To quote Mitt Romney, "Corporations are people, my friend."
I work for a corporation. And I do so because they pay me. It's fair to say getting paid is my "primary goal." But it doesn't animate my every activity.
I have never understood why some people get so worked up about corporations. A sole proprietorship does not imply a person willing to "throw most things under the bus" in order to make money. There are some business owners who are like that, but, again, most American sole proprietorships are not like that at all. The same is true of partnerships.
Remember: There is no such thing as a soulless corporation because a corporation is at its core nothing more than a collection of souls.
I disagree; corporations behave much worse than the individuals that comprise them. This is due to two things: the rise of "maximizing shareholder value" in the 80's, and diffusion of responsibility.
A private business owner can say, "I'm making that decision that incurs a hit on short-term profit because I believe that it's in the long-term interest of our employees, the local community, and the nation." If a corporate officer said such a thing, not only would they be fired, but they would be understood as having behaved unethically---as an irresponsible steward of shareholder value.
Now, of course, a committed group of activist shareholders could demand better behavior, but that's where diffusion of responsibility comes in. Because there are so many shareholders, and because each shareholder pays only the smallest bit of attention to any one of the corporations they "own", it takes an enormous effort to coordinate the kind of shareholder revolt required.
That's Matt's point when he says that the corporations (and the individuals therein) are doing what they're supposed to do. It's not a matter of Tim Cook being insufficiently committed to human rights. We need actual policy changes so that Tim Cook can say, "We're not cooperating with China on this because to do so incurs a federal regulatory risk."
I think diffusion of responsibility is a really key point here. It's easy to beat up on "shareholder value" but I suspect that even if we killed that idea off, diffusion of responsibility would still allow people to do things at work (with tremendous leverage from the collective action of the company) that they wouldn't be comfortable with individually.
Also, "everyone I know is doing it" is a tremendous social queue/shortcut that helps us feel like what we're doing can't be that bad.
In addition to corporations worse than individuals that comprise them: not sure I understood this correctly (being neither a lawyer nor an American), but aren't managers legally expected to maximise profits? They can do all sorts of non-prima-facie-maxing behaviour that can be justified for the long-term value of the corporation (reputation etc) but they cannot be intentionally generous.
(there is a problem of course because anonymous investors are there presumably only for their ROI but still)
I'm trying to think of examples where a corporation could even impact the long-term interests of our nation. I'm struggling. How were you thinking about this?
A privately-held business can be a corporation. And it is simply untrue that an officer in a publicly-held corporation cannot prioritize the long-term interest of employees, their community, or the nation over short-term profits. It happens every day.
I agree with most of this, and what Romney was getting at in his quote (though he should have said "Corporations are made up of people, my friend" to be clearer). However, a corporation is also a sort of institution, and institutions are supposed to be separate from the people that run/inhabit them at any given time. Think about the U.S. government, the Catholic Church, etc. - these are also groups of people, but their structure, history, and traditions give them a life of their own that makes them distinct from the collection of people within them.
"...institutions are supposed to be separate from the people that run/inhabit them at any given time."
That only occurs when the people selected (either by the institution or self-selected) possess or are prepared to accept the values of the institution. It's never automatic.
Semantics are fun. If your point is that corporations are comprised of people who have souls, then point taken though that seems pretty banal. If your point is that because corporations are made up people who have souls a corporation therefore has a soul then I think you've gone astray.
But there's been a long history of unethical behavior by corporations to optimize profits at the expense of people's health and well-being, right?
I'm talking about companies dumping known pollutants, tobacco companies, the recent scandal over the opiate pharmaceuticals. Given a choice between profit and ethics, the companies choose profit unless there is a calculation on their part that going the ethical route will be better in the end for their profit margin. Is this just a cynical assumption on my part? Can you give me an example where a corporation knowingly went against its own profit motivation b/c of an ethical issue?
So much Christian doctrine seeping through your arguments. "There are bad people in the world. Some people choose profits. Most choose ethics." Talking about "souls" in corporations.
Corporations are amoral. Their guiding principal is profit. This is neither good, nor bad; it just is. Some of the *ramifications* of that can be bad, and therein lies the question of how to mitigate that harm. There are several flaws in your argument, some of which have been pointed out. One flaw is that when you have a group of individuals making decisions, ethical concerns get diluted out. It's like when someone is attacked on the street and none of the neighbors call the police b/c they think someone else will do it.
The other issue (and maybe this is where I am cynical) is that I don't ever expect people to act against their own interests, nor do I expect corporations to do that. I admire it when they do. We call those people heroes and they are often punished by society or the corporation- whatever guiding body is dictating the unethical behavior. Again, please give me an example of where a corporation has knowingly sacrificed its own interest for the good of society.
So, I guess this is where government regulation and the courts come in, as imperfect as those are. You need some disinterested body regulating to mitigate the potential harm of Capitalist interests. I guess you could call me an idealistic liberal for thinking regulation will solve these problems, but I would call you an idealistic Conservative if you think we can trust corporations to police themselves.
Twitter's political ad ban was a recent example that was so detrimental to their earnings that I'm actually surprised Jack hasn't been legally tested yet for his fiduciary duties.
"Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price. The economic case for shareholder-value maximization similarly rests on incorrect factual claims about the structure of corporations, including the mistaken claims that shareholders “own” corporations, that they have the only residual claim on the firm’s profits, and that they are principals who hire and control directors to act as their agents."
This is a question of prioritization, and corporations prioritizing profit maximization is the norm, and according to Friedman, their fiduciary responsibility.
A lot of the social strictures against egregious actions to maximize profit are more effective in sole proprietorships or partnerships in your average town than they are on your average Fortune 500 company CEO or board of directors.
"This is a question of prioritization, and corporations prioritizing profit maximization is the norm, and according to Friedman, their fiduciary responsibility."
Maximizing profit doesn't just mean maximizing profit today. Increasing today's profit by acting unethically or mistreating workers jeopardizes actual profit maximization, which occurs over the long-term. That's why most corporations act ethically.
It's so interesting. I see it the exact opposite. The regulatory disclosure hurdles of operating a public company and then the presence of an independent board - I think provide real value and create a counter-balance. The opaqueness of both a private company and then even more so with a sole proprietorship create so much opportunity to act unethically.
I didn't mean to imply that this is a dichotomy. I view corporations as acting along a continuum that stretches from "unethical but maximally profitable" to "ethical but not maximally profitable". Most, but certainly not all, corporate actions would be closer to the latter, but the regulatory disclosure requirements you refer to are in place precisely because left to their own devices, corporations cannot be trusted not to engage in the former.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a big believer in the effectiveness of boards in practice, especially for large corporations – they are distant and almost completely beholden to management when it comes to obtaining information, so a lot of their power lies in approving preventive control which they are then poorly placed to monitor.
Right - and yet when you group them together and create an organizational system, the decision making process is really not the same as what individuals make.
A large corporation has a _mechanism_ to limit what the individuals in the company can do.
If I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company and I decide to get into it with China, maybe I can make that decision as the head of the company. If down-stream revenues are down (particularly compared to peer companies) because of the loss of that market, there's a mechanism to replace me with someone who will make different decisions.
Yes. Corporations can be ok, but they are only as good as the rules and regulations that govern them. The rules and regulations determine how shareholders' wants are aggregated into entity-level decisions.
With regard to LeBron, I disagree - I actually hold him 100% responsible and think what he said was an embarrassment. I have no problem with NBA players deciding that they just want to focus on domestic activism, and I don’t think any who do should ever be asked about China, because that’s not relevant. But LeBron specifically criticized what Morey said. Once you step into international politics as an athlete, you better know your stuff, and I think he deserves to be hounded about it from now until the heat death of the universe because it was a complete embarrassment.
Didn’t he say something in a meeting with NBA execs like “What are you going to do about this?” In other words, he wasn’t just reacting to Morey being thrown under the bus—he was calling for him to be thrown.
To be fair the criticism of Lebron comes because he in particular helped throw Morey under the bus by saying:
“I don’t want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand, and he spoke, and so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and what we say, and what we do. Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.”
Yes, the issue with LeBron is that he specifically defended the Chinese government because of his business interests and exposed himself as really quite uneducated on the topic.
This then becomes doubly rich when LeBron tweets a picture of a cop who just saved a girl’s life with the hashtags "#ACCOUNTABILITY #YOURENEXT" and then doesn’t apologize for it.
I don’t think any NBA player who wants to focus on domestic issues, racial equity, etc should ever be harassed over China and I find GOP attempts to do so deeply cynical, but LeBron chose to wade into international politics because he wanted to protect his $ from China. Nobody made him.
I think if you scratch the surface with James and many other (though not all) black male pro athletes, you'll find that they are not really liberals but rather, black conservatives. Matt has written about this, but not all black conservatives look like Clarence Thomas: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/booker-t-washington-and-the-black-conservative-tradition-64717ff2ca1/ The common thread is being "pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic in orientation." (This shouldn't be that surprising given that these guys are generally non-college males and we know how non-college males usually lean politically. You wouldn't naturally expect a ton of openness to experience or whatever.)
I would say James is only mildly conservative, but the way this played out with him is that he saw a dispute between a white guy (Morey) and a nonwhite country (China) and due to his nationalistic orientation and general ignorance, he reflexively took the side of the latter as being the enemy of the enemy. It isn't that different from what happened with Muhammad Ali and Vietnam, although in that case Ali happened to land on a place that was correct on the merits.
I think you give LeBron far too much credit with the ideological racial solidarity frame to this one, especially given historical issues between the African-American and Asian-American communities. I think it was pretty simple - he makes a lot of $$$ in China and he wants to keep making a lot of $$$ in China.
I mean, #1 the government of China is not Asian-American, nor were the Viet Cong. Also, your definition of "racial solidarity" apparently differs from mine, because that was not what I was describing.
Finally, is this "giving him credit"? I think it would probably reflect better on him if it were just venal. That would simply put him in the same boat as every other large business in the US.
I'm quite aware that Chinese people are not Asian-American. My point is that I'm very skeptical of the idea that LeBron would view this as framed primarily in "us vs. them" racial terms, rather than business ones, due to (among other things) the troubled history between Asian and African-American communities in the US.
To your "black conservatives" point, if LeBron was a black conservative in the "pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic" sense, why would he take an explicitly anti-nationalistic stance by siding with an ideologically hostile foreign power over a prominent American? This doesn't make sense either.
The "nation" in "nationalism" doesn't necessarily refer to the legal nation-state entity in which you now live. It can be anything: a region, a province, a religious community, an ethnic group, a cultural grouping. Just think of the many different ways the word is used: We have Hindu nationalism and Basque nationalism and white nationalism and black nationalism and Arab nationalism.
Not for nothing: White nationalists often hate Jewish Americans but are pro-Israel. (This is not to say LeBron James has any analogous animus against Asian-Americans. There's no basis for that, obviously.)
Most of them are technically some-college males. James is an exception in that he was drafted straight out of high school, but the vast majority do their one-and-done year in college.
