
The New China Syndrome: American business meets its new master - pron
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/11/the-new-china-syndrome/?single=1
======
chillacy
> When the United States wielded power over corporations in the postwar era,
> our overarching goal was — with some notable exceptions — stability, peace,
> and prosperity. When China wields its power over foreign corporations, the
> ultimate goal is — always — command and control.

That's some narrow-minded thinking. Two different words for the same thing.
I'm sure the south american governments who were dismantled in the cold war
era by the CIA would see the actions as "command and control" as opposed to
peace and stability. Likewise, the chinese government is going to serve the
interests of itself.

~~~
vinceguidry
South America has a long tradition of interchangeable strongman governments,
none of whom had any real interest in advancing the needs of citizens. Plenty
of populist autocrats that paid lip service to social advancement, very little
actual public service. It's understandable that the US would get a little
jaded regarding which regimes to back.

I can easily see how a CIA official, tasked with determining how to best
advance US interests in the region, but otherwise having a good bit of
autonomy, would come to the conclusion that whichever regime was most amenable
to the American way of doing things would also be the best steward of the
public interest.

It's not like they had a bunch of upstanding, self-sacrificing public servants
to choose from, and they deliberately chose the wannabe gangbangers to
support. And Latin Americans themselves weren't much help either, often
eagerly buying into the cults of personality that the strongmen built up.
Hence the public fascination with thugs like Che and Escobar.

I think you'd find that there's a real, discernible difference between Chinese
strong-arming and American interventionism, on both ideological and practical
levels.

~~~
dragonbonheur
I'm sure you can find an equally great excuse for the reasons the CIA taught
Pinochet's cronies how to torture people by putting one electrode to their
gums and attaching another electrode to their genitals and passing several
amperes through their bodies.

Or maybe you have a great justification for why they taught others how to hook
up metal spring beds to the electric grid with the aim of getting sincere
confessions and apologies out of people.

I'm equally sure the tens of thousands people that were "disappeared" by the
regimes your glorious and righteous CIA sponsored really look forward to your
justifications.

~~~
adventured
The CIA doesn't run nations and they didn't put Pinochet into power. You're
drastically inflating their power over the world. The CIA are opportunists.
You might start by applying responsibility to the countries in question for
the actions of their own governments, and their own citizens who did the
torturing and disappearing - while _simultaneously_ not ignoring any terrible
things the CIA has done. Trying to proclaim the CIA is responsible for
everything is just silly, they're a bit player.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Really?

Allende must be very impressed at how wise, educated and enlightened you are.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Chile)

[http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/20000919/](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/20000919/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_FUBELT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_FUBELT)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor)

I'd say the CIA is the prime reason we got Al Quaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and all
the other shitty orgs that the Great and Glorious United states of America is
so scared of these days.

Keep building bro.

~~~
dizzyviolet
I think you're proving his point though.

If they were _that_ powerful, they'd just hit the "Turn off Daesh and Al
Qaeda" switches at the controls, wouldn't you think?

It isn't as simple as you're making it. The CIA has been successful and _very
not successful_ in its history.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Hurricanes (to put it in US terms) are powerful. But they don't have either
off switches or controls. The CIA's influence in the world is just as strong
or to put it in a way that your child-minds would better understand, reckless.

Are you a child, living in a constructed reality, unwilling to look past the
set of beliefs that were erected by politicians, right-wing imperialist media
and corporate empires? Or are you willing to find out, not only for yourself
but also for future generations, how deep those rabbit holes go and how your
democracies are in fact, Banana republics?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions)

~~~
vinceguidry
You need to think a little more critically about the actual mechanics of
regime change and pulling off a coup d'etat.

Also it wouldn't hurt to lose the arrogance.

Running a country is not easy. You need to command loyalty from a group of
people that can safeguard your place in the nation. Not just an army, but also
groups of people who can fund and support that army. It's as true for a tiny
island nation as it is for the USA. European colonialism had outsized effects
on the Caribbean for that reason, way easier to keep a nation of 10,000 under
your thumb than to control millions.

The CIA has resources comparable to a small army, but it must project these
resources thinly across all the countries the US wishes to influence. It can
buy guns and train limited numbers of rebels, but it cannot create a ruling
party where before there was none. It can alter the course of politics in a
nation, but that influence can't come close to actual control unless the
nation is very small.

Once in awhile they got lucky, and their group of trigger-happy idiots
overwhelmed the other group of trigger-happy idiots. It's arguable as to
exactly how much damage this does. Obviously it has a negative effect,
political chaos is generally worse for a people than stability. Try to measure
the effects in aggregate though, and comparing them to what would have
happened otherwise, and it's hard to really tell.

Political upheaval can destroy individual lives, but generally the industries
underneath are left alone, it makes no sense, say, for a rebel group to
destroy farmland, or a factory. Your efforts are much better directed at
military targets, you're going to want that factory to keep making things once
you're in power, being needlessly destructive hurts your interests too.

------
thedogeye
"The turning point came with the triumph of modern libertarianism, with its
sophisticated, Orwellian method of hiding corporate power behind the rhetoric
of individual liberty"

Had me until the part about the "triumph of libertarianism," a system which
has never been tried anywhere.

