SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST - 12 August 2015
SOUND AND FURY
TOM PLATE
Our circus is getting started, and so is the China debate.
The first stop of many on the American
presidential debate trail produced smashing TV ratings. Like much of the world,
Americans are worried about where the U.S. is headed and what quality of person
should lead it. In not much more than a year (and how time will fly!) our new White
House decision will be foisted on the world, and everyone will have to live
with it.
One direction to which our
early-on debate has not yet turned is to the China-relations question. The only
candidate who seemed to make much it the other night last week was bombastic
billionaire businessman Donald Trump. He muttered about how “we lose to China …
we don’t beat China in trade,” whatever that might mean (U.S. should manufacture
more cheap toys - what?).
But what is sure to surface
over the long campaign is that many Americans worry about the Sino-U.S.
relationship, are either puzzled or troubled about China, or are convinced they
know all the answers. (The notable exception is American businessmen: Though quite
knowledgeable, their focus is on economics more than politics, and so for most,
the bottom line about China is its contribution to their bottom line. Period.)
Only the know-it-all constituency believes it has China all figured
out: It claims that, despite Beijing’s charm offensives, rollicking pandas and dainty
educational-exchange programs, what Beijing is up to is this: It is up to no
good. This paranoid perspective permits the imagining of a destructive Red
conspiracy behind every move China makes and everything it says and everything
it might dream of.
Are the paranoids for real? Many make you worry and want to
find a bomb shelter; but one exception is veteran defense official and analyst
Michael Pillsbury, who is very smart, knows his China stuff and worked for
years at RAND, the world-famous think tank with headquarters near Los Angeles. His new book “The Hundred Year Marathon:
China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” offers ominous
views on “evil” China that cannot be ignored and out-thumps Trump and others in
the ‘we’re losing to China’ department.
Pillsbury is absolutely sold
on the idea that America is naïve to believe China is aiming for anything other
than to emerge the biggest elephant in the jungle: the globe’s sole superpower.
Economic espionage and deceptive diplomacy will be constant. While deferring
actual military confrontation for the time being, China’s ying pai hawks flutter and strut behind the takeover strategy.
What should be the response of
the American ba (a multi-layered Chinese
term that Pillsbury takes to men ‘tyrant’)? Start by creating a credible and cohesive
anti-China coalition of those unwilling to kowtow, and at every step confront
Beijing, it being one canny competitor and no cuddly panda. Warns Pillsbury: “Western elites and
opinion shapers provide the public with rose-colored glasses when it comes to
looking at China. That, of course, is just as the Chinese have planned it.”
If there is any comfort in the
Pillsbury perspective, it’s that China’s new unipolar world order could well
take (he concedes) 100 years to realize. That’s a long stretch of tick-tock
even by a Chinese time clock. Our best multinational corporations are lucky to
keep even five-year plans in one piece. Pillsbury and other ‘sold warriors’ like
him are entitled to their mission-impossible conspiracy view but common sense suggests
that China’s policy, like the America’s, is more a patchwork of daily
challenges to ever-changing pressures than some master plan hatched by the ying
pai in some secret basement room of the Central Party School.
Unsold non-warriors (like me) compose our minds
(and emotions) off of the hard work of more patient and less easily wowed China
evaluators. One premier sage of the Sino heuristic is Dr. Charles Wolf Jr., who
for many decades has starred as RAND’s senior economist. He views China much
like the U.S.: as a mixed bag of the smart and the dumb, the good and the bad, the
old and the new. But rather than conspiracy theory, he promotes social-science
methodology. (And it’s much less boring than it sounds.)
Wolf’s most recent
book, “Puzzles, Paradoxes and Controversies, and the Global Economy,” offers
sane deductions and reasoned correctives for geopolitical emotional insecurity.
At the outset he wearily reminds that presidential candidates will “talk tough”
about China but “toughness is not a policy.” (May this Dr. Wolf live another
hundred years!) For panicky types, he counsels patience, sometimes inspirationally
abandoning the temptation to Power Point a point by welcoming in the warming glow
of historical perspective. Cleverly, Mao’s droll reservation about the
limitations of anti-corruption campaigns - “it’s hard to squeeze out all the toothpaste
from the tube” - enlivens his view that too much anti-corruption activity can
cause as much trouble as too much corruption. (So try for balance, China!) Anti-China
nagging about the “undervalued Yuan” lacks intellectual fairness by ignoring the
severe structural asymmetry between the world’s two biggest economies. As for Beijing’s
blustery plunge into the foreign aid game (a favorite subject of alarmist Western
media) Wolf predicts for China considerable frustration. Foreign aid recipients,
Beijing will find, tend to have amazingly short memories about what they
promised in return for the aid, as the U.S. has found to its melancholy.
RAND,
oft-dubbed as little more than a paid-in-full policy-scout team for money-bags Pentagon,
is increasingly working the peace-side of the all-important Sino-U.S.
relationship. But it takes two to play this good and noble game. For starters, Beijing
could embrace a carefully framed RAND proposal, recently tendered confidentially
to high-level Chinese officialdom, of methodologies for the serial highlighting
and expanding of overlapping mutual national interests. This might read like a
mouthful, but the idea is clear enough - and might even prove a game-changer. Who
knows unless it is tried?
Columnist Tom Plate’s
‘In the Middle of China’s Future” will be available in Chinese translation next
year from Lujiang Publishing House (Xiamen, Beijing). The Distinguished
Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at LMU in Los Angeles is also the author
of ‘The Fine Art of the Political Interview’, just out.
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