Should Biden jawbone private companies on kowtowing to China or will that provoke a thermostatic response? The CCP has “Communist” right there in the name, and the Trump/Tucker/Thiel authoritarian wing of the Republican Party has so far been *more* hawkish on China, but I keep waiting for them to realign. Will they decide that Xi is on their side with Russia, against Europe and Wokeness and Muslims and young people?
twitter's a terrible platform which gives smart people brainworms so anything to hasten its destruction is good imo. being taken over by an eccentric billionaire who already runs two more profitable companies and clearly now has no interest in actually running the company was a good start, but kowtowing to china and destroying its credibility might even be better?
I think that, in the end, I worry less about Musk taking over Twitter because while Tesla can't really grow without a China footprint, the USA's political discourse and free speech can absolutely survive without Twitter. It just isn't all that hard for a tech company or entrepreneur to set up a Twitter-like site if Twitter turns into a hellscape of tech bros and Elon Musk vain tweeting all the time, weighing in with his foreign-policy genius. Heck, as a result of Donald Trump's expulsion ALONE we got GETTR and Truth Social - either of which could likely be purchased for a handful of Red Robin gift cards - and Parler was already there, full of fascists. If those sites can survive, a Twitter-like site could easily be stood up, sans Nazis, and take its place.
We'll all survive Musk taking over Twitter, if only because it survives due to its brand and not much else. Take away its brand and it's...Truth Social.
There’s been a strange vibe among the very online lefties who tend to populate Twitter. There was a period where criticism of China seemed to code as right wing to many of them, I think because Trump was being so critical of China.
Then during COVID, it was as if holding China accountable at all was letting Trump off the hook, and people didn’t want to hear it.
It’s been really strange to see people demand moral stances from their employers on the issue of the day, while their employers do business in Xinjiang, and otherwise cover for China.
The current unwillingness to bring up China when attacking Musk feels like an extension of these things.
Apologies for being all over the place, I’m supposed to be working at the moment. Ethan Strauss wrote an excellent “it’s ok to be mad at China/why isn’t it ok?” piece that gets at a lot of these things, for those who can read it.
Not sure I follow what the FTC would investigate here. They have law enforcement authority over antitrust violations and "unfair and deceptive acts and practices". Censoring things for the Chinese government isn't an antitrust violation, it doesn't have anything to do with competition.
Maybe if you really squint you could say it is deceptive because Twitter is held out as unbiased but secretly acts in a pro-China way. But the fact you wrote this article kind of gives it away. The standards for this authority are also very tight, as a reasonable consumer must not be able to avoid the practice (in the statute). And in any case the suspicion that might happen is not something you could block the deal over, it would actually need to happen.
Notwithstanding the dreams of current leadership, the FTC isn't the national reviewer of whether we like people's business plans. It actually needs to prove a violation of the law.
>>>Because for all the virtues of capitalism and the for-profit business corporation, it also has at its core an amorality that can produce really bad results when it interfaces with a large despotic regime.<<<
This correct observation is also why I'm pretty pessimistic about how easy it could be for a future Trump/DeSantis administration bring large swaths of civil society to heel as they set up an Orban-style autocracy in America. Even just implied/subtle threats appear to be enough to make industrial and media companies toe the line and serve the interests of what they calculate to be an entrenched regime.
All the more reason for us to carefully heed Slow Boring political advice so as to head off this Orban-style autocracy as best we can ....
What would realistically happen? No one considers it their right to watch China-negative content on AppleTV, but Twitter content moderation is subject to an enormous amount of scrutiny. It's hard to imagine Musk enacting a policy that you can't criticize China on Twitter, even if China explicitly demanded it and linked it to treatment of Tesla. Musk would probably just have to re-sell Twitter in that case. Are there more subtle ways in which he could be forced to introduce a pro-China slant?
He himself mentioned wanting it to be more like Tiktok. That would rely on algorithms to curate content, which could fairly easily be pushed in certain directions.
I would ask about this in the mailbag, but given Matt's contempt for the legal system, I don't see much hope he'd answer it, so I'll just float it here instead:
As everyone knows, private actors are generally not subject to the First Amendment. There is, however, an exception to that rule: where a private actor has been deputized or otherwise directed by a state actor to take actions that violate someone's First Amendment rights, the private actor can be held liable along with the state actor at least where the state actor is a political entity subject to 42 U.S.C. 1983 (I'd need to research what actual case law there is on applying this doctrine to the federal government, but I believe the consensus is that it would).
This historically has no relevance to the PRC's coercion of American businesses and organizations because there's no facial constitutional problem with a foreign government deputizing or directing private actors to violate Americans' First Amendment rights. However, what if 42 U.S.C. 1983 was amended to add "Foreign Nation" to the existing list of political entities that could be sued under the statute ("any State or Territory or the District of Columbia")? This would obviously be creating an exception to the general rule of foreign sovereign immunity in the American courts, but it also seems like it would be really awkward for members of Congress to explain why foreign nations should have the power to violate the constitutional rights of people inside the US's borders. This would also then open up the possibility of actions by residents of the US versus private businesses to the extent those businesses adopt policies inside the US under pressure from the PRC that are intended to limit Americans' free speech.
Business leaders in politics should come in for a lot more skepticism generally. One idea in particular that needs reconsideration, the desire to have business leaders run for political office. I think this idea has died an unceremonious death on the left with the growth of more explicitly anti-capitalist rhetoric from the fringe since 2009 and the election of Trump in 2016. But it's a good point for Republicans to internalize as well. As an example of a Democrat with uncomfortably close ties to foreign powers, I think Mike Bloomberg is the best recent case study. His 88% ownership Bloomberg LP (which had not insignificant financial stakes in China) combined with his weakness on Chinese political leadership should have been disqualifying. Serious writers talked about it in opinion pieces at the time, but there wasn't much of a popular outcry over this issue in particular.
Perhaps media companies that have no-China offense policies could be required to post the policy at each screening the way they do the FBI warnings against plagiarism.
On a larger issues, this shows the dangers of the West and specifically the US, not growing fast enough to prevent China from playing too large a geopolitical role.
With the recent restrictions of chip exports to China, we’re dropping the pretense of making nice, so why not extend to other sectors? If selling to China induces companies to self-censor, why not just ban media companies (esp movie studios) from selling to China? I want to see a Bond movie with PRC bad-guys.
In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences...but historically the fact that all these platforms are blocked from day 1 in China means it’s much less of an issue for China.
The closest analogy is how China treated Google, and in that case they only demanded Google moderate search results for domestic audiences, not the rest of the world. Ultimately, Google gave up on the Chinese market and shelved the plan to build a censored version of Google.
Additionally, its not clear to me that Twitter isn’t worth more to China as is (banned domestically, but utilized by hawkish Chinese dignitaries for Chinese propaganda and marketing) than in the way you describe. It’s pretty clear that any move to pressure Musk to ban (or shadowban) content China doesn’t like would be found out immediately and potentially lead to the death of the platform, and thus cause it to lose any value the Chinese get from it now as a diplomatic tool in which their own government officials dunk feverishly on other nations. Seems much easier to just pick and choose battles with individuals who have something to lose in China, as historically that has worked.
>>In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences.<<
What leverage do they have? Twitter, FB, Netflix and Google (including Youtube and all its other services) are blocked in China. These services do take advertising dollars (or RMB ) from Chinese parties wishing to reach Western consumers, I think, but the PRC perhaps doesn't want to mess with the ability of their own firmst to target foreigners (and this isn't a big revenue source, I think, for the Western firms in question, so losing it wouldn't be a major threat).