~~~
pron
Libertarianism was tried in the US during the Gilded Age[1], and failed
spectacularly. Power quickly consolidated in the hands of the (unelected) very
few, and in a form of modern feudalism, much of the population came to live
under the boot of the robber barons and called on the government to save them.
That's how the strong American federal government came to be. The US is one of
the few places where government regulation actually came about to free people
from libertarianism.

Somewhat ironically, Ayn Rand came to the US in the aftermath of the backlash,
not knowing that all of her ideas had been tried and the mess they caused
cleaned up not long prior to her arrival.

[1]: Of course, some would say that the US in the Gilded Age wasn't _really_
libertarian, but it was closer to true libertarianism than anyone has ever
gotten to true communism. So anyone who says libertarianism hasn't failed
because it hasn't been tried must admit the same about communism.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Libertarianism was tried in the US during the Gilded Age_

It's very popular among some people to quote the Gilded Age as an alleged
failure of libertarianism, but they can never seem to pinpoint just exactly
_how_ it was libertarian. Certainly, the climate was economically liberal...
and that was about it. The Gilded Age was about industrialization, not any
political order. There was no one there to "try" anything. I assume China and
Singapore are libertarian, too?

~~~
pron
It is similarly popular among some to paint libertarianism as some lofty ideal
distant from any actual human history so that _post facto_ it can never _have_
been tried so it always holds its promise.

China and Singapore are most certainly not libertarian as they impose very
strong central government regulations, whereas gilded-age America had a small
and weak government, and was almost devoid of regulation (at least de facto;
any de jure regulation could be skirted with bribes). The result was neo-
feudalism, which came as a surprise to no one as feudalism has grown
organically in almost every society with a weak government in human history,
and with similar results -- a handful of people enjoying the product of the
miserable masses.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
There's the whole elephant in the room of _de jure_ segregation and
disenfranchisement that significantly weakened the demand side's ability to
engage in voluntary contracts. That's not some incidental thing to gloss over,
but a clear case of crippling binary intervention.

There were plenty of land grant programs at the time, such as the Homestead
Act. The state, through common law, retained eminent domain and condemnation
of private land for nominally "public" purposes. There were several
immigration restriction acts passed that served as a free trade barrier.

Let's not forget that the railroads which characterized the Gilded Age were
kickstarted by government initiative in the form of the Pacific Railroad Acts,
which ensured land and bond grants.

There were at least a dozen tariff acts passed by the time the Gilded Age was
emerging, and indeed U.S. trade policy was quite protectionist back then. The
U.S. have also been involved in plentiful military interventions, some
overseas, others covered by the Monroe Doctrine, since the earliest days for
economic and hegemonic reasons.

The federal government was weaker, but not as much as often presented. They
tried wholesale embargoes as early as 1807, enacted tariffs, controlled trade
(Commerce Clause and other justifications), intervened militarily frequently,
and remember that the Constitution in general greatly expanded federal power
relative to the prior Articles of Confederation.

As such, I'd think it disingenuous to qualify the Gilded Age as "libertarian".
There wasn't really so much as a _system_ back then, it was a country in an
identity crisis trying to see what worked, and often coming to protectionist
conclusions that would foreshadow what was to come (ironically, tariffs are
much less of a problem in the present than back then). It was economically
liberal... that was it. You can't really characterize it as anything beyond
that, the circumstances were rather unique.

~~~
pron
> There's the whole elephant in the room of de jure segregation and
> disenfranchisement that significantly weakened the demand side's ability to
> engage in voluntary contracts. That's not some incidental thing to gloss
> over, but a clear case of crippling binary intervention.

