The New China Syndrome: American business meets its new master
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&#x27;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&#x27;re now trading with. Surely that&#x27;s a good thing.<p>But let&#x27;s examine this accusation that culture has acquiesced. Gravity&#x27;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&#x27;t really all that surprising. I don&#x27;t see the author writing a big cautionary tale about how Disney stars don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t make political statements or cultural products. And they make this junk primarily for the benefit of shareholders.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s income is another man&#x27;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.<p>The Chinese state, through blunders, and Western regulators, through austerity, magnified unemployment—they&#x27;re both equally stupid. You can&#x27;t blame trade—demand has to come from somewhere, and it seems totally reasonable that demand comes from people outside your national borders. It&#x27;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&#x27;s not obvious how to increase demand while reducing global trade.<p>But the few billions of dollars shareholders miss out on out when the Chinese state strongarms executives? Who gives a shit. The author&#x27;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.<p>I think he gives Google too much credit for not having business in China. Besides funding the author&#x27;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&#x2F;Foxconn employees.<p>Google&#x27;s search engine facilities an absolutely colossal amount of commerce that must employ millions of people indirectly. But so does Baidu. It&#x27;s a Pyrrhic victory for free speech. At the end of the day, Chinese people don&#x27;t need Google. They need rice on a plate.<p>The alternative world, where American &quot;relies&quot; on &quot;itself&quot; for everything, is not one we want to live in. Billions of people—Chinese people, Indian people, the world&#x27;s people—stuck in a much worse poverty because they can&#x27;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&#x27;t born among a lucky few prior to that time, you wouldn&#x27;t want that system. This &quot;Chinese master&quot; worldview is ridiculous.