I think, though, that the cultural effects of attending college don't really apply to D1 revenue sports "student-athletes" and they are effectively non-college.
Loved that book but one quibble with it: there already are about billion Americans needing our goods and services. We just don't all live in one country or economic bloc.
China has a larger market, but they don't have a wide open market.
My company makes software, which is sometimes sold as an app. Starting in 2021, games sold via the iPhone app store need to have a game license (from what I can tell, it's a pair of licenses, one for the producing company and one for the title). This is a PRC rule - Apple enforces it in that they will only sell your app into a given market if you meet all applicable domestic laws.
As best we can tell, the producer licenses are only provided to domestic companies, so we can only sell in China by picking a local partner, not by selling directly to Chinese iPhone users.
The game license requires us to, among other things, turn over the raw Chinese-language strings for the whole game, so that they check all of our content without having to 'discover' any hidden features in the game.
Faced with this, we decided to get out of China entirely - this wasn't really an ethical stand - we never got as far as considering that. We didn't have a good option for a local partner who we trusted to be in that kind of situation with at a price that made any sense.
We lose some revenue from this, and luckily we can survive this. Our users in China lose out - they were using our app and we had just finished localizing the text into Chinese for them.
I think my main point here is that the Chinese market is really big so western companies drool, but it's filled with obstacles and a tilted field, so market size winning out isn't a foregone conclusion.
I do wonder whether we may have seen (or will soon see) the "high water" mark of US business engagement in China. As China rapidly becomes more and more ideologically hostile under Xi, and more explicitly looks to gut foreign companies in favor of domestic ones, it will be harder for Western companies to gain or maintain a foothold.
We can even see this with Hollywood, whose share of the domestic Chinese box office has steadily shrunk in recent years as the Chinese film industry matures.
I don't know about high water, but I would characterize Chinese policy now as different from ten years ago - I think they were better before at really slicing the salami thin and getting in a lot of egregious behavior and influence _under the radar_, which was more efficient for their strategic goals.
For instance, Apple makes about $20 billion a quarter in China but $40 billion a quarter in the US.
Disney makes about $50 billion in the US and $6 billion in China.
So getting to one billion Americans wouldn't change anything, especially with the countervailing force of China getting wealthier. Disney is already bending over backwards over China when it is just 11% of revenue, after all.
Related to this but in a much less confrontational way. Is it not necessarily China’s fault but the fault of the Hollywood-China synthesis that movies are now... mostly bad? And by bad, I don’t mean not entertaining, but just rather overly colossal and Marvelized.
Douthat made this point in the NYT. That the idea that you have to sell movies to the entire world makes more Godzilla vs. Kong (actually the 4th sequel to “Godzilla” in 2014, and about the millionth iteration of the genre) and less good buddy comedies, rom-coms, and culture specific films.
I also can't help wondering about the quote in the article:
'the two things we will never do are hard-core nudity and China'
Obviously the China bit is about China, but perhaps/probably the nudity bit is also about international sales and therefore China, ie most major productions are not just globalised but also sanitised as well.
(I also can't help but laugh with amazement at the expression 'hard-core nudity'. What on earth does it mean? When I have a shower in the morning, am I engaged in 'hard-core nudity'? Baffling.)
I actually happen to know the person who said the quote. He's not the type to be embarrassed by using the word porn. I think he must be trying to differentiate a long full-frontal shot versus a quick shot from behind.
I agree and think this is a very good point, but I wonder about if there is a chicken-and-egg issue going on here: do people only go to the movies to watch Marvel films becasue that's the only thing that at the movies, or are Marvel films the only thing at the movies because that' the only thing people will go to the movies to watch?
Big screen spectacles are best viewed on the big screen. Buddy films and rom-coms play fine at home on a big screen TV.
That's been a Hollywood challenge for years but the at-home experience keeps getting better. One response - plenty of movie theaters used to have crowded seating that would embarrass an airline exec. Now many theaters have replaced those with spacious recliners that put my La-Z-Boy to shame.
Yeah, this: SFX specials are worth seeing in the theater, anything else is just fine streaming at home, and the at-home experience is better if anything, because you can pause or rewind whenever you like, so a weak bladder no longer means missing chunks of the film.
And you can turn on captions as well. Or audio description if your sight is bad, or the DP has decided to light the frame in gray on gray.
Counterpoint - watching a film in a theater makes you focus on the film because you can't get distracted by your phone, stuff around your household needing attention, etc. And the volume is loud enough (no neighbors to worry about!) that you don't need captions. But I do take your point for people with specific accessibility-related needs.
There are a lot of people who like captions because the music is loud relative to the voices. I think Netflix had some data that people started using captions from somewhere in their 50s, but I couldn't find the article after spending the last five minutes trying to google it.
I personally do tend to use subtitles at home, especially for an action movie or anything else with loud sound effects. The audio is mixed so that gunshots and whatnot are very loud relative to dialogue, which is realistic but causes problems if you're in an apartment.
Depending on your income you can just fire up the AC. And even non-well off people can probably afford a window AC (200 dollars or less) for the living room (personal experience).
Agree, and not only that. There are filmmakers who plainly film with the theater in mind, and it pays off in a way that home theater just can't. I'm thinking of The Lighthouse at the moment, but I suspect everyone will just think I'm crazy :)
I’m stoked to see “A Quiet Place 2.” And to me, nothing like a crowded theater opening weekend of a summer horror flick so it’s a slam dunk.
I love the la-z-boy. That innovation has successfully extracted 100$ + per movie outing per family of 4 when you go and you find it worth it. Is that better for Colossal pictures? Maybe..
On the “chicken or the egg...” I have no answer. It’s a very valid point and question to be raised. One thing I would note, is that in November/ December (not 2020) the theaters are all packed when the “adult movies” come out. Maybe that’s because they come out once a year, but I think there’s still a market
Great post, Matt. 100% agree that a great place to start is, as you say, some boring, old fashioned congressional hearings on the issue. The stance that the US government is taking on a shipment of Uniqlo products that Fast Retailing is unable to convincingly show were not produced with slave labour inputs, though not dealing directly with the free speech problem you discuss here, is also an avenue to force large companies to deal proactively and constructively with Chinese abuses.
I would like to submit that another potential remedy for this problem is to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and break these massive conglomerates up. If these companies weren't so large and embedded so deeply into every aspect of our lives, the damage of any single cowardly decision to kowtow to China would be far less meaningful. Equally, a multitude of smaller businesses would likely not be as leveraged to the Chinese market and thus less likely to toe the CCP line.
Yes, I think like both you and Matt observe, aggressive threats to break these companies up if they continue bowing over backwards for China may be the best way.
My fear is that one day we may end up in a shooting war with China, god forbid, and if we do I can’t even begin to imagine how ugly the public mood towards all these corporations and celebrities will be. CEOs with a bit of long-term vision would do well to consider what might happen to them and their companies at the hands of an American public which held them complicit in the deaths of American soldiers on a scale not seen since WWII. It would not end well for them.
The average person doesn't know anything about what companies work with China and in what capacity. Maybe you're seeing an angle that I'm not. But the way I picture an awful scenario like that unfolding is no ones would burn down a Walmart because they had been sourcing plastic toys to China previously. Lone mentally disturbed people would randomly attack old Filipino ladies, though
If (and to stress again, I hope to god not) we ever end up in a shooting war with the CCP, the average person will learn *very* quickly which companies have worked with China and in what capacity.
I'm not talking about Walmart, to be clear, or companies that source low-end manufacturing from China. I'm talking about companies and entities which have abetted the CCP's ideological goals (film/entertainment), engaged in technology transfers to the benefit of the PLA (aviation/high-end industry/etc), or collaborated with or otherwise enabled the PLA in military research (universities, tech companies, etc).
Boosters made rosy promises about engagement because that’s what boosters do. I concede that China is a sophisticated surveillance state that has a shitty effect upon Western speech. It does not follow that engagement was bad.
China has done much better in the 32 years after Tiananmen then in the 40 years before it. Rather than mass famines and the great leap forward we’ve had a quintupling of per capita income, sharp increases in life expectancies, and less total violence (public and private) than in Latin America. Clinton’s prediction that integration would unleash Chinese human potential and curb the power of state enterprise was correct. China has 4x our population, so the material conditions of Chinese is orders of magnitude more important than its effects upon the speech of Western celebrities and the possibility Apple Store managers might self censor their tweets.
Furthermore, integration has made a new hot or cold war much less likely. Both sides have a strong material interest in peace. Neither side can cut off trade without wrenching sacrifices. The U.S. has a much better, safer relationship with China than it had with the USSR or than the Austro-Hungarian Empire had with Russia. Avoiding a war that would certainly be bloody and could go nuclear is orders of magnitude more important than the ability of those who want to work for conglomerates to tweet about the Uighurs and Hong Kong.
I like the idea of Congressional hearings. Breaking up media conglomerates would not only to stiffen our resistance to Chinese soft power, but also keep the marketplace of ideas from turning into a dreary oligopoly.
My point is that engagement has probably been a net positive even though China remains a surveillance state and increasingly pisses on Western free speech.
Integration hasn’t really made a war less likely. China will soon be at a point where it can be reasonably confident of victory over the US in a war over Taiwan, and then? What defused the prior Taiwan Strait Crises is that the CCP understood that they lacked the capacity to invade Taiwan successfully.
I think engagement has been a net good for the number of people it’s brought out of poverty, but we should be clear-eyed about the very real risks of war. Xi Jinping is deeply ideological and nothing would cement his quest to be the biggest leader since Mao better than the reconquest of Taiwan on his watch.
>>>China will soon be at a point where it can be reasonably confident of victory over the US in a war over Taiwan, and then?<<<
That's a possibility. But your use of "will" makes this prediction sound over-assured. For starters America's nuclear arsenal is orders of magnitude larger and more lethal than China's. I know one response is: they don't think we'd risk LA for Taipei. I personally hope you're right (that we wouldn't). But I'm not sure of that. And neither are you. And neither, I think, is Beijing.
An actual shooting war between the PRC and the USA carries with it the non-zero risk that nuclear weapons will be introduced. If the Chinese aren't aware of this, we're all in much greater danger than I feared.
I mean the way nuclear great power games are played is with tripwires--sending a carrier through the Strait--and if China's not certain invasion won't trigger nuclear war, it's certainly not sure sinking a carrier group won't trigger nuclear war
The last 7 decades have seen a handful of situations where great powers went towards the brink of nuclear war. The birds haven’t flown yet, but the sample size is small. I don’t know if the risk of an invasion of Taiwan leading to nuclear war are 10% or 15%. I do know I wouldn’t want the government playing that game if the chances are even 2%.
War is only possible if we care enough about the political status of Taiwan to fight one. Taiwan is symbolically important and practically useless. Virtually everything we buy from them we could make ourselves or get from another country at slightly greater cost. We could continue to trade with Taiwan if it were part of China.
The thing about tripwires is they seem low cost until someone calls your bluff at which point the costs balloon exponentially. Maybe having a bunch of carrier battle groups deters China. But if it doesn’t, the costs of a war far exceed anything we possibly get by Taiwanese independence.
