It turns out that almost every sentence in that quote turned out to be correct *in part.*
The role of the state in the economy was vastly reduced between 1999 and 2008, and tepidly so between 2008 and 2015. State-owned enterprises have less of a stranglehold over the productive apparatus than before, and are much more market-oriented, especially those owned by the national government.
In addition, there are a great many more Chinese citizens for whom relative prosperity has brought a more liberal or global outlook, not only among the professional classes. The middle classes are also much more open and outward-looking.
This has lead to the growth of organizations promoting exactly the things outlined in the last sentence, few or none of which existed prior to 1999.
The real problem isn’t that the expected “natural outcomes” of liberalized trade with China didn’t materialize, but that the Party-State proved extraordinary adept at neutralizing those less conducive to its continued rule without actually killing off the overall benefits of (limited) economic liberalization.
Suffice it to say a lot of the outcomes of these trends are still very much up in the air.
I know it's apocryphal that Chou En Lai told Henry Kissinger it was "too soon" to evaluate the effects of the French Revolution (apparently, he was talking about the 1968 student revolt), but I do wonder if 30 years is too soon to evaluate the liberalizing effects of trade on the Chinese polity. Don't want to be a naive optimist, but sometimes things take time. Thirty years into its Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was not exactly a utopian democracy.
There’s a sort of precedent for Chinese industrialization: tsarist Russia. Russia made huge strides in industrial progress in the 30 years before the great war while remaining autocratic. But for overplaying their hand in 1914, the Romanovs might still be on the throne.
The interesting thing there is that the "overplaying their hand" consisted largely of refusing to reform to be if not more democratic, then less autocratic. (Thinking Stolypin here.)
“Only” is rather strong. That was one of the reasons it was relatively easy for Xi to shift the elite consensus (or piggyback on the already-shifting consensus… little bit of both really) and build a faction able to punch out both the rural populists and the Shanghai clique, but it’s far from the only reason.
A movement like his was, to my mind, bound to occur once China had seen a degree of success with Reform and Opening. 2007-9 sped it up and led to a very impatient Pooh Bear taking the throne, but the contours were there ever since ‘89.
What might have changed, had Xi not pushed so rapidly in the direction he has, is that the liberals might have been a large enough grouping to come into open opposition instead of hiding behind the market reformist authoritarians and the kleptocrats. Whether/how that would have changed the outcome is unknowable.
One thing that both Brexit and YIMBY-ism really brought home to me is how much of a drag the cumulative effect of individually-defensible box ticking exercises like rules-of-origin can be. The entire thing just becomes hella cumbersome in a way that I think a lot of my fellow progressives can miss.
Odd that many of the comments have to do with China, ignoring MY’s basic argument: cultivate the garden in your own back yard, instead of that of the unpleasant neighbor down the street.
Those of you who know me, know I am work in Latin America quite regularly.
Full confession. Up until I started working in Latin America 10-years ago, I was pretty much a border controls limit immigration guy.
But during that time I have both seen steady and sometime amazing economic progress.
Colombia is my favorite example. It has this reputation for being a Narco state, but when you go downtown and meet young people. English is more and more common. They have call centers! The downtowns are clean and modern. Bars, restaurants, signs of western civilization.
But even Mexico. I was just in Hermosillo. In parts... you would swear you were in Arizona. The thing that really struck me there was the development of gated American like suburbs. Also the cars... high end, modern cars everywhere.
I was in Guanajuato Mexico for the month of October 2021, including a week in Mexico City. The central city was cleaner and felt safer than downtown Seattle or Portland by quite a bit.
Yes I know that bad things can happen there too. But we’ve been to Mexico 8 times in the last 10 years and have never had a problem.
The restaurant scene is spectacular in Mexico City. Great meals for half as much as US.
I had a similar experience when I was visiting UNAM in Mexico City in 2017 and recall being pretty surprised by it. I'm pretty sure there were more English signs in the mall than Spanish, for example. And the Wal-Mart was practically identical to the one near me here in the US. In contrast, Oaxaca did appear to be a bit poorer (in 2015 at least).
I agree with you as a matter of principle. However, the political economy of trade is always molded by the domestic political environment. Politicians will never be lobbied by foreign producers. They will also claim that their role is support for Americans not a bunch of lazy, ignorant foreigners. Subtext: Don't you see they have brown skins?