How is disenfranchisement relevant? And why would legal segregation matter
when blacks were a small part of the population? You could say that the USSR
being autocratic is also not something incidental to gloss over (and I'd argue
a far greater deviation from the ideal). Feudalism has always had "demand-
side" problems, with or without legal roadblocks.

> There were plenty of land grant programs at the time... The federal
> government was weaker, but not as much as often presented...

Sure, but all of it amounted to very little regulation compared to any modern
Western countries.

> You can't really characterize it as anything beyond that, the circumstances
> were rather unique.

True, but again, it was still closer to the libertarian ideals than the USSR
ever was to communism, and it would be at least as equally disingenuous to
conclude that we can't draw any conclusions from that era to libertarianism.
Bear in mind that the Gilded-Age America was only the latest such experiment
in the West. All other (older) examples of weak governments gave rise to
feudalism and similar results.

So while libertarianism later created a well-formed political theory behind
free markets and low regulation, it is a stretch to claim that its practices
have never been tried. If a valid experiment can be nothing short of full
global libertarianism, then it will forever be a beautiful utopia in the minds
of the precious few who still prescribe to that ideal.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
When you have structural barriers around the right to contract, then yes,
that's a practical issue with your libertarian narrative.

 _Sure, but all of it amounted to very little regulation compared to any
modern Western countries._

We actually have an even better example of a contemporary Western nation
achieving great results through economic liberalization: the United Kingdom
repealing the Corn Laws and abandoning mercantilism circa the 1840s. Agrarians
and formerly rural landowners did get shafted in the process of
industrialization (as it tends to occur), but free trade policies were a boon
for everything else.

But there's also the whole problem of just looking at macro-level
"regulations" without taking into account the vastly different social and
technological climate. See below.

 _True, but again, it was still closer to the libertarian ideals than the USSR
ever was to communism_

Smells of a fallacy of composition.

 _it would be at least as equally disingenuous to conclude that we can 't draw
any conclusions from that era to libertarianism_

You can, but it's _very_ limited. The Lucas critique demonstrates that
analyzing historical macrotrends in of itself is useless because of a lack of
policy-invariance. You need good microfoundations for proper modeling. Hence
my assertion that calling the Gilded Age a "libertarian failure" is so
simplifying as to be little but a political provocation.

You're echoing the old Methodenstreit debate all over again.

 _If a valid experiment can be nothing short of full global libertarianism,
then it will forever be a beautiful utopia in the minds of the precious few
who still prescribe to that ideal._

No, it doesn't have to be a "global libertarianism". The problem is again,
you're extracting one component (relative economic liberalism, but still
ignoring barriers to voluntary relations) in _specific_ complex time periods
as a catch-all argument against "libertarianism" even though you clearly do
not have the proper microfoundations of libertarian theory to even make such a
judgment at all.

~~~
pron
> We actually have an even better example

Thing is that libertarianism, like communism, is an extreme ideology. A
liberal economy is great and regulation is great, but they so far seem to work
best when both are applied in moderation. So far, _all_ attempts to
significantly increase one or the other have failed. It is, of course,
possible that they weren't taken far enough, and something happens at a point
more extreme from the ones tried -- a change of trend -- but there it is
reasonable to believe that this is not the case.

> analyzing historical macrotrends in of itself is useless because of a lack
> of policy-invariance

This applies to any ideology, especially the extreme ones. Like I said, it is
in the clear interest of utopians to keep their dreams unrealized. What better
way to do it than to disregard as invalid any form of approximation? This,
too, is something we have seen over and over.

> You're echoing the old Methodenstreit debate all over again.

Historians are careful not to try to predict the future, but sometimes certain
things can strike a familiar chord, especially when utopian ideologies are
concerned.

But let me state my original point more clearly: _Libertarianism has been
tried to a similar extent as any extreme ideology ever has._

Whether you want to take that as "libertarianism, just like most other extreme
ideologies, has never been tried" or as "libertarianism, like other extreme
ideologies, has been approximated and failed" is up to you. Whether you find
this satisfying or not as an objection to the ideology is up to, and it was
not my intention to claim that we can predict the exact outcome of a full
realization of libertarianism based on history. Personally, I don't need to,
because I find libertarianism to be the morally repugnant brainchild born of
pure intentions[1].

> but still ignoring barriers to voluntary relations

Because I studied history in grad school I can tell you with a relatively high
degree of certainty that the greatest barriers to voluntary relations -- or,
rather, the most economically significant barriers -- have rarely been legal
(in fact, the ability of the state to effectively enforce its laws is rather
new, and is far, far more recent than feudalism), but economic. I don't know
if you can extrapolate from that to the future or not (historians are careful
about extrapolation), but so far that has been the case.

It is true that certain groups of people have suffered terribly due to legal
restrictions, but they (naturally) were never a majority. It is the majority
(who are mostly poor or poor-ish) whose freedoms are restricted via economic
means.

[1]: it is an ideology that effectively lets the rich keep all their power,
but takes it away from the poor, whose power is in their numbers and in coming
together to regulate, and thus somehow balance, the power of the rich; I favor
letting anyone use their power equally, like in an anarchy or a social-
democracy; I can accept libertarianism as possibly working well in some
imagined, fresh-born society, a society of spherical cows, if you will, but
not in our real-life society, in our real world

