Today marks the anniversary of some of the most momentous events of the 20th Century.
Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway during which, as Richard Fernandez points out, in a matter of five minutes Japan went from being master of the Pacific to being doomed.
Today also marks the anniversary of the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre.
1989 was one of the pivotal years in history with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It marked the beginning of the American conceit of the “End of History”, that with the collapse of communism, and soon of the Soviet Union, History (with a capital H) had reached its end point. Democracy, liberalism, and capitalism had triumphed and soon all of the problems of the world would go away as countries and their leaders decided that they would rather be rich and buy each other a Coke.
Tienanmen Square and its aftermath should have disabused us of that notion. The protests that Spring in Beijing were an early sign of a year of color revolutions, of popular revolts. However, unlike later that year in Europe, the Chinese leadership did not turn turtle and collapse in the face of demonstrations, but rather deployed tanks and massacred the protesters. It showed that the critical element of 1989 was not popular revolution so much as the willingness to crush it.
History was still very much on as China showed that it was quite possible to become rich, as well as to have a Coke, and still deny basic human freedoms.
The ugly truth is that violence works. Sure, one day the CCP will fall, everything does, but it didn’t go the way of its European counterparts, and instead got a new lease on life.
The West looked away. After the initial condemnations, it allowed China to ascend to the WTO, where like one of its fishing fleets on the world oceans, it strip-mined the world economy through currency manipulation, an export-driven economy, and wide-scale theft of intellectual property.
It used that newfound wealth to develop, not freedom, but rather an oppressive police state where it is illegal to even mention the Tienanmen Square massacre.
The West accepted all of that because it was lured in, not only by the promise of wealth, but by the dream of becoming China for a day.
Shame on us. Let us at least remember that.
I don’t believe that in the large sense we ever dreamed of “becoming China” but I remember the argument at the time: that with economic prosperity they will become democratic.
In the smaller sense I am sure there are a few of our “EWlite” who which they could control us as the Chinese do (with help from American technology”.
I had a nice tri[p last week that included the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda (I am in the process of writing a blog piece for CB) and they dealt a lot with Nixon’s visit to China.
What a year 1989 was. The DDR was the most oppressive of the Communist states – at least in Europe, and it fell without a shot being fired.
Our political leadership, whether Republican or Democrat, doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that China is our only serious geopolitical enemy. They have blindly and stupidly turned Russia, our strongest potential ally against Chinese aggression, into a bitter enemy. With the aid of the legacy media they have insured that most people in the West are blind to the strong arguments justifying her actions in Ukraine. As for the rest of the world, criminal imbeciles like Lindsey Graham are allowed to run rampant, to all appearances doing his best to insure that the US alienates other potential allies. Meanwhile, the Europeans, hopelessly mired in a 1940’s time warp and imagining everything that happens in the world as them versus the Nazis, continue to pursue a policy that is, if possible, even more stupid than ours. In short, forget about any effective opposition to China. We have succeeded in aligning much of the world on their side, and against us.
There was a brief instance of democracy under sun yatsen and then it descended to warlords we would call them oligarchs probably pla regional commanders with some trying to be chiang (head dog)
China is not the real enemy — the real enemy is our “democratic” leaders. And ourselves!
China was prepared to give the West cheaper goods — and we all wanted cheaper goods. If we had “elected” smart leaders, they would have advised us that there would be a long-term cost associated with those cheaper goods. We would eventually find ourselves without a steel industry, a shipbuilding industry, an electrical equipment manufacturing industry … even ultimately a defense industry. We would have effectively disarmed ourselves and prostrated ourselves before the Chinese — all for the short-term benefit of some cheaper goods.
But we “elected” those “democratic leaders”. We brought the problems upon ourselves — and now we are finding out how expensive cheaper goods can be.
Im convinced that they follow pillsburys one hundred year war to recover what they lost in the colonial period
I don’t think the initial driver for expanding trade w China was the offshoring of manufacturing so much as it was the idea that we were going to sell a lot to China…many people were thinking, let’s see, a billion Chinese people, if I can sell my product to only X percent of them, that’s Y dollars…wow!