Well, for at least a short period (2006 to 2010) Google was available in China, i believe...and at that point the kind of influence Matt was worried about did not occur. Instead, all Chinese pressure was focused on what domestic audiences saw...
The hypothesis that China would utilize significant financial / market control over CEOs to control what third parties do or say elsewhere i think is a bit misread. China doesn’t have to get Apple or HBO to control what their big (or minor) stars say...it just has to control what those big stars say directly. It is a minor, but perhaps key, difference in how their soft power is flexed and works here.
We Americans, i think, want to read this as our Corporate Overlords telling us what to do...in reality, though we self censor and “read the room” when we realize it might matter to us...
Also, I do wonder to what degree a nation like China sees Twitter as a bit of an Achilles Heel for a Nation and really doesn’t want to do anything to get rid of it because of the fat tail it creates for political upheaval everywhere (up China). After all, they have to see it as such to ban it in their own nations....
Great post - as usual, you highlight an important issue that most people aren't talking about. This is why I subscribe.
One quibble - I find it difficult to see the NYT or Twitter as media brands "with integrity" -they may be willing to challenge China, but there's enough troubling behavior at both with respect to "no go" areas of coverage (NYT) or outright censoring of dissenting views (Twitter). Perhaps for Substack, the broad diversity of the views of the writers plus the volume of content could mean there's no simple chokepoint for blocking content consistently (I am sure someone could come up with a means, however). More importantly, Substack's brand seems tied to having a diversity of views and topics being available on the platform and letting individuals choose who they want to subscribe to. Censoring writers would damage the brand. Both Twitter and the NYT seem to me to have embraced having a fairly high degree of ideological conformity as part of their brands. Musk might change that at Twitter.
>>>Because conservatives agree with Musk about the importance of making social media a welcoming place for transphobic jokes, they haven’t been nearly as quick to condemn him telling the Financial Times that Taiwan ought to become a Beijing-ruled Special Administrative Region. But when it comes to a random celebrity like John Cena, conservatives understand the basic dynamic perfectly well — money talks.<<<
Matt's being too polite here. Republicans are deeply unserious and/or profoundly duplicitous about China policy. Pretty much everything the GOP does on China is intended for domestic political audiences only. Strengthening America to compete in the new Cold War would mean things like:
*Addressing US demographic decline via immigration (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and push our growth levels down to PRC levels).
*Competing for the world's best and brightest to strengthen America's STEM sector (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and make it harder for talented foreigners to get work permits, green cards or student visas).
*Leading on Pacific Rim economic integration (Republicans have become the more protectionist of our two parties, and gave Obama essentially zero support on TPP, despite the obvious boost joining this group would have given to US efforts to contest the PRC's growing influence in this critical region).
*Bolstering US democratic norms (something cold warriors in the 1950s and 1960s understood: a nontrivial degree of support for the Civil Rights movement was generated by the need to compete for global hearts and minds, and to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy over totalitarianism). Republicans won't even disavow insurrectionists.
*Readying the country for its next, inevitable rendez-vous with a pandemic. (Republicans have mostly gone full anti-vax nutter).
I could also cite climate change, infrastructure and various other areas where the US should play a leading role and/or demonstrate robust state capacity. The PRC is a formidable adversary: surely a lot tougher opponent that the USSR ever was. Republicans aren't serious about any of it, though admittedly they do a bang up job hurling racist invective (Kung Flu, etc) on Twitter, so at least there's that!
Is it serious to not acknowledge obvious truths in the name of social justice? What is the truth about the vaccines? It does seem like they significantly reduce the risk of bad outcomes for an individual. What do they do to limit transmission? Not much. I am vaccinated. Fauci is out there now denying his role from a lot of the policies pursued during COVID, particularly with schools.
You’re right Republicans are crazy. But Dems are also non-serious, science denying, culture warring nutters too. Just a little less.
What evidence has led you to believe they do "not much" to limit transmission? That differs from my understanding, which is that reducing infection severity is a mechanism by which they do limit transmission, since it lowers viral load and thus ability to transmit.
But it's hard to keep up with the ever-shifting body of research and I'm no expert, so if you have seen compelling evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested to see it
You’re right it is hard to keep up. My understanding is that with variants the protection of getting the virus has diminished significantly. The protection against getting the virus also diminished significantly with time, even with no variants. These two things together seem to explain so many vaccinated getting the virus.
When the original variant was still present, and vaccinated people all had fresh vaccines, infections among vaccinated people were about 95% lower than among unvaccinated people. After the alpha variant, and the delta variant, and the omicron variant, and after vaccinated people mostly let their vaccines go stale without a booster (classic or updated), vaccinated people still have a 60% lower risk of infection than unvaccinated people. (I think there was one week at the tail end of omicron when vaccinated people were only 30% less likely to be infected than unvaccinated people in the same age range, because the unvaccinated people were mostly recently infected.)
I believe this page has the CDC data on infection by vaccination status up until this week, but it looks like they will stop tracking it next week:
Oh and it is true that I don’t have a peer reviewed scientific paper that supports the theory that the vaccines aren’t doing much to reduce transmission.
I’d rather not fight a second cold war. Losing a cold war is catastrophic, and winning won hardly made the US better off in material terms. Indeed, the fallout of the first cold war still has a fair chance of leading to nuclear strikes.
Sorry, are you suggesting that if the US in 1945 had returned to its pre-1940 isolationism that the US would have been better off in 2022?
Communism was a hostile expanding totalizing ideology with the potential & capacity to knock over country after country, picking up momentum as it went. If the US had sat on its hands and whistled as Communism expanded, we would have had a Cold War starting in the 1970s after the Soviets had finished adding France+Italy+Spain to the Warsaw pact, installed a Communist government in Indonesia, and started securing multiple footholds in Latin America (not just Cuba but also Chile / Nicaragua / Peru, in all likelihood).
I strongly disagree. The Vietnam War went from 1946-1975. If the French had packed up and left at the first sign of Vietnamese Communists, then the wave of un-obstructed Communist expansion would have hit surrounding nations 30 years earlier & during the time when the Soviets and CCP were working together.
In our timeline, there were over a million Communist members and sympathizers in Indonesia by 1965 [before the purges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366], and India experienced repeated Naxalite uprisings starting in 1967 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insurgency]. There was clearly scope for Communism to spread further than it did in Southern and Southeast Asia if it hadn't been stalled in Vietnam for 30 years, especially since the 1917-1949 period saw rapid Communist expansion in Eurasia on multiple fronts.
Yes, and that death toll is smaller than the expected death toll of communism taking over Indonesia, let alone also taking over India.
In addition to millions dying in "third-world backwaters", a more expansive communism would eventually have caused problems for rich-world countries, if it was actively expanded towards them and had ideological momentum thanks to fresh revolutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not guaranteed.
correct. it’s not as if every communist regime became a stalinist hellhole. vietnam today is probably a better place than myanmar, i’d certainly rather play the natural lottery in todays vietnam than haiti
Mind your manners. The U.S. had practically no realpolitik interest in propping up Western Europe. It was Cade of mission creep. We were politically compelled to do it to honor the sacrifice of US soldiers in defeating Germany. If only Hitler hadn’t declared war on the U.S., Germany and the USSR could have fought to exhaustion. Britain might still be an imperial power if it hasn’t insisted on protecting Poland when it lacked the military ability to do so
Depends on strategy. Trying to outgrow China and helping the resto f the world to do so, too would be a great Cold War strategy. [It wouldn't have anything in particular to do with total trade with China even.] It worked with the Soviet Union, but their economic policies were much worse so it didn't take much to best them. China is a more serious competitor.
