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> The growing confrontation between the West and China seems to me to boil down to a philosophical problem

It is not West VS China, it is mainly US VS China. EU and other Asian developed economies might disdain China ideologically, but I don't think they have the appetite to break the status quo this eagerly.

And it is nothing philosophical about it. It is geopolitical, and it is human nature. What you are saying are just intellectual seasoning, it may be necessary to intrigue the audience, but not for action.

China is a new world power that competes with US both militarily and economically. Post WWII, US had fought with Soviet/Japan on those fronts separately, but China looks like a combination of both, makes it even more threatening and hard to tolerate.

> but I don't think they have the appetite to break the status quo this eagerly.

Mainly they don't have the strength to break the status quo. Plus they don't want to jeopardise access to such a large market. It's a Faustian bargain they're beginning to regret.

China is going to rise, this cannot and should not be prevented. But allowing them to rise at your own country's expense is folly. America gets this.

Also US can weather itself the best if the status quo is broken, because it is currently on top. Other countries won't be so lucky.

Trump's actions feel dramatic, but mainly on the magnitude and fast aggression. Something is due to happen and the world needs to adapt to that new normal.

Trumps actions seem dramatic because they are largely incoherent with no end goal in mind and based on his personal feelings.

The US would have made far more progress against China if it had remained in the TPP.

So you change the rules in the middle of the game so you don't lose, sounds right if you are the arbiter too

China never obeyed the rules, so the rest of the world has a choice: continue to play by the old rules at a disadvantage to a cheating China, accept the new rules China has been playing by, or isolate China until they start playing by the old rules.

Which rules didn't china obey?

Broadly speaking (for a detailed list see the US Trade Representative's report[1]) they failed to allow access to their markets or respect the rights of foreign companies.

They've shown that a nationalist nation can exploit the globalist system to its own profit, raising doubts about globalism itself and leading to the resurgence of nationalism.

1: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2018-USTR-Report-to-Con...

Promise they made when joining WTO

You should look up WTO statistics sometimes. Who has substantially more complaints from the global trade community [1]? Who imposes the highest number of protectionism policies [2]? Hint: it's not China. There's no reason to believe USTR reporting, or much government reporting when it comes to geopolitics to be unbiased. Especially under this administration. During a tradewar no less. This isn't about obeying the rules. It's about the reigning cheater stacking the deck against an upcoming cheater while pretending their own hands are clean. China's ascension to WTO was inevitable despite US being one of the last hold outs [3]. An emerging great power and the largest exporter responsible for driving substantial global growth should get a say in the rules. That's just common sense. China maybe revisionist but it also has't been in a large shooting war in 40 years, that's a good direction to revise towards.

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user330...

[2] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/pub...

[3] https://thebulwark.com/a-failure-to-adjust/

When one is powerful enough, rules are an advantage. The powerful can now enjoy the well protected benefit of breaking the rules. That's how we can more or less predict who breaks the rules.

Number of complaints is irrelevant without considering the magnitude of the infractions.

Does the US require foreign firms to have local partners? Routinely ignore foreign copyrights? Completely block all foreign information from reaching its people?

>Completely block all foreign information from reaching its people?

There are many studies that shows that racism is still present in US, in police,justice, work place

Now you give me the excuse for the racism then think maybe China may have their own excuses that you will not understand, then maybe think about school shootings tell me the excuses for why those happen ..then think maybe China has some excuses too for other shit.

IMO there are problems that don't have a simple solution, tell em the simple solution for the gun violence or racism in US. Is the same for China or other country, there is a large number of people in that country, they have a different culture, they have different values and you can't change them over night and some US values should probably be not exported.

That's pretty far off topic, but China is at least as racist as the US, arguably far more so.

At least in the US, victims are allowed to publicly protest and seek redress in the courts. Not so in China.

Bringing the freedom to access all the internet and suggesting the the US actions are because Trump cares about that is ... , so let's agree that Trump or US don't started this because of human rights (see Saudi Arabia money accepted with open arms) . It is an political/economic issue and even if you as a person care about the human rights if you claim this is about that you are naive.

My points about racism is not to try to put an equality between the 2 countries, I want to show that there are issues that have no simple solution, you make a lay that from tomorrow all races are equal and it takes a few generations for the racism to completely disappear. As similar you can't have China embrace all Western values over night, it is not possible. it takes generations so you need to be patient.

I did not see your simple solutions for the US or China issues, do you have them? If there are no such solutions what do you want? An invasion or tariffs to bring down the firewall and magically fix the racism in China (while at the same time you have a racist leader)

The US is likely to have fewer infractions, because they make the rules.

