four months pass...
six months pass...
clearing out old things i meant to post but never got round to, plus i've got a few articles on china in the backlog i want to get to over christmas, so it's a good refresher, even if i've lost some of the points i wanted to make now:
Spent a bit of holiday time (note: i think this must have been the summer holiday) reading up on the current state of China in the world. Clearly a massive topic of which this can be the barest expression, but putting down some thoughts here. Inevitably fairly long, apologies.
First up Adam Tooze's excellent essay in the LRB. Tooze writing continues to have the sound of someone who is based in Keynesianism and social democracy but is continually drawn to post-GFC Marxist critiques. I have some not very well formed doubts I guess at an epistemological level about his 'history as it happens' approach, but he brings a energy, hard work, intelligence and honed historiographical skills to doing it, which makes him the closest thing I think we've got at the moment to a public intellectual.
In fact one of the first things he points out in the essay is that the all of the books that he's reviewing feel like they're out of date, due to the continual and rapid reframing of China and its relationship with the US (Trump, Covid).
End of History Narratives
One of the main themes of the essay is how end-of-Cold-War narratives, whether in their end-of-history, or neoliberal/economic forms of emphasis, have significantly misled US and Western observers and commentators of China:
The crude Trumpian take, which is perhaps also the kindest, is that the US negotiators of the 1990s and early 2000s were chumps, suckered by the Chinese. The more sophisticated version is that Bill Clinton’s team were too committed to the kind of modernisation theory Frances Fukuyama spun in his ‘end of history’ essay in 1989. They believed the liberal story that as China’s economy matured it would inevitably develop a need for the rule of law and representative democracy. If the Communist regime refused this logic and clung to its old ways, the laws of social science would condemn it to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.
This is another description of the belief that where global trade can be introduced, western democratic values must surely follow (a causal narrative argument derived from the fall of the Soviet Union) and conversely, that contemporary Western methods of democracy are a pre-requisite for wealth (this i take to be a fundamentally Chicago School/Hayekian argument – that the market will always outperform any form of central planning, not just economically, but in terms of managing social needs as well).
Tooze identifies Tiananmen Square as the crucial bit of information missing from the neoliberal/EoH model for historical and global engagement. He compares 1989 in Germany and China, both of which have seen significant trade imbalances in favour of exports, both of which drove down wages in different ways. In Germany the fall of the Berlin Wall meant access to cheap east European production resources. In China, for Tooze, Tiananmen Square signified the beginning of state repression, holding down of wages and currency manipulation (downward), as part of a global cheap export drive.
Crucially for Tooze where the fall of the Berlin wall was the critical motif of the explanatory end of history explanatory model, and neoliberal approach to generating and distributing wealth, and represented a rupture with the previous era, Tiananmen Square represented *continuity*. As Tooze says towards the end, "We have to take seriously the CCP's sense of mission." Tiananmen Square was for Tooze a doubling down, which was ignored, while the West applied a model based on Cold War victory.
This was based on opening up China for business. Bill Clinton's administration worked hard to encourage the WTO to accept China, while on the Chinese side there was a large amount of work to enable trade convergence, with thousands of laws being changed to ensure WTO compliance. None of this was accidental but represented a major act of geopolitical world building, in the US case, based on the neoliberal predictive principles outlined above, and in the Chinese case, feeding into the export-driven model of growth.
The US perception of a unipolar world, led to a world in which, in a great phrase by Tooze, "Economic growth powered by globalisation was geopolitically innocent." Where there was "a clean line between economic policy and security policy".
There's some great paras in the Tooze essay – I loved this one on how a business-led approach
This is all a long way from the 1990s, when America’s corporate leaders could confidently assume that their way of seeing the world was so deeply entrenched in the US political system that their desired version of integration with China would go unchallenged, whatever the costs it imposed on American society. They folded China into their corporate planning as though all that was involved were private business decisions, not a wholesale rewiring of the global order. Today, that wager on the world as a playground of corporate strategy is unravelling.
This is course a description of simon pure, 100% no-pepsi-in-my-product neoliberalism.
So what went wrong?
Fold all that – Berlin Wall model v Tiananmen Square model, neoliberalism, corporation-led politics as benchmark of success, false perception of a unipolar world – against a single-minded, state-pursued 'sense of mission', what do you get?
As Beijing coolly points out when faced with complaints from the Americans, no one forces Boeing, GE or GM to invest in the Chinese market: they do it for profit.
The US complains about lack of transparency, the lack of opening up of China, the retention of 'sovereign discretion', of the Chinese regime, while still seeking to trade, and so has no bargaining power in the process of economic liberalisation - what on earth is the incentive for China.
Tooze is some fairly devastating paragraphs in the essay, including this on the notion of a Cold War victory:
For Americans, part of the appeal of allusions to Cold War 2.0 is that they think they know how the first one ended. Yet our certainty on that point is precisely what the rise of China ought to put in question. The simple fact is that the US did not prevail in the Cold War in Asia. Korea was divided by a stalemate. Vietnam was a humiliating failure. It was to find a way out of that debacle that Nixon and Kissinger turned to Beijing and inaugurated a new era of Sino-American relations.
This created the rules for the current game being played, which the piece argues are out of date.
Misreading the rules can have have significant effects - there's an important argument against US austerity, with some recommending cutting government spending, and making companies more competitive. in fact it is capital inflow from abroad, with China investing export earnings in safe US assets and US government debt, rather than productivity that's the problem. again, it's difficult to beat Tooze here:
By 2013, Chinese dollar holdings had risen to more than three trillion dollars, driving up the dollar and crowding out American manufacturing. An imaginative American policymaker might have decided to treat this inflow like proceeds from oil wells, directing it into a ring-fenced sovereign wealth fund, which could have been used to fund much needed infrastructure projects or an industrial policy to match those of China and Germany. Instead, it was Wall Street that profited in its role as the chief conduit of global finance – opening a third front in the class war.
Tooze argues that some people are fighting 'the last war' wrt China's low wages and currency manipulation to drive exports, IP protection and access to the markets is what matters now.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 24 December 2020 08:31 (three years ago) link
two weeks pass...
one year passes...
six months pass...
I've just read Red Dust by Ma Jian, the author leaves his job after his work unit accuse him of being too liberal (he likes poetry and art, wears denim and sports long hair). He travels across China commenting on political change etc.This takes place around 1983, and to be honest his account of his country scares and intrigues me.
What is China like now? I still seem to know so little of it. Are the carriages on trains swimming in mucus? Do bad teeth abound?
I'd like to know if it has changed much culturally from 20 years ago and if so, is it for the better.
And other little titbits too please.
― Rumpy Pumpkin (rumpypumpkin), Wednesday, December 1, 2004 4:27 PM (eighteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink
So I did an interview with my wife, she talks about her great-grandfather, who was a spy for the communists in the civil war, and her aunt who was a red guard, then a lot about growing up in a huge communal factory complex, also about her brother dying and how her parents could secretly have another kid (this is the comedy section afaic)
May be of interest, well it is to me, ymmv etc. but you're already on the China thread so
https://centuriesofsound.com/2023/04/17/1-4-the-timbers-already-a-boat/