China Syndrome

After decades of explosive economic growth, China is feeling its oats and starting to throw its weight around. No more Mr. Nice China seems the order of the day, so it issues threats against any US action to reduce our massive trade deficit, reasserts old claims to Indian territory, and beats up on Japan.

The West, and the world, made a gigantic bet that if China were brought into the world economic and political community it would learn to play nicely - whatever that means. China has changed itself from a decrepit socialist basket case into an marvel of state capitalism, but it has kept the same old Communist Party apparatus in firm charge. The leaders decided to abandon the Party's rationale for existence but kept the power. That totalitarian grip is evident in the paranoid and vicious reaction to the selection of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace prize.

So why, exactly, did the US and the world tolerate and encourage the emerging superpower and allow themselves to become so dependent on it? Short term thinking and stupidity played their role, of course, but so did a belief in a kind of Magical Capitalism. Milton Friedman and his followers were convinced that capitalism had this magical power to spread freedom. I don't think that they are necessarily completely wrong, but they overestimated its power. Secure in that magical belief, we outsourced our jobs and mortgaged our country to China. Lenin (or was it Marx) would say that we sold them the rope to hang us with.