Dealing With China, Somehow

CHINA HAS LONG BEEN a force with which to be reckoned, but never so much as now, and the force can only grow, and the cost of reckoning increase. During the communist era, and for centuries before, China, despite its size and potential for economic and military strength, remained essentially isolated from the world, by choice. Considering the world, and its attitude towards and designs on China, it can hardly be blamed. The mysterious kingdom behind walls and water remained for centuries a source of legend, and Europeans who knew little to nothing about Chinese civilization filled in the blanks with rumors, legends, and distortions of epic proportions. The Chinese, it was widely believed, practiced cultish religions of the most esoteric sort, involving gruesome ritual sacrifices, even the consumption of their own offspring. They ate bizarre foods, wore little or no clothing, wore their hair in pony tails or shaved their heads, and spoke an utterly inscrutable language, but only spoke when they chose to reveal some small aspect of their utterly inscrutable minds. Europeans have always been good at filling in blanks. Explorers like Marco Polo who made dents in the walls were regarded as pioneers of the most intrepid caliber, for even daring to make inroads into solving the mystery of China, and to open its resources to the civilized world. The British under Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century made the deepest inroad, when British ingenuity and naval power implemented a diabolical scheme to grow opium in India, then transport and sell it in China, reducing as much of the ancient kingdom as possible to abject drug addiction, thus allowing the English to have their merry economic way in old Cathay. Finally, in sheer greed and frustration, Europe and the United States in 1900 began an unmitigated feeding frenzy, with Japan eventually joining the fun. Outsiders had never wanted anything from China except to exploit it, and this they now began in earnest, dividing up the huge country into zones of economic intercourse, giving each foreign power its very own little fiefdom of exploitation and profit. The United States gave this imperialist gluttony an innocuous, palatable sounding name: the "Open Door policy". Americans have a special knack for renaming their own barbaric behavior to sound pleasant and helpful to others. Now, however, things have changed. This time China is coming out of its self imposed shell of its own accord, seeing missed opportunities for greatly enhanced prosperity, opportunities to elevate its billions of impoverished masses to the middle class through participation in global commerce. State controlled communism has been supplanted by state controlled capitalism, mercantilism in modern guise. The industrialized world is, as always, more than happy to accommodate, but the old goals of exploitation has never been abandoned. And that is precisely what motivates American policy towards china, economic and military, then and now, from Roosevelt the first through Obama and now Trump; the unbridled intent to exploit. Only this time, its different. This time, The United States is as dependent on China, if not more so, than China is on America. Financing its staggering and ever growing national debt, the United States has sold over a trillion dollars of government bonds in China, whose purchasers are perfectly willing to hold the debt and simply wait, for the time being, as the value of the investment grows, and United States dependence on China grows. American billionaires and multi-billion dollar corporations rely on Chinese labor for cheap consumer goods for importation back to the states, to be sold to a consumer public which eagerly laps them up, and begins to take low priced Chinese goods for granted. A huge percentage of American manufactured exports go to Chinese markets. The American arrogance of believing that it can enact tariffs on Chinese products to gain better trade concessions is typically misguided, intended not to gain fair and equal trade arrangements, but, as always, to exploit. This time, the United Stats had better deal with China very, very carefully. This time, America has a tiger by the tail.