It’s worth reminding the appeasers that Britain and France failed to accomplish their original war aims in World War Two. The sovereignty of Poland was crushed for two generations. However, by the time Germany was defeated, Britain and France had lost great power status and France had been occupied and humiliated.
That's not true, Taiwan has an absolute advantage over every other country in its most important export, semiconductors
Also, that's a fairly ridiculous analogy because the U.S. is not going to go to total war over Taiwan because China cannot strike the American homeland. Also, Britain bankrupted itself in World War II in large part because it was already declining vis a vis the U.S.
I frankly don't think we will actually get into a shooting war with China over Taiwan. The odds of an Taiwanese/American victory at this point seem quite low, especially in a scenario where China moves slowly instead of going "OK, big invasion time!" and I don't know that the U.S. government would be willing to lose a lot of warships and planes over Taiwan - better to preserve the idea that "well we *could* defeat you but choose not to" rather than run a fleet into a meat & metal grinder of anti-ship rockets.
To be clear, this is bad! I would prefer we not get into a shooting war over Taiwan because China knows it couldn't win it! But at this point it sort of is what it is.
Genuinely stupid question #1: why shouldn’t China invade Taiwan? I mean, it almost doesn't make sense from them not to.
Genuinely stupid question #2: why should the US care? Taiwan is a lot closer to China than it is to the US.
I’m obviously betraying my ignorance here, and I am in no way advocating for this and I’m generally unformattable with China exerting more influence around the globe, but from a realpolitik standpoint it seems suicidal for the US to respond militarily to Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
>>>Genuinely stupid question #1: why shouldn’t China invade Taiwan? I mean, it almost doesn't make sense from them not to<<<
Because from their perspective it's risky, and what, exactly, would be accomplished that merits the risk (alienation of other states, causalities, possibility they'd lose, possibility of nuclear war with America)? China's already a huge, semi-hegemonic power. Their GDP increases by, what, 2% if Taiwan's added to the PRC's total? Their land area and population increase by even less. Not really all that much gained.
If China does invade Taiwan it'll be for emotional reasons -- reasons of national pride, or even hubris. It won't be because of any plausible cost-benefit analysis.
(Anyway, Beijing may not see things this way, but you asked for a "reason" not to invade; and rational, cost/benefit analysis is a big one in my view).
I agree that a Chinese invasion will be driven more by emotion than analysis. But events may drive their decisions. Imagine Taiwan defiantly declaring independence. I'm sure the result would be war.
Agreed. I hope US officials have quietly, in no uncertain terms told Taipei: declare independence at your own risk, because you'll be on your own. I don't take pleasure in writing that: like anybody else I'd be elated if, tomorrow morning, the CCP declared they've relinquished their territorial claims to Taiwan, and the island can do whatever it wants. But that's probably not happening.
I want Taiwan to gain de jure independence. But not if that means getting involved in 90 year-old Chinese civil war, especially now that one of the two parties in that war is an armed to the teeth nuclear superpower.
There are numerous examples in US history when "ignoring" authoritarians in fact worked out ok, at least for the US. We didn't intervene in Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Or Afghanistan in 1979. We wisely refrained from sending boots on the ground in the recent case of Syria.
We sell arms to Taiwan and should continue to do so. I think we ought to immediately green light a vaccine shipment. We also ought to consider legislation giving Taiwanese green cards based on contingencies (PRC military action, say). We should do stuff like this. What we shouldn't do is extend an explicit, Nato-style, nuclear tripwire guarantee to Taiwan. It's not our fight.
I don't agree or disagree. Everybody always points to that example because it's the single best one for making that case. But there are infinite counter examples.
Every time Putin launched a military adventure in the recent past we had the opportunity to escalate far beyond what we actually did, but it's not clear to me that was a mistake. The US could have declared war on Japan back in 1936 or 1939 when they first invaded China, but even in hindsight I'm not sure that would have been a good idea. A lot of people would now make the case that we should have just ignored North Vietnam back in in the 60s.
Russia's intervention in Ukraine and Georgia were in the back of my mind when I asked my stupid questions (and thanks to all of you trying to make me less stupid - no easy task).
My larger point is that, on balance, the US acting like a global in every corner of the world would be destabilizing.
Re #1: Beside the risks of unintentional escalation, which go as high as all-out nuclear war, I'd say China has more to lose than to win by taking risks in invading Taiwan.
If Taiwan is determined to resist then the costs to China would be immense. It's not easy to invade by sea anywhere, especially across the rough straits separating the island from China. For all the damage that China could do to Taiwan, Taiwan also has plenty of weapons that could retaliate by striking China's mainland military installations. A loss could even mean the fall of the CCP.
It's also hard to calculate what the negative PR would look like, but it could result in an enormous hit to China's prestige with various boycott's and severing of business ties. Especially if the world's ability to produce computer parts grinds to a halt until the situation is resolved and China is blamed.
On the other hand, is China is successful at eroding Taiwan's will to resist the situation looks very different. At some point they only need to present a credible stick and offer sufficient carrots to some portion of Taiwan's population. That seems to be China's strategy for the time being as they've continued to grow in strength. Why risk war if you can eventually win peacefully?
Contested amphibious invasions are very, very difficult to pull off. In fact, I'm not sure that any country has ever managed it besides the United States. The Nazis, with complete control of Continental Europe, never had a real hope of crossing the Channel, and that was before the technological balance shifted even more heavily in favor of defense against ships.
The part I agree the most with here is that we don't really have the counterfactual. Engagement didn't work as well as hoped, but how it compared to the other main alternatives is another question
I have to agree with your utilitarian argument - a billion people not starving is really good.
But I think the critique of 90s free traders (free global capitalism will induce democracy) is also totally right - China has made huge gains economically but is nothing like a wester democracy.
I see this argument made constantly, but, I'm not sure it's right, in that, I don't recall a particular time line being promised. Was democracy supposed to have arrived by 2007? 2018? 2045? Maybe the last date will prove feasible. Also, what's the alternative, not trade with a fifth of humanity? Even if that were possible for America (I doubt it) how many countries would follow us? Not many, I bet.
Hoping that China eventually goes through what Taiwan or S. Korea did in the 80s (and doing what we can do to encourage this) is still the only realistic long-term play, I reckon. We're not going to be sufficiently safe and secure (that is, the risks of a disastrous great power war will continue to loom overly large) as long as China remains a fascist* semi-rogue state.
My personal view is we need America's policy wrt to China needs to be something along the lines of "competitive engagement." That is, we're not going to stop doing transactions with the Chinese (even Trump's own hawkish trade czar Robert Lighthizer admitted as much). But there needs to be a frank and (critically) coherent strategy of competition. The fist part of this seems to have arrived in DC and, increasingly, other western capitals. I'm not so sure about the second.
*The PRC does pretty much fit the traditional polysci definition for "fascism" when you think about it.
I think you're right that we don't have great options and treating the PRC like North Korea won't help. If the question is "what's the policy option", I don't know - I think the 90s idea that is invalidated is "if China is doing X that we don't like, we should keep our mouths shut and wait while the solvent of capitalism changes their behavior."
With that idea gone, we have to consider what's worth fighting about using the leverage we have and what's not, and how we make a coherent predictable stable policy that the PRC can understand and weigh strategically.
Well said. I think it's simply too early to say what the impact on China domestically the opening up will have. It still ranks as the greatest act of improving people's material condition in history, with the mass reduction in poverty. Politically, China remains a terrible place, and its treatment of minorities is abominable. But what will it be like in 50 years? Most societies that have reached a certain level of wealth at some point demand political liberation. It hasn't happened in China, but there's no reason to think that the door has been permanently closed.
This is the point where one inserts the obligatory Zhou Enlai anecdote about commenting that it was "too early" to assess the impact of the French Revolution. True in this case, but alas not in his since he was (in 1972) actually talking about the impact of the 1968 French student revolt. (https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/)
If you were given the choice in 1998 of replicating the Cold War with a USSR like China, isolated except in its fiefdom, or what we have now, the USSR model was much less frightening.
Well put. The question I would ask though is where does China go from here? It clearly cannot sustain the economic growth trajectory that got us to this point by continuing to tap into Chimerica.
If you look at some of what it is trying to accomplish through the Belt and Road Initiative, it becomes more difficult to claim that further positive-sum integration is high on their agenda.
The stated plan for China is to shift to a consumption-based economy, like most developed economies. The question is whether they will be able to execute it without hitting a lost decade like Japan.
You beat me to the punch. With population growth being what it is, there doesn’t seem to be a way out for Japan either.
On China, I thought that the relaxation of the one child policy would give the economy a boost a couple of decades from now, but it looks like they early data is indicating that there won't be a big baby boom.
If China wants to turn into a consumer-driven economy, someone else would conceivably have to play the China role in providing cheap labor – I’m not an expert here, but perhaps China itself could do that, but that sort of cleavage could be problematic.
China's demographics now are worse than Japan's in the 1990s, and will grow more so with time. I'm going with "no," China wont avoid sharply lower rates of growth (at least not for much longer). Already the PRC's growth rates are much lower than in the 90s, 2000s (though they're seeing a bit of a growth spurt now, just like the US).
sorry for linking twice, but it's more relavant to this post. You can actually compare mid-90s Japan to 2020 China here http://bensolucky.github.io/world_population_pyramids.html by opening in 2 windows and left, right, up and down arrow keys
Chinese per capita GDP is still low enough that they can increase it merely by importing technologies and building widgets. They are a better place to build widgets than Mexico, better infrastructure, less crime and graft, etc. The present path is sustainable for 20 years.
However, it is in the US interest to do everything we can to make Mexico a better place to build widgets.
This a case of conflict between the overall long-term national interest of the US as a whole, and the immediate, short-term individual interests of many US companies, who mostly just care about getting their widgets built a little more cheaply and efficiently today so they don't fall behind their competition.
That's not a knock on any individual company, as it's not their role to make martyrs of themselves. It's just pointing out this is a collective action problem that can only be solved by coordinated national policy that changes the rules of the road for all private companies.
I really like visiting China. The buzz and upward energy of the young professionals in the cities is very contagious. It’s really unfortunate that Chinese leadership has made such a hard turn towards more authoritarianism and nationalism. It’s a beautiful place with a great culture.
Chinese leadership is an authoritarian, despotic regime. What makes you think they are representative of the Chinese culture and people when they aren’t a representative government?
If China was a democracy there probably wouldn’t be the he world’s most sophisticated surveillance state and propaganda machine deluding it’s population. I have no idea what would happen, but history suggests that democracies make a lot of noise about nationalism but rarely do straight up wars of expansion.
Also, if China was a democracy, they might not *need* to invade Taiwan. There's a sizeable chunk of the Taiwanese electorate that would be down for unification with a democratic mainland; that's the core base of the KMT and theoretically their goal. It wouldn't necessarily be uncontroversial (path-dependency, etc.), but a democratic China would probably try the diplomatic/political route and wouldn't even consider the use of force unless these efforts came to naught.
