China’s Bull Shop
WSJ spanks a gullilble Geithner for falling for China’s one world currency ploy to expand its economic influence.
NYT: Pentagon report sees China seeking weapons to challenge American supremacy. China calls it a “gross distortion of facts” regarding “the fallacy of China’s military threat.”
Here’s a good one. Reuters: China tells U.S. to drop “Cold War” mentality.
Point PRC for gall on that one. China has engaged in dangerous harassment of our naval aircraft and vessels in international waters, where they operate in long established defence of regional allies. China has abruptly turned our ships away from scheduled ports-of-call, played on-again-off-again with military cooperation agreements, and has engaged in extensive efforts to steal critical weapons technology … not to mention civilian technology and trade secrets … and is building up its capacity to project power in the form of naval forces and missile technology. Still leads in the critical propaganda arena, though. Back to NYT, which has a little good news:
The report describes how China’s military modernization has continued over the past year, with a particular focus on Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. China has built up short-range missiles across from Taiwan, even though the report concludes that relations between the two have relaxed over the past year.
Even so, the study said China could not deploy and sustain even small military units far beyond its borders before 2015. Further, China would not be able to deploy and sustain large forces in combat operations far from China until well into the following decade, the report states.
So, we’re six to 16 years out from that, theoretically, though at the current level of concern, we might as well pull back, hand them the technology and dispense with the wait. In fact China is already conducting remote military operations off Somalia, and the projection of power is not purely a matter of military capabilities. The perception of strength and exercise of non-military means, economic and political, also play significant roles. For example, last week South Africa disinvited the Dalai Lama from a peace conference. The government once led by Nelson Mandela, supposedly founded on moral outrage, openly admitted it didn’t want upset China, its major trading partner. The good news is, that’s turned into a major embarrassment for South Africa.
American presidential administrations have a long history of tip-toeing around China, and kowtowing to Chinese ploys and nonsense. Sometimes, like George Bush back in April 2001, it’s because of concerns that they might “lose face,” so when they knocked down one of our planes, we apologized in order to expedite the return of a naval crew and got our plane back in pieces. Losing face is the Chinese equivalent of a threat to hold your breath until you turn blue. Anyone who falls for tantrums like that deserves the unruly, disruptive and dangerous behavior that ensues. There is also a concern that China owns large parts of our debt. There is an apparent failure to understand that is a two-way relationship. It’s because we buy their stuff. We don’t have to do that. Not all of it, not all the time. There are concerns that we can’t call them what they are, and that we have to even honor them with laurels like the Beijing Olympics, when China is remains a wretched 20th-century dictatorship by committee, which imprisons and tortures its citizens for thought crimes.
All of these are complex issues, and reasonable administrations have a real world they need to operate in. But the starting point in all relations with China needs to be: hurting the feelings of the bull in the China shop should be the last, not the first concern. Anything and everything China proposes or does is to advance China’s interest. And China’s interest, for the moment, is to dominate Asia, the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Militarily and/or economically, with the goal of competing with and ultimately supplanting us as the dominant world power. China’s other interest is to prop up its ex-commie kleptocracy, which used at least to have vile Marxist-Leninist-Maoist values, but now has no values whatsoever.
Here’s another part of that Pentagon. Press Trust of India:
India’s emergence as an economic, political and military power has left Chinese army worried, even as the two countries in the recent years have increased their economic and military cooperation, a report released by Pentagon said.
“The PLA (People’s Liberation Army) remains concerned with persistent disputes along China’s shared border with India and the strategic ramifications of India’s rising economic, political, and military power,” the Pentagon said in its Congressional mandated annual report on China’s army.
The 78-page report devotes a small sub-section on India-China relations, along with those on Russia and Central Asian republics. “China has deepened its ties with India through increased trade, high-level dialogues, and an improved military-to-military relationship,” the report said.
The two countries have agreed to boost their bilateral trade from USD 11.4 billion in 2007 to USD 40 billion in 2010. India and China have also held several rounds of dialogue over disputed territorial claims.
Sino-Indian defence ties were institutionalised in 2007 with the establishment of an Annual Defence Dialogue and by conducting three bilateral defence exercises since 2007, but the PLA remains worried about the rise of India as a regional and global power and its increasing military might, the report said.
Europe is useless, skittish and unwilling to act in its own interest. But there is an actual rising Asian democracy, that would very much like to be a responsible first-world power, with which we might partner. China’s rise and a confrontation with us and us alone is not inevitable. There can be a world in which there is an more equitable East-West balance of power. In fact, China, if and when it grows up to be an actual modern nation, could even be a part of it. America’s interest is not in denying China a place on the world stage. America’s and the world’s interest is that China exercise it in a mature fashion. And China, while busily arming up, is another bitter revolution away from that.
Topics: China
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:55 am on Thursday, March 26, 2009
2 Responses to “China’s Bull Shop”
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March 26th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
One of the things that worries me about China is that there are too many men. What happens to a society that has 20% more men than women? Up to this point, conformity and a rigid social structure has kept this problem tamped down, but when does it reach a tipping point? I don’t believe that there is a historical precedent for this, and the idea of a huge, powerful country with lots of men and not enough women is an unsettling one.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
The upside of an India/China cooperative alliance is that the Pakistani/Islamic threat will be held in place or face utter destruction, and not at our hands.
The downside is that America may become irrelevant in the coming century.