I think the point of this column is "if we help these brown people we can pwn the Chinese." As a way of persuading the kinds of voters who are predisposed to dislike doing things that are nice for Latin America (even when those things are also economically good for the US), framing it as a way of weakening or getting one over on "scarier" foreigners is at least a theoretically sound approach. (Not saying one way or another whether I think it’s true or effective, but insofar as it’s a concern that’s how it’s addressed.)
"if we help these brown people we can pwn the Chinese."
Well, I'd say it's more like,
"If we help these democracies, we can pwn autocracy."
I think the desire to limit the spread of autocratic, authoritarian regimes is sincere on MY's part -- it's not a cover for some racial/ethnic animus.
Most people who hate the PRC do not hate Chinese people or culture. I had lots of Chinese students back in the day, and liked and admired many of them. But the communist party over there is seriously bad news, as their behavior with Tibet, the Uyghurs, Taiwan, etc, goes to show.
I mean, sure, on the substance. But I was specifically pointing out the move MY is making when framing it as an anti-Chinese action. For purposes of marketing the policy to people whose priors are "why help stinky foreigners" (the OP's point), "to fight/hurt/own the scary foreign country" is (at least theoretically) a good move.
That is a strength of Mattress argument. It's not clear that it will be enough. As May is fond of pointing out, US government has lots of choke points that can prevent decisive action.
Ok, so you can give up because why even struggle if there's opposition? Or you can try to make progress, even if it's incremental and at the margins. A slow boring of hard boards if you will.
My comment was not a cry of despair, merely realistic about the politics of this sort of liberalization. Can you think of a politician of either party who would have the courage to confront these interests?
There doesn't seem to be much deal cutting these days. Republicans are too intent on preventing any Democratic wins. Democrats don't wish to press off labor unions.
Republicans were extremely obstructionist during Obama's second term, but were the Democrats more open to cutting a deal with Trump than Republicans are to Biden? Was there any legislation that as many Democrats joined as Republican's joined the BIF?*
*Understand its hard to compare different legislation, but wondering if McConnell and Senate Republicans haven't adapted their strategy to be (somewhat) less obstructionists.
The point of trade negotiations is to get domestic exporters into the room to offset the weight of domestic firms that compete with imports. It is the political science of the economic insight that any restriction on imports is a restriction on exports. This goes slightly off the rails when "exporters" of intellectual property "services" have too much weight in the mix as it prevents wider sharing of the benefits of trade liberalization.
Making a shirt with American cotton costs about 6 cents more than making it with Indian cotton. American cotton costs $2.68/kg. Indian cotton costs $2.28/kg (36150 rupees per bale, 74.5 rupees per dollar, 212 kg per bale). The average t-shirt weighs 150 grams.
Accordingly, the effects of the yarn forward rule are pretty small. Mexican goods can get to the US much faster and at lower transport cost than Asian goods. The speed is probably more important than shipping cost, as textiles are cheap to transport but fashions and demand can change quickly.
The somnolence of Latin American textiles has much more to do with those countries being corrupt and unstable than the yarn forward rule.
Furthermore, the allure of immigration to the US is a huge obstacle to Latin American garment producers. Who wants to work in a sweat shop competing against Vietnamese and Bangladeshi sweat shops for third world wages when you can install dry wall or clean houses in the US for first world wages.
You are arguing about the size of the benefits. Fewer restrictions on skilled immigration and LA imports are both good but neither is a panacea. PR still has a lower pc income that the rest of the US although it enjoys no restrictions on either. (OK, the Jones Act is a drag.)
A comment from a neighbor that is nowhere mentioned in your column: Canada. We have had a free trade agreement with you for automobiles since the 1960s, and a comprehensive agreement since 1988. It has been a rocky relationship.
A perpetual irritant has been exports of softwood lumber from Canada to the U.S. Here, most forests are owned by governments, and so there is no payment to private owners of trees. Instead, lumber companies pay stumpage fees. The U.S. claims these are too low and so imposes countervailing tariffs. The issue has been to arbitration panels several times and, to my knowledge, Canada has always won. Yet the U.S. always manages to find new grounds for applying tariffs yet again.
There are many other such irritants. A big one was included in President Biden's Build Back Better bill. It provided for significant subsidies to electric cars, on condition that they be built in the U.S. This would have devastated the Canadian automobile industry, in violation of the spirit, and most probably the letter of the new USCMA.
The politics of Matt’s proposed good neighbor policy are dubious. He admits that the economy was disastrously under stimulated for 10 of the last 14 years and was somewhat under stimulated for the 7 years prior to 2008. We’ve had a couple short stints of full employment, but real wages for working stiffs are still lower than in 2000. Telling working stiffs “it’s been a fine pandemic, time to combat inflation with immigration and cheap imports” will not go over well.
