Frankly, to prevail over China (in the sense of dominating its near abroad in the way that NATO dominates Russia’s near abroad) is vastly more difficult than defeating the Soviet Union. Even if the CCP fell tomorrow, do you think that the Chinese people or the following regime would accept foreign naval hegemony over the seal lanes connecting Chinese ports to the open ocean? Especially given that everyone in China would believe, correctly, that foreign powers want the ability to pressure and influence how China is governed? A lot of the conflicts between China and the rest of the world are not at all driven by anything particular to the CCP, but rather have to do with securing China’s geopolitical influence and in protecting the sovereignty of the country from foreign influence. Now, some of that conflict might dissipate if China’s citizens were allowed to weigh in on the costs involved in shoring up Chinese sovereignty from the threats that integration into the global economy and accompanying geopolitical order entail.
Thinking the “U.S. won the Cold War” is overstating the case and has always seemed to me to be state-side propaganda and self-aggrandizement. It ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union from within. There were economic forces and internal imperatives. The decrease in the oil price contributed to forcing restructuring and the need to reduce corruption increased transparency. The dissolution might be reversing to some extent as Putin wants to absorb Belarus and eastern Ukraine.
Peak China hysteria came for my when Lyman Stone, who normally makes posts about fertility statistics, started arguing that we need to place nuclear mines in the Taiwan straight. What makes a normal person go China crazy?
So let me lay my cards on the table. I think the CCP is messed up. I think this because ANYONE who lived through China in the last century has to be fucked up. Has to be. Like the entire nation has got to have PTSD and lots of disorders.
So I get the drawbacks. But I still don’t care. At least I don’t want to start lobbing nukes in the Taiwan Straight and I don’t give a fuck what they are doing with the Yogurts.
In 1984 Winston thought hope lied with the proles. Maybe he was naive. But in the current world our Based hopes lie with the Chinese. Is there a single credible threat to Globohomo beside the Chinese. They are the only combination of Basedness, Scale, and State Capacity. Charles Murray remarked that only losing a Total War might reset the spiral we are in. Well, losing a few aircraft carriers in the South China Sea might be the only way to make merit and real world results matter again in the Globohomo sphere. We aren’t going to be shutting down magnet schools for being too Asian if they sink our ships will we.
So yeah its a risk, but it’s the only counterbalance I see in the world. I sure as fuck don’t want to stop lobbing nukes willy nilly because the Chinese have become the one place we are allowed to two minutes hate.
Plus, they can start lobbing nukes at US anytime they want. I get it that lots of people hate Donald Trump, and lots of people hate déclassé Americans, but Trumps initial approach to China, however botched was the right one. Get the US people a better deal from our dealings with China, and beyond that, ignore what goes on within their borders. There isn’t anything we can do to change their behavior anyway, and everyone in the US is perfectly cool with supporting Saudi Arabia and looking the other way at what they do in the Mideast so long as they keep the oil flowing. The same principles apply to China.
Looking the other way regarding China and Saudi Arabia is not a maximum pressure tactic but it is rational if you believe there isn’t anything we can do to change their behavior.
It’s depressing to think you want to perpetuate a messed up status quo for “regular” people in those countries.
We should bombard them with signals from the outside. More importantly we should make signals inside be anonymized so they can talk to each other freely within their borders.
This isn’t about trade deals.
If we got in a war in China, I literally could not tell you “what we are fighting for”. My own country HATES me. Does the CCP hate me? Not as far as I can tell.
Censorship? Facebook literally only allowed you to talk about a lab leak in Wuhan like two weeks ago. The last president of the United States isn’t even allowed on Facebook.
Yogurts? Please. If they were living in America they would have trashed the downtown of some city and I’d have to write an essay about how that’s my fault for being white if I wanted to get into college.
Look, China is still a poor backward place with a few non-backward Special Economic Zones. When it’s as rich as Singapore, maybe I will be like Singapore. I love Singapore, even if they “censor” things and the leadership is “racist”. Sure sounds better then what I’m seeing here. Why would I want to die in a war for a country that hates me?