And even if we are not successful, we're still better off.
Even aid enthusiast I cannot say that our "out grow" competition with China should be mainly about poorer countries, but they certainly should benefit.
In addition as a rich country and as one that has contribute a lot to the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, we (though not we alone) should provide aid to poorer countries to undertake mitigation of CO2 effects and damages thereof (e.g. the foods/drought in the Indian Subcontinent). How and how much requires more thought. I guess we have some obligation to help poor countries offset the deadweight loss of their own taxes on net CO2 emissions, but these will be hard to observe and I suspect pretty low.
Perhaps the first thing we should do is mothball most of our aircraft carriers. The idea that the US can project power even where allies can’t provide secure bases is dangerous.
If China attacked Taiwan, we should do no more for the Taiwanese than we have for Ukraine
Agreed, with the proviso that aircraft carriers are still useful for intimidating shit countries like Iran. But China, with its ninety zillion surface to ship missiles and drones? Not so much.
Was Haoan better off when it had the largest carrier fleet in the world (which it constructed during its occupation of China!) than it is now? Did the extra muscle carriers offered Emperor Hirohito in responding to the US oil embargo redound to Japan’s benefit? Or did carriers create the illusion Japan could humble a county with twice its population and keep on building its foreign policy castles in the sky?
I’m totally ok nudging Taiwan towards the PRC. The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil, and it is orders of magnitude harder to confront
I think it would terrible for America to in any way pressure Taiwan into an annexation deal with the totalitarian across the Strait. Is that what you mean by "nudge"?
Relatedly, though, I think it would be madness for the US to get into a shooting war with the PRC over that island's status. If we're going to "nudge" them, said nudges should concentrate on getting them to spend a lot more on their military. It would make everybody's life easier (except Xi's) if the PLA knew an invasion were overwhelmingly likely to result in defeat. Alas, Taipei spends about a 1/3 of what Israel does on defense.
>The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil
This is just completely not true on a variety of metrics. If you care about personal liberties at all, China is orders of magnitude worse than either of these two. If you're a minority in China, you have no path for any form of political representation. China also allows no competing political parties that could challenge the CCP, there is no avenue for political change outside the state regime. Brazil is a fairly robust, multi-party democracy and while the Philippines is a bit of a basket case, it does have elections and opposition parties do have some say in their political system.
Both the Philippines and Brazil consistently support freedom of religion, academic freedom, and freedom of movement. Brazil has constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression (The Philippines has restrictions on media but individuals retain pretty broad latitude in what they can say in public on social media). China is a country that (still! even as they're trying to raise birth rates) explicitly restricts the reproductive freedom of most of their population and is actively committing reproductive genocide on their citizens in Xinjiang. Like, this is night and day, foundational stuff. And that totally discounts the fact that Taiwan is *better* than both Brazil and the Philippines on all those metrics. Encouraging Taiwan to just accept the loss of these freedoms is, to my eye, moral bankruptcy on par with Nixon and Kissinger's tacit acceptance of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.
In the Philippines and Brazil, there are state adjacent hit squads that run around killing different types of undesirables. The plight of the Uighurs is different, but they are leas than 1% of Cinha’s population and even the US imprisons a bunch of black men.
I am happy to concede that The Philippines, Brazil, China, and even the US are all imperfect countries whose governments, in some shape or another, restrict or oppress their citizens. But what matters is the entire scope, not the mere presence of illiberalism in each. And China is demonstrably much worse than every other country mentioned on nearly every metric. To ignore that is crass whataboutery. Feel free to look through the Freedom House reports on all of them sometime if you don't want to take my word for it (and please note that Taiwan is one of the most free countries on the planet by their standards) https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map
China has always been pretty inward looking and has never expanded much beyond its periphery, unlike European powers from Portugal to France to Britain, which gobbled up vast swathes of territory
China has had recurrent warfare with almost all of its neighbors since WW2. It invaded South Korea, fought multiple large battles with the Soviet Union, fought a small war with India and a larger one with Vietnam, was intimately involved with supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and its proxies in Laos, and is supplying troops and expertise to Myanmar. It's also threatened all its maritime neighbors and refuses to recognize Japan's sea borders. It takes real effort to have disputes with all your neighbors except North Korea.
Well said, but I would add to that that there is no through-line for any Republican/conservative critique/policy direction. Their strongest motivator is to win the day's propaganda battle and score debating points against the despised liberals. They would be very happy to excoriate Biden for being weak on protecting Taiwan if that won them the day's points, but then drop Taiwan support like a hot potato once they take power.
To be fair, this is common across the political spectrum, from “Bernie would have won” and whatever the woke flavor of the minute is through the Bill Maher center as well as the Republican brand.
For a long time I thought that their only real interest was reducing taxes on the rich. I now think some of their positions on social issues (they look at immigration just as a social issue, not as a growth inhibiting economic issue) and maybe (hopefully not) trade restrictions are also sincere, provided addressing them do not require higher taxes on the rich.
True. Trump could come out tomorrow morning advocating that China annex the US and his followers would lap it up. (Indeed, he was singing Xi's praises recently for having such a firm grip—an iron fist was the phrase in question—on the lives of 1.4 billion human beings):
It feels like you're being too uncharitable here. I agree with you that Republicans are not prioritizing competition with China at a level that would justify their rhetoric. But I think you can make a similar argument about Democrats, who I think have made similarly unserious choices if China is truly *the* major threat to US interests (if not quite as many unserious choices). Specifically, I am thinking of the many complaints by European and East Asian partner nations regarding the trade policies at the heart of the Biden team's foreign policy and the "Made in America" requirements of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. A conservative could also argue that Democrats are encouraging cultural balkanization in their social policies, which is the last thing a country needs of it's preparing for conflict with a major foreign threat (as a liberal, I don't think this argument is particularly fair either, but there's a kernel of truth here. Democrats certainly aren't prioritizing policies that would lead to greater cultural integration or reconciliation with Republicans).
In the comment you're responding to, I wasn't accusing the GOP of not taking the country's national security seriously (although they don't). Rather, I was accusing them of being hypocritical. Anti-China hawkery has become perhaps that party's mostly deeply held, core principle, in a way that is most definitely *not* the case with the Democratic Party.
That said, Biden has absolutely bludgeoned China's chip sector with his most recent executive order, and Democrats in general support ideas and policies that actually would strengthen—not weaken—the country in its struggle with the PRC.
You do raise another hobbyhorse of mine: the tendency of our anti-China policy (both political parties are guilty in this case) to basically not even *attempt* to woo the Chinese people, and/or differentiate between them and their government/party.
We should be trying to make it as difficult as possible for Beijing to implement or promote anti-USA policies and rhetoric by tapping into the still quite large reservoir of goodwill toward America that's very apparent in the Middle Kingdom. Make Xi's task more difficult, not easier.
But we seem intent on doing the latter by doing our utmost to play the bitter, remorseless, uber-enemy of China 24/7.
Please say more about the "large reservoir of goodwill toward America." I'd very much like to believe it and I profess total ignorance about the Chinese people. But it strikes me that there is intense nationalism in Chinese views of the world and that can often be very strongly triggered. (I'm thinking, e.g., of the accidental (?) US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.)
