International affairs... and China Redux

Turmoil  in Hong Kong. A trade war that turns out to not be so "easy to win." Chinese companies replacing western ones drilling for middle eastern oil. Threats aimed at Taiwan. Accusations of currency manipulation. Ongoing Intellectual Property ripoffs.... I won't talk about any of those things in today's turn toward the east.

In fact, let's start with some good news for a change. 

Announced in 1978, China’s “Green Great Wall” project aims to plant 400 million hectares of new forests (spanning 42 percent of China’s landmass) by 2050. ... and now... "Alipay’s ‘crowd’-planted trees not only comprise a growing carbon sink, offsetting China’s high emissions, but also aid in building this 4,500-kilometer ecological barrier to combat land degradation. Over the past 20 years, China and India have contributed one-third of the planet’s increased foliage.” Now “green points” are being earned by Chinese citizens for engaging in eco-better activities like walking. These can be used to help plant trees.  

        (Via Abundance Insider.)

So much for the good. A recent posting of mine caused a lot of buzz regarding some of the state-sponsored mythologies and rationalizations for conflict that are now pouring from Beijing. If you haven't seen it, I offer at least half a dozen insights into China you've never seen elsewhere.

What are PRC leaders trying to achieve? And what narratives are they using to justify a coming "clash of civilizations?" And how insightful was Mao's demand that the masses "Combat Liberalism"?  

== International affairs ==

For foreign consumption: Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged countries not to "close their doors and hide behind them.”  Xi said there was no need for "civilizations to clash with each other.”…” No civilization is superior over others.” 

Of course ironies abound. For millennia, China closed its doors and declared the Central Kingdom to be so inherently superior that it had nothing to learn from outside cultures. Of course this was a mistake of titanic magnitude. 

But more important than history is what they do today. Yes, there is immense savvy and sagacity in their neo-mercantilist dedication to national development — the PRC leadership caste is made up largely of former engineers, not Wall Street parasites, slumlords, casino moguls and shyster-lawyers. Hence they are much better short term tacticians. Still, they appear to be poor at strategic overview of long-term consequences.

Our post World War II Rising World - from the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany etc. to the spectacular rise of China - was built upon a plan crafted by FDR and Cordell Hull, then George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, for Pax Americana to do what no other empire did, favoring overseas industrial development by buying a hundred trillion dollars worth of crap we never needed. In China’s case, especially, this was the fifth time their only-ever friend came to their aid. This was policy -- to deliberately behave differently from every previous empire. And it worked. You're welcome.

But it's one thing to get rich selling us stuff. It is another to steal the inventiveness that enabled us to do that, thus killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

The final irony is that Xi and his factotums tell a very different story for internal consumption. Desperately seeking to unify the nation by riling up jingoism and fiery resentment, they stoke a sense of destiny and grievance at two levels. First simplistic public memes about revenge for colonialism (none of which applies to the USA, whatsoever, and we need to fiercely reject such guilt trips). Then second at an intellectual level.

Elsewhere I describe some of the rationalizations that are pouring from Chinese government think Tanks like Tsinghua University, where scholars like Feng Xiang work out “logically” how only one form of governance — a permanently centralized, pseudo-Leninist party apparat — can possibly guide humanity through a minefield of future challenges, These range from automation-driven unemployment and artificial intelligence to environmental stress and other dangers. 

They claim that this central party hierarchy will not at all (except in every way) replicate the ancient, dreary failures of imperial-feudalism. 

Moreover, in a final irony, this centralized, all-controlling state can never be asked or expected to wither away into Marxism’s idealized-liberated individualist anarchy, because it will always be necessary, under siege and attack from hostile forces. (How convenient for those whose personal self-interest lies in that apparatus being forever-needed.) 

In other words, the very last connection to actual, Marxian Marxism has been cut. These rationalizations are intelligent, well-articulated... and spectacularly dishonest in their tendentiously pre-decided conclusions, and especially their omissions. 

I’ll not repeat that error by tendentiously declaring their conclusions to be wrong! I don’t know — no one can. Indeed it may be that confucian-meritocratic hierarchy is the best way to guide humanity to a soft landing in a benign future. I doubt it, and I have evidence to back up my argument. But I was trained in the catechism of science: I Might Be Wrong. 