My one take away from the comments here is that most people have never spent much time talking to Chinese people, particularly those that haven't gone to University in the US. I work with some pretty small companies in China and sometimes my colleagues there don't know enough about Western culture to know what not to say, and what they do say would be considered shockingly racist by our standards. Many have absolutely no problem saying that the Han Chinese are superior to all other cultures.
I'm confused by this. There's certainly a grain of truth to it. But if you take it as far as you're suggesting then it follows that something in Chinese culture has grown more repressive and authoritarian over the last 10 years, rather than a decision made by Xi and top leadership. Or you'd say that North and South Korea (or Germany or Vietnam) each had a government that reflected local culture when they were created.
I would posit that China hasn't become more repressive and authoritarian over the past 10 years. They just have better tools now.
I have done business there; some of those arrangements (supply contracts, Joint Ventures, wholly-owned factories making machined products) have been mutually beneficial. But in all cases, the Chinese managers on their side of the negotiation were smart, respectful, duplicitous, untrustworthy and had conflicts of interest in most senior officials. Intellectual property was routinely stolen. Counterfeit parts would regularly show up. The only way for people to succeed there is to conform to the regime and over time this has resulted in a situation where the culture (norms, behaviors, etc) and the regime are largely synonymous.
"I would posit that China hasn't become more repressive and authoritarian over the past 10 years. "
On this point, I would disagree - the consensus among most China watchers is that there has been a rapid illiberal shift under Xi's regime, with the government growing much more repressive. Many China watchers I follow who used to live in China have left in the past ~5 years out of fear of an increasingly ugly and repressive climate.
The tools are better, yes, but that's in no small part because the will to develop and use them is stronger.
You are right to note the connection. But I think you've got it backwards - the authoritarian and nationalism of the Chinese leadership has trickled down to the culture. If the rules of the game are rigged, to succeed you have to play by those rules. Also, "culture" is an awfully broad term to use.
The OP introduced the "great culture" concept. We've been conditioned, wrongly in my view, to avoid criticizing cultures in lieu of focusing on either leaders or individuals. I take issue with that concept. I think some cultures are better than others, and we are constantly competing between different cultures (values, norms, behaviors) for global influence. Call me I think the US culture is better, on balance, than China's, Russia's, Saudi's, Iran's and many other places and I just disagree that the China culture is "great".
Obviously that's a subjective view, and I think it is totally acceptable to rank other cultures based on how closely they align to your values.
The thing that I think is important to point out, and I am in no ways insinuating that you're doing that John, is that it is usually a short distance between saying a culture is inferior and then discriminating against people from that culture.
At any rate, I do think however that culture is indeed a broad term to use particularly on an entire country, let alone one with China's size and history.
So you are saying there were no authoritarian or nationalistic leaders in China before Mao? What about the Emperors? Or in the ROC, the one-party rule of KMT under Chiang Kai-shek until his passing?
I do believe countries can change. I also believe China has some beautiful parts. I just disagree with your characterization that it has a "great culture." It has a culture that is antithetical with Western ideas around democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, respect for property rights, etc. I hope its culture changes, as I believe it can. But I don't think it is a great culture today.
While Taiwan is, in most senses, a separate country, it's culture has many strong historical ties to China. And yet it's a very free and democratic society, on par with the US. Hong Kong literally is a part of China, and yet there is very obviously a strong popular desire for non-despotic rule.
I think that you have define "culture" in a fairly narrow way to blame it for the PRC regime's authoritarianism.
Taiwan was also until fairly recently an authoritarian regime, but is now exceptionally vibrant, which shows the foolishness of extrapolating culture backwards from politics
I think it's just kind of hard to boil any whole culture down to just a couple words or a single good/bad judgment. America is both a land of free individuals choosing to work together as it suits them, with lively debate and a general upward trend in standards of living and scientific progress ... and also a land of lowbrow reality-TV culture, lingering racism, big divides in access to money and medical care, and decaying institutions. You can pick whatever aspects of American culture you want, depending on whether you want to portray America as a generally positive force for good that the world can aspire to emulate, or a warning about how Western culture leads to division and decadence.
I do wonder whether Xi will be able to keep the lid on with this increasingly repressive turn towards authoritarianism as the economy slows down. I don't doubt for a moment that the majority of Chinese support the CCP (it's hard to see how most of them wouldn't after the massive economic gains of the past few decades) but once China finally enters a slowdown, or even a recession, one imagines that the middle class's appetite for tolerance of increasingly Maoist policies will be much reduced.
A counter argument would be that the slowdown makes China more dangerous. Nationalism is an extremely strong force in China. A war to "liberate" Taiwan would serve the interests of Xi in this situation, in that it would stir nationalistic feelings and give him a further rationale for stifling dissent.
Clearly, improving living standards and the satisfying of material needs have not been accompanied by wide demands for greater representation or liberalization - people who have more to lose become the vanguard of the status quo.
You could easily construct a scenario where a severe downturn could precipitate public angst, but I could just as easily buy the case that it would entrenches the political system, via geopolitical adventurism or a call to preserve gains already obtained.
The argument here is that China's slowdown and stagnation seems likely to occur *before* standards of living / per capita GDP get anywhere near the US, Western Europe, or Japan/South Korea. The Soviet Union was also a formidable growth machine in the '50s and '60s, but the stagnation it entered in the '70s was a big factor in Soviet citizens' faith in their system eroding as they saw the West continue to grow.
It might turn out this way, but it also might now. And as much as I'm no theorist of international relations I do find the realist view compelling enough to believe that the United States should not leave its sovereignty and independence to chance or in the hands of what China may or may not do. We should plot our course and national strategy on the assumption that China will be successful at increasing its wealth (which after all is a good thing for humanity) and power.
I 100% agree with this, we shouldn't assume that China will actually enter an economic slowdown until it does, even if signs point to that happening. And assuming that China's citizens can accept something like half the per capita GDP of the US without revolting, that leaves their government with way more economic clout than the US given the population difference. Overall the situation is much less favorable for the US than it was during the Cold War with the Soviets.
We can Focus on about 3-5 things max in this country especially things that require presidential action. This is the free speech of Americans to other Americans. As Matt points out it will eventually be assistant managers at the apple store who have to watch what they tweet or comments they make on Facebook. Like in what universe will Israel Palestine be in the top 3. Beating out 1 global warming, 2 China's growing power, and 3 the Pandemic.
Google took the non-slippery slope hard line with China when they pulled most of their products out of the market. I wonder if Matt has been to China — it’s a truly surreal experience when suddenly none of your Google searches, Maps, etc work anymore.
There are also really big structural differences between Apple and Google's businesses. The Chinese market is big but comes with various levels of hurdles and hindrances - Google may simply have a business model that the PRC would only let a "local champion" dominate.
Very possibly true, but nobody knows. When Google did try to enter the Chinese market with Dragonfly, their employees scuttled it before anything really came if it.
"So far, we don’t know about China monitoring the Twitter feeds of obscure actors and complaining about random things they’ve said."
The recent row over Nomadland director Cloe Zhao could be illustrative. China got angry at her for some random quote about there being "lies everywhere" in her home country which could affect the rollout of her upcoming MCU film The Eternals.
It's really interesting how completely '90s free traders failed to imagine the consequences of what would happen when the Chinese economy began to approach in size the American economy. Once you hit that point, our corporations need the Chinese much more than the Chinese need our corporations and the consequences you described follow.
Now that I say that, I bet they in their wildest dreams didn't think the Chinese market would eclipse the US market in like two decades.
I also hate to say it, but one of the most plausible ways out of our polarization is a cold war with China.
Your paragraph clarifying that you don’t want a war (shooting or cold) with China reminds me of a frustrating tendency on the Left to take any criticism of China as “oh the US is trying to manufacture consent for a war.” Freddie DeBoer actually had a post where he said “your government is laying the groundwork for an actual war with China.” It’s depressing for a few reasons: it suggests that the Left has lost its former capacity for internationalism (with the exception of Palestine, I guess), and it suggests that either we’ve greatly over-learned the lesson of Iraq (now *that* was a government laying a groundwork for war; the China thing looks nothing like it), or that those who got Iraq right did so out of pure dumb luck, and their vindication on that point prevents them from learning to make distinctions.
I think a fair number of people on the US left believe one of the following: (1) As a US citizen you must and may oppose only America's sins and possibly those of its allies, but other countries' bad acts are the business only of the people who live there and it's wrong to stick your nose in their business. (2) Even though other countries do many bad things, the main problem with the world is that the US is too powerful, causing it to be the main source of harm in the world, and thus the overriding priority of all world citizens should be to form a united front against it, and to set aside any differences with any other country. (3) The US is, in fact, the world's most evil country and the overriding priority of all world citizens should be to form a united front against it, and to set aside any differences with any other country.
If you subscribe to any of those premises, then everything you described will kind of flow naturally from it.
Cynically: China did learn our values: that money is the most important thing to America and we'll throw most things under the bus in pursuit of them.
Yeah, that's far too cynical. Most Americans do not live their lives that way.
It's cynical but ... I think there's something there.
We organize so much of our economic through corporations. And most of those corporations are set up to make money as their primary goal.
I think you're right about Americans, but us individuals aren't the giants of the land.
To quote Mitt Romney, "Corporations are people, my friend."
I work for a corporation. And I do so because they pay me. It's fair to say getting paid is my "primary goal." But it doesn't animate my every activity.
I have never understood why some people get so worked up about corporations. A sole proprietorship does not imply a person willing to "throw most things under the bus" in order to make money. There are some business owners who are like that, but, again, most American sole proprietorships are not like that at all. The same is true of partnerships.
Remember: There is no such thing as a soulless corporation because a corporation is at its core nothing more than a collection of souls.
I disagree; corporations behave much worse than the individuals that comprise them. This is due to two things: the rise of "maximizing shareholder value" in the 80's, and diffusion of responsibility.
A private business owner can say, "I'm making that decision that incurs a hit on short-term profit because I believe that it's in the long-term interest of our employees, the local community, and the nation." If a corporate officer said such a thing, not only would they be fired, but they would be understood as having behaved unethically---as an irresponsible steward of shareholder value.
Now, of course, a committed group of activist shareholders could demand better behavior, but that's where diffusion of responsibility comes in. Because there are so many shareholders, and because each shareholder pays only the smallest bit of attention to any one of the corporations they "own", it takes an enormous effort to coordinate the kind of shareholder revolt required.
That's Matt's point when he says that the corporations (and the individuals therein) are doing what they're supposed to do. It's not a matter of Tim Cook being insufficiently committed to human rights. We need actual policy changes so that Tim Cook can say, "We're not cooperating with China on this because to do so incurs a federal regulatory risk."
I think diffusion of responsibility is a really key point here. It's easy to beat up on "shareholder value" but I suspect that even if we killed that idea off, diffusion of responsibility would still allow people to do things at work (with tremendous leverage from the collective action of the company) that they wouldn't be comfortable with individually.