This implies that you'd need a Chinese person to have a "large reservoir of goodwill toward America" before you'd consider using honey and not vinegar, thus highlighting the very selective racism being highlighted.
Even if Chinese people were chock full of badwill toward America or the West, so what? Why should that change anything? That is not the standard liberal line when it comes to other non-white peoples, which is that the West must accommodate them, that any animosity that they as individuals might feel toward the West is the fault of the West. Perhaps elevating ethnic Chinese within America would be the best soft power weapon one could have ("our Chinese have it so much better than your Chinese!"), but of course neither side is interested in doing that. Conservatives for obvious reasons, but also liberals - from looking at the Substacks you subscribe to (Krugman, DeLong, etc.), you're one. We have some other poster down here, raging against the GOP but also ranting about 1200 years (?) of unique violence by China (thus giving lie to any claim that their animosity toward the Chinese people is limited to the Cee Cee Pee), as if the history of white Europeans wasn't many times worse.
Another thought. Any geopolitical or technological struggle with China will require increased buy-in from the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese. What are the odds that America, and American society, will use honey and not vinegar toward those countries, and people of those ethnic descent here in America? It all depends on which kind of liberal wins out in the culture here, because it's certainly not going to come from the type who suddenly became a foreign policy hawk in the 2010's for totally non-racial reasons.
"If Muslims are anti-West, we must step up our treatment of Muslims in the West to show that Our Way is Better", for instance, is hardly a narrowly-held view. It is the default view of all institutions and Western liberals. If the race-swapped corollary is not one of the first things that pop in a Democrat's head when thinking of How to Deal with China, perhaps they should consider what underlying racism prevents it from being so.
This isn't to say that Chinese as a group face more racism than Muslims as a group. Different groups face different kinds of racism more or less than others, and there's particular kinds that Chinese and East Asians are particularly more likely to face.
And everyone is consistent when put on the spot or challenged. And yet obvious double standards in how center-to-left Westerners, who in the American context I'm just calling Democrats, see and treat different non-white groups persist. So obviously someone, a great many someones, are lying. Your "obvious answer" is not obvious in practice to the centrist-leaning liberals for whom you are speaking.
You should believe it. It's true. They watch our TV (often with use of VPNs), wear our sneakers, drive our cars (Buicks, Jeeps, Teslas, Cadillacs), text and browse the web our our phones, drink our coffee, worship our tycoons (Buffetts, Jobs, Musk, Gates, etc), wear our baseball caps (Yankees caps are everywhere), listen to our music, watch our basketball games, eat our crap fast food and dream of going to our universities. For starters. They're well aware we have the ability to fire our leaders. They're well aware our vaccines work. They're well aware we're no long in lockdown nor are we obliged to wear masks.
No time for a long comment, and I'm not suggesting some of the dysfunction on display in the US recently hasn't hurt our image. But yeah, I stand by my contention about the good will. Also, remember, there are several million residents of the US who were born in China, so there are family ties as well...
I would add that my professional sphere (academic science) attracts a disproportionate share of Chinese expats, many/most of whom (including friends, mentors, colleagues and former students) start out thinking that they will attend a Western university, learn some science and then pursue a career back in China. But once they experience a free society up-close, the good will often goes way past baseball caps and Big Macs. So many decided to stay and seek residence/citizenship (in the US or a European country) that the Chinese Academy more-or-less has to bribe them (with ridiculous research budgets, etc.) to return. And yet I often get an ear full about how difficult it is to conduct research in a totalitarian society (my words) from very successful professors in China.
I have seen many young Chinese scientists struggle with the dissonance of what they believed growing up versus what they see from the outside—and they talk with the friends and family back home. Even the ones who do decide to return to China take back with them an obvious fondness for the West and personal connections to people from all over the world. I have to assume the same happens in all of the areas in which China deliberately sends people out to learn/copy from Western companies, etc. (Maybe I'm actually making the argument that soft power is still a thing.)
The Chinese government pushes Chinese nationalism very hard precisely because they understand the US is a real beacon to Chinese people. We are rich, welcoming, allow people to practice their religion openly, don't legislate how many children they should have, and have relatively low levels of corruption. We also have a lot of very successful Chinese-Americans with real social and political capital in a democracy. To the extent we promote people-to-people contacts with Chinese people and argue our beef is only with the CCP, we can make real headway.
We could make headway except on the Taiwan issue. From what I can tell the Chinese to a man/woman strongly feel that island is their country's territory. That's my strong impression based on not just knowing a lot of Chinese people, but also knowing a fair number who are highly skeptical of the Party's rule and want their country to become a democracy.
How do these people feel about Mongolia or Vladivostok or Sikkim? Do they also consider those places to be their country's territory? How about Singapore or Malaysia?
Well, yes, that's a fair point. Take Saudi Arabia for example. A brutal dictatorship that kills Washington Post journalists by luring them into its consulates. Biden was fist-bumping their dictator a few months ago.
Contrast that with the attitude of US elites toward China. You wouldn't have to have gone full Greenwaldian to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it's not China's non democratic governmental norms that have got DC riled up; it's about the fact that the Chinese have a $30 trillion economy, a giant defense budget, and a rapidly growing nuclear arsenal...
But as it happens, I suspect ant-China animus would take different forms were the mainland to democratize, and I think a full-blown Cold War wouldn't be possible to sustain in the US, politically. But we'd probably continue to experience a lot of trade friction, just like back in the 70s and 80s vis-a-vis Japan.
That immigration of talented workers, lower deficits, taxation of net CO2 emissions, and freer trade promote growth is not rocket science. Cognitive challenges are not a good explanation.
It's possible that there's some of that. But (call me cynical if you like, but this is actually how I see it) I think there are plenty of very, very smart right wingers out there who know perfectly well that actually maximizing the country's position vis-a-vis the PRC would mean doing some things likely to ruffle the feathers of both their MAGA footsoldiers AND a few of their elites (I'm thinking of the Stephen Miller set).
But they're infinitely more concerned with winning the next election than they are about seeing the United States of America prevail in its competition with the CCP/PRC.
(A particularly egregious example of GOP awfulness on this score involved Ted Cruz. He's very far indeed from being a stupid man. But he's beyond Nixonian in his craven cynicism. You may recall someone floated the concept—there may even have been a bill before a committee though I don't recall the specifics—of greenlighting large-scale Taiwanese immigration in the wake of an invasion. Cruz, of course, shot it down, citing a nonspecific national security risk).
Twitter might not be that important to the average person, but I just listened to Rachel Maddow on Ezra Klein's podcast and they both agreed that Trump's use of Twitter is what allowed him to drive the media narrative and coverage about himself. I'm not sure much has changed for the members of the media on Twitter.
Should Biden jawbone private companies on kowtowing to China or will that provoke a thermostatic response? The CCP has “Communist” right there in the name, and the Trump/Tucker/Thiel authoritarian wing of the Republican Party has so far been *more* hawkish on China, but I keep waiting for them to realign. Will they decide that Xi is on their side with Russia, against Europe and Wokeness and Muslims and young people?
twitter's a terrible platform which gives smart people brainworms so anything to hasten its destruction is good imo. being taken over by an eccentric billionaire who already runs two more profitable companies and clearly now has no interest in actually running the company was a good start, but kowtowing to china and destroying its credibility might even be better?