Does it matter? US has a different protectionist toolbox, one that is applied more broadly and affects more countries across the world. Chinese JV affects IP heavy western companies disproportionately, companies with the loudest lobbying voices which gives the perception of magnitude. But we don't know the relative severity only broadness of impact, where US protectionism and number of victims is multiples more. Unless you want to believe USTRs 250-600 billion a year estimate, which again that's propaganda at work.

Of course severity matters. Someone who gets a speeding ticket every single day of their life is still less of a criminal than someone who commits armed robbery just once and never breaks another law.

I agree severity is hard to measure, but that's not a reason to ignore severity and compare something that's easy to measure but uninformative.

In the absence of numerical measures of severity, there's room for opinion. My opinion is that the Great Firewall or Chinese IP theft are more severe infractions than tariffs or protected industries.

The big difference between the us and china is the us doesn't require international companies building factories in the us to disclose their technology to required local partner companies here. That's the key problem with China (second would be outright stealing technology and hacking) and this first thing is the easy thing to hold against them (I'm aware this supposedly changed, tesla said they didn't have to do this for their new factory, but lets see if it is true). It's basically indefensible, just like the super low international post rates that Chinese companies have enjoyed until the recent agreement [0]. Of course china doesn't really operate according to international law unless it suits them, and so if you protest unfair treatment in China, your company won't succeed. That was all before the recent kidnapping of book sellers from H.K. (and billionaires). So to sum up my wandering comment, it's hardly surprising that there are less complaints in China, because complaining means the likely end of your chance to operate there.

Was Tibet the last place China invaded, that was more than 50 years ago though. It's true they haven't invaded any places people live, but they are taking over those atolls out in the ocean.

Every country has some protectionism (Canada and their milk farms for example), and everyone wants to help themselves. But the "proper" way to do this is trade off a few protectionistic choices against another countries and shake hands over it. China is of course the emerging great power and the us is handling it poorly at this moment. I advocate for the us to insist China stop doing the stealing by official decree, stop putting "holds"/prisoner-keeping on people at the border. If the us is able to get china to actually be a good citizen in terms of following international law, and we get back to mutually beneficial trade pacts, we'll all be okay and reduce the chance of war. I really think our insane period in the us with a nationalistic stooge will end, and we can back away from the edge of the abyss where we are now.

0. https://www.barrons.com/articles/international-postal-rates-...

>China maybe revisionist but it also has't been in a large shooting war in 40 years, that's a good direction to revise towards.

Indeed it would be, though China hasn't been in a large shooting war since Korea largely because they were incapable of it. But as their military capabilities change, their shooting war track record may too.

They were pretty happy to shoot their own citizens in 1989.

> China never obeyed the rules

did China had a say when the old rules were made?

It's far simpler than that. In order to look good domestically Trump needs a foe, and China conveniently provides that foe. They're a credible threat, they are not his Russian buddies and the US is to a large extent dependent on them.

On top of that I suspect that when the last stone is overturned we will find a bunch of ways in which the US president and his cronies profited from the wild gyrations of the stock market as a result of the trade war.

No matter who's in charge in each moment, the West should try to convince China that it must transition to a political system like ours if they want to keep dealing with us.

Allowing China to maintain its tyrannic regime is extremely dangerous for everybody in the long run.

The change doesn't need to be abrupt and it's possible to make some assurances for people currently in power.

Not that it worked so well with Russia, I know.

The only way such change can be enforced without a war is from inside.

I mean, isn’t that exactly the whole point of sanctions, to make people on the inside to feel the effects and do something about it from within?

That's the theory. The practice is the rulers will use the sanctions to prove to their people that the outside world is mean and evil and their only hope lies in their dear leaders.

"Enforced" is not the word I was looking for. More like showing the ruling class that it's in their own interest to gradually apply some changes. There are many obstacles for such a strategy. But even if there isn't a clear path, there needs to be some factors in place for somebody inside to invent that path. If nothing is ever done, nothing will change.

The other Asian countries were quite willing and ready to join with the US in action against China, eg. the TPP, but Trump seemed to have no interest in enlisting allies in this battle.

Imagine how much faster this trade war would be over if all of China's top trading partners were involved rather than just the US.

The so-called free market game is naturally rigged in favor of those who have more access to capital. And this includes capital of restricted intellectual property, however free one thinks restricting that capital is. However, even with the advantage of capital, a rich country like the US can find reasons, such as national security, to go against the rules. Agricultural subsidies and the military industrial complex go against the free market. Furthermore the US has a history of close relationships with countries which are in theory its philosophical opposite (Romania under Ceausescu, Saudi Arabia, and more recently Myanmar). Philosophical conflict is just an intellectually weak way of making a geopolitical conflict seem less cynical.

It will be quite funny if the US inadvertently makes the traditional market system obsolete by becoming too "sanction happy". Kind of like how they triggered a de-dollarization push...