Immigration and imports do not affect inflation and unemployment; the Fed does that. There is never a "bad" time to play win-win games with trade and development, just better times. But seeing the Administration's laid back attitude to vaccinating the world, even huge win-wins are not enough to get action.
At a minimum, we should wait for labor force participation to exceed pre pandemic levels before saying there are enough jobs. I’d also like to see the share of GDP going to capital take a big hit.
Probably not a big problem. We're already within one percentage point of the pre-pandemic level, and no matter who reads him there, I don't think the White House takes marching orders from Slow Boring and will jump to this immediately.
While I agree with the logic of the central argument Matt is making here, I do think think one reason jobs got outsourced to China, and not to Honduras or Dominican Republic, is the former's ability to ensure rule of law. US companies could be confident that the investments made in China would be protected, and that the factories etc. will not be impacted by lawlessness, which unfortunately is a hallmark of the countries south of the US border. One might argue that this lawlessness is a consequence of the US (both in terms of providing a huge market for illicit drugs as well as being a source for assault weapons).
Mmm, rule of law in China is ... somewhat flexible, both in terms of (1) the chance that your business partner will decide it's no longer a partnership and (2) rampant IP theft and after-hours production of competitive grey-label goods using your own design....
"The U.S. should prioritize prosperity in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean"
No, the US should prioritize working class and low income prosperity within its own borders because the US has invited in too much poverty from those places already. Once we get our own house in order, including stopping the flow of millions of poor and uneducated from those places, we can work on providing some assistance to benefit their working class and poor.
I do not understand the idea that liberalizing trade with China (even if is did not result in more political liberalization there) was bad or in some sense in trade-off with liberalizing trade with C&S America (or anywhere else). The point I made in another post -- that most people in the US would be better off if we had prioritized opening markets for US exports over trademark and copyright protection -- apply very strongly to China.
I think if you're a China hawk then you see it as bad, e.g. if you think it's bad that China is in a position to challenge US hegemony internationally by having a combination of a large population and a reasonably high level of industrialization.
If you're a globalist who thinks the main point was lifting people out of poverty and not some zero sum clash of great powers, then maybe you're unhappy that the Chinese government is repressive but otherwise glad that people have more food.
I am a "hawk" in regretting that the CCP is using part of their wealth to challenge some desirable aspects of US "hegemony." But that does not mean that it would have been desirable (or passible) for the US to prevent China from carrying out the economic reforms that have created so much wealth. Would Chinese GDP really be that much smaller and it's ability and inclination to threaten Taiwan, repress the Uyghurs, and prop up Duterte and Kim if the US had opposed China's entry to the WHO?
The US's mistake vis a vis China is to have mismanaged the US economy -- structural deficits, immigration restrictions, urban housing and development restrictions, trade restriction -- to have produced low GDP and GPD GDP per capita growth rates.
I listened to John Mearsheimer recently on Andrew Sullivan's podcast - toward the end Mearsheimer points out the folly of the US creating a peer competitor (by having a policy in the 90s to promote Chinese industrialization). I was frustrated because Sullivan tiptoes up to, but never asks the hard question about the moral choices, since Chinese industrialization took so many people out of poverty.
And I've been thinking about the US's treatment of our neighboring countries, including the war with Mexico, embargoes on Cuba, and interference in South America, particularly in the context of evaluating Russia's current actions in Ukraine and China's possible future actions in Taiwan. Mearsheimer's take on Ukraine is that "big countries tend to do whatever they want WRT their smaller neighbors" and he would find anything less than China trying to annex Taiwan to be really surprising.
So today's article fits into this in an interesting way - our Western hemisphere trading partners are countries where we could promote industrialization without a strategic risk, do humanitarian good, and address domestic problems all at the same time.
“This was really wrong.”
I have a few quibbles.
Actually, a lot of quibbles.
It turns out that almost every sentence in that quote turned out to be correct *in part.*
The role of the state in the economy was vastly reduced between 1999 and 2008, and tepidly so between 2008 and 2015. State-owned enterprises have less of a stranglehold over the productive apparatus than before, and are much more market-oriented, especially those owned by the national government.
In addition, there are a great many more Chinese citizens for whom relative prosperity has brought a more liberal or global outlook, not only among the professional classes. The middle classes are also much more open and outward-looking.
