Myths and Realities of Ping-Pong Diplomacy | Hacker News Reader

Myths and Realities of Ping-Pong Diplomacy

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21 pointsThevet6 comments

Starting with Nixon, China has been diplomatically genius. Unlike the Soviet Union, they avoided being isolated from the West. As a result, they were able to acquire the needed technological and business expertise from the West. In addition, they figured out how to open the economy enough for it to grow well and avoid the stagnation of the Soviet Union, while at the same time maintaining control by the Communist Party.

Also, another brilliant move was building enough nuclear weapons to serve as an effective deterrent while not building so many that a nuclear arms race is triggered.

And they managed to do this without any major hot wars.

Whether or not you agree with the Chinese government, their diplomacy and foreign policy for the last several decades have been stellar.

It is not as that brilliant. Mao wanted to be the leader of the international communists, he was not happy with Stalin. China was in confrontation with the Soviets. At the same time, China's economy was at the edge of collapsing, so CCP need to be friend with the west. At the time Nixon needed to score a Foreign Police achievement. So it happened.

But, China is really good at screw up the west. China has always being spread the misinformation about the west to Chinese people all the time, even when China and the west was having the best relationship. At the same time, as a deeply corrupted power, the CCP knows how to play with the powerful families in the west. So there are so many people in powerful positions support China / China-West trades, when they clearly know China has being undermining the west interest through trade all the time.

I think it really comes down to the following:

In the 1970s, we needed ally in Asia to backstop our failures in Vietnam, and Nixon going to China was an apt opportunity to take advantage of the so called Sino-Soviet split[0], as Soviet and Chinese relations had been deteriorating since Stalin[1][2].

At the same time, Nixon was facing what would become one of the broader pain points of the 1970s that Nixon had to deal with, which due to both increased domestic spending and the war in Vietnam, the US was entering a situation that was economically becoming increasingly fragile (and culminated with the closing of the "gold window"), to quote A research paper by Scott W. Ohlmacher at the University of Delaware, THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM EVIDENCE FROM THE NIXON TAPES:

>In August 1971, the Nixon administration faced an international monetary

>crisis. The Bretton Woods system, established in 1945, was crumbling. Under the

>Bretton Woods system, the US dollar was pegged to the value of gold at the price of

>$35 [USD] per ounce. Most of the world's other currencies were then subject to fixed

>exchange rates with respect to the dollar. Growing concerns over rising current*

>account...and government deficits in the United States drove

>investors away from the dollar and encouraged purchases of gold. Gold outflows, as

>depicted in Table 3, began in the second quarter of 1970 and continued in earnest until

>the fourth quarter of 1971.

>Nixon was very much aware of the fact that