
Can China Be Contained? - IBM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-china-be-contained-1434118534
======
qiqing
This part makes my stomach turn:

 _The West has been in this position before. Optimism about the prospects of
transforming an ancient civilization through engagement, followed by deep
disillusion, has been the pattern ever since early Jesuit missionaries sought
to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Those envoys adopted the gowns of the
Mandarin class, grew long beards and even couched their gospel message in
Confucian terms to make it more palatable. The 17th-century German priest Adam
Schall got as far as becoming the chief astronomer of the Qing dynasty. But he
fell from favor, and the Jesuits were later expelled._

More like disillusioned with "the West." The lesson learned on the other side
(which took a really long time with wars, revolutions, and capitalist reforms
to un-learn) is to not trust 'the West' because they'll try to hook your
citizens on opium while trying to convert you to their religion. And if you
ban opium and deport opium dealers, they'll kidnap your emperor, start a war,
and burn/loot your ancient civilization.

What the author of the article seems to forget is that there are elderly
people alive today who lived through that. My grandfather was sold into
indentured servitude because of his parents' opium habit.

Moreover, for a nation with China's current levels of import/export and the
rate at which cargo ships get attacked by pirates (as they go around Somalia
to reach the Mediterranean), what's wrong with building up a navy? That's
reducing dependence on local infrastructure and has got nothing to do with the
U.S.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> what's wrong with building up a navy?

Ask Taiwan and the Philippines how they feel about that.

~~~
ausjke
By the same logic we probably should also ask China about US Navy cruising
close to its territory regularly, i.e. how does China feels about that over
the years. China has indeed never been a country that is offensive, unlike the
west.

China prefers to fighting internally instead historically.

~~~
invaliddata
Unless never does not apply to any history older than about three decades
past, I think Vietnam and India would have serious problems with the
characterization that china has not been (militarily) offensive.

That's not to draw any comparison to the history of the us, but china is
hardly a paragon of restraint, even in the relatively recent past.

------
Animats
Can China be contained? No, because China has finally figured out how to make
their country work.

Russia never worked very well. It didn't work under the tsars, it made some
progress under communism but never caught up, it regressed when the USSR broke
up and Russia tried capitalism (deaths and poverty rose a lot), the oligarch
era didn't help, and it's not doing that great as a semi-dictatorship.
Containing the USSR worked because nobody wanted the USSR in charge.

China, on the other hand, has a system which is moving forward rapidly. It
took them a long time to find something that worked. They had their disasters,
such as the "Great Leap Forward", under Mao. Now, though, the country is doing
a lot of things right. The government is unapologetically authoritarian, but
not stupid. As long as the government can keep the standard of living going
up, it can stay in power.

China's foreign policy is another matter. The government would like to
dominate Asia. Taiwan remains an annoyance, but it's more like Cuba being an
annoyance to the US, not a real problem for China. The countries in the area
spend a lot of time and effort fussing over minor islands, but that's not
likely to lead to a major war.

China is gradually building up a blue-water navy. With the amount of shipping
China has, that makes sense for them. China has a lot of economic interests
outside China now, and wants to be able to protect them. Economic power, not
military power, leads the way.

It all depends on whether China can maintain its growth rate.

~~~
lachesisdecima
I would not say that the USSR did not make a lot of progress. It was
technologically advanced (through it's use of design bureaus) but the inherent
inefficiencies of it's system made it quite impossible to grow after a certain
point (economically speaking).

China is playing it smart. It is waving the proverbial carrot in front of the
faces of poorer countries in Africa etc. They would gladly support the Chinese
coming over to build their infrastructure after being f __*ed over by the
international (i.e. Western) financial institutions. They are running over to
China because it can help them. China can already count on a large base of
support from these countries.

The military is going to be used to further this base of support. Being strong
means that more people would be inclined to deal with you, knowing that you
can accord them protection. The military will play a huge role in increasing
the economic might of China.

This will not happen soon. China still has a long way to go. China needs to
assume greater control of world finance for this to work. Their new
development bank is just firing up. China is still only a major exporter of
cheap goods and electronics.

------
jseliger
The number of actual facts in this article is distressingly small. Paragraphs
like this:

 _Even the U.S. business community, once Beijing’s staunchest advocate in
Washington, has lost some of its enthusiasm for engagement. James McGregor, a
former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now the China
chairman of APCO Worldwide, a business consultancy, recalls helping to
persuade U.S. trade associations to lobby for China’s admission to the World
Trade Organization, which happened in 2001._

make me wince because at any given time you can probably get someone to say
business has lost enthusiasm for "engagement" and someone else to say business
is as engaged as ever.

More importantly, Andrew Browne misses an extremely obvious point: the USSR
had an ideology totally opposed to capitalism, a murderous state machine that
killed _tens of millions_ of its own citizens, and an expansionist mindset
demonstrated by Russia's control of Eastern Europe. China has none of those
things. It is "communist" in name only; to the extent it has an ideology at
its heart it might be called crony capitalism, or something like "material
goods for all!" It would like to invade Taiwan, which is bad, and it is
attempting to claim the South China Sea, which is also bad, but it isn't in
the same order of magnitude as taking over half of Europe and flaming proxy
wars around the world.

That an article like this even makes it into the WSJ is depressing.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> that killed tens of millions of its own citizens

China doesn't have that? It certainly had it.

