Chinas Great Leap Backward The Atlantic
What if china is going bad? Since early last year I have been asking people inside and outside China versions of this question. By bad I dont mean morally. Moral and ethical factors obviously matter in foreign policy, but Im talking about something different.
Nor is the question mainly about economics, although for China the short-term stability and long-term improvement of jobs, wages, and living standards are fundamental to the governments survival. Under Chinas single-party Communist arrangement, sustained economic failure would naturally raise questions about the system as a whole, as it did in the Soviet Union. True, modern Chinas economic performance even during its slowdowns is like the Soviet Unions during its booms. But the absence of a political outlet for dissatisfaction is similar.
Instead the question is whether something basic has changed in the direction of Chinas evolution, and whether the United States needs to reconsider its China policy. For the more than 40 years since the historic Nixon-Mao meetings of the early 1970s, that policy has been surprisingly stable. From one administration to the next, it has been built on these same elements: ever greater engagement with China; steady encouragement of its modernization and growth; forthright disagreement where the two countries economic interests or political values clash; and a calculation that Cold Warstyle hostility would be far more damaging than the difficult, imperfect partnership the two countries have maintained.
That policy survived its greatest strain, the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. It survived Chinas entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the enormous increase in Chinas trade surpluses with the United States and everywhere else thereafter. It survived the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 (an act assumed to be intentional by every Chinese person Ive ever discussed it with), periodic presidential decisions to sell arms to Taiwan or meet with the Dalai Lama, and clashes over censorship and human rights.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/chinas-great-leap-backward/505817/
muriel_volestrangler
(101,361 posts)It assumes a Hillary victory without stating it,
Well, that's the world fucked, then. Trump sees ruining the Iran deal as a plus.