Judging by his most recent column in the Washington Post Fareed Zakaria has spent a week in Beijing and returned home having adopted key elements of Beijing’s framing. The column reads less like analysis than like a briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Yes, China’s economy has grown enormously over the past 45 years. Yes, China is producing large numbers of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Much of that dominance has been produced by successively dumping products. Since its joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) China has had more dumping complaints than any other country. It has determinedly protected its large, internal market via import quotas and restrictions and encouraged its industries through export subsidies. To whatever extent being an unscrupulous, ruthless competitor is “taking the long view”, yes, China has taken the long view. While scale, labor costs, and supply chain integration explain part of China’s rise, its systematic use of protected domestic marketsm export subsidization, and dumping have been central.
For another view, consult China’s neighbors. They have a host of complaints from China’s encroachment on their territory to China’s poisoning reefs by dumping cyanide into the ocean. Making sweeping claims of its ownership of the South China Sea, it has occupied much of that sea, even building artificial islands to occupy.
I am not claiming that China is bad while we are good. My claim is that the Chinese authorities are focused unswervingly on China’s near-term benefit. The United States, on the other hand, only episodically pursues its own best interests. For decades we pursued the largely neoliberal “Washington Consensus” in terms of trade policy which was not in our near-term interest. Then President Trump’s tariffs whipsawed in the opposite direction which was also not in our near-term interest. Is the war against Iran in the U. S. best interest? The honest truth is we don’t know.
China’s advantage is not that it takes the ‘long view’ but that it takes a view and sticks to it. The United States alternates between frameworks, often abandoning one before its consequences are fully realized.
China has had no regime change. The party Xi leads is the same party that conducted the Cultural Revolution. An analysis of China’s “long game” that treats this history as irrelevant isn’t just incomplete it’s asking us to evaluate a player’s trustworthiness while ignoring everything we know about how they’ve played before.
The modern CPC is most certainly not the Party that conducted the Cultural Revolution. That was Mao’s party. What governs China today is Deng’s party, which is a reaction against Maoist extremism.
The various complaints of China dumping are based on a refusal to recognize the fundamental superiority of Chinese manufacturing. It is at least one, and more likely two or three generations in advance of the West’s obsolete, and often archaic, manufacturing sectors. China’s heavily automated and highly optimized factories produce products at costs that are a fraction of Western costs. The result is strong deflationary pressures in all manufacturing. This is not the deflation caused by economic depression; it is deflation caused by rapidly increasing efficiencies. The same good deflation happened in the US in the later part of the 19th Century.
Whatever chance the US had of following China’s lead into the new world economy has been wrecked by Trump’s lunatic Zionist policies that are about to destroy the West’s remaining manufacturing sectors.
I’ve already refuted your claim of “heavily automated and highly optimized factories” using CHINESE SOURCES. You choose to ignore that.