I think that, in the end, I worry less about Musk taking over Twitter because while Tesla can't really grow without a China footprint, the USA's political discourse and free speech can absolutely survive without Twitter. It just isn't all that hard for a tech company or entrepreneur to set up a Twitter-like site if Twitter turns into a hellscape of tech bros and Elon Musk vain tweeting all the time, weighing in with his foreign-policy genius. Heck, as a result of Donald Trump's expulsion ALONE we got GETTR and Truth Social - either of which could likely be purchased for a handful of Red Robin gift cards - and Parler was already there, full of fascists. If those sites can survive, a Twitter-like site could easily be stood up, sans Nazis, and take its place.
We'll all survive Musk taking over Twitter, if only because it survives due to its brand and not much else. Take away its brand and it's...Truth Social.
There’s been a strange vibe among the very online lefties who tend to populate Twitter. There was a period where criticism of China seemed to code as right wing to many of them, I think because Trump was being so critical of China.
Then during COVID, it was as if holding China accountable at all was letting Trump off the hook, and people didn’t want to hear it.
It’s been really strange to see people demand moral stances from their employers on the issue of the day, while their employers do business in Xinjiang, and otherwise cover for China.
The current unwillingness to bring up China when attacking Musk feels like an extension of these things.
Apologies for being all over the place, I’m supposed to be working at the moment. Ethan Strauss wrote an excellent “it’s ok to be mad at China/why isn’t it ok?” piece that gets at a lot of these things, for those who can read it.
https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/china-empathy-and-chamath
I’d love to post a few pertinent paragraphs from it, but don’t want to do that to Strauss.
Not sure I follow what the FTC would investigate here. They have law enforcement authority over antitrust violations and "unfair and deceptive acts and practices". Censoring things for the Chinese government isn't an antitrust violation, it doesn't have anything to do with competition.
Maybe if you really squint you could say it is deceptive because Twitter is held out as unbiased but secretly acts in a pro-China way. But the fact you wrote this article kind of gives it away. The standards for this authority are also very tight, as a reasonable consumer must not be able to avoid the practice (in the statute). And in any case the suspicion that might happen is not something you could block the deal over, it would actually need to happen.
Notwithstanding the dreams of current leadership, the FTC isn't the national reviewer of whether we like people's business plans. It actually needs to prove a violation of the law.
>>>Because for all the virtues of capitalism and the for-profit business corporation, it also has at its core an amorality that can produce really bad results when it interfaces with a large despotic regime.<<<
This correct observation is also why I'm pretty pessimistic about how easy it could be for a future Trump/DeSantis administration bring large swaths of civil society to heel as they set up an Orban-style autocracy in America. Even just implied/subtle threats appear to be enough to make industrial and media companies toe the line and serve the interests of what they calculate to be an entrenched regime.
All the more reason for us to carefully heed Slow Boring political advice so as to head off this Orban-style autocracy as best we can ....
What would realistically happen? No one considers it their right to watch China-negative content on AppleTV, but Twitter content moderation is subject to an enormous amount of scrutiny. It's hard to imagine Musk enacting a policy that you can't criticize China on Twitter, even if China explicitly demanded it and linked it to treatment of Tesla. Musk would probably just have to re-sell Twitter in that case. Are there more subtle ways in which he could be forced to introduce a pro-China slant?
He himself mentioned wanting it to be more like Tiktok. That would rely on algorithms to curate content, which could fairly easily be pushed in certain directions.
I would ask about this in the mailbag, but given Matt's contempt for the legal system, I don't see much hope he'd answer it, so I'll just float it here instead:
As everyone knows, private actors are generally not subject to the First Amendment. There is, however, an exception to that rule: where a private actor has been deputized or otherwise directed by a state actor to take actions that violate someone's First Amendment rights, the private actor can be held liable along with the state actor at least where the state actor is a political entity subject to 42 U.S.C. 1983 (I'd need to research what actual case law there is on applying this doctrine to the federal government, but I believe the consensus is that it would).
This historically has no relevance to the PRC's coercion of American businesses and organizations because there's no facial constitutional problem with a foreign government deputizing or directing private actors to violate Americans' First Amendment rights. However, what if 42 U.S.C. 1983 was amended to add "Foreign Nation" to the existing list of political entities that could be sued under the statute ("any State or Territory or the District of Columbia")? This would obviously be creating an exception to the general rule of foreign sovereign immunity in the American courts, but it also seems like it would be really awkward for members of Congress to explain why foreign nations should have the power to violate the constitutional rights of people inside the US's borders. This would also then open up the possibility of actions by residents of the US versus private businesses to the extent those businesses adopt policies inside the US under pressure from the PRC that are intended to limit Americans' free speech.
I love it! Who do I start harassing to make this happen?
It requires federal legislation, so you could write to your U.S. representative and senators.
Business leaders in politics should come in for a lot more skepticism generally. One idea in particular that needs reconsideration, the desire to have business leaders run for political office. I think this idea has died an unceremonious death on the left with the growth of more explicitly anti-capitalist rhetoric from the fringe since 2009 and the election of Trump in 2016. But it's a good point for Republicans to internalize as well. As an example of a Democrat with uncomfortably close ties to foreign powers, I think Mike Bloomberg is the best recent case study. His 88% ownership Bloomberg LP (which had not insignificant financial stakes in China) combined with his weakness on Chinese political leadership should have been disqualifying. Serious writers talked about it in opinion pieces at the time, but there wasn't much of a popular outcry over this issue in particular.
Perhaps media companies that have no-China offense policies could be required to post the policy at each screening the way they do the FBI warnings against plagiarism.
On a larger issues, this shows the dangers of the West and specifically the US, not growing fast enough to prevent China from playing too large a geopolitical role.
J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS!
With the recent restrictions of chip exports to China, we’re dropping the pretense of making nice, so why not extend to other sectors? If selling to China induces companies to self-censor, why not just ban media companies (esp movie studios) from selling to China? I want to see a Bond movie with PRC bad-guys.
In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences...but historically the fact that all these platforms are blocked from day 1 in China means it’s much less of an issue for China.
The closest analogy is how China treated Google, and in that case they only demanded Google moderate search results for domestic audiences, not the rest of the world. Ultimately, Google gave up on the Chinese market and shelved the plan to build a censored version of Google.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138307/how-google-took-on-china-and-lost/amp/
Additionally, its not clear to me that Twitter isn’t worth more to China as is (banned domestically, but utilized by hawkish Chinese dignitaries for Chinese propaganda and marketing) than in the way you describe. It’s pretty clear that any move to pressure Musk to ban (or shadowban) content China doesn’t like would be found out immediately and potentially lead to the death of the platform, and thus cause it to lose any value the Chinese get from it now as a diplomatic tool in which their own government officials dunk feverishly on other nations. Seems much easier to just pick and choose battles with individuals who have something to lose in China, as historically that has worked.
>>In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences.<<
What leverage do they have? Twitter, FB, Netflix and Google (including Youtube and all its other services) are blocked in China. These services do take advertising dollars (or RMB ) from Chinese parties wishing to reach Western consumers, I think, but the PRC perhaps doesn't want to mess with the ability of their own firmst to target foreigners (and this isn't a big revenue source, I think, for the Western firms in question, so losing it wouldn't be a major threat).
Well, for at least a short period (2006 to 2010) Google was available in China, i believe...and at that point the kind of influence Matt was worried about did not occur. Instead, all Chinese pressure was focused on what domestic audiences saw...