~~~
rakoo
No, it doesn't _have_ that. The era of Mao and the soviet ideology is long
gone, but the number one priority ("maintain social harmony") made rejecting
communism too expensive. jseliger is right in saying that today's China is
"communist" only by name.

------
ffn
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but from the point of view of
the several hundred Chinese netizens I know, a lot of China's current
international policy decisions are arising out of desperation. For the past
couple of decades, China has experience about 10% growth to its economy per
year which has led to a wealth gap that makes ours look small. While the tide
was rising, I suppose the average Chinese citizen had hope that perhaps he too
can make it big... but with Xi's crack down on corruption (which, for good or
evil, was just how business had worked in China), the economy slowed down
considerably.

With that slow-down, the feeling of hope that the young unmarried men of China
depended on to buoy up their spirits (it needed buoying up because there is
tremendous societal pressure for them to find a good wife, but they outnumber
girls their age by as many as 17 to 1 in certain cities) just vanished,
leaving in its place restlessness and frustration. And if you get a bunch of
young, restless, and frustrated men together, you have the historically tried
and true recipe for destruction. I guess China's leadership, fearing for
government stability, is looking to turn that sentiment outward via war,
rather than take it inward via civil disobedience / revolution.

~~~
curiously
I don't know why you were downvoted but you've hit a lot of points which is
fairly correct to assume.

Given that core East Asian familial, I'm not surprised by the tremendous
societal and materialistic pressure on men of East Asian descent.
Seriously....places like Korea and China men are regarded as just...fucking
money making machine and nothing more.

Downturn of Chinese economy is a serious threat to the stability of the
regime. The Chinese Dream or Zhonguo Meng, is uniting force. Everyone is out
chasing money. It's like a giant ponzi scheme with someone on the other end
always getting fucked while enriching those before it. When the flow of money
stops so do these societal hierarchies built on money and power (easily
purchasable with money in China), and suddenly 500 million middle class
citizens who wants to stay that way become a very big force.

------
danboarder
Meanwhile, in China, a headline reads "Can the U.S. be Contained?". On its
face this rings of ethnocentrism.

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism)

~~~
IBM
It's less ethnocentrism and more realism (the IR theory) and realist scholars
proposing a different tack with how the US deals with China going forward.

------
meira
What would mean "be contained?"

Can US prevents China's influence to grow and keep bombing and destabilizing
governments all around the world while the chinese invest so much in Latin
America, Africa and Asia? I don't think so.

------
ForHackernews
The view from the other side:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/chi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/china-
dream-liu-mingfu-power/394748/)

------
comrade1
It will require a much different strategy than with the Soviets. We don't have
a fundamental political difference in belief with the Chinese. The Chinese are
ultra-capitalists with a technocracy leadership (although the u.s. is more
lead by lawyers than engineers, so maybe there's a conflict there). It's not
even clear if a conflict is necessary.

The Chinese mostly care about resources and economics in China - they are
determined to have a minimum percentage of economic growth in order to
continue pulling their population out of poverty. They have brought something
like 500,000,000 Chinese into the middle class and want to continue doing so,
and this requires economic growth. Their military is mostly run by officers
that are running factories - not even on the side, it's just normal.