But the Chinese turned out to be better at manufacturing that just about anybody had expected, and at the same time, the dominant opinion in academia and consulting was “We know how to design stuff, we don’t need to make it, that’s unworthy of an advanced nation.” The wage rate differential was huge, which mattered a lot in a low-tariff environment, at the same time, regulatory constraints in the US were becoming more and more constraining.
Now we are hearing that even though Chinese wage rates have gone up a lot, they have a huge advantage in skills and in their local supply chain (network effect), so we *can’t* compete with them, except maybe in a few selected defense-critical areas.
David F: “… so we *can’t* compete with them [China], except maybe in a few selected defense-critical areas.”
This creates a problem for so-called “Free Traders”. Every true “Free Trader” knows that equilibrium is reached when trade balances. The normal route for that would be for the exchange rate of the dollar to collapse, making those cheap, efficiently-made Chinese goods as expensive as something made in the US.
In the real (as opposed to theoretical) world, the more likely intermediate case is that China will use the profits from its efficient manufacturing to buy up everything of value in the US. (They have apparently already bought the Congress — not that those CongressScum are worth much). The US will be reduced to a Third World exporter of commodities in exchange for those Chinese manufactured goods.
But nothing lasts forever. It took China over a quarter of a century to surpass the US in manufacturing. After “Our Betters” have collapsed the US economy and the smoke clears, a new generation of Americans will start rebuilding and maybe someday will have to fight a second War of Independence. As they rebuild, there will be precious few jobs for lawyers and bureaucrats.
There are problems with the “focus only on the defense-critical areas”…the first one being that there is heavy overlap between the supply chains for defense items and civil items. The second is skills overlap: a welder or toolmaker who has learned his skills in civilian work is pretty transferrable to defense work. And the third is that, as @josephflaherty remarked the other day, “One of the reasons the “reshoring, but for critical industries only” rationale fails is that the next big, globally destabilizing technology starts out looking like a toy”…to which I added “Absolutely. Consider the importance of computer gaming in the building of Nvidia.
David – someone said something in re: China that stuck with me. That China is a replicative society and we are an innovative society. Explains their wholesale spying and intellectual property theft.
One of the (many) advantages of getting older is that you actually have experienced what was the prevailing zeitgeist of a given period, to absorb what the consensus was at the time, as opposed to some later historian trying to put the pieces back together.
We have as the public consensus in our elite circles since…. the early 20th Century – that there is a History, with a capital H. In true Hegelian fashion it moves in a certain direction toward a certain outcome.
Think back to the rise of Progressivism in this country in the early 20th Century which introduced the concept of “historicism” into the American intellectual mainstream. That there are no enduring ideas, only ideas that are correct for that particular time; life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was great for 1776 but we’re smarter now. How do we know we’re smarter? Because we have developed the ideas that prove it.
The visceral reaction against Trump is due in large part to this, he wasn’t supposed to happen. The arc of history pointed toward the decline of nationalism toward mangerialism and open borders, The revolt against that future was crushed during the Tea Party. Trump was the person History said could no longer win. Trump’47 is an existential crisis.
So it wasn’t just the sense of American triumphalism that saw the end of the Cold War as the End of History, but a prior wholescale adoption of that Hegelian view of (H)istory. Obama’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” or more pertinaciously George W. Bush’s commitment in his Second Inaugural to use the might of the US to promote freedom and democracy which both ratified past action and legitimated future ones to push Western liberal values to places such as the Hindu Kush.
In that spirit the Pride Flag flying over the US Embassy in Kabul in 2021 makes perfect sense both from a historicist and Hegelian perspective. I should also add that if you believe History exists, then you feel little compunction in leaving past ideals behind. 1776 is so 249 years ago. What was the Biden regency about except the culmination of a Hegelian project?
It’s not just the End of History leading to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s the conceit of the past 80 years – since the dawn of the nuclear age – that great power war is impossible. That the enthno-nation state was consigned to the dustbin, what is the EU after all but a Hegelian project following the arc of history? The Maastricht Treaty can be seen as the end result of the century of European civil wars, WW I and WW II.
