But...no USA (*).
So, in short, the Americans believed that expanding economic cooperation with China was a necessary post-Cold War step to make sure that Chinese growth came with an American imprimatur and that over time the growth would create a more liberal, open Chinese establishment that would fall in line with Western democratic capitalism. We had become accustomed to pictures like this. We saw China's leadership as capable only of oppressing the in-born desires of millions--billions--of good hearted Chinese people that yearned only to buy more stuff (I mean, it's not insignificant the man in this iconic picture carries a grocery bag, is it?). And we saw ourselves as a force for good by way of infiltrating the Chinese economy and allowing a newly burgeoning middle class to demand more democratic representation. (Or perhaps we saw the opportunity to co-opt the inevitable economic expansion of China and to get rich off of China getting rich....there's that, too)
You may recall that in 2016, US presidential candidates Trump and Clinton agreed on pretty much only one thing: that the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) was a bad idea for American workers and both poo-pooed the idea of joining in--even though it was Hillary Clinton that initially put the organization together while Secretary of State under President Obama. The whole point of the TPP was to create an East Asian trade block that would be aligned against China but Trump was against this because of his rabid anti-China policy (uh...wait that doesn't make any sense) and Clinton caved in the face of the Bernie Bros that (for whatever reason) think global trade is somehow bad for American industrial production. *sigh* Even when Americans have the right idea they manage to talk themselves out of it.
So instead of an American-based free trade coalition spanning vast chunks of human population arrayed in opposition to China, now we have a China-based group without the need of American economic muscle behind it. Between the Bernie crowd and the Trump idiots (**), I'm certain I'm in the minority when I say this is a colossal wasted opportunity for USA. And likely an all-out triumph for China.
Instead of TPP, Trump pursued a trade war with China built around unilateral tariffs--which would've been greatly aided by a TPP-like organization but somehow he didn't see it that way. My personal belief is that Trump's anti-China rhetoric was merely a staged attempt to create a détente with China going into the 2020 election and that the first three years of tariffs were really just a pantomimed attempt to gin up rapprochement. (***) But once Covid-19 appeared, the hope of détente with China evaporated. So instead, Xi Jinping has moved on with other plans: testing nuclear weapons again, cracking down on Hong Kong, picking fights with India, continuing to grow a military presence in the South China Sea and snatching the free trade bonanza the Americans let wither on the vine.
About 15 minutes into this video, Ambassador Fujisaki refers to the 1990s-era belief (mostly in USA) that expanding trade with China would bring about a democratic revolution among Chinese workers/consumers. To further flesh out this belief that he refers to, I went back to "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner from the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs (****). The authors say things like, "Growth was supposed to bring not just further economic opening but also political liberalization...with a burgeoning Chinese middle class demanding new rights and pragmatic officials embracing legal reforms...for further progress." But "(r)ather than becoming a force for greater openness, consistent growth has served to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party". I think it's fair to say the first sentence was a popular belief in American foreign policy circles in the 1990s and that the second sentence is a popular belief in current American foreign policy circles.
But when Xi Jinping came to power in 2010 and then retained power in 2015 (and will be granted another 5-year term any day now), something previously unconstitutional in China, Americans began to wake up to the idea that the grand design of democratic capitalism wasn't taking hold as it should. Indeed, the power structure seems all the more powerful because the last 20 years of Chinese economic growth hasn't produced a middle class but a thin layer of super-rich private citizens eager to wed themselves to the CCP's hold on the culture. Oh...yeah....there has to be a middle class to have a middle class revolution.
For my part, I never really bought the idea back in the 1990s. China has been China for more than 3000 years and the only hint of democracy they've ever had was a brief flirtation with Republican gov't in the early 20th century that was not popular, not successful and is likely considered their lowest point in the last 3000 years (at least by the Chinese themselves). The people of China have been ruled by the imperial Middle Kingdom since before the beginning of time--yeah, check it out: Chinese history kicks off with several hundred years worth of a dynasty that no one's sure even existed. The Emperor emerged from the mythological primordial ooze of life itself and that's all they've ever known. And--here's the thing Americans will NEVER understand--the Chinese people are...pretty cool with that. They don't mind it, they rage against it every once in a while but nothing else has ever replaced it. So expecting the Chinese people to rise up and demand more self-determination is gonna take some time. Like, a lot of time. Like, I dunno, a thousand years...? The idea that two decades of selling Chinese people Wal-Mart bedsheets was gonna completely reverse several millennia of culture...uh...never made any sense to me. Americans are beholden to iconic images like the one above, but I gotta tell ya: you don't control a billion and a half people with a line of tanks.
