We’re becoming more like China than China is like us

[HARDCORE]

ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson warns that the U.S. is becoming more like China, and only freedom will suffer:

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We’re becoming more like China than China is like us

By Victor Davis Hanson

A little over 40 years ago, Chinese communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

The results of Deng’s revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the second-largest economy on the planet. It lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese into the global middle class.

Deng’s revolution came at a cost of terrible environmental damage, the rampant destruction of local communities and continued political repression. A more efficient economy empowered dictatorship.

Abroad, China systematically violated every tenet of international trade and commerce. It stole copyrights and patents. It ran up huge trade surpluses. It dumped products at below the cost of production to hook international customers. It threatened critics with boycotts, divestments and expulsions. It manipulated its currency. It demanded technology transfers from companies doing business in China. It created a vast espionage network in Western countries to steal technology. And it increasingly bullied and threatened its Asian neighbors.

Such criminality abroad and such repression at home was contextualized and mostly excused by Western nations.

U.S. foreign policy toward China seemed to be based on the belief that the more China modernized and the more affluent its citizens became, the more inevitable Chinese political freedom would be.

Supposedly a free-market China would drop its communist past to become a Westernized democracy such as Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. Once China fully joined the family of successful, law-abiding nations, it would empower Western freedoms and help create a stable international order.

None of that came close to happening.

There was never evidence that China wished to end communism–other than to allow some market reforms designed to strengthen its dictatorial rule and its influence overseas.

If in the past Chinese communism impoverished its own citizens but left the world mostly alone, now it has enriched more than a billion people at home and terrified 6 billion abroad.

Far from a newly rich China becoming Westernized politically, the West and the rest of the world are more likely to become politically repressive like China.

Westerners, who apologize when Islamists kill cartoonists and journalists for supposedly insulting Islam, do not say a word when China puts a million Muslims into re-education camps, bulldozes Islamic cemeteries and shuts down mosques.

Loud human rights lions in Europe turn into kittens when it is a question of Chinese organ harvesting, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the jailing and execution of dissidents.

American environmentalists demand a radical shutdown of the current fossil-fuel-based U.S. economy. They say little about greenhouse gas emissions from China, the biggest polluter in the world by far.

Outspoken NBA athletes and hip Hollywood celebrities damn the Second Amendment, curse their president, and boycott states they find politically incorrect. But they become abject cowards when it comes to China.

Loud college students who disrupt campus speakers and forbid free speech never say a word about the horrendous human rights record of China. They ignore strident Chinese expatriate student supporters on campus.

College deans who weigh in on global morality say nothing about Chinese gulags or crackdowns against Hong Kong.

Why are we becoming more like China than China is like us?

China has the world’s largest consumer market. Corporations get rich outsourcing their factories to take advantage of its cheap labor. They all compete for lucrative markets of television viewers, tech consumers and students.

Western intellectuals always romanticize lethal communists as misguided idealists rather than stone-cold authoritarians. Mao is still a hero to many in the West despite his liquidation of some 50 million people over his violent career.

China does not fool around. Beijing does not just threaten neutrals, rivals and enemies, but uses it economic clout–and no doubt soon its growing military power–to force acquiescence.

An appeasing world is terrified about what a huge military and economic colossus of 1.4 billion people will soon be able to do to its critics.

A nondiverse and abjectly racist China plays the victim card brilliantly. It often claims that as an Asian nation it suffers racial bias from the Western white establishment. China always channels the victimization myth that supposedly oppressed nonwhite peoples cannot themselves be oppressors.

All these reasons and more explain why there wasn’t a single major Western politician who warned the world of a frightening, Chinese-dominated future–one in which the West turned into China rather than China into the West.

The single figure who finally issued such a warning, brash Donald Trump–without prior military or political experience–was as loudly and publicly damned as he was privately and quietly admired for doing so.

[Boats]

The U.S. is becoming like China on trade policy, ex-White House negotiator says
By: Elliot Smith - CNBC 10-18-19
RE: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/18/the-...egotiator.html

KEY POINTS:

* Harry Broadman, former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative under the Bill Clinton administration and chief of staff to George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, told CNBC that the U.S. approach to trade talks with China should be seen through the lens of the president’s “singular focus” on his 2020 re-election campaign.