This has lead to the growth of organizations promoting exactly the things outlined in the last sentence, few or none of which existed prior to 1999.
The real problem isn’t that the expected “natural outcomes” of liberalized trade with China didn’t materialize, but that the Party-State proved extraordinary adept at neutralizing those less conducive to its continued rule without actually killing off the overall benefits of (limited) economic liberalization.
Suffice it to say a lot of the outcomes of these trends are still very much up in the air.
I know it's apocryphal that Chou En Lai told Henry Kissinger it was "too soon" to evaluate the effects of the French Revolution (apparently, he was talking about the 1968 student revolt), but I do wonder if 30 years is too soon to evaluate the liberalizing effects of trade on the Chinese polity. Don't want to be a naive optimist, but sometimes things take time. Thirty years into its Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was not exactly a utopian democracy.
There’s a sort of precedent for Chinese industrialization: tsarist Russia. Russia made huge strides in industrial progress in the 30 years before the great war while remaining autocratic. But for overplaying their hand in 1914, the Romanovs might still be on the throne.
The interesting thing there is that the "overplaying their hand" consisted largely of refusing to reform to be if not more democratic, then less autocratic. (Thinking Stolypin here.)
“It only went into reverse”
“Only” is rather strong. That was one of the reasons it was relatively easy for Xi to shift the elite consensus (or piggyback on the already-shifting consensus… little bit of both really) and build a faction able to punch out both the rural populists and the Shanghai clique, but it’s far from the only reason.
A movement like his was, to my mind, bound to occur once China had seen a degree of success with Reform and Opening. 2007-9 sped it up and led to a very impatient Pooh Bear taking the throne, but the contours were there ever since ‘89.
What might have changed, had Xi not pushed so rapidly in the direction he has, is that the liberals might have been a large enough grouping to come into open opposition instead of hiding behind the market reformist authoritarians and the kleptocrats. Whether/how that would have changed the outcome is unknowable.
This piece contains too much good common sense to be adopted clearly and widely as official policy by our politicians.
Matt goes to Mexico:
"...what if...
we already have 1 billion Americans?"
Broke: the EU should look at the US as a model for state building
Woke: the US should look at the EU as a model for state building
One thing that both Brexit and YIMBY-ism really brought home to me is how much of a drag the cumulative effect of individually-defensible box ticking exercises like rules-of-origin can be. The entire thing just becomes hella cumbersome in a way that I think a lot of my fellow progressives can miss.
Odd that many of the comments have to do with China, ignoring MY’s basic argument: cultivate the garden in your own back yard, instead of that of the unpleasant neighbor down the street.
But MY brought up the China issue :)
In New Mexico they tell the joke this way. “Pity poor New Mexico, so far from God, so close to Texas.”
Those of you who know me, know I am work in Latin America quite regularly.
Full confession. Up until I started working in Latin America 10-years ago, I was pretty much a border controls limit immigration guy.
But during that time I have both seen steady and sometime amazing economic progress.
Colombia is my favorite example. It has this reputation for being a Narco state, but when you go downtown and meet young people. English is more and more common. They have call centers! The downtowns are clean and modern. Bars, restaurants, signs of western civilization.
But even Mexico. I was just in Hermosillo. In parts... you would swear you were in Arizona. The thing that really struck me there was the development of gated American like suburbs. Also the cars... high end, modern cars everywhere.
I was in Guanajuato Mexico for the month of October 2021, including a week in Mexico City. The central city was cleaner and felt safer than downtown Seattle or Portland by quite a bit.
Yes I know that bad things can happen there too. But we’ve been to Mexico 8 times in the last 10 years and have never had a problem.
The restaurant scene is spectacular in Mexico City. Great meals for half as much as US.
(Good food is one of my great loves)
I had a similar experience when I was visiting UNAM in Mexico City in 2017 and recall being pretty surprised by it. I'm pretty sure there were more English signs in the mall than Spanish, for example. And the Wal-Mart was practically identical to the one near me here in the US. In contrast, Oaxaca did appear to be a bit poorer (in 2015 at least).
I agree with you as a matter of principle. However, the political economy of trade is always molded by the domestic political environment. Politicians will never be lobbied by foreign producers. They will also claim that their role is support for Americans not a bunch of lazy, ignorant foreigners. Subtext: Don't you see they have brown skins?