The hypothesis that China would utilize significant financial / market control over CEOs to control what third parties do or say elsewhere i think is a bit misread. China doesn’t have to get Apple or HBO to control what their big (or minor) stars say...it just has to control what those big stars say directly. It is a minor, but perhaps key, difference in how their soft power is flexed and works here.
We Americans, i think, want to read this as our Corporate Overlords telling us what to do...in reality, though we self censor and “read the room” when we realize it might matter to us...
Also, I do wonder to what degree a nation like China sees Twitter as a bit of an Achilles Heel for a Nation and really doesn’t want to do anything to get rid of it because of the fat tail it creates for political upheaval everywhere (up China). After all, they have to see it as such to ban it in their own nations....
Great post - as usual, you highlight an important issue that most people aren't talking about. This is why I subscribe.
One quibble - I find it difficult to see the NYT or Twitter as media brands "with integrity" -they may be willing to challenge China, but there's enough troubling behavior at both with respect to "no go" areas of coverage (NYT) or outright censoring of dissenting views (Twitter). Perhaps for Substack, the broad diversity of the views of the writers plus the volume of content could mean there's no simple chokepoint for blocking content consistently (I am sure someone could come up with a means, however). More importantly, Substack's brand seems tied to having a diversity of views and topics being available on the platform and letting individuals choose who they want to subscribe to. Censoring writers would damage the brand. Both Twitter and the NYT seem to me to have embraced having a fairly high degree of ideological conformity as part of their brands. Musk might change that at Twitter.
>>>Because conservatives agree with Musk about the importance of making social media a welcoming place for transphobic jokes, they haven’t been nearly as quick to condemn him telling the Financial Times that Taiwan ought to become a Beijing-ruled Special Administrative Region. But when it comes to a random celebrity like John Cena, conservatives understand the basic dynamic perfectly well — money talks.<<<
Matt's being too polite here. Republicans are deeply unserious and/or profoundly duplicitous about China policy. Pretty much everything the GOP does on China is intended for domestic political audiences only. Strengthening America to compete in the new Cold War would mean things like:
*Addressing US demographic decline via immigration (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and push our growth levels down to PRC levels).
*Competing for the world's best and brightest to strengthen America's STEM sector (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and make it harder for talented foreigners to get work permits, green cards or student visas).
*Leading on Pacific Rim economic integration (Republicans have become the more protectionist of our two parties, and gave Obama essentially zero support on TPP, despite the obvious boost joining this group would have given to US efforts to contest the PRC's growing influence in this critical region).
*Bolstering US democratic norms (something cold warriors in the 1950s and 1960s understood: a nontrivial degree of support for the Civil Rights movement was generated by the need to compete for global hearts and minds, and to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy over totalitarianism). Republicans won't even disavow insurrectionists.
*Readying the country for its next, inevitable rendez-vous with a pandemic. (Republicans have mostly gone full anti-vax nutter).
I could also cite climate change, infrastructure and various other areas where the US should play a leading role and/or demonstrate robust state capacity. The PRC is a formidable adversary: surely a lot tougher opponent that the USSR ever was. Republicans aren't serious about any of it, though admittedly they do a bang up job hurling racist invective (Kung Flu, etc) on Twitter, so at least there's that!
Is it serious to not acknowledge obvious truths in the name of social justice? What is the truth about the vaccines? It does seem like they significantly reduce the risk of bad outcomes for an individual. What do they do to limit transmission? Not much. I am vaccinated. Fauci is out there now denying his role from a lot of the policies pursued during COVID, particularly with schools.
You’re right Republicans are crazy. But Dems are also non-serious, science denying, culture warring nutters too. Just a little less.
What evidence has led you to believe they do "not much" to limit transmission? That differs from my understanding, which is that reducing infection severity is a mechanism by which they do limit transmission, since it lowers viral load and thus ability to transmit.
But it's hard to keep up with the ever-shifting body of research and I'm no expert, so if you have seen compelling evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested to see it
You’re right it is hard to keep up. My understanding is that with variants the protection of getting the virus has diminished significantly. The protection against getting the virus also diminished significantly with time, even with no variants. These two things together seem to explain so many vaccinated getting the virus.
When the original variant was still present, and vaccinated people all had fresh vaccines, infections among vaccinated people were about 95% lower than among unvaccinated people. After the alpha variant, and the delta variant, and the omicron variant, and after vaccinated people mostly let their vaccines go stale without a booster (classic or updated), vaccinated people still have a 60% lower risk of infection than unvaccinated people. (I think there was one week at the tail end of omicron when vaccinated people were only 30% less likely to be infected than unvaccinated people in the same age range, because the unvaccinated people were mostly recently infected.)
I believe this page has the CDC data on infection by vaccination status up until this week, but it looks like they will stop tracking it next week:
https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-Case-Trends-by-Age-Group-/gxj9-t96f
Oh and it is true that I don’t have a peer reviewed scientific paper that supports the theory that the vaccines aren’t doing much to reduce transmission.
I’d rather not fight a second cold war. Losing a cold war is catastrophic, and winning won hardly made the US better off in material terms. Indeed, the fallout of the first cold war still has a fair chance of leading to nuclear strikes.
I mean I don't know the causality here but the 90's were freaking great as far as US prosperity went.
Sorry, are you suggesting that if the US in 1945 had returned to its pre-1940 isolationism that the US would have been better off in 2022?
Communism was a hostile expanding totalizing ideology with the potential & capacity to knock over country after country, picking up momentum as it went. If the US had sat on its hands and whistled as Communism expanded, we would have had a Cold War starting in the 1970s after the Soviets had finished adding France+Italy+Spain to the Warsaw pact, installed a Communist government in Indonesia, and started securing multiple footholds in Latin America (not just Cuba but also Chile / Nicaragua / Peru, in all likelihood).
I strongly disagree. The Vietnam War went from 1946-1975. If the French had packed up and left at the first sign of Vietnamese Communists, then the wave of un-obstructed Communist expansion would have hit surrounding nations 30 years earlier & during the time when the Soviets and CCP were working together.
In our timeline, there were over a million Communist members and sympathizers in Indonesia by 1965 [before the purges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366], and India experienced repeated Naxalite uprisings starting in 1967 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insurgency]. There was clearly scope for Communism to spread further than it did in Southern and Southeast Asia if it hadn't been stalled in Vietnam for 30 years, especially since the 1917-1949 period saw rapid Communist expansion in Eurasia on multiple fronts.
Yes, and that death toll is smaller than the expected death toll of communism taking over Indonesia, let alone also taking over India.
In addition to millions dying in "third-world backwaters", a more expansive communism would eventually have caused problems for rich-world countries, if it was actively expanded towards them and had ideological momentum thanks to fresh revolutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not guaranteed.
correct. it’s not as if every communist regime became a stalinist hellhole. vietnam today is probably a better place than myanmar, i’d certainly rather play the natural lottery in todays vietnam than haiti
~40 million people died in Europe alone for WW2. Perhaps only 10 million die if we don't fight Hitler. Do you think that was worth it?
what exactly did we need to import from western europe in 1945?
Mind your manners. The U.S. had practically no realpolitik interest in propping up Western Europe. It was Cade of mission creep. We were politically compelled to do it to honor the sacrifice of US soldiers in defeating Germany. If only Hitler hadn’t declared war on the U.S., Germany and the USSR could have fought to exhaustion. Britain might still be an imperial power if it hasn’t insisted on protecting Poland when it lacked the military ability to do so
Wild. Thanks for saving me a conversation!