Also, "everyone I know is doing it" is a tremendous social queue/shortcut that helps us feel like what we're doing can't be that bad.
In addition to corporations worse than individuals that comprise them: not sure I understood this correctly (being neither a lawyer nor an American), but aren't managers legally expected to maximise profits? They can do all sorts of non-prima-facie-maxing behaviour that can be justified for the long-term value of the corporation (reputation etc) but they cannot be intentionally generous.
(there is a problem of course because anonymous investors are there presumably only for their ROI but still)
I'm trying to think of examples where a corporation could even impact the long-term interests of our nation. I'm struggling. How were you thinking about this?
How about the social media companies and US democratic political discourse?
A privately-held business can be a corporation. And it is simply untrue that an officer in a publicly-held corporation cannot prioritize the long-term interest of employees, their community, or the nation over short-term profits. It happens every day.
I agree with most of this, and what Romney was getting at in his quote (though he should have said "Corporations are made up of people, my friend" to be clearer). However, a corporation is also a sort of institution, and institutions are supposed to be separate from the people that run/inhabit them at any given time. Think about the U.S. government, the Catholic Church, etc. - these are also groups of people, but their structure, history, and traditions give them a life of their own that makes them distinct from the collection of people within them.
"...institutions are supposed to be separate from the people that run/inhabit them at any given time."
That only occurs when the people selected (either by the institution or self-selected) possess or are prepared to accept the values of the institution. It's never automatic.
"Remember: There is no such thing as a soulless corporation because a corporation is at its core nothing more than a collection of souls."
A collection of souls does not a soul make.
Yes, a collection is more than one. And a lot more than zero.
Semantics are fun. If your point is that corporations are comprised of people who have souls, then point taken though that seems pretty banal. If your point is that because corporations are made up people who have souls a corporation therefore has a soul then I think you've gone astray.
But there's been a long history of unethical behavior by corporations to optimize profits at the expense of people's health and well-being, right?
I'm talking about companies dumping known pollutants, tobacco companies, the recent scandal over the opiate pharmaceuticals. Given a choice between profit and ethics, the companies choose profit unless there is a calculation on their part that going the ethical route will be better in the end for their profit margin. Is this just a cynical assumption on my part? Can you give me an example where a corporation knowingly went against its own profit motivation b/c of an ethical issue?
"But there's been a long history of unethical behavior by corporations to optimize profits at the expense of people's health and well-being, right?"
Yes, there are bad people in the world.
"Given a choice between profit and ethics, the companies choose profit..."
No, given that choice some *people* chose profit. Most chose ethics.
So much Christian doctrine seeping through your arguments. "There are bad people in the world. Some people choose profits. Most choose ethics." Talking about "souls" in corporations.
Corporations are amoral. Their guiding principal is profit. This is neither good, nor bad; it just is. Some of the *ramifications* of that can be bad, and therein lies the question of how to mitigate that harm. There are several flaws in your argument, some of which have been pointed out. One flaw is that when you have a group of individuals making decisions, ethical concerns get diluted out. It's like when someone is attacked on the street and none of the neighbors call the police b/c they think someone else will do it.
The other issue (and maybe this is where I am cynical) is that I don't ever expect people to act against their own interests, nor do I expect corporations to do that. I admire it when they do. We call those people heroes and they are often punished by society or the corporation- whatever guiding body is dictating the unethical behavior. Again, please give me an example of where a corporation has knowingly sacrificed its own interest for the good of society.
So, I guess this is where government regulation and the courts come in, as imperfect as those are. You need some disinterested body regulating to mitigate the potential harm of Capitalist interests. I guess you could call me an idealistic liberal for thinking regulation will solve these problems, but I would call you an idealistic Conservative if you think we can trust corporations to police themselves.
Twitter's political ad ban was a recent example that was so detrimental to their earnings that I'm actually surprised Jack hasn't been legally tested yet for his fiduciary duties.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/twitter-political-ads-ban.html
According to this: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/
"Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price. The economic case for shareholder-value maximization similarly rests on incorrect factual claims about the structure of corporations, including the mistaken claims that shareholders “own” corporations, that they have the only residual claim on the firm’s profits, and that they are principals who hire and control directors to act as their agents."
This is a question of prioritization, and corporations prioritizing profit maximization is the norm, and according to Friedman, their fiduciary responsibility.
A lot of the social strictures against egregious actions to maximize profit are more effective in sole proprietorships or partnerships in your average town than they are on your average Fortune 500 company CEO or board of directors.
"This is a question of prioritization, and corporations prioritizing profit maximization is the norm, and according to Friedman, their fiduciary responsibility."
Maximizing profit doesn't just mean maximizing profit today. Increasing today's profit by acting unethically or mistreating workers jeopardizes actual profit maximization, which occurs over the long-term. That's why most corporations act ethically.
It's so interesting. I see it the exact opposite. The regulatory disclosure hurdles of operating a public company and then the presence of an independent board - I think provide real value and create a counter-balance. The opaqueness of both a private company and then even more so with a sole proprietorship create so much opportunity to act unethically.
I didn't mean to imply that this is a dichotomy. I view corporations as acting along a continuum that stretches from "unethical but maximally profitable" to "ethical but not maximally profitable". Most, but certainly not all, corporate actions would be closer to the latter, but the regulatory disclosure requirements you refer to are in place precisely because left to their own devices, corporations cannot be trusted not to engage in the former.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a big believer in the effectiveness of boards in practice, especially for large corporations – they are distant and almost completely beholden to management when it comes to obtaining information, so a lot of their power lies in approving preventive control which they are then poorly placed to monitor.
Right - and yet when you group them together and create an organizational system, the decision making process is really not the same as what individuals make.
A large corporation has a _mechanism_ to limit what the individuals in the company can do.
If I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company and I decide to get into it with China, maybe I can make that decision as the head of the company. If down-stream revenues are down (particularly compared to peer companies) because of the loss of that market, there's a mechanism to replace me with someone who will make different decisions.
"A large corporation has a _mechanism_ to limit what the individuals in the company can do."
So do small corporations. And partnerships. And sole proprietorships.
Yes. Corporations can be ok, but they are only as good as the rules and regulations that govern them. The rules and regulations determine how shareholders' wants are aggregated into entity-level decisions.
I'd say the -incentives- matter most in determining how entity-level decisions are made.
With regard to LeBron, I disagree - I actually hold him 100% responsible and think what he said was an embarrassment. I have no problem with NBA players deciding that they just want to focus on domestic activism, and I don’t think any who do should ever be asked about China, because that’s not relevant. But LeBron specifically criticized what Morey said. Once you step into international politics as an athlete, you better know your stuff, and I think he deserves to be hounded about it from now until the heat death of the universe because it was a complete embarrassment.
I mostly agree but think heat death is too punitive. Death of star in our solar system would be more reasonable
Didn’t he say something in a meeting with NBA execs like “What are you going to do about this?” In other words, he wasn’t just reacting to Morey being thrown under the bus—he was calling for him to be thrown.
To be fair the criticism of Lebron comes because he in particular helped throw Morey under the bus by saying:
“I don’t want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand, and he spoke, and so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and what we say, and what we do. Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20915339/lebron-james-hong-kong-quotes-daryl-morey
Yes, the issue with LeBron is that he specifically defended the Chinese government because of his business interests and exposed himself as really quite uneducated on the topic.
This then becomes doubly rich when LeBron tweets a picture of a cop who just saved a girl’s life with the hashtags "#ACCOUNTABILITY #YOURENEXT" and then doesn’t apologize for it.
I don’t think any NBA player who wants to focus on domestic issues, racial equity, etc should ever be harassed over China and I find GOP attempts to do so deeply cynical, but LeBron chose to wade into international politics because he wanted to protect his $ from China. Nobody made him.
I think if you scratch the surface with James and many other (though not all) black male pro athletes, you'll find that they are not really liberals but rather, black conservatives. Matt has written about this, but not all black conservatives look like Clarence Thomas: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/booker-t-washington-and-the-black-conservative-tradition-64717ff2ca1/ The common thread is being "pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic in orientation." (This shouldn't be that surprising given that these guys are generally non-college males and we know how non-college males usually lean politically. You wouldn't naturally expect a ton of openness to experience or whatever.)
I would say James is only mildly conservative, but the way this played out with him is that he saw a dispute between a white guy (Morey) and a nonwhite country (China) and due to his nationalistic orientation and general ignorance, he reflexively took the side of the latter as being the enemy of the enemy. It isn't that different from what happened with Muhammad Ali and Vietnam, although in that case Ali happened to land on a place that was correct on the merits.
I think you give LeBron far too much credit with the ideological racial solidarity frame to this one, especially given historical issues between the African-American and Asian-American communities. I think it was pretty simple - he makes a lot of $$$ in China and he wants to keep making a lot of $$$ in China.
I mean, #1 the government of China is not Asian-American, nor were the Viet Cong. Also, your definition of "racial solidarity" apparently differs from mine, because that was not what I was describing.
Finally, is this "giving him credit"? I think it would probably reflect better on him if it were just venal. That would simply put him in the same boat as every other large business in the US.
I'm quite aware that Chinese people are not Asian-American. My point is that I'm very skeptical of the idea that LeBron would view this as framed primarily in "us vs. them" racial terms, rather than business ones, due to (among other things) the troubled history between Asian and African-American communities in the US.
To your "black conservatives" point, if LeBron was a black conservative in the "pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic" sense, why would he take an explicitly anti-nationalistic stance by siding with an ideologically hostile foreign power over a prominent American? This doesn't make sense either.
The "nation" in "nationalism" doesn't necessarily refer to the legal nation-state entity in which you now live. It can be anything: a region, a province, a religious community, an ethnic group, a cultural grouping. Just think of the many different ways the word is used: We have Hindu nationalism and Basque nationalism and white nationalism and black nationalism and Arab nationalism.
Not for nothing: White nationalists often hate Jewish Americans but are pro-Israel. (This is not to say LeBron James has any analogous animus against Asian-Americans. There's no basis for that, obviously.)
Most of them are technically some-college males. James is an exception in that he was drafted straight out of high school, but the vast majority do their one-and-done year in college.
I think, though, that the cultural effects of attending college don't really apply to D1 revenue sports "student-athletes" and they are effectively non-college.
I think he's using it in the sense of "black nationalism," not nation-state nationalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_nationalism
If only there were a billion Americans needing our goods and services so we could be less concerned about the Chinese market.
Loved that book but one quibble with it: there already are about billion Americans needing our goods and services. We just don't all live in one country or economic bloc.
Man. MattY is gonna eventually give Yellowjacket a celeb shot post
There was an author who argued for this I believe.
Lucky for us, China’s population will start to decline soon.
China has a larger market than the US. As long as we have free markets, the desires of the larger market will win out.
Too bad nobody has any ideas for how to create a market to compete with China, right? Like, One Billion ideas?
China has a larger market, but they don't have a wide open market.
