Rethinking the opening with China

Mistakes were made! W was the worst!!

I’m sort of over cold weather at this point and looking forward to some proper spring, and I’m not even someone who minds the cold all that much!

Some good news this week includes an ambitious rezoning in Burlington, VT; Elon Musk endorsing One Billion Americans, congestion pricing is (finally) happening in New York, and the Biden administration is going to re-open a nuclear plant in Michigan.

My post earlier this week on state-level climate targets wasn’t really about backup power for data centers — the point was objectors were using them as a pretext. But this comment from Eric on the actual subject of backup power as interesting. I love to learn from readers!

It's worth noting that modern data center don't actually need backup generators as often as one might think. The multinational companies that host them have now gotten so big that, if one particular data center loses power, they can simply route traffic to another data center somewhere else. The likelihood of dozens of data centers in different geographical areas, connected to different power grids, all losing power at the same time is essentially zero. And, for the few minutes it takes to shut down the servers cleanly to avoid data loss, they can just run everything off batteries (such batteries cannot be replaced by backup generators anyway, as large generators take several minutes to start up, compared to battery response time, which is almost instant).

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Recommended reading this week:

• Kat Rosenfield on learned helplessness.

• Jen Pahlka on Death Star thinking.

• Amy Lutz on eugenics.

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On to the main event:

Lost Future: Was the US opening China up to trade a huge mistake? If you could go back in time to the 90s and the Clinton Administration would heed your wise council, would you tell them not to let China join the WTO, grant MFN status to them, etc.? There was a lot of optimism that increased trade & capitalism in general would sand the rough edges off of the CCP, obviously that looks very naive now. Would leaving them in poverty be a good or wise US policy? Would it even have worked? Maybe Europe would've simply traded with China sans America.

On one level, I think obviously yes, mistakes were made.

For starters, it’s pretty clear that policymakers underestimated how big of a deal China’s entry into the WTO was going to be. That doesn’t, on its own, mean that it was a mistake. But an important component of the analysis was wrong, and other things followed downstream from that. Beyond that, I think the early proponents of deeper engagement with China sincerely believed that commercial ties would lead to political liberalization in China and a more peaceful relationship with the United States. Or more to the point, they believed that if those optimistic forecasts didn’t come to fruition, it would probably be because the commercial ties themselves ended up not being that deep. The analysis was, in retrospect, riddled with errors, and clearly if everyone had understood the situation better, they would have made different choices.

That said, taking the question literally and traveling back in time 25 years, I’m not sure that convincing Bill Clinton that Permanent Normal Trade Relations was a mistake would have accomplished very much.