I think the point of this column is "if we help these brown people we can pwn the Chinese." As a way of persuading the kinds of voters who are predisposed to dislike doing things that are nice for Latin America (even when those things are also economically good for the US), framing it as a way of weakening or getting one over on "scarier" foreigners is at least a theoretically sound approach. (Not saying one way or another whether I think it’s true or effective, but insofar as it’s a concern that’s how it’s addressed.)
"if we help these brown people we can pwn the Chinese."
Well, I'd say it's more like,
"If we help these democracies, we can pwn autocracy."
I think the desire to limit the spread of autocratic, authoritarian regimes is sincere on MY's part -- it's not a cover for some racial/ethnic animus.
Most people who hate the PRC do not hate Chinese people or culture. I had lots of Chinese students back in the day, and liked and admired many of them. But the communist party over there is seriously bad news, as their behavior with Tibet, the Uyghurs, Taiwan, etc, goes to show.
I mean, sure, on the substance. But I was specifically pointing out the move MY is making when framing it as an anti-Chinese action. For purposes of marketing the policy to people whose priors are "why help stinky foreigners" (the OP's point), "to fight/hurt/own the scary foreign country" is (at least theoretically) a good move.
Ditto reducing restrictions on immigration.
That is a strength of Mattress argument. It's not clear that it will be enough. As May is fond of pointing out, US government has lots of choke points that can prevent decisive action.
Ok, so you can give up because why even struggle if there's opposition? Or you can try to make progress, even if it's incremental and at the margins. A slow boring of hard boards if you will.
My comment was not a cry of despair, merely realistic about the politics of this sort of liberalization. Can you think of a politician of either party who would have the courage to confront these interests?
That's why you do it by cutting deals and rolling the boulder uphill a little at a time. "Courage" is overrated.
There doesn't seem to be much deal cutting these days. Republicans are too intent on preventing any Democratic wins. Democrats don't wish to press off labor unions.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with our host's writing on "Secret Congress."
Republicans were extremely obstructionist during Obama's second term, but were the Democrats more open to cutting a deal with Trump than Republicans are to Biden? Was there any legislation that as many Democrats joined as Republican's joined the BIF?*
*Understand its hard to compare different legislation, but wondering if McConnell and Senate Republicans haven't adapted their strategy to be (somewhat) less obstructionists.
There was also the First Step Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act
CARES Act
The point of trade negotiations is to get domestic exporters into the room to offset the weight of domestic firms that compete with imports. It is the political science of the economic insight that any restriction on imports is a restriction on exports. This goes slightly off the rails when "exporters" of intellectual property "services" have too much weight in the mix as it prevents wider sharing of the benefits of trade liberalization.
Don't worry, black and indigenous people of color also hate foreigners taking their jobs.
Making a shirt with American cotton costs about 6 cents more than making it with Indian cotton. American cotton costs $2.68/kg. Indian cotton costs $2.28/kg (36150 rupees per bale, 74.5 rupees per dollar, 212 kg per bale). The average t-shirt weighs 150 grams.
Accordingly, the effects of the yarn forward rule are pretty small. Mexican goods can get to the US much faster and at lower transport cost than Asian goods. The speed is probably more important than shipping cost, as textiles are cheap to transport but fashions and demand can change quickly.
The somnolence of Latin American textiles has much more to do with those countries being corrupt and unstable than the yarn forward rule.
Furthermore, the allure of immigration to the US is a huge obstacle to Latin American garment producers. Who wants to work in a sweat shop competing against Vietnamese and Bangladeshi sweat shops for third world wages when you can install dry wall or clean houses in the US for first world wages.
You are arguing about the size of the benefits. Fewer restrictions on skilled immigration and LA imports are both good but neither is a panacea. PR still has a lower pc income that the rest of the US although it enjoys no restrictions on either. (OK, the Jones Act is a drag.)
Does that mean it’s a good thing to tell companies they’re not even allowed to consider the trade offs of 6 cents vs shipping speed?
Hi Matt
A comment from a neighbor that is nowhere mentioned in your column: Canada. We have had a free trade agreement with you for automobiles since the 1960s, and a comprehensive agreement since 1988. It has been a rocky relationship.
A perpetual irritant has been exports of softwood lumber from Canada to the U.S. Here, most forests are owned by governments, and so there is no payment to private owners of trees. Instead, lumber companies pay stumpage fees. The U.S. claims these are too low and so imposes countervailing tariffs. The issue has been to arbitration panels several times and, to my knowledge, Canada has always won. Yet the U.S. always manages to find new grounds for applying tariffs yet again.