The Internet, capitalism, and the unquenchable thirst for liberty would make tyranny impossible. If only the CCP had understood those truths, understood History the way we did then we would have realized that Tienanmen Square was a mistake. Oops.
I could go, but the End of History in this country was a fiction, an almost inevitable result of the century-long introduction of Hegelian thinking that served as a repudiation of the lessons of human history and experience. That geography, culture, and societies matter. That despite what Gunnery Sergeant Hartman might say, inside of every foreigner is not an American fighting to get out. That the fight against tyranny is perpetual.
Someone keeping those lessons, bitterly learned through the years before 1989, would have looked upon post-Tiannamen with trepidation. A murderous elite that proved it would kill in large numbers to keep power. That saw an expanding “private sector” as merely a tool of the state that provided it with resources and influence. That was very determined through its digital Great Wall of China to stop foreign contagion. That saw the world very differently than us. A country that was very much still living in the realm of hard-won experience.
We laughed at them because according to Tommy Friedman’s theory regarding McDonald’s and international relations the arc of History stated that economic development and global interconnectedness made war was less likely. Information wants to be free. Everyone wants to sing “Imagine” and buy the world a Coke.
Remember Obama’s quip to Romney during the 2012 debate, “the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back.” Yak that was Barry being Barry but everyone knew what he meant. It might have been about Russia…. but still.
Yeah
Had we kept all of that in mind back in 1989 or 1991, perhaps we would not have so much hubris and be in a better place. In regard to China today.
Bill B. :“That China is a replicative society and we are an innovative society.”
What is the use of being an innovative society if one cannot manufacture the innovative goods one invents? Designing chips is great! But absolutely useless if the designs have to be sent to Taiwan or China to be manufactured.
Looking back, the US turned the corner around 1970 with the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the explosion in regulation. For over half a century, the US has been bleeding technical capacities. We have more expensive lawyers and bureaucrats than any country needs, and have become something dangerously close to a Cargo Cult economy dependent on imports. It was not China which did this — we did this to ourselves. Now we have to suffer the consequences.
Can’t disagree with anything you said Gavin
Bill Brandt…remember that the US did a certain amount of intellectual property theft back in the day. The original US textile industry was based on British designs that Samuel Slater (‘Slater the Traitor’, some called him in the UK) memorized and brought to America to build his mill in Pawtucket. Copyright laws were flagrantly ignored, to the great unhappiness of authors such as Charles Dickens.
The trouble with making a living from IP is that once your “idea” is out there, you are completely dependent on your ability to collect. An individual with a really good idea immediately must square off against others with deep pockets and an endless supply of lawyers. There’s a reason why there are so few stories of “lone inventors” prevailing, not many live long enough to even get to court.
The light bulb that Thomas Edison “invented” (spoiler: he wasn’t the first in any respect) was miles and miles from a commercially viable product. Most especially; how to power them? How many electric light bulbs would have been sold if the user had to haul heavy, expensive batteries to a charger every few days? Or, had to maintain a small steam engine and dynamo in the basement? What Edison built was what we now call the whole ecosystem, working out all the details of generation, distribution, installation and even billing that made electric light commercially viable.
The Wrights are a prime counter example. At the exact instant where it was crucial to demonstrate progress toward a practical device, the Wrights allowed themselves to be sidetracked trying to develop an engine. This when IC engine development was barely beyond aircraft. They went quiet for five years, apparently expecting the rest of the world to sit by, patiently waiting for them to unveil their further progress. The world didn’t. When they next looked up, they had lost any sort of control over their invention. What was even worse was that Glen Curtis took their discovery that the way to steer an airplane was by rolling the wings instead of turning a rudder and replaced the Wrights complicated and limited system of wing warping with his much simpler ailerons. When all the litigation finally settled out, the Wright name came after Curtis. Curtis had started out racing motorcycles which gave him experience with, for the time, compact and high performance engines, the Wrights sent him packing.