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Why America And China Will Clash

Posted by majestic on January 19, 2010

Gideon Rachman explains in the Financial Times:

Google’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.

The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.

If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America’s only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush firmly believed that free trade and, in particular, the information age would make political change in China irresistible. On a visit to China in 1998, Mr Clinton proclaimed: “In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is essential to the greatness of any nation.” A year later, Mr Bush made a similar point: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy … Trade freely with the Chinese and time is on our side.”

The two presidents were reflecting the conventional wisdom among America’s most influential pundits. Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of best-selling books on globalisation, once proclaimed bluntly: “China’s going to have a free press. Globalisation will drive it.” Robert Wright, one of Mr Clinton’s favourite thinkers, argued that if China chose to block free access to the internet, “the price would be dismal economic failure”.

So far, the facts are refusing to conform to the theory…

[continues in the Financial Times]

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  • ClayBarham

    Bush was wrong! Even in America, with a tradition allowing pebble droppers to be nails sticking up on the boardwalk the bureaucrats want to pound flat, the tradition of individual freedom and elbowroom has been all but rejected. Obama said community interests are more important than are individual interests and people said OK and voted for him. That is the same philosophy of the Chinese, that only community counts, as they direct it, and individual freedom is not wanted. If we cannot win in America, we can never win in China. See Save Pebble Droppers & Prosperity on claysamerica.com.

  • Anarchon414

    The funny thing is that the US is becoming more like China faster than China is becoming more like the US. Torture? check Capitol Punishment for children? check Sending the army to stop protests? check Watching everything you do in the name of “security”? check… and so on. We don't censor the internet AS MUCH as China but we keep records of everything you do online and make them available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies without any probable cause.