There are many other such irritants. A big one was included in President Biden's Build Back Better bill. It provided for significant subsidies to electric cars, on condition that they be built in the U.S. This would have devastated the Canadian automobile industry, in violation of the spirit, and most probably the letter of the new USCMA.
This is not how friends behave.
The politics of Matt’s proposed good neighbor policy are dubious. He admits that the economy was disastrously under stimulated for 10 of the last 14 years and was somewhat under stimulated for the 7 years prior to 2008. We’ve had a couple short stints of full employment, but real wages for working stiffs are still lower than in 2000. Telling working stiffs “it’s been a fine pandemic, time to combat inflation with immigration and cheap imports” will not go over well.
Immigration and imports do not affect inflation and unemployment; the Fed does that. There is never a "bad" time to play win-win games with trade and development, just better times. But seeing the Administration's laid back attitude to vaccinating the world, even huge win-wins are not enough to get action.
Can you quantify what you mean by "real wages for working stiffs are lower than in 2000"?
At a minimum, we should wait for labor force participation to exceed pre pandemic levels before saying there are enough jobs. I’d also like to see the share of GDP going to capital take a big hit.
Probably not a big problem. We're already within one percentage point of the pre-pandemic level, and no matter who reads him there, I don't think the White House takes marching orders from Slow Boring and will jump to this immediately.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm
While I agree with the logic of the central argument Matt is making here, I do think think one reason jobs got outsourced to China, and not to Honduras or Dominican Republic, is the former's ability to ensure rule of law. US companies could be confident that the investments made in China would be protected, and that the factories etc. will not be impacted by lawlessness, which unfortunately is a hallmark of the countries south of the US border. One might argue that this lawlessness is a consequence of the US (both in terms of providing a huge market for illicit drugs as well as being a source for assault weapons).
Mmm, rule of law in China is ... somewhat flexible, both in terms of (1) the chance that your business partner will decide it's no longer a partnership and (2) rampant IP theft and after-hours production of competitive grey-label goods using your own design....
"The U.S. should prioritize prosperity in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean"
No, the US should prioritize working class and low income prosperity within its own borders because the US has invited in too much poverty from those places already. Once we get our own house in order, including stopping the flow of millions of poor and uneducated from those places, we can work on providing some assistance to benefit their working class and poor.
I would agree with you if there were a tradeoff.
I do not understand the idea that liberalizing trade with China (even if is did not result in more political liberalization there) was bad or in some sense in trade-off with liberalizing trade with C&S America (or anywhere else). The point I made in another post -- that most people in the US would be better off if we had prioritized opening markets for US exports over trademark and copyright protection -- apply very strongly to China.
I think if you're a China hawk then you see it as bad, e.g. if you think it's bad that China is in a position to challenge US hegemony internationally by having a combination of a large population and a reasonably high level of industrialization.
If you're a globalist who thinks the main point was lifting people out of poverty and not some zero sum clash of great powers, then maybe you're unhappy that the Chinese government is repressive but otherwise glad that people have more food.
I am a "hawk" in regretting that the CCP is using part of their wealth to challenge some desirable aspects of US "hegemony." But that does not mean that it would have been desirable (or passible) for the US to prevent China from carrying out the economic reforms that have created so much wealth. Would Chinese GDP really be that much smaller and it's ability and inclination to threaten Taiwan, repress the Uyghurs, and prop up Duterte and Kim if the US had opposed China's entry to the WHO?
The US's mistake vis a vis China is to have mismanaged the US economy -- structural deficits, immigration restrictions, urban housing and development restrictions, trade restriction -- to have produced low GDP and GPD GDP per capita growth rates.
I listened to John Mearsheimer recently on Andrew Sullivan's podcast - toward the end Mearsheimer points out the folly of the US creating a peer competitor (by having a policy in the 90s to promote Chinese industrialization). I was frustrated because Sullivan tiptoes up to, but never asks the hard question about the moral choices, since Chinese industrialization took so many people out of poverty.
And I've been thinking about the US's treatment of our neighboring countries, including the war with Mexico, embargoes on Cuba, and interference in South America, particularly in the context of evaluating Russia's current actions in Ukraine and China's possible future actions in Taiwan. Mearsheimer's take on Ukraine is that "big countries tend to do whatever they want WRT their smaller neighbors" and he would find anything less than China trying to annex Taiwan to be really surprising.
So today's article fits into this in an interesting way - our Western hemisphere trading partners are countries where we could promote industrialization without a strategic risk, do humanitarian good, and address domestic problems all at the same time.