Frankly, it just shows a misapprehension on the part of the West of how China works. We look at the Chinese Communist Party and see only the Communist part and totally neglect the Chinese part. I would suggest the CCP functions pretty much just like the Confucian bureaucracy that was the spine of the last thousand years of the Middle Kingdom. Hell, I would suggest the CCP is way more enlightened, egalitarian, forward-looking, responsible and inclusive than the Confucians ever were. So what the Chinese people have is already light years more advanced than what their ancestors would've expected from their emperors. Furthermore what they have is not actually something that we would recognize as "Communist". The way the CCP operates in China is not at all how Communism has ever been practiced anywhere else--and certainly not what Karl Marx would've imagined (an agrarian peasant rebellion was not what Marx had in mind (*****)).
Actually what Americans think of as Communism is just Authoritarianism with a fancy name on it. In the west we fear Communism for its authoritarian tendencies and we use Stalin and Mao as the examples; but the authoritarianism in both cases pre-dates Marx and has little to do with top-down Marxist economics. When we say that Communism has never worked, that isn't really true: it's never been tried. When the Russians latched on to Marxist thought, they were working within a tradition of brutal authoritarianism and they saw the opportunity to push the Czar out and grab that authoritarianism for themselves. Stalin grabbed power and glommed onto Marxist ideas about committees and class warfare, neither of which really come from Marx, but I see no evidence that Stalin had any interest in the economic precepts of Marxism. I am convinced that Marxist top-down economic doctrines are doomed to failure but I am not convinced the failure of the Russian Soviets was because of Marxist economic dogma. As for the authoritarianism, it wasn't a product of Marxism, it was already there, the Czars ruled with an iron fist long before Karl Marx was born (******). Stalin was born from a tradition of Czarism more than Marxism and Mao represented a new type of Middle Kingdom rather than being the Marxist ideal.
As for the economics, the reason Americans fear it is because we are born of commerce and bristle at any notion of fettering it. In America we have created not a worker's paradise but a consumer's paradise: it is still not uncommon to find items in your local grocery that are cheaper than the lands they came from. That's because we're awesome and those other places suck and the likely reason those other places don't have the options that Americans have is because there is some top-down authority keeping the citizenry from full self-expression. We have a tendency to call this "Communism", whether or not that is actually the case. Thus, we equate Communism with Authoritarianism and Capitalism with Democracy: it is only in a free economy than we can have a free society (or something like that). And, the thinking goes, the expansion of Chinese economy must necessarily be joined with the expansion of civil liberties and voting rights, while a decrease of Chinese Communism will produce a decrease of Authoritarianism. We have come to see these things as two separate poles and presume the rise of one will spell the doom of the other. But this isn't necessarily so. I never bought that Chinese capitalism would lead to freer gov't because I think the gov't and the economy are two separate and distinct paradigms. And in this case it shows our fundamental misunderstanding of Communism.
The Chinese are doing something that no one else has ever done before: they're actually following Marxist economic ideology. The authoritarianism has been there for thousands of years but their recent forays into global trade are because Marx says quite explicitly that Communism derives from Capitalism. Marx says you must indulge entrepreneurial industrial Capitalism in order for Communism to arise (re: you have to create wealth that so that you can then have wealth to control). Thus, the Chinese have allowed a greater expansion of market activity and wealth creation among the citizenry over the last 30 years because that's what Marx says to do--not because it seeks to adhere to American-style capitalist democracy. Capitalism will morph into Socialism, then Socialism will morph into Communism. I think Marx is probably right (*******) but whereas in the West we fear the steady decrease of individual choice due to the imposition of more and more top-down economic activity, in China they already have the top-down activity and are trying to bring the relative wealth of the citizenry up through a burst of macroeconomic activity. In the long run, the Chinese will either become prisoners of the endless chase for economic growth or they will actually achieve the Marxist Utopia (which is basically just Europe before the French Revolution). Neither of those options sound very "Chinese" to me but they gotta do something, I guess.
