All of Our Bets on China Have Been Wrong | Hacker News Reader

All of Our Bets on China Have Been Wrong

nakedcapitalism.com

34 pointshoward9414 comments

I was really impressed by an article [0] linked by the original, which details the philosophy of Robert Lighthizer, the current US Trade Representative. I had little to no knowledge of of history or motivation of the current tariffs, and had mostly viewed the US administration's approach to the WTO and multilateralism as foolhardy at best.

I am more and more becoming convinced that West v China is going to be the single most impactful issue of this decade, if not century. One would never be able to glean that based on what the western media reports on, however. I don't know if Lighthizerism is the best approach, but it is at least a different approach. I'm not sure if I agree with the article's apocalyptic ending tone, though.

[0] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/06/you-live-in-robert-ligh...

> One would never be able to glean that based on what the western media reports on, however.

yeah. i feel this is an interesting point.

the article says that within China there are mainly disincentives to argue with or reason against the leader (Xi)

OTOH, Western media see mainly incentives to argue with and reason against the leader (Trump).

i daresay sometimes the Western media seem like theologians who already have the right answer (Trump and all of his statements and actions are by definition ignorant/wrong/bad) and have tasked themselves with constructing a path, a narrative, which supports only that answer.

and, of course, Trump himself acts a lot like a medieval theologian too, but one who belongs to a different religion than the media. also, he often commits heresy and even changes religion altogether. at unpredictable times.

so we're all rather confused about what's going on now and about what the future holds. interesting times.

I would argue the earlier mindset (i.e. China engagement) was not based solely on pie-in-the-sky optimism, but had a couple of other factors -

1) The belief that China would eventually succeed with or without us, so it is to our benefit for them to succeed with us.

2) The belief that engaging the Soviets hastened the end of the [First?] Cold War, so it might also work on the Chinese.

Because we have no control scenario we can't be sure, but engagement probably worked, if for no other reason than to set up a situation where China appears a bit more transparent today than 30 years ago.

The article makes some pretty intense claims but I'm not clear if they are purely hypothetical or closer to real predictions

> This entry was posted in China, Doomsday scenarios,

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