My company makes software, which is sometimes sold as an app. Starting in 2021, games sold via the iPhone app store need to have a game license (from what I can tell, it's a pair of licenses, one for the producing company and one for the title). This is a PRC rule - Apple enforces it in that they will only sell your app into a given market if you meet all applicable domestic laws.
As best we can tell, the producer licenses are only provided to domestic companies, so we can only sell in China by picking a local partner, not by selling directly to Chinese iPhone users.
The game license requires us to, among other things, turn over the raw Chinese-language strings for the whole game, so that they check all of our content without having to 'discover' any hidden features in the game.
Faced with this, we decided to get out of China entirely - this wasn't really an ethical stand - we never got as far as considering that. We didn't have a good option for a local partner who we trusted to be in that kind of situation with at a price that made any sense.
We lose some revenue from this, and luckily we can survive this. Our users in China lose out - they were using our app and we had just finished localizing the text into Chinese for them.
I think my main point here is that the Chinese market is really big so western companies drool, but it's filled with obstacles and a tilted field, so market size winning out isn't a foregone conclusion.
Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective!
I do wonder whether we may have seen (or will soon see) the "high water" mark of US business engagement in China. As China rapidly becomes more and more ideologically hostile under Xi, and more explicitly looks to gut foreign companies in favor of domestic ones, it will be harder for Western companies to gain or maintain a foothold.
We can even see this with Hollywood, whose share of the domestic Chinese box office has steadily shrunk in recent years as the Chinese film industry matures.
I don't know about high water, but I would characterize Chinese policy now as different from ten years ago - I think they were better before at really slicing the salami thin and getting in a lot of egregious behavior and influence _under the radar_, which was more efficient for their strategic goals.
China doesn't have a larger market than the US.
For instance, Apple makes about $20 billion a quarter in China but $40 billion a quarter in the US.
Disney makes about $50 billion in the US and $6 billion in China.
So getting to one billion Americans wouldn't change anything, especially with the countervailing force of China getting wealthier. Disney is already bending over backwards over China when it is just 11% of revenue, after all.
Related to this but in a much less confrontational way. Is it not necessarily China’s fault but the fault of the Hollywood-China synthesis that movies are now... mostly bad? And by bad, I don’t mean not entertaining, but just rather overly colossal and Marvelized.
Douthat made this point in the NYT. That the idea that you have to sell movies to the entire world makes more Godzilla vs. Kong (actually the 4th sequel to “Godzilla” in 2014, and about the millionth iteration of the genre) and less good buddy comedies, rom-coms, and culture specific films.
I think this is 100% true.
I also can't help wondering about the quote in the article:
'the two things we will never do are hard-core nudity and China'
Obviously the China bit is about China, but perhaps/probably the nudity bit is also about international sales and therefore China, ie most major productions are not just globalised but also sanitised as well.
(I also can't help but laugh with amazement at the expression 'hard-core nudity'. What on earth does it mean? When I have a shower in the morning, am I engaged in 'hard-core nudity'? Baffling.)
It means porn. But they don't say "porn" because - well, because I think they're embarrassed.
I actually happen to know the person who said the quote. He's not the type to be embarrassed by using the word porn. I think he must be trying to differentiate a long full-frontal shot versus a quick shot from behind.
NSFW
I agree and think this is a very good point, but I wonder about if there is a chicken-and-egg issue going on here: do people only go to the movies to watch Marvel films becasue that's the only thing that at the movies, or are Marvel films the only thing at the movies because that' the only thing people will go to the movies to watch?
Big screen spectacles are best viewed on the big screen. Buddy films and rom-coms play fine at home on a big screen TV.
That's been a Hollywood challenge for years but the at-home experience keeps getting better. One response - plenty of movie theaters used to have crowded seating that would embarrass an airline exec. Now many theaters have replaced those with spacious recliners that put my La-Z-Boy to shame.
Yeah, this: SFX specials are worth seeing in the theater, anything else is just fine streaming at home, and the at-home experience is better if anything, because you can pause or rewind whenever you like, so a weak bladder no longer means missing chunks of the film.
And you can turn on captions as well. Or audio description if your sight is bad, or the DP has decided to light the frame in gray on gray.
Counterpoint - watching a film in a theater makes you focus on the film because you can't get distracted by your phone, stuff around your household needing attention, etc. And the volume is loud enough (no neighbors to worry about!) that you don't need captions. But I do take your point for people with specific accessibility-related needs.
There are a lot of people who like captions because the music is loud relative to the voices. I think Netflix had some data that people started using captions from somewhere in their 50s, but I couldn't find the article after spending the last five minutes trying to google it.
I personally do tend to use subtitles at home, especially for an action movie or anything else with loud sound effects. The audio is mixed so that gunshots and whatnot are very loud relative to dialogue, which is realistic but causes problems if you're in an apartment.
And the AC blasts on a hot summer day. There’s a lot of benefits to the theater and I can’t wait to get back to it.
Depending on your income you can just fire up the AC. And even non-well off people can probably afford a window AC (200 dollars or less) for the living room (personal experience).
Agree, and not only that. There are filmmakers who plainly film with the theater in mind, and it pays off in a way that home theater just can't. I'm thinking of The Lighthouse at the moment, but I suspect everyone will just think I'm crazy :)
All fair points. It's just been so long since I've been to the movies that I'm willing to go watch anything right now.
My gosh amen to that brother.
I’m stoked to see “A Quiet Place 2.” And to me, nothing like a crowded theater opening weekend of a summer horror flick so it’s a slam dunk.
I love the la-z-boy. That innovation has successfully extracted 100$ + per movie outing per family of 4 when you go and you find it worth it. Is that better for Colossal pictures? Maybe..
On the “chicken or the egg...” I have no answer. It’s a very valid point and question to be raised. One thing I would note, is that in November/ December (not 2020) the theaters are all packed when the “adult movies” come out. Maybe that’s because they come out once a year, but I think there’s still a market
Do you happen to have a link to that Douthat article?
Yeah:
Apologies MattY if this breaks any rules!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/opinion/sunday/sex-romance-movies.html
It does not!
Great post, Matt. 100% agree that a great place to start is, as you say, some boring, old fashioned congressional hearings on the issue. The stance that the US government is taking on a shipment of Uniqlo products that Fast Retailing is unable to convincingly show were not produced with slave labour inputs, though not dealing directly with the free speech problem you discuss here, is also an avenue to force large companies to deal proactively and constructively with Chinese abuses.
I would like to submit that another potential remedy for this problem is to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and break these massive conglomerates up. If these companies weren't so large and embedded so deeply into every aspect of our lives, the damage of any single cowardly decision to kowtow to China would be far less meaningful. Equally, a multitude of smaller businesses would likely not be as leveraged to the Chinese market and thus less likely to toe the CCP line.
Thanks for the post.
Yes, I think like both you and Matt observe, aggressive threats to break these companies up if they continue bowing over backwards for China may be the best way.
My fear is that one day we may end up in a shooting war with China, god forbid, and if we do I can’t even begin to imagine how ugly the public mood towards all these corporations and celebrities will be. CEOs with a bit of long-term vision would do well to consider what might happen to them and their companies at the hands of an American public which held them complicit in the deaths of American soldiers on a scale not seen since WWII. It would not end well for them.
The average person doesn't know anything about what companies work with China and in what capacity. Maybe you're seeing an angle that I'm not. But the way I picture an awful scenario like that unfolding is no ones would burn down a Walmart because they had been sourcing plastic toys to China previously. Lone mentally disturbed people would randomly attack old Filipino ladies, though
If (and to stress again, I hope to god not) we ever end up in a shooting war with the CCP, the average person will learn *very* quickly which companies have worked with China and in what capacity.
I'm not talking about Walmart, to be clear, or companies that source low-end manufacturing from China. I'm talking about companies and entities which have abetted the CCP's ideological goals (film/entertainment), engaged in technology transfers to the benefit of the PLA (aviation/high-end industry/etc), or collaborated with or otherwise enabled the PLA in military research (universities, tech companies, etc).
Boosters made rosy promises about engagement because that’s what boosters do. I concede that China is a sophisticated surveillance state that has a shitty effect upon Western speech. It does not follow that engagement was bad.
China has done much better in the 32 years after Tiananmen then in the 40 years before it. Rather than mass famines and the great leap forward we’ve had a quintupling of per capita income, sharp increases in life expectancies, and less total violence (public and private) than in Latin America. Clinton’s prediction that integration would unleash Chinese human potential and curb the power of state enterprise was correct. China has 4x our population, so the material conditions of Chinese is orders of magnitude more important than its effects upon the speech of Western celebrities and the possibility Apple Store managers might self censor their tweets.
Furthermore, integration has made a new hot or cold war much less likely. Both sides have a strong material interest in peace. Neither side can cut off trade without wrenching sacrifices. The U.S. has a much better, safer relationship with China than it had with the USSR or than the Austro-Hungarian Empire had with Russia. Avoiding a war that would certainly be bloody and could go nuclear is orders of magnitude more important than the ability of those who want to work for conglomerates to tweet about the Uighurs and Hong Kong.
I like the idea of Congressional hearings. Breaking up media conglomerates would not only to stiffen our resistance to Chinese soft power, but also keep the marketplace of ideas from turning into a dreary oligopoly.
My point is that engagement has probably been a net positive even though China remains a surveillance state and increasingly pisses on Western free speech.
Integration hasn’t really made a war less likely. China will soon be at a point where it can be reasonably confident of victory over the US in a war over Taiwan, and then? What defused the prior Taiwan Strait Crises is that the CCP understood that they lacked the capacity to invade Taiwan successfully.
I think engagement has been a net good for the number of people it’s brought out of poverty, but we should be clear-eyed about the very real risks of war. Xi Jinping is deeply ideological and nothing would cement his quest to be the biggest leader since Mao better than the reconquest of Taiwan on his watch.
>>>China will soon be at a point where it can be reasonably confident of victory over the US in a war over Taiwan, and then?<<<
That's a possibility. But your use of "will" makes this prediction sound over-assured. For starters America's nuclear arsenal is orders of magnitude larger and more lethal than China's. I know one response is: they don't think we'd risk LA for Taipei. I personally hope you're right (that we wouldn't). But I'm not sure of that. And neither are you. And neither, I think, is Beijing.
An actual shooting war between the PRC and the USA carries with it the non-zero risk that nuclear weapons will be introduced. If the Chinese aren't aware of this, we're all in much greater danger than I feared.
I mean the way nuclear great power games are played is with tripwires--sending a carrier through the Strait--and if China's not certain invasion won't trigger nuclear war, it's certainly not sure sinking a carrier group won't trigger nuclear war
The last 7 decades have seen a handful of situations where great powers went towards the brink of nuclear war. The birds haven’t flown yet, but the sample size is small. I don’t know if the risk of an invasion of Taiwan leading to nuclear war are 10% or 15%. I do know I wouldn’t want the government playing that game if the chances are even 2%.
are you actually in Beijing?
War is only possible if we care enough about the political status of Taiwan to fight one. Taiwan is symbolically important and practically useless. Virtually everything we buy from them we could make ourselves or get from another country at slightly greater cost. We could continue to trade with Taiwan if it were part of China.