And so here we are at a juncture of history where the Chinese are expanding their economic frontiers and reaching out to their neighbors (something they've done very little of in 3000 years), while the Americans are acting like trade is bad for workers. Yes, I was skeptical back in the 1990s of the political liberalization the Americans promised would happen, but I did kinda believe that Chinese people would get used to having choices and that would filter into the Party structure on the local level. Not on the national level, because that is now and will forever be just a room full of chain smoking old men making the decisions for a billion other souls. But I did think and still do that on the local level the reach of the CCP will actually--perhaps in spite of itself--give more people more opportunity to exert some bottom-up control. But that would be relatively invisible to American eyes and probably have little to do with the foreign policy/foreign trade powers of the Party. So while I didn't really buy it back in the day, I think it's much too early to say the liberalization didn't work because even if it does work, foreigners probably won't be able to tell. And it'll take a while before it works anyway, maybe not a thousand years but probably something like a hundred years.
Marx was not talking about Russia, Marx was certainly not talking about China. Marx was talking about England--and by extension America. Marx presumed that the Capitalism Americans so cherish will eventually devolve (evolve/devolve? You decide) into Communism: a world where all the economic decisions are made by a handful of old men in committees telling everyone else what will be available to purchase. I understand Marx's point: as economic growth binds social structures together, an overarching abstract power will naturally arise on top--indeed, may be forced to arise--in order to smooth the flow of resource distribution. But Marx (like Einstein) was wedded to a steady state universe. For some reason he didn't account for economic expansion, so his notion that wealth would entropically rise to the top is not quite how things work. Also the notion that economic power and political power are the same thing is frankly not how America ever worked.
Granted, the super rich in America become super richer all the time but they don't hoard that wealth, they put it back into the markets. Indeed, the rich people are the ones creating the wealth that drives all economic growth. So while Marx was correct that a handful of rich people would control all the money, he was mistaken in that it would be controlled by a gov't force. It is not. That is private wealth put to private ends and the aim of of private wealth is to create ever more private wealth, which is not at all what a gov't would do. And Marx's notion that a gov't committee would be the best source of resource distribution is...man, as wrong as it could be!
Only private wealth can create capital; the gov't produces merely inflation. "Helping" people through gov't demand doesn't help anyone because it doesn't create sustainable economic structures, it just creates inflation. A sugar rush is fine for a while but it isn't nutrition, it won't keep the body from dying. Likewise, gov't spending can be an occasionally worthwhile stopgap but it does not provide nourishment. Only markets build into the future.
The American Congress is ruled by a series of committees but frankly the sheer amount of wealth it controls is pretty piddly compared to the private wealth in our capital markets. The politicians (and the politically minded citizenry) are fighting over tax dollars, which by definition is a tiny percentage of the overall economy. They can be as Marxist as they like, it'll actually have a pretty minimal effect on the wealth redistribution that happens all day long in the American economy. The politicians like to act important--and the citizenry is eager to make them appear important--but they're pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. They have the ability to waste a lot of time and money but not much more than that--they certainly can't make money or invest it. Congress's only real economic power is making money go away. Congress is absolutely invested in helping the citizenry be more productive (re: produce more capital) because that's where the wealth comes from. It doesn't come from the gov't. Wealth can never and will never come from gov't spending. That's just as true in China as it is in America.
The Russian Soviets didn't care about economics, they cared only for the maintenance of their iron fist, generally by cowing people into silence and inactivity. China, too, has a long history of just shutting people up rather than dealing with their desires. In America we blame the political structure but frankly it doesn't do much because it actually effects a pittance of the overall spending. Marx's assumption that gov't power is real power is only true when you follow the top-down economic structures that Americans have always eschewed. But the idea that Capitalism and Democracy go hand in hand is not plainly obvious. I think its quite possible to have free economies in a tyrannical state and loads of democracy in a top-down economy. Market forces are latent, permanent and exist regardless of the particular ruling authority; ruling authorities can make economies worse but they have no power to make them better because economy comes from the People not the State.
The fact that we've lumped all of these ideas in a single stew is an unnecessary complication that clouds our vision of objective reality (an effect of Media, I'd say). It makes Americans think that our politicians should do more and then complain when they try to do anything. And it makes us fear any other country in the world doing anything because we see competition as a zero-sum game rather than a source of continual growth.