China already has a crypto Yuan, there is no reason they can't use a Binance style exchange for frictionless worldwide direct investment in their companies.

China: You want to boycott investing in our companies? We'll route around your whole financial system and help make it obsolete. See what happens to the US economy when banks can no longer collect 20% fees on a growing percentage of the world population's transactions.

The West bulldozed its way through the whole world and imposed rules that benefit it.

The issue here is much less cultural that you might think.

China has been weak in the past couple of centuries and was thus on the receiving end. But as they grow stronger the rules will have to change to take them and their interests into account.

This obviously does not mean that we should cave in to everything. It means that they should have an equal say in the rules.

At the moment it's the US fighting China more than the West as a whole. It makes sense because it's US dominance that is under threat. The question is whether the US want to fight a losing battle or work constructively for the long term.

Let us look at the facts from [1]:

- China require companies to transfer all intellectual property to a venture owned 51% by Chinese before getting access to market

- people running joint ventures like clockwork open competing companies cutting western partners out

- China is a developed country that declare themselves as developing to skirt economic and environmental controls

- China has state owned companies that compete with western companies that they regularly subsidize to beat competition

Also on a softer end China is trying to spread its way of ruling their people to the west [2]. How long do you think you’d last under such a system before being “re-educated” like the Muslim Uighur or Confucian Falun Gong?

[1] https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2018-USTR-Report-to-Con... [2] Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641770546/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Da...

Equal say is nice, but I want equal treatment too. (Both when it comes to trading [MFN rules], and when it comes to law, courts, administration. They are extremely far in both regards from healthy/sane.)

All the amazing gain and growth given to us by the free market worths nothing if it fuels oppression, if it raises barriers to entry to markets, if it pushes the whole economy toward monopolies and monopsonies, toward fragile centralization, and toward worse lives for the participants.

And no, it should be more cultural, not less. There are clever and efficient policy tools to manage healthy free markets. Allowing China, the US or anyone to make people forget/ignore these cultural foundations and all the achievements of good policy (as in political cooperation and economic competition; from the forming of the US itself from the individual original states to the contemporary EEA integration such as traditional/geographical origin protection and indication, Schengen border control union, emission quotas, common food and drug inspection standardization, etc.), just because some country is strong would be a folly of the greatest magnitude.

>But as they grow stronger the rules will have to change to take them and their interests into account.

You're asking me to give up QoL/future income/whatever based on what? Their threat of violence? That's ridiculous, threaten them back and follow up on it if necessary.

> The growing confrontation between the West and China seems to me to boil down to a philosophical problem ... Should free markets/societies/cultural entities allow participation by all actors, even those which (in their own spaces) obviously don't play by the rules of the entered market/society culture?

You're missing one of the major points: freedom. The issue is not just weighing the utilitarian pros/cons of allowing diversity of thought. In the U.S. (and generally the west), the ability to think and do what you want is valued as an important individual right that each person is entitled to, regardless of whether it's good or bad for society as whole.

I'm specifically talking about the issue of allowing non-agreeable actors into your own space, or in the case of this article, stock exchanges.

> I'm specifically talking about the issue of allowing non-agreeable actors into your own space

Yes, I get that's the point, but it's consistent with my original point: the right to be disagreeable, whether an outsider or not, is an important freedom that's valued in the U.S., regardless of whether it's a net socioeconomic benefit or loss.

>the ability to think and do what you want is valued as an important individual right that each person is entitled to, regardless of whether it's good or bad for society as whole.

At one point in life I'd have agreed with you. Now I can't agree with this at all. Usually the West wants very specific kinds of freedom; the kinds which are useful for social control. The first amendment may remain in the US as a sort of residual idea from classical liberalism, but it seems not too many people actually want this.

> The first amendment may remain in the US as a sort of residual idea from classical liberalism, but it seems not too many people actually want this.

I'm not sure the first amendment was ever really popular - Nazi's marching down a Jewish neighborhood, hippies burning the American flag, John Adams defending British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre - freedom is often very unpopular. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's not sacred.

What other country from the West has a beef with China?

This is purely US vs China. Leave the rest of us out of your own mess please.

So what's the message, the EU is only interested in combating oppression when there's no money on the table?

Yeah a little bit like the US, supporting Saudi Arabia whatever they do.

Are we pretending that any of this has to do with combatting oppression?

So.. just to be clear. Are you aware of the consequences of economic inequality? You know, the greatly inequal opportunities, the drastic bargaining power difference, etc.

Do you think China is not going to exploit its economic power to achieve political goals?

Are you aware of China's political goals? Do you agree with them?

Just to name a few: censorship, take Taiwan, suppression of self-determination of minorities, gaining more territory in the East China Sea (island building) from its neighbors.