Depends on strategy. Trying to outgrow China and helping the resto f the world to do so, too would be a great Cold War strategy. [It wouldn't have anything in particular to do with total trade with China even.] It worked with the Soviet Union, but their economic policies were much worse so it didn't take much to best them. China is a more serious competitor.
And even if we are not successful, we're still better off.
Even aid enthusiast I cannot say that our "out grow" competition with China should be mainly about poorer countries, but they certainly should benefit.
In addition as a rich country and as one that has contribute a lot to the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, we (though not we alone) should provide aid to poorer countries to undertake mitigation of CO2 effects and damages thereof (e.g. the foods/drought in the Indian Subcontinent). How and how much requires more thought. I guess we have some obligation to help poor countries offset the deadweight loss of their own taxes on net CO2 emissions, but these will be hard to observe and I suspect pretty low.
Me neither, but, at least for the time being, that ship has already sailed.
I think you would agree that "I would simply not engage in warfare" is not a very serious position.
My position is “I would engage in warfare to the extent Canada has since 1945.”
Perhaps the first thing we should do is mothball most of our aircraft carriers. The idea that the US can project power even where allies can’t provide secure bases is dangerous.
If China attacked Taiwan, we should do no more for the Taiwanese than we have for Ukraine
Agreed, with the proviso that aircraft carriers are still useful for intimidating shit countries like Iran. But China, with its ninety zillion surface to ship missiles and drones? Not so much.
You are being even more flagrantly unserious than usual.
Was Haoan better off when it had the largest carrier fleet in the world (which it constructed during its occupation of China!) than it is now? Did the extra muscle carriers offered Emperor Hirohito in responding to the US oil embargo redound to Japan’s benefit? Or did carriers create the illusion Japan could humble a county with twice its population and keep on building its foreign policy castles in the sky?
Are Canada, Italy and Germany not serious countries?
I’m totally ok nudging Taiwan towards the PRC. The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil, and it is orders of magnitude harder to confront
I think it would terrible for America to in any way pressure Taiwan into an annexation deal with the totalitarian across the Strait. Is that what you mean by "nudge"?
Relatedly, though, I think it would be madness for the US to get into a shooting war with the PRC over that island's status. If we're going to "nudge" them, said nudges should concentrate on getting them to spend a lot more on their military. It would make everybody's life easier (except Xi's) if the PLA knew an invasion were overwhelmingly likely to result in defeat. Alas, Taipei spends about a 1/3 of what Israel does on defense.
>The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil
This is just completely not true on a variety of metrics. If you care about personal liberties at all, China is orders of magnitude worse than either of these two. If you're a minority in China, you have no path for any form of political representation. China also allows no competing political parties that could challenge the CCP, there is no avenue for political change outside the state regime. Brazil is a fairly robust, multi-party democracy and while the Philippines is a bit of a basket case, it does have elections and opposition parties do have some say in their political system.
Both the Philippines and Brazil consistently support freedom of religion, academic freedom, and freedom of movement. Brazil has constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression (The Philippines has restrictions on media but individuals retain pretty broad latitude in what they can say in public on social media). China is a country that (still! even as they're trying to raise birth rates) explicitly restricts the reproductive freedom of most of their population and is actively committing reproductive genocide on their citizens in Xinjiang. Like, this is night and day, foundational stuff. And that totally discounts the fact that Taiwan is *better* than both Brazil and the Philippines on all those metrics. Encouraging Taiwan to just accept the loss of these freedoms is, to my eye, moral bankruptcy on par with Nixon and Kissinger's tacit acceptance of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.
In the Philippines and Brazil, there are state adjacent hit squads that run around killing different types of undesirables. The plight of the Uighurs is different, but they are leas than 1% of Cinha’s population and even the US imprisons a bunch of black men.
I am happy to concede that The Philippines, Brazil, China, and even the US are all imperfect countries whose governments, in some shape or another, restrict or oppress their citizens. But what matters is the entire scope, not the mere presence of illiberalism in each. And China is demonstrably much worse than every other country mentioned on nearly every metric. To ignore that is crass whataboutery. Feel free to look through the Freedom House reports on all of them sometime if you don't want to take my word for it (and please note that Taiwan is one of the most free countries on the planet by their standards) https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map
China has always been pretty inward looking and has never expanded much beyond its periphery, unlike European powers from Portugal to France to Britain, which gobbled up vast swathes of territory
China has had recurrent warfare with almost all of its neighbors since WW2. It invaded South Korea, fought multiple large battles with the Soviet Union, fought a small war with India and a larger one with Vietnam, was intimately involved with supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and its proxies in Laos, and is supplying troops and expertise to Myanmar. It's also threatened all its maritime neighbors and refuses to recognize Japan's sea borders. It takes real effort to have disputes with all your neighbors except North Korea.
The list fails to include deficit financed tax cuts as profoundly anti growth.
Well said, but I would add to that that there is no through-line for any Republican/conservative critique/policy direction. Their strongest motivator is to win the day's propaganda battle and score debating points against the despised liberals. They would be very happy to excoriate Biden for being weak on protecting Taiwan if that won them the day's points, but then drop Taiwan support like a hot potato once they take power.
To be fair, this is common across the political spectrum, from “Bernie would have won” and whatever the woke flavor of the minute is through the Bill Maher center as well as the Republican brand.
For a long time I thought that their only real interest was reducing taxes on the rich. I now think some of their positions on social issues (they look at immigration just as a social issue, not as a growth inhibiting economic issue) and maybe (hopefully not) trade restrictions are also sincere, provided addressing them do not require higher taxes on the rich.
True. Trump could come out tomorrow morning advocating that China annex the US and his followers would lap it up. (Indeed, he was singing Xi's praises recently for having such a firm grip—an iron fist was the phrase in question—on the lives of 1.4 billion human beings):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/06/trump-authoritarians-republicans-iron-fist/
It feels like you're being too uncharitable here. I agree with you that Republicans are not prioritizing competition with China at a level that would justify their rhetoric. But I think you can make a similar argument about Democrats, who I think have made similarly unserious choices if China is truly *the* major threat to US interests (if not quite as many unserious choices). Specifically, I am thinking of the many complaints by European and East Asian partner nations regarding the trade policies at the heart of the Biden team's foreign policy and the "Made in America" requirements of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. A conservative could also argue that Democrats are encouraging cultural balkanization in their social policies, which is the last thing a country needs of it's preparing for conflict with a major foreign threat (as a liberal, I don't think this argument is particularly fair either, but there's a kernel of truth here. Democrats certainly aren't prioritizing policies that would lead to greater cultural integration or reconciliation with Republicans).
In the comment you're responding to, I wasn't accusing the GOP of not taking the country's national security seriously (although they don't). Rather, I was accusing them of being hypocritical. Anti-China hawkery has become perhaps that party's mostly deeply held, core principle, in a way that is most definitely *not* the case with the Democratic Party.
That said, Biden has absolutely bludgeoned China's chip sector with his most recent executive order, and Democrats in general support ideas and policies that actually would strengthen—not weaken—the country in its struggle with the PRC.
You do raise another hobbyhorse of mine: the tendency of our anti-China policy (both political parties are guilty in this case) to basically not even *attempt* to woo the Chinese people, and/or differentiate between them and their government/party.
We should be trying to make it as difficult as possible for Beijing to implement or promote anti-USA policies and rhetoric by tapping into the still quite large reservoir of goodwill toward America that's very apparent in the Middle Kingdom. Make Xi's task more difficult, not easier.