I've long been "soft" on China, even though I didn't buy the 1990s-era rhetoric of Chinese capitalist democracy. The Chinese people have been empowered over the last few decades but that doesn't mean they have much political participation. Yeah....because they don't want it. They like American-style improvement of standard of living but they think our politics is stupid and corrupt (and I agree). But I believe that China's continued growth and international influence is coming whether we like it or not--and, personally, I like it. I do not fear it and I think economic growth in all places is good because it empowers the citizens, the individuals, the People, even if has the unfortunate by-product of making States seem more powerful than they actually are.
But it's hard to wrap my mind around a China that yearns for free trade while in America our politicians are clamoring for the cancellation of student loans; while I agree that our method of financing higher education is shameful and stupid, using the gov't as a mechanism to release people from their contractual obligations is precisely the opposite of what our gov't should be doing (and would be ruinously expensive for the higher educational opportunities of future generations). When American Liberals dream of a "better world", they are invariably thinking only of a more expensive one...and then expect the price to be paid by someone else. For some reason, they think that's what Socialism is but I bet they wouldn't if they ever read Marx.
(*) You will notice that North Korea and Taiwan, the two inescapable lightning rods of Pacific Asia, aren't there, either. But why isn't Bangladesh in the RCEP?
(**) Obama gave lip service to TPP in 2016 but I suspect this was simply because he knew it was a losing cause. I thought at the time that Congress might've wanted TPP so much that they would actually let Obama have a little victory on the way out, but either Obama didn't care enough to take up the offer or Congress didn't care enough to extend it. Instead, the presidential candidates both talked Americans out of its usefulness...and we got a lame-ass trade war instead. *sigh* The business of America is business and we forget that at our peril.
(***) I think Xi Jinping was on board with this plan. Enduring three years of an American tantrum for the prospect of 4-5 years of American support probably looked pretty good to him So, in case you're trying to read between the lines, I would suggest this shows that Covid-19 is absolutely NOT a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the global economy because I think it actually hinders what Xi wanted to do going forward. Or if this is some kind of devious plot, it is anti-Xi plot more than an anti-American one.
(****) I started this post on Aug 29, 2018 initially with my thoughts on Foreign Affairs Mar/Apr 2018 essay "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner. But...I'm a lazy guy, picked this back up based on recent events.
(*****) I kept trying to convince my Chinese Political History professor that in an agrarian economy the farmers control the means of production, but he never bought it. I still (sorta) believe it but I still have no way of making anyone else believe it. Like I still believe that when looking at a US electoral map, it's easy to point out that the red states produce little of the overall GDP but how can you not notice it's where all our food comes from? Do you honestly think that's insignificant?
(******) I'd say it's an outgrowth of the Golden Horde. Prior to the Mongols ransacking Russia circa 1250, there were democratic movements in that area, there was the attempt to make the leadership responsible to the citizenry. The Mongols ruled not merely with an iron fist but went out of their way to humiliate local Russian leaders and for 200 years brutally repressed any kind of movement at all. When the Muscovite princes were able to finally shake off Mongol rule around 1450, they took on the tenor of that bone-crushing leadership and that's the way it's been ever since in Russia. At to that end: Yeah, I know you're not gonna dig this but Vladimir Putin is easily the kindest, sweetest most benevolent leader they've ever had. I would say by a fucking longshot, he's the most enlightened leader they've ever had. Russia today actually has something that could be referred to as a middle class....when in the last thousand years was that even a possibility?
(*******) Though I don't agree with his rationale. To Marx economic growth will necessarily create an underclass that can only be cared for by the State and the State will then have to collect more and more from the citizenry to account for the left behind. I think the actuality is different: I think the upwardly mobile citizenry want more than they want to pay for and will think that gov't spending will be able to provide more and more. Thus, wealthy gov'ts will steadily drift toward Socialism and ultimately Communism through the force of ever-growing debt obligations. Politicians in charge will take on more and more spending as a means of holding on to power. But as gov't accrues more purchasing power, it will continually depress its own currency and all other markets. And in the long run we'll end up with dwindling consumer choices and more expectation of the gov't to make our choices for us. Kinda the same but Marx thought of helping the poor within a world of economic growth while I see it as steady decrease of economic growth as the people have fewer and fewer choices that only makes life tougher for the poor.
PS -- Here's the Chinese stuffed shirt talking head hot take version. I think its noteworthy that they close by allowing the Singaporean representative to remind everyone that RCEP does not keep these Asian nations from militarily hedging against China (oh yeah: militarism is another separate and distinct paradigm that I didn't even touch on here). The agenda for the Americans is clear: guns but not butter.
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