* Broadman called Trump’s focus on the merchandise bilateral trade deficit an “economically meaningless metric.”

* He said the administration was correct to criticize China for being a member of the WTO while maintaining a prominent state role in its economy, but suggested that Trump was now moving the U.S. toward a “statist economy.”

The U.S. is beginning to resemble China on trade rather than the other way around, according to a former top trade and economic adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The U.S.-China trade war showed some signs of easing last week after Washington and Beijing indicated that phase one of a deal had been agreed. However, doubt was cast over the details on Wednesday after a report that China’s commitment to U.S. agricultural purchases may be less substantial than initially claimed by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Harry Broadman, former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative under the Bill Clinton administration and current partner at the Berkeley Research Group, told CNBC that any White House communications regarding the trade war should be seen through the lens of the president’s “singular focus” on his 2020 re-election campaign, adding that the deal touted by U.S. trade officials was “not much of a deal in any kind of meaningful way.”

“As everyone knows, it does not touch on the threshold issues that the administration has been talking about for two years, which is the structural reforms, the intellectual property protections, subsidies, the state-owned enterprises and the like,” Broadman told CNBC via telephone from Washington on Tuesday.

“It’s not even obvious to me how much of that was even discussed in the conversations and the reason for that, I believe, is the metric that Trump and his lieutenants, the Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Trade Representative, focus on is how to eliminate the merchandise bilateral trade deficit between the two countries.”

Larry Kudlow: There’s a lot of momentum for a US-China trade deal.

Broadman, who also served as chief of staff on George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, suggested that since the Trump campaign’s focus in both 2016 and 2020 is on eliminating the bilateral trade deficit on goods, the administration’s sole focus would be on demonstrating to Trump’s base that the promise been fulfilled. However, he dismissed the merchandise bilateral trade deficit as an “economically meaningless metric.”

Defending the president’s trade policies, White House spokesman Judd Deere told CNBC on Thursday that the president has “used every available tool to level the playing field for American workers and reduce barriers to the export of our goods and services — a promise he made to all Americans and will continue to keep.”

“With a booming economy, low unemployment, and rising wages, it’s clear that the President’s policy of fair and reciprocal trade along with lower taxes and deregulation are working,” Deere added.

‘Statist economy’
China has been a trade adversary for successive U.S. administrations and other major Western powers, who have accused the world’s second-largest economy of flouting World Trade Organization (WTO) rules since it joined the agreement in 2001.

Broadman, who was part of the U.S. team that negotiated with the WTO, said a marked shift had occurred away from a focus on multilateral and plurilateral regional agreements and toward bilateral efforts between individual nations.

“The other issue within that context, particularly in the bilateral context with China, is that these ‘agreements’ with China and the U.S. under the Trump administration, frankly, are making the U.S. look more like China, in the sense that these state-to-state deals on agricultural purchases are not market-driven purchases,” Broadman said.

He added that the Trump administration was correct to criticize China for being a member of the WTO while maintaining a prominent state role in its economy, but suggested that Trump was now “centering his negotiations by employing the U.S. government on the transaction side.”

Both Trump and Xi Jinping face mounting domestic political and economic pressures, with Trump fighting an impeachment inquiry regarding his team’s involvement in Ukraine and Xi facing violent Hong Kong protests and sharply increasing food prices.

Both have refused to acknowledge that the trade war has been detrimental to their respective domestic economies, while remaining reluctant to concede ground and risk denting their popularity back home. The partial deal announced last Friday received a lukewarm reception, with market participants wary of the lack of detail on paper.

“I think if anything, the U.S. is becoming more like China in this context, than the Chinese are becoming like the U.S.,” Broadman said.

“He has said many times that he is a ‘bilateral guy’ and when you get into the world of bilateral and you have a political campaign to run, and you are fixated on the merchandise trade deficit, all of a sudden you’re in a world of a statist economy.”