No, the most telling thing about this debate is that it is not a debate. Oligarchs of all kinds are declaring grand assumptions to justify the re-establishment of hierarchical rule over unruly (democratic) mobs, then commanding their hired intellectuals to justify that hierarchy. I portrayed this in EXISTENCE. The rationalizations of billionaires are remarkably similar to those of commissars.

No bad habit is more likely to convince the coming AI minds that human “sapience” is over-rated, and that we cannot be trusted with a burnt match.

== Influence at universities ==

Not to oversimplify. But one action could make a huge difference. It begins at U.S. universities, where foreign students -- including one-third of a million Chinese -- swarm across our campuses.

It used to be that when America, Canada and the west took in hundreds of thousands of foreign students, we got a win-win. We'd skim off the top 10% and make them Americans, thus acquiring loads of international expertise for free, along with great, brilliant citizens...

... and we'd send the rest of those graduates home -- infected with our values!

The CPPRC have given high priority to ending this 70 year-old American win-win. Now? The top 10% of Chinese graduates from U.S. universities hurry home to government-subsidized opportunities to get rich! (Can't blame them.) Moreover, while they are here, 350,000 Chinese students are carefully herded, tended, indoctrinated by Confucius Institutes near our universities, encouraged to report on one another, and rewarded for information gathering.

Recent news from NPR: "Seeking to develop its "soft power" abroad, China's Education Ministry funds the Confucius Institutes...(to teach the Chinese language, but also)... to monitor Chinese students abroad and shape international perceptions of China." Senator Ted Cruz attached an amendment last year to the U.S. military spending bill that says a university with a Confucius Institute cannot also receive money from the Defense Department program that pays for Chinese language training. Forced to choose, at least 13 U.S. universities have closed Confucius Institutes in the past year.

Might I recommend a much better silver bullet?  

Require all* undergrads and grad students to take one year of civics. Our civics. With focus on due process, rule of law, and the reasons why individual leaders should matter much less than transparent-accountable error-detecting processes. Heck, a large part of the class could consist of just viewing and discussing great films like "Mr. Smith goes to Washington." Oh, and make the Confucius Institutes register and pay taxes, and accountable to any student they bully.

Even if 99% pretend the courses had no effect on them, their steeped-in knowledge of rule-of-law and accountable authority would be a ticking time bomb to the CPPRC. They will know that they need to plan for a withering away - either ours or Marx's. And if the politburo guys do that loosening soon enough... gracefully enough... they may even be well-remembered by the free generations to come.

== A lesson from kindergarten -- Remember your friends ==

"Chinese strategist Yan Xuetong’s book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power argues that all countries must recognize and accept China's centrality to the world as the Middle Kingdom," writes Yuriko Koike in The World Post.  

In fact, that way of thinking has been China’s curse, ever since Emperor Chi’in made the transcendent mistake of uniting the Four Nations. Until that moment, those four kingdoms had been profoundly innovative and progressive… the way a divided Europe rocketed ahead in the 15^th through 19^thcenturies. The sense of centrality -- Chung Kuo or "central kingdom" -- made things more "peaceful" though no more safe for commonfolk. It also led to one calamitous error, after another. Above all, a preening attitude that drove away every potential friend.

Don't believe it? Here is the ultimate question to ask our friends -- and I do mean to call them by that word – in the Central Kingdom, in order to help talk them down from a rising nationalist boil. This is another of my... name one example challenges.

Across the subsequent four millennia, name for us one example of a great and loyal foreign friend that China ever had? 

There was one. Only one, across 4000 years of civilization. Just one powerful friend who ever came - voluntarily and repeatedly (though not always vigorously or intelligently or with complete purity of motives) - to China’s aid, in times of need.  Not as a subject or satrapy, but just as a friend, seeking nothing in return. 

I’ll bet you’ll never guess who it was.

Oh, that one friend's record is far from perfect! But it is pretty good, by the standards of human history. And it truly was, across all those countless centuries, China’s only friend.

And funny thing… now that I think on it… the same exact thing can be said of Japan. 

Just.. one… true (though not always consistent)… friend.

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* Yes, including especially U.S. born students!