Counter-question: How exactly is the US combating oppression in China? Apart from ruining your own relationship with your 3rd biggest trade partner, that is.

If China abide by WTO rules, environmental protections required by developed countries and had to abide by basic human rights for religious groups the Muslim Uighur, Tibetan Buddhists, Confucian Falun Gong and other groups would be freer [1,2,3,4]. Abiding by these rules would also make it hard to make their social credit system effective in stopping anyone that themselves or with a family member that voice dissent from taking public transit, transacting, getting a job etc [5]

All great gains for the Chinese people.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/worl...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong

[3] https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/tibetan-re-educat...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

China today is a lot more free and open than when Nixon went to China in '72 to play them out against the Soviets.

The real issue is that as China continues to grow economically, its military power grows as well and ultimately the US is no longer the dominant military power in the south china sea. Rhetorics about fair trade, democracy, freedom is just that, rhetorics; international politics is about raw power.

Europe has no military interest in the south china sea. And China does not pose a military threat to us. Therefore we are fine with China's continuous growth as it benifits us economically.

The EU has put forth a picture of itself as a defender of human rights for both EU citizens and global residents.

There are two main streams of human rights policy and action within the European Union. One is to protect the fundamental human rights for EU citizens, and the other is to promote human rights worldwide.

https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/human-rights_en

I don't see how that is compatible with the frequent violations of human rights in China. As an above commenter said: it seems to boil down to money.

Because it is bullshit. The current US administration is pushing issues now that it has ignored in the past. Eventhough in the broad view these issues are improving dramatically. Look at China today compared with how it was two or three decades ago and it will show massive improvements on living standard, environment, human rights, protection of minorities, intectual property rights, rule of law etc.

Environmental? China emit more CO2 than the EU and US combined https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/20...

Human rights? They have started putting Uighurs, Buddhists and Falun Gong into re-education camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong

Two previous points also counter the rule of law point, which is admittedly a western concept.

China is 1.4 B people; why wouldn't it have higher co2 emissions than EU and USA?

Anyways. We can chat about particular data points. But if you look at the broad picture over decades; you really have to be willfully blind to deny massive improvements that have happened.

The claim though was that it had improved on these and other points. And at least on these there seem to be a big and widely published degradation.

Can always talk about data on the other points as well to see what they say.

I don't have a feel for what is BS in the usual rhetoric, but I saw something interesting today - among the measures reportedly being contemplated by the administration are the elimination of "waivers" for Chinese companies that are listed on US stock exchanges without meeting US accounting/auditing standards.

Now, there may be nuance or whatever that I'm not aware of, but that actually sounds quite reasonable on the face of it. Why not require Chinese companies to meet US standards to be listed here? Maybe waivers were a type of corruption, even if well intended?

The EU consistently promotes these ideas in trade agreements (for example simply by requiring equal access to courts, administration, markets to anyone, respect for privacy and consumer rights, health safety and environmental protection). They are alas not backed on a lot of issues by other geopolitical entities.

It's not more free, less deadly though. Back then there was Mao Zedong Thought now we have Xi Jinping Though.

Canada, for one. China continues to imprison random Canadians as retaliation for the arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Vancouver.

Canada does it because of pressure from the US.

The whole Huawei CFO debacle involves them breaking Canadian laws, so I don’t see how it can be simply dismissed as “Canada is just doing the US bidding”.

I haven't found which Canadian law they are accused of breaking. Could you be more specific?

"Meng, 47, was arrested at Vancouver's airport on December 1 at the request of the United States, where she is charged with bank fraud and accused of misleading HSBC Holdings Plc about Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's business in Iran."

The mentioned market access inequality is a problem for every other WTO member too.

I was just reading an article in the South China Morning Post (from a year ago) that was making the case that it is not in fact just the US.

"In recent months, Germany, France, Britain, the European Union, Australia, Japan and Canada have all joined an unprecedented global backlash against Chinese capital, citing national security concerns. Dealmakers now wonder whether this dynamic will run its course or should be taken as a new normal."

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/216397...

It's not the 'West'. It's US America. And to be even more precise: it's GOP-led US America.

People catching a hint of the real power they have is an existential threat to traditional myth structures; not just China's.

I think that you should play by the rules of the playground.

If you think its ok to try and change other peoples rules to suit yourself instead of adampting to the rules of the area you enter then you are simply a bully.

People seem to forget the basic fact that markets are run by greedy psychopaths. And I don't mean this as a hyperbole. Capitalism directly selects for psychopathic behavior because it's a system of Darwinian competition. The system efficiently selects for this behavior. If you want to have capitalism then the only sane approach is heavy government regulation.

Think Anti-Vaxxers

Alternative hypothesis: Trump is bullying China to make himself appear strong to US voters. He has no objective other than that.