dagblog - Comments for "Also Speaking Of China..."

Alas, bullet trains are

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:48:43 +0000

Alas, bullet trains are obviously not a point of American pride. I think that some big Chinese military advance that we don't have would do the trick or if they're GDP outpaces ours or if they start beating us in technology innovation. I don't see any of those happening in the next couple of years, though. I wrote a post about it last year: http://dagblog.com/politics/american-hegemony-what-it-where-it-going-and...

Yeah! I forgot one point I

Michael Maiello — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:37:33 +0000

In reply to Destor, good

Yeah! I forgot one point I wanted to make in my post, it's not original but... although the country is in a sour mood right now, the U.S. is one of the world's only truly global countries. People still want to come live here. L.A., New York and D.C. can make claim to being global centers for entertainment, media and policy. Silicon Valley is still a global technology center. We're ethnically diverse and so people from all over can come here and find homes and communities. We also have vast resources and nature. So, democracy, conservation and enlightenment in the classical sense are big draws for us. Maybe we need to add to the tired, poor huddled masses that we would also like your curious intellectuals, your philosophers, poets, hackers, geneticists, and mathematicians!

This is a huge advantage that China, despite having some global cities of its own, can't match and isn't even trying. Why are we playing their game? Let them make our toys so long as people want to play with them at our house.

Destor, good

Oxy Mora — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:11:52 +0000

In reply to The only thing I think you

Destor, good point--innovation, rules of the game. I might say "perception" of the game. Maybe our game should be conservation, democracy, enlightenment--what do you know, we might be the best game in town. And it's not that difficult. Mass transit in cities, high speed rail, use of the Great Plains to grow switch grass, education improvement. That's just for starters. Now throw in technical innovation, entertainment(well, not my first choice)and then tourism. Oh, by the way we still make Harleys and Chevies. Maybe Americana will become the rage and my first edition Emily Dickinson will become priceless. Our biggest problem--resistance to change and admission that we're not the "biggest" anymore. Maybe we can become the best at capitalism in a democracy instead of commercialism in a communist country.

The only thing I think you

Michael Maiello — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:38:18 +0000

In reply to It seems like a kind of wierd

The only thing I think you might have to worry about, as an average citizen is that you'll be on a global market competing with the Chinese for goods and you'll be using a weaker dollar to do it. So if you and a consumer in China want to fill your tanks with oil from Qatar, they have the advantage of being able to bid up prices with their better currency and you end up paying for it.

That would be marginally true for the many other oil based products out there, including plastics.

But then, we've been hollering for a reason to get off the black ooze, haven't we? I don't think people have considered the extent to which innovators in the U.S., if properly supported, could actually change the rules of the game that we're supposedly trying to win.

Yeah... You hear all the

Michael Maiello — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:35:32 +0000

In reply to I find it interesting that

Yeah... You hear all the time about the ways that China does spank us. I hate to be nice to Thomasd Friedman but I was very amused by the joke in his column: "A cell phone call within China sounds like a call from two blocks away, a cell phone call in the U.S. sounds like a call from China." But they haven't produced a multinational world class company that's come to beat up on one of our prestige companies. Well, that's not true necessarily. One could argue that their energy companies regularly outperform ours. And we lock them out of deals so they don't do it over here. But for the most part they're better at building airports and bullet trains than we are. I kind of wish we'd take that more personally!

1) The structure of our

cmaukonen — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:33:16 +0000

In reply to Also Speaking Of China...

1) The structure of our fears. We tend to fear being put to rest by an outside economic threat.
2) That it is possible for one of our competitors to grow into a wealth country without severely diminishing life in the U.S.

That was precisely what WWII was all about.

They are and will be a

Michael Maiello — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:32:42 +0000

In reply to China is not a threat to the

They are and will be a legitimate competitor to us, no doubt. Just like Germany and Japan and the E.U. I don't see us being "defeated" by it. If we're smart it could enrich us at least in some ways. Keep in mind that even though Goldman Sachs predicts China's economy will be larger than the U.S. economy by around 2030, the per capita economy won't approach outs for decades more. And that's with very low U.S. growth going forward. I think there's a lot of room for the U.S. to get smart about building a more vibrant, competitive economy. The Art of War can work for us too. Though I don't consider this a war.

Around here the big

kgb999 — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:23:44 +0000

In reply to Also Speaking Of China...

Around here the big interaction with China is when the local mill closed and the last guy out was the guy supervising loading up all the milling equipment that had been crated for shipment to China. Quite the drama for the local press "Stimpson has been milling here since the 1800's" or whatever.

I think "end of the world" is a relative situation. In this case, it was prevailing-wage blue collar career jobs replaced by short-term construction and minimum-wage retail; ponzi-economy jobs (most of which never materialized because the real estate markets crashed along with the rest of the economy). For some folks it seems the world sure got a good deal smaller. I can see how from some perspectives China feels quite menacing.

Of course, that's sort of tangential to my life ... my personal issue with our Asia policy is the H1B situation, and that's not really China at this point.

It seems like a kind of wierd

Obey — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:23:41 +0000

In reply to Also Speaking Of China...

It seems like a kind of wierd fear to me. I lived, traveled, and worked around East Asia through the nineties and oughties, and the general impression is one of China being perceived as a regional leader more than a regional thug like the US is to some extent for the Americas. Apart from seeking reliable provision of natural resources, they don't have much in the way of imperial ambitions (Tibet and the Taiwan issue notwithstanding). Whereby I mean US-style military bases plonked down in random countries across the globe. And they shy away from interfering in other countries' internal affairs. When you've got a billion and some people to govern, you're not necessarily looking to babysit a bunch more. So I don't see them being remotely interested in being 'competitors' in that sense

And if the worry is just 'they will surpass the US as the dominant world economy', well that isn't a worry: that's just a fact that's going to become reality in the next ten years (in real - i.e. purchasing power parity - terms). But is it a fact that is worth getting worried about? It's a bit strange to expect a population four times the size of the US to never exceed US production, isn't it? Is it that there some intrinsic threat in the prospect of the world economy being centered on China? Well, it pretty much already is. Is it that there is some threat that Chinese corporations may come to exploit the US, much in the way that now developing countries quiver at the approach of a swaggering Exxon-Mobil executive, or a bloodsucking Citi banker? Well, I can't imagine the Chinese being any worse for Americans than US corporations already are.

Dunno, I'm just throwing out questions. I don't grasp the nature of the perceived threat itself.

I find it interesting that

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:18:26 +0000

In reply to Also Speaking Of China...

I find it interesting that China is not more of a big story. I think it's because they have not yet spanked us on any sacred benchmark where we have not already been spanked by someone else. For instance, part of what drove the Japan phobia was the supremacy of Toyota over GM and Ford, which had long been the pride of American manufacturing.

But China will spank us on something emotionally significant sooner or later, and I predict much wailing and gnashing of teeth.