The thing about tripwires is they seem low cost until someone calls your bluff at which point the costs balloon exponentially. Maybe having a bunch of carrier battle groups deters China. But if it doesn’t, the costs of a war far exceed anything we possibly get by Taiwanese independence.
It’s worth reminding the appeasers that Britain and France failed to accomplish their original war aims in World War Two. The sovereignty of Poland was crushed for two generations. However, by the time Germany was defeated, Britain and France had lost great power status and France had been occupied and humiliated.
That's not true, Taiwan has an absolute advantage over every other country in its most important export, semiconductors
Also, that's a fairly ridiculous analogy because the U.S. is not going to go to total war over Taiwan because China cannot strike the American homeland. Also, Britain bankrupted itself in World War II in large part because it was already declining vis a vis the U.S.
I frankly don't think we will actually get into a shooting war with China over Taiwan. The odds of an Taiwanese/American victory at this point seem quite low, especially in a scenario where China moves slowly instead of going "OK, big invasion time!" and I don't know that the U.S. government would be willing to lose a lot of warships and planes over Taiwan - better to preserve the idea that "well we *could* defeat you but choose not to" rather than run a fleet into a meat & metal grinder of anti-ship rockets.
To be clear, this is bad! I would prefer we not get into a shooting war over Taiwan because China knows it couldn't win it! But at this point it sort of is what it is.
Genuinely stupid question #1: why shouldn’t China invade Taiwan? I mean, it almost doesn't make sense from them not to.
Genuinely stupid question #2: why should the US care? Taiwan is a lot closer to China than it is to the US.
I’m obviously betraying my ignorance here, and I am in no way advocating for this and I’m generally unformattable with China exerting more influence around the globe, but from a realpolitik standpoint it seems suicidal for the US to respond militarily to Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
>>>Genuinely stupid question #1: why shouldn’t China invade Taiwan? I mean, it almost doesn't make sense from them not to<<<
Because from their perspective it's risky, and what, exactly, would be accomplished that merits the risk (alienation of other states, causalities, possibility they'd lose, possibility of nuclear war with America)? China's already a huge, semi-hegemonic power. Their GDP increases by, what, 2% if Taiwan's added to the PRC's total? Their land area and population increase by even less. Not really all that much gained.
If China does invade Taiwan it'll be for emotional reasons -- reasons of national pride, or even hubris. It won't be because of any plausible cost-benefit analysis.
(Anyway, Beijing may not see things this way, but you asked for a "reason" not to invade; and rational, cost/benefit analysis is a big one in my view).
I agree that a Chinese invasion will be driven more by emotion than analysis. But events may drive their decisions. Imagine Taiwan defiantly declaring independence. I'm sure the result would be war.
Agreed. I hope US officials have quietly, in no uncertain terms told Taipei: declare independence at your own risk, because you'll be on your own. I don't take pleasure in writing that: like anybody else I'd be elated if, tomorrow morning, the CCP declared they've relinquished their territorial claims to Taiwan, and the island can do whatever it wants. But that's probably not happening.
I want Taiwan to gain de jure independence. But not if that means getting involved in 90 year-old Chinese civil war, especially now that one of the two parties in that war is an armed to the teeth nuclear superpower.
Why should we have cared when Germany annexed Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then invaded Poland? Hitler said he was just unifying the German people.
The history of ignoring or appeasing authoritarians is not a good one.
There are numerous examples in US history when "ignoring" authoritarians in fact worked out ok, at least for the US. We didn't intervene in Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Or Afghanistan in 1979. We wisely refrained from sending boots on the ground in the recent case of Syria.
We sell arms to Taiwan and should continue to do so. I think we ought to immediately green light a vaccine shipment. We also ought to consider legislation giving Taiwanese green cards based on contingencies (PRC military action, say). We should do stuff like this. What we shouldn't do is extend an explicit, Nato-style, nuclear tripwire guarantee to Taiwan. It's not our fight.
The US already does have a Taiwan tripwire and has for a very long time
I don't agree or disagree. Everybody always points to that example because it's the single best one for making that case. But there are infinite counter examples.
Every time Putin launched a military adventure in the recent past we had the opportunity to escalate far beyond what we actually did, but it's not clear to me that was a mistake. The US could have declared war on Japan back in 1936 or 1939 when they first invaded China, but even in hindsight I'm not sure that would have been a good idea. A lot of people would now make the case that we should have just ignored North Vietnam back in in the 60s.
Millions of South Koreans are better off today because of Asian military adventurism.
Russia's intervention in Ukraine and Georgia were in the back of my mind when I asked my stupid questions (and thanks to all of you trying to make me less stupid - no easy task).
My larger point is that, on balance, the US acting like a global in every corner of the world would be destabilizing.
I don't think the anaolgy is perfect but the underlying point is correct and I agree with it.
Re #1: Beside the risks of unintentional escalation, which go as high as all-out nuclear war, I'd say China has more to lose than to win by taking risks in invading Taiwan.
If Taiwan is determined to resist then the costs to China would be immense. It's not easy to invade by sea anywhere, especially across the rough straits separating the island from China. For all the damage that China could do to Taiwan, Taiwan also has plenty of weapons that could retaliate by striking China's mainland military installations. A loss could even mean the fall of the CCP.
It's also hard to calculate what the negative PR would look like, but it could result in an enormous hit to China's prestige with various boycott's and severing of business ties. Especially if the world's ability to produce computer parts grinds to a halt until the situation is resolved and China is blamed.
On the other hand, is China is successful at eroding Taiwan's will to resist the situation looks very different. At some point they only need to present a credible stick and offer sufficient carrots to some portion of Taiwan's population. That seems to be China's strategy for the time being as they've continued to grow in strength. Why risk war if you can eventually win peacefully?
Contested amphibious invasions are very, very difficult to pull off. In fact, I'm not sure that any country has ever managed it besides the United States. The Nazis, with complete control of Continental Europe, never had a real hope of crossing the Channel, and that was before the technological balance shifted even more heavily in favor of defense against ships.
The part I agree the most with here is that we don't really have the counterfactual. Engagement didn't work as well as hoped, but how it compared to the other main alternatives is another question
I have to agree with your utilitarian argument - a billion people not starving is really good.
But I think the critique of 90s free traders (free global capitalism will induce democracy) is also totally right - China has made huge gains economically but is nothing like a wester democracy.
I see this argument made constantly, but, I'm not sure it's right, in that, I don't recall a particular time line being promised. Was democracy supposed to have arrived by 2007? 2018? 2045? Maybe the last date will prove feasible. Also, what's the alternative, not trade with a fifth of humanity? Even if that were possible for America (I doubt it) how many countries would follow us? Not many, I bet.
Hoping that China eventually goes through what Taiwan or S. Korea did in the 80s (and doing what we can do to encourage this) is still the only realistic long-term play, I reckon. We're not going to be sufficiently safe and secure (that is, the risks of a disastrous great power war will continue to loom overly large) as long as China remains a fascist* semi-rogue state.
My personal view is we need America's policy wrt to China needs to be something along the lines of "competitive engagement." That is, we're not going to stop doing transactions with the Chinese (even Trump's own hawkish trade czar Robert Lighthizer admitted as much). But there needs to be a frank and (critically) coherent strategy of competition. The fist part of this seems to have arrived in DC and, increasingly, other western capitals. I'm not so sure about the second.
*The PRC does pretty much fit the traditional polysci definition for "fascism" when you think about it.
I think you're right that we don't have great options and treating the PRC like North Korea won't help. If the question is "what's the policy option", I don't know - I think the 90s idea that is invalidated is "if China is doing X that we don't like, we should keep our mouths shut and wait while the solvent of capitalism changes their behavior."
With that idea gone, we have to consider what's worth fighting about using the leverage we have and what's not, and how we make a coherent predictable stable policy that the PRC can understand and weigh strategically.
Well said. I think it's simply too early to say what the impact on China domestically the opening up will have. It still ranks as the greatest act of improving people's material condition in history, with the mass reduction in poverty. Politically, China remains a terrible place, and its treatment of minorities is abominable. But what will it be like in 50 years? Most societies that have reached a certain level of wealth at some point demand political liberation. It hasn't happened in China, but there's no reason to think that the door has been permanently closed.
This is the point where one inserts the obligatory Zhou Enlai anecdote about commenting that it was "too early" to assess the impact of the French Revolution. True in this case, but alas not in his since he was (in 1972) actually talking about the impact of the 1968 French student revolt. (https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/)
If you were given the choice in 1998 of replicating the Cold War with a USSR like China, isolated except in its fiefdom, or what we have now, the USSR model was much less frightening.
Well put. The question I would ask though is where does China go from here? It clearly cannot sustain the economic growth trajectory that got us to this point by continuing to tap into Chimerica.
If you look at some of what it is trying to accomplish through the Belt and Road Initiative, it becomes more difficult to claim that further positive-sum integration is high on their agenda.
The stated plan for China is to shift to a consumption-based economy, like most developed economies. The question is whether they will be able to execute it without hitting a lost decade like Japan.
We can probably say lost decade(s) at this point. Real growth rates just seem stuck at 1%.
You beat me to the punch. With population growth being what it is, there doesn’t seem to be a way out for Japan either.
On China, I thought that the relaxation of the one child policy would give the economy a boost a couple of decades from now, but it looks like they early data is indicating that there won't be a big baby boom.
If China wants to turn into a consumer-driven economy, someone else would conceivably have to play the China role in providing cheap labor – I’m not an expert here, but perhaps China itself could do that, but that sort of cleavage could be problematic.
China's demographics now are worse than Japan's in the 1990s, and will grow more so with time. I'm going with "no," China wont avoid sharply lower rates of growth (at least not for much longer). Already the PRC's growth rates are much lower than in the 90s, 2000s (though they're seeing a bit of a growth spurt now, just like the US).
sorry for linking twice, but it's more relavant to this post. You can actually compare mid-90s Japan to 2020 China here http://bensolucky.github.io/world_population_pyramids.html by opening in 2 windows and left, right, up and down arrow keys
Chinese per capita GDP is still low enough that they can increase it merely by importing technologies and building widgets. They are a better place to build widgets than Mexico, better infrastructure, less crime and graft, etc. The present path is sustainable for 20 years.
However, it is in the US interest to do everything we can to make Mexico a better place to build widgets.
This a case of conflict between the overall long-term national interest of the US as a whole, and the immediate, short-term individual interests of many US companies, who mostly just care about getting their widgets built a little more cheaply and efficiently today so they don't fall behind their competition.
That's not a knock on any individual company, as it's not their role to make martyrs of themselves. It's just pointing out this is a collective action problem that can only be solved by coordinated national policy that changes the rules of the road for all private companies.
I really like visiting China. The buzz and upward energy of the young professionals in the cities is very contagious. It’s really unfortunate that Chinese leadership has made such a hard turn towards more authoritarianism and nationalism. It’s a beautiful place with a great culture.