~~~
dragonwriter
> So far, all attempts to significantly increase one or the other have failed.

Actually, there is a very wide range of balances that work and have worked in
the modern developed world, and countries in that group have made fairly big
changes within that range without failing.

There _are_ things outside that proven range, though, and you would be
correcet to say that what hardcore libertarian advocates seem to seek [0]
seems to be among them.

[0] I say "seem to seek" because hardcore libertarians are often much clearer
about what they don't want than what they do, and about dismissing every real
world example that is raised to suggest problems with their approach with the
claim that the problems pointed to are a result not of the relative
libertarianess, but the fact that the government involvement in the example,
however minimal, was still too much.

~~~
pron
> there is a very wide range of balances that work and have worked in the
> modern developed world

Oh, absolutely.

------
bhewes
For most of China's Imperial history they had a tributary system. Which I
think ended in 1912. It is not really surprising to see it come back in a some
form.

~~~
zhte415
A lot of China's tributary system was money / resources flowing from the
center to the outlying areas, to keep them favorable / quell unrest / keep the
center stable. China is very geographically islanded (depending on the
dynasty, the fee to keep disarray at bay depending on the territory occupied;
the many 'great walls' over the centuries basically land-grabs coupled with
payments for compliance).

But this article is about Ford. Ford is an extremely low-key brand in China.
GM is the biggest US brand, but there are far more VWs, Audis and BMWs than
GM. Also more BYDs, who despite a reputation for poor material quality are
making big pushes in buses, conventional hybrid and electric, and other public
transport. BYD will be the name to look out for over the next 15 years.

~~~
bhewes
Interesting, I did see a lot of Geely and Great Wall Motors autos in Ecuador
last time I was there. Thanks for introducing me to BYD.

------
adventured
China is no more the new master today, than Japan was in 1992. The exact same
things were claimed about Japan back then. Comically, the timing was exactly
wrong, just as it is now: this is the end of China's boom, not the beginning.

~~~
josai
Aren't you forgetting the small detail that China is literally ten times the
size of Japan?