Granted, there's friction in places like in the South China Sea. But the real
conflict will be in Africa - there are entire Chinese cities in Africa as they
move engineers and resources to take on large engineering projects and exploit
the vast resources of the area. But the u.s. has seemingly abandoned Africa
(and South America) and instead is putting all of their money into the middle
east and Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran.

I wonder if the u.s. will just concede Africa to the Chinese or if there will
be conflict in the future.

(If you do a google search you'll come across articles about chinese ghost
cities in Africa, but keep in mind that all of these ghost cities, even in
china and mongolia, are eventually filled with chinese)

~~~
powerapple
Thank god there are Chinese cities in Africa. If they follow the western way
and put high paid management there only, there will never be roads. For years
western can always go to Africa and say 'oh, so poor, we can help them' to top
up their compassion credit.

------
curiously
"watching the administration of President Xi Jinping crack down hard on
internal dissent while challenging the U.S. for leadership in Asia"

but that's exactly Xi Jinping's motive. People watching and making their own
conclusions as long as its coming from the citizens. To Chinese public, Xi
looks like a straightshooter, standing up for justice and vying for the
attention of united states.

In reality, the outcome is increased internal support for Xi. The foreign
policy component is a paper tiger. China has no desire or the capability to
enter a military conflict with United States. No other countries can seriously
oppose United States in a conventional warfare, even if they all got together
and decided to attack it.

So China can be contained as long as it rejects democracy and run by a central
power. This won't last long however. We are already seeing the CCP is
faltering. When you live by the gun you die by the gun. Such is power in a
allocated and dictated hierarchy. The challenge for China is to determine at
which point do you introduce a democracy. Too soon or too late will both
divide the country.

~~~
sangnoir
Empires rise and fall. The British empire at its zenith was impressive as well
and was almost unchallenged. Military supremacy follows economic development.

I'm curious how the next 100 years will turn out (I'll experience 60+ of
those, if I'm lucky), considering the following:

\- the shift in American demographics (how long will the slightly right-of-
center politics hold? To which side of the spectrum will it shift?)

\- if China manages to sustain it's growth rate. Superpower status seems
guaranteed at this point

\- how unified will Europe be? what happens to Nato

~~~
tim333
If you believe the 'singularity' stuff, the changes will dwarf those you
mention.

~~~
sangnoir
I do believe in the 'singularity' stuff - but I doubt it will happen within
the next 100 years. I don't think as humans we are ready for it yet socially
or politically (post-scarcity).

We're pretty terrible at distributing resources currently - not because of
logistics mind you, but pure self-interest. that's not going to change
overnight. If we were to upload our consciousness today, we're going to end up
looking more like a balkanized "The Terminator" rather than "The Culture"

------
fown9
China has an authoritarian government that produces pollution that threatens
the entire world, uses the great firewall to attack tech companies in other
countries, prints up to 282% of GDP [1] in order to buy their way into other
countries real estate and companies, ignores human rights and free speech, and
supports dictators in Russia and Africa. If China gets anymore powerful, the
world is doomed. We need to curb commerce with China.

[1]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/11/c...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/11/chinas-
increase-in-debt-is-massive-and-unsustainable/)

~~~
maguirre
I don't know if you realize it or maybe the sarcasm is lost in this medium.
However many of the things you just said about China, with the exception of
being an authoritarian government, could also be said about the US.

~~~
curiously
I would rather have US as an authoritarian government than China. I mean do
you see how China treats it's own people? It's fucking horrid. the 500 mil
Chinese pulled out of poverty line is classic propaganda CCP would love to
have you spewing.

~~~
invaliddata
It seems pretty clear that china has done a better job in raising the overall
circumstances of the poorest of its citizens than many other developing
countries over a similar time span. I'm not just talking about a bunch of
African basket cases either. Look at India; for all the progress they have
made, the poorest of their people live in horrible circumstances, the likes of
which one doesn't find in the same enormous magnitude. I'm sure china could
have done much worse. I know which country I'd rather be destitute in. Now how
much of that is attributable to something like the one child policy where the
have essentially mortgaged their future in exchange for fantastic present
growth? We will find out eventually.

~~~
curiously
India is different because they don't embrace the same communist party
ideology and leadership structure. Unfortunately, the government has no power
because all the money in India is flowing to private anonymous banking
friendly countries and they can't tax it.