But we seem intent on doing the latter by doing our utmost to play the bitter, remorseless, uber-enemy of China 24/7.
Please say more about the "large reservoir of goodwill toward America." I'd very much like to believe it and I profess total ignorance about the Chinese people. But it strikes me that there is intense nationalism in Chinese views of the world and that can often be very strongly triggered. (I'm thinking, e.g., of the accidental (?) US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.)
This implies that you'd need a Chinese person to have a "large reservoir of goodwill toward America" before you'd consider using honey and not vinegar, thus highlighting the very selective racism being highlighted.
Even if Chinese people were chock full of badwill toward America or the West, so what? Why should that change anything? That is not the standard liberal line when it comes to other non-white peoples, which is that the West must accommodate them, that any animosity that they as individuals might feel toward the West is the fault of the West. Perhaps elevating ethnic Chinese within America would be the best soft power weapon one could have ("our Chinese have it so much better than your Chinese!"), but of course neither side is interested in doing that. Conservatives for obvious reasons, but also liberals - from looking at the Substacks you subscribe to (Krugman, DeLong, etc.), you're one. We have some other poster down here, raging against the GOP but also ranting about 1200 years (?) of unique violence by China (thus giving lie to any claim that their animosity toward the Chinese people is limited to the Cee Cee Pee), as if the history of white Europeans wasn't many times worse.
Another thought. Any geopolitical or technological struggle with China will require increased buy-in from the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese. What are the odds that America, and American society, will use honey and not vinegar toward those countries, and people of those ethnic descent here in America? It all depends on which kind of liberal wins out in the culture here, because it's certainly not going to come from the type who suddenly became a foreign policy hawk in the 2010's for totally non-racial reasons.
"If Muslims are anti-West, we must step up our treatment of Muslims in the West to show that Our Way is Better", for instance, is hardly a narrowly-held view. It is the default view of all institutions and Western liberals. If the race-swapped corollary is not one of the first things that pop in a Democrat's head when thinking of How to Deal with China, perhaps they should consider what underlying racism prevents it from being so.
This isn't to say that Chinese as a group face more racism than Muslims as a group. Different groups face different kinds of racism more or less than others, and there's particular kinds that Chinese and East Asians are particularly more likely to face.
And everyone is consistent when put on the spot or challenged. And yet obvious double standards in how center-to-left Westerners, who in the American context I'm just calling Democrats, see and treat different non-white groups persist. So obviously someone, a great many someones, are lying. Your "obvious answer" is not obvious in practice to the centrist-leaning liberals for whom you are speaking.
You should believe it. It's true. They watch our TV (often with use of VPNs), wear our sneakers, drive our cars (Buicks, Jeeps, Teslas, Cadillacs), text and browse the web our our phones, drink our coffee, worship our tycoons (Buffetts, Jobs, Musk, Gates, etc), wear our baseball caps (Yankees caps are everywhere), listen to our music, watch our basketball games, eat our crap fast food and dream of going to our universities. For starters. They're well aware we have the ability to fire our leaders. They're well aware our vaccines work. They're well aware we're no long in lockdown nor are we obliged to wear masks.
No time for a long comment, and I'm not suggesting some of the dysfunction on display in the US recently hasn't hurt our image. But yeah, I stand by my contention about the good will. Also, remember, there are several million residents of the US who were born in China, so there are family ties as well...
I would add that my professional sphere (academic science) attracts a disproportionate share of Chinese expats, many/most of whom (including friends, mentors, colleagues and former students) start out thinking that they will attend a Western university, learn some science and then pursue a career back in China. But once they experience a free society up-close, the good will often goes way past baseball caps and Big Macs. So many decided to stay and seek residence/citizenship (in the US or a European country) that the Chinese Academy more-or-less has to bribe them (with ridiculous research budgets, etc.) to return. And yet I often get an ear full about how difficult it is to conduct research in a totalitarian society (my words) from very successful professors in China.
I have seen many young Chinese scientists struggle with the dissonance of what they believed growing up versus what they see from the outside—and they talk with the friends and family back home. Even the ones who do decide to return to China take back with them an obvious fondness for the West and personal connections to people from all over the world. I have to assume the same happens in all of the areas in which China deliberately sends people out to learn/copy from Western companies, etc. (Maybe I'm actually making the argument that soft power is still a thing.)
Very illuminating. Thanks.
The Chinese government pushes Chinese nationalism very hard precisely because they understand the US is a real beacon to Chinese people. We are rich, welcoming, allow people to practice their religion openly, don't legislate how many children they should have, and have relatively low levels of corruption. We also have a lot of very successful Chinese-Americans with real social and political capital in a democracy. To the extent we promote people-to-people contacts with Chinese people and argue our beef is only with the CCP, we can make real headway.
We could make headway except on the Taiwan issue. From what I can tell the Chinese to a man/woman strongly feel that island is their country's territory. That's my strong impression based on not just knowing a lot of Chinese people, but also knowing a fair number who are highly skeptical of the Party's rule and want their country to become a democracy.
How do these people feel about Mongolia or Vladivostok or Sikkim? Do they also consider those places to be their country's territory? How about Singapore or Malaysia?
Well, yes, that's a fair point. Take Saudi Arabia for example. A brutal dictatorship that kills Washington Post journalists by luring them into its consulates. Biden was fist-bumping their dictator a few months ago.
Contrast that with the attitude of US elites toward China. You wouldn't have to have gone full Greenwaldian to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it's not China's non democratic governmental norms that have got DC riled up; it's about the fact that the Chinese have a $30 trillion economy, a giant defense budget, and a rapidly growing nuclear arsenal...
But as it happens, I suspect ant-China animus would take different forms were the mainland to democratize, and I think a full-blown Cold War wouldn't be possible to sustain in the US, politically. But we'd probably continue to experience a lot of trade friction, just like back in the 70s and 80s vis-a-vis Japan.
That immigration of talented workers, lower deficits, taxation of net CO2 emissions, and freer trade promote growth is not rocket science. Cognitive challenges are not a good explanation.
Which of those do you think are election winners?
That's a Republican platform I'd be very attracted to unless the lower deficits were achieved mainly by reducing downward income transfers.
Sure — but would voters? I doubt it.
OK, but still the point is that the reason is not lack of lower level staff to flesh out the positions.
It's possible that there's some of that. But (call me cynical if you like, but this is actually how I see it) I think there are plenty of very, very smart right wingers out there who know perfectly well that actually maximizing the country's position vis-a-vis the PRC would mean doing some things likely to ruffle the feathers of both their MAGA footsoldiers AND a few of their elites (I'm thinking of the Stephen Miller set).
But they're infinitely more concerned with winning the next election than they are about seeing the United States of America prevail in its competition with the CCP/PRC.
(A particularly egregious example of GOP awfulness on this score involved Ted Cruz. He's very far indeed from being a stupid man. But he's beyond Nixonian in his craven cynicism. You may recall someone floated the concept—there may even have been a bill before a committee though I don't recall the specifics—of greenlighting large-scale Taiwanese immigration in the wake of an invasion. Cruz, of course, shot it down, citing a nonspecific national security risk).
Twitter might not be that important to the average person, but I just listened to Rachel Maddow on Ezra Klein's podcast and they both agreed that Trump's use of Twitter is what allowed him to drive the media narrative and coverage about himself. I'm not sure much has changed for the members of the media on Twitter.