Even if your claim is true, and you don't present any evidence to that effect,
the order of magnitude size difference makes it rather a different ball game.

~~~
adventured
No, I take that into account. China is ten times larger in population, but
that doesn't mean they can grow ten times larger economically. There are
limits to both sheer consumption / production within N amount of years in
terms of how fast the global economy can grow, and limits in terms of how many
resources a nation can realistically consume. For China to be ten times
larger, they'd have to figure out how to produce the world's GDP almost twice
over. It's impossible, the global economy in real terms is growing at a few
points per year, China's growth must inherently move _toward_ that line as it
gets larger, just as the US has.

It's not hard to find evidence for China's boom being completely over. The
best estimates on their actual GDP growth, already have them closer to 2-4%
growth, if any growth at all if you go by trade volume / trains / baltic index
/ copper / construction / concrete etc.

Ten years ago they began to shift to massively taking on debt to continue to
fake growth. Countries only do that when their organic growth is completely
exhausted. It's exactly what Japan did when their bubbles began to unravel,
and their money expansion began to implode. When the great recession hit, that
was the end of the temporary consumption binge that drove most of China's
2000-2008 growth. Now they're arguably the most indebted nation in world
history on a GDP ratio basis, and it's still getting worse, while companies
are being artificially floated so banks don't have to own the vast bad loans
outstanding, perfectly repeating what Japan did with zombie corporations.

------
hitekker
I would like to address the theme of "the U.S. is no better than China!" when
it comes to trade.

It is true that both have countries have manipulated and are currently
manipulating levers in greedy self-interests. It is also true that the U.S. is
not perfect. Far from it: I'm sure many Russian commenters have some words
about the western-bred neoliberal experts who preached "Shock Therapy" to
Yeltsin (Spoiler alert: oligarchs).

The difference between China and the US, in my opinion, lies in their
motivations and how it translates into economic action. The West, like other
"enlightened" spheres before it, has had some element of "for the greater
good" guiding its vision. One historical example is that instead of colonizing
Europe after WW2 (like the Soviets did), the US instituted the Marshall Plan.
You can argue that this aid was given in exchange for a degree of suzerainty (
don't bomb NATO! ). Fundamentally, however, those states regained their status
as independent actors and were not seen as extensions of the US.

Security is very much the heart of the matter here, it's the age-old question
of "how much control does the government need over its spheres to feel secure
and therefore strong?". Although not always spoken, a country normally ought
to be as protectionist over its trade as it is weak in that area of trade. In
the U.S., it happened with Japan and Cars as the article points out, and Great
Britain and textiles if one goes back even further.

With this rationale in mind, Xi Jingping insists that China is still
"developing"[1], that China can be excused for so-and-so action to maintain
its economy, even though it wields more power than almost all other
"developing nations" in the same space put together.

What's often overlooked is that it's not just economic (in)securities at play
here. China demands the submission of foreign companies because China is
_politically_ insecure. Consider a related section from the "X Article":

> Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the
> submission or destruction of all competing power. Outside of the Communist
> Party, Russian society was to have no rigidity. There were to be no forms of
> collective human activity or association which would not be dominated by the
> Party. No other force in Russian society was to be permitted to achieve
> vitality or integrity. Only the Party was to have structure. All else was to
> be an amorphous mass. [2]

Although China hasn't been at this totalitarian stage for a long while, the
concept of "amorphousness", that the only "true" political form is the central
power and all else exists in service to it, is one of China's current most
debilitating problems. If you don't have multiple organizations each with
their own sphere of power, how can you express the multifaceted will of your
citizenry (the definition of a functional civil society)? While the Chinese
people have to date built many forms [3], the central government is certain to
come down hard on any actual power of the forms as fast as they develop. [4].

To summarize: China acts with greater force internally because China's leaders
are afraid. Very afraid. First, they don't have the same political mechanisms
for dealing with foreign political influences that the U.S. has. In more
concrete terms: the last time they allowed for other forms, in the same way
the U.S. did and does, came just before their tanks crushed students underfoot
in their nice, government square. History in mind, China's leaders have
continually resorted to harsh action in all spheres to maintain their form,
which they cannot bear to be without.

[1] [http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/25/is-china-still-a-
develop...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/25/is-china-still-a-developing-
country/)

[2] [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-
federation/1...](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-
federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct)

[3] [http://www.economist.com/news/china/21600747-spite-
political...](http://www.economist.com/news/china/21600747-spite-political-
clampdown-flourishing-civil-society-taking-hold-beneath-glacier)

[4] [https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/08/dispatches-china-
tighten...](https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/08/dispatches-china-tightens-
screws-civil-society)

------
doctorpangloss
The anecdotes on corporate and cultural acquiescence to the Chinese state are
not all that convincing. Overall, industrial interdependence and trade is
employing way more people than otherwise, in a strictly macroeconomic sense.
Normatively, it might result in executives in jail, but fewer people
everywhere are starving. Americans aren't killing people all over the world at
the same magnitude that they used to—especially not killing Korean, Japanese
and Vietnamese people, whom they're now trading with. Surely that's a good
thing.

But let's examine this accusation that culture has acquiesced. Gravity's
trading the real Chinese antagonist for the fake Russian one is pretty
damning, but has the author ever watched an episode of South Park? Trey and
Matt do not trade in the most friendly opinions. The best point you can make
from an example like Gravity is that mainstream cultural products are
cowardly. But that isn't really all that surprising. I don't see the author
writing a big cautionary tale about how Disney stars don't write enough songs
about climate change and cuts to food stamp programs. That self-censorship
started long ago, way before there was a Chinese market for American media.
Self-censorship and the dumbing down of mainstream media—i.e., endogenous U.S.
state and corporate propaganda—is a way bigger threat to our way of life than
the organization of Chinese markets ever will be.

What about the other corporations, like Walmart, Apple, GM and Rio Tinto, who
got their executives jailed for not accommodating Chinese state demands? I can
also say: so what? These companies make a bunch of physical junk, they don't
make political statements or cultural products. And they make this junk
primarily for the benefit of shareholders.

Asceticism (in its many forms, like lower demand) is a bigger threat to junk
makers than Chinese market controls. Ask Paul Krugman: A slump in global
demand put way more American workers on the street than a free trade deal ever
has. Germany's savers and domination of the currency union puts way more
people on the street than reckless borrowing in a small country like Greece
ever has. One man's income is another man's expense. The system by which that
exchange happens is sort of irrelevant, depending on where you normatively
value people like shareholders in the grand scheme of things.

The Chinese state, through blunders, and Western regulators, through
austerity, magnified unemployment—they're both equally stupid. You can't blame
trade—demand has to come from somewhere, and it seems totally reasonable that
demand comes from people outside your national borders. It's something that
the Soviet Union never figured out but the Chinese government did. Demand is a
more fundamental economy property than the author admits, and it's not obvious
how to increase demand while reducing global trade.

But the few billions of dollars shareholders miss out on out when the Chinese
state strongarms executives? Who gives a shit. The author's blaming the very
industrial interdependence that in a macroeconomic sense is keeping millions
of people employed, while at the same time kvetching about some bad deals some
companies got sometimes.

I think he gives Google too much credit for not having business in China.
Besides funding the author's think tank, whom exactly are they employing?
Which millions of factory workers? At least the junk makers are directly
putting money into the pockets of many millions of Walmart and Apple/Foxconn
employees.

Google's search engine facilities an absolutely colossal amount of commerce
that must employ millions of people indirectly. But so does Baidu. It's a
Pyrrhic victory for free speech. At the end of the day, Chinese people don't
need Google. They need rice on a plate.

The alternative world, where American "relies" on "itself" for everything, is
not one we want to live in. Billions of people—Chinese people, Indian people,
the world's people—stuck in a much worse poverty because they can't make
something Americans can buy. The subsequent wars due to poverty. The
nationalism and jingoism a closed-trade policy breeds, and the consequences
like institutionalized racism, colonization and vindictive foreign policy.
That was reality up until the 1970s, just when global economic liberalization
started to reach billions of people. If you weren't born among a lucky few
prior to that time, you wouldn't want that system. This "Chinese master"
worldview is ridiculous.

~~~
danielrhodes
Perhaps you have missed the point of the article? It is not arguing that there
haven't been great benefits to trade, nor is it arguing for strong
protectionism.

Instead it is arguing that the strategy of easing up trade rules so US corps
could go into China, which it was thought would ultimately tame China into
becoming a more free and open society, has backfired both figuratively and
literally (as was shown with US entertainment). China is now exerting
political and cultural control over the US via its corporations, which at
least from the perspective of the US, is not a desirable outcome.

You can argue that lots of jobs and economic prosperity has been created and
this is a fair trade for some independence lost, but most of the benefits have
gone to China rather than the US.

~~~
fspeech
It seems like a simple case of Newton's third law. You can push a small
economy around, but it would be naive to believe that you can push against a
larger economy without experiencing a reaction.

------
known
Unlike in USA, Capex and Opex is low in China;

------
danharaj
> When the United States wielded power over corporations in the postwar era,
> our overarching goal was — with some notable exceptions — stability, peace,
> and prosperity. When China wields its power over foreign corporations, the
> ultimate goal is — always — command and control.

What a load of propagandistic garbage. Stability, peace, and prosperity for
everyone the US government liked at the terrible, terrible expense of everyone
else. It's insulting to my sensibilities. I honestly cannot figure out where
to start in dismantling this pile of garbage.

How about all of the coups sponsored by the United States to remove threats to
the hegemony of U.S. corporations? It's a fun exercise to count them.

~~~
adventured
> How about all of the coups sponsored by the United States to remove threats
> to the hegemony of U.S. corporations? It's a fun exercise to count them.

Ok, count them for me. Are you going to say Vietnam? That was France asking
the US to get involved to save its colonial possession. Are you going to say
Iran? That was the UK asking the US to get involved.

Turns out it's an extraordinarily short list.

~~~
user_0001
You are correct that global political manoeuvring is rarely a straight forward
case of just one country involved. Countries come together when it suits them
and oppose each other just as readily.

The US does sometimes come under unfair criticism for being the cause of all
evil, when the reality is a lot more nuanced, but when you are sitting on top
the pile, everyone is gunning for you.

However, as the parent comment pointed out, the US has been "involved" in many
coups / destabilising existing governments. Do you think the US would help out
in French / British coups if it wasn't in their interest?