The Chinese leadership is a reflection of their culture, not a separate entity disconnected from the people.
Chinese leadership is an authoritarian, despotic regime. What makes you think they are representative of the Chinese culture and people when they aren’t a representative government?
Maybe talk to Chinese ultras sometime.
If China was a democracy they'd have *already* invaded Taiwan.
If China was a democracy there probably wouldn’t be the he world’s most sophisticated surveillance state and propaganda machine deluding it’s population. I have no idea what would happen, but history suggests that democracies make a lot of noise about nationalism but rarely do straight up wars of expansion.
Also, if China was a democracy, they might not *need* to invade Taiwan. There's a sizeable chunk of the Taiwanese electorate that would be down for unification with a democratic mainland; that's the core base of the KMT and theoretically their goal. It wouldn't necessarily be uncontroversial (path-dependency, etc.), but a democratic China would probably try the diplomatic/political route and wouldn't even consider the use of force unless these efforts came to naught.
Good point there, the blue view of the greens is that the greens are giving up on the mainland.
A Chinese "democracy" would look a lot like a South African one, or indeed, an American one pre-1865 (or pre-1964) at best.
My one take away from the comments here is that most people have never spent much time talking to Chinese people, particularly those that haven't gone to University in the US. I work with some pretty small companies in China and sometimes my colleagues there don't know enough about Western culture to know what not to say, and what they do say would be considered shockingly racist by our standards. Many have absolutely no problem saying that the Han Chinese are superior to all other cultures.
I'm confused by this. There's certainly a grain of truth to it. But if you take it as far as you're suggesting then it follows that something in Chinese culture has grown more repressive and authoritarian over the last 10 years, rather than a decision made by Xi and top leadership. Or you'd say that North and South Korea (or Germany or Vietnam) each had a government that reflected local culture when they were created.
I would posit that China hasn't become more repressive and authoritarian over the past 10 years. They just have better tools now.
I have done business there; some of those arrangements (supply contracts, Joint Ventures, wholly-owned factories making machined products) have been mutually beneficial. But in all cases, the Chinese managers on their side of the negotiation were smart, respectful, duplicitous, untrustworthy and had conflicts of interest in most senior officials. Intellectual property was routinely stolen. Counterfeit parts would regularly show up. The only way for people to succeed there is to conform to the regime and over time this has resulted in a situation where the culture (norms, behaviors, etc) and the regime are largely synonymous.
"I would posit that China hasn't become more repressive and authoritarian over the past 10 years. "
On this point, I would disagree - the consensus among most China watchers is that there has been a rapid illiberal shift under Xi's regime, with the government growing much more repressive. Many China watchers I follow who used to live in China have left in the past ~5 years out of fear of an increasingly ugly and repressive climate.
The tools are better, yes, but that's in no small part because the will to develop and use them is stronger.
Hey, at least it isn't Mao staving 20 million people to death!
Yeah, it’s not like all the recent oppressive measures taken in Xinjiang are dependent on 21st-century technology. Concentration camps are very old!
You are right to note the connection. But I think you've got it backwards - the authoritarian and nationalism of the Chinese leadership has trickled down to the culture. If the rules of the game are rigged, to succeed you have to play by those rules. Also, "culture" is an awfully broad term to use.
The OP introduced the "great culture" concept. We've been conditioned, wrongly in my view, to avoid criticizing cultures in lieu of focusing on either leaders or individuals. I take issue with that concept. I think some cultures are better than others, and we are constantly competing between different cultures (values, norms, behaviors) for global influence. Call me I think the US culture is better, on balance, than China's, Russia's, Saudi's, Iran's and many other places and I just disagree that the China culture is "great".
Obviously that's a subjective view, and I think it is totally acceptable to rank other cultures based on how closely they align to your values.
The thing that I think is important to point out, and I am in no ways insinuating that you're doing that John, is that it is usually a short distance between saying a culture is inferior and then discriminating against people from that culture.
At any rate, I do think however that culture is indeed a broad term to use particularly on an entire country, let alone one with China's size and history.
So you are saying there were no authoritarian or nationalistic leaders in China before Mao? What about the Emperors? Or in the ROC, the one-party rule of KMT under Chiang Kai-shek until his passing?
Right. When Chinese people get sick of the current government they can just vote in another!
That’s a determinist view of history that. If you believe that countries can never change which isn’t true. It’s also a tautology.
I do believe countries can change. I also believe China has some beautiful parts. I just disagree with your characterization that it has a "great culture." It has a culture that is antithetical with Western ideas around democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, respect for property rights, etc. I hope its culture changes, as I believe it can. But I don't think it is a great culture today.
While Taiwan is, in most senses, a separate country, it's culture has many strong historical ties to China. And yet it's a very free and democratic society, on par with the US. Hong Kong literally is a part of China, and yet there is very obviously a strong popular desire for non-despotic rule.
I think that you have define "culture" in a fairly narrow way to blame it for the PRC regime's authoritarianism.
Taiwan was also until fairly recently an authoritarian regime, but is now exceptionally vibrant, which shows the foolishness of extrapolating culture backwards from politics
I think it's just kind of hard to boil any whole culture down to just a couple words or a single good/bad judgment. America is both a land of free individuals choosing to work together as it suits them, with lively debate and a general upward trend in standards of living and scientific progress ... and also a land of lowbrow reality-TV culture, lingering racism, big divides in access to money and medical care, and decaying institutions. You can pick whatever aspects of American culture you want, depending on whether you want to portray America as a generally positive force for good that the world can aspire to emulate, or a warning about how Western culture leads to division and decadence.
I do wonder whether Xi will be able to keep the lid on with this increasingly repressive turn towards authoritarianism as the economy slows down. I don't doubt for a moment that the majority of Chinese support the CCP (it's hard to see how most of them wouldn't after the massive economic gains of the past few decades) but once China finally enters a slowdown, or even a recession, one imagines that the middle class's appetite for tolerance of increasingly Maoist policies will be much reduced.
A counter argument would be that the slowdown makes China more dangerous. Nationalism is an extremely strong force in China. A war to "liberate" Taiwan would serve the interests of Xi in this situation, in that it would stir nationalistic feelings and give him a further rationale for stifling dissent.
I think both these things could be true.
Clearly, improving living standards and the satisfying of material needs have not been accompanied by wide demands for greater representation or liberalization - people who have more to lose become the vanguard of the status quo.
You could easily construct a scenario where a severe downturn could precipitate public angst, but I could just as easily buy the case that it would entrenches the political system, via geopolitical adventurism or a call to preserve gains already obtained.
The argument here is that China's slowdown and stagnation seems likely to occur *before* standards of living / per capita GDP get anywhere near the US, Western Europe, or Japan/South Korea. The Soviet Union was also a formidable growth machine in the '50s and '60s, but the stagnation it entered in the '70s was a big factor in Soviet citizens' faith in their system eroding as they saw the West continue to grow.
It might turn out this way, but it also might now. And as much as I'm no theorist of international relations I do find the realist view compelling enough to believe that the United States should not leave its sovereignty and independence to chance or in the hands of what China may or may not do. We should plot our course and national strategy on the assumption that China will be successful at increasing its wealth (which after all is a good thing for humanity) and power.
I 100% agree with this, we shouldn't assume that China will actually enter an economic slowdown until it does, even if signs point to that happening. And assuming that China's citizens can accept something like half the per capita GDP of the US without revolting, that leaves their government with way more economic clout than the US given the population difference. Overall the situation is much less favorable for the US than it was during the Cold War with the Soviets.
I keep saying it: this is more important than Israel Palestine.
About a billion times more.
We can focus on multiple things at once, you know.
We can Focus on about 3-5 things max in this country especially things that require presidential action. This is the free speech of Americans to other Americans. As Matt points out it will eventually be assistant managers at the apple store who have to watch what they tweet or comments they make on Facebook. Like in what universe will Israel Palestine be in the top 3. Beating out 1 global warming, 2 China's growing power, and 3 the Pandemic.
I got banned from China for the aristocrats
Do we really need bob saget jokes in here...?
Honestly Bob Saget in these comments is often a highlight
Hell yes we do!
Google took the non-slippery slope hard line with China when they pulled most of their products out of the market. I wonder if Matt has been to China — it’s a truly surreal experience when suddenly none of your Google searches, Maps, etc work anymore.
Which i believe Google did largely because of activism from their employees. Apple had never been as in fear of their employees.
There are also really big structural differences between Apple and Google's businesses. The Chinese market is big but comes with various levels of hurdles and hindrances - Google may simply have a business model that the PRC would only let a "local champion" dominate.
(Apple makes a thing - that is made in China.)
Very possibly true, but nobody knows. When Google did try to enter the Chinese market with Dragonfly, their employees scuttled it before anything really came if it.
He has been to China. I'd guess he had enough sense to download a VPN.
"So far, we don’t know about China monitoring the Twitter feeds of obscure actors and complaining about random things they’ve said."
The recent row over Nomadland director Cloe Zhao could be illustrative. China got angry at her for some random quote about there being "lies everywhere" in her home country which could affect the rollout of her upcoming MCU film The Eternals.
It's really interesting how completely '90s free traders failed to imagine the consequences of what would happen when the Chinese economy began to approach in size the American economy. Once you hit that point, our corporations need the Chinese much more than the Chinese need our corporations and the consequences you described follow.
Now that I say that, I bet they in their wildest dreams didn't think the Chinese market would eclipse the US market in like two decades.
I also hate to say it, but one of the most plausible ways out of our polarization is a cold war with China.
Your paragraph clarifying that you don’t want a war (shooting or cold) with China reminds me of a frustrating tendency on the Left to take any criticism of China as “oh the US is trying to manufacture consent for a war.” Freddie DeBoer actually had a post where he said “your government is laying the groundwork for an actual war with China.” It’s depressing for a few reasons: it suggests that the Left has lost its former capacity for internationalism (with the exception of Palestine, I guess), and it suggests that either we’ve greatly over-learned the lesson of Iraq (now *that* was a government laying a groundwork for war; the China thing looks nothing like it), or that those who got Iraq right did so out of pure dumb luck, and their vindication on that point prevents them from learning to make distinctions.
I think a fair number of people on the US left believe one of the following: (1) As a US citizen you must and may oppose only America's sins and possibly those of its allies, but other countries' bad acts are the business only of the people who live there and it's wrong to stick your nose in their business. (2) Even though other countries do many bad things, the main problem with the world is that the US is too powerful, causing it to be the main source of harm in the world, and thus the overriding priority of all world citizens should be to form a united front against it, and to set aside any differences with any other country. (3) The US is, in fact, the world's most evil country and the overriding priority of all world citizens should be to form a united front against it, and to set aside any differences with any other country.
If you subscribe to any of those premises, then everything you described will kind of flow naturally from it.
It's not just people in the entertainment business who have been affected. Remember that two fans were kicked out of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia for showing "Free Hong Kong" signs at a game with a Chinese team. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/09/us/nba-fan-hong-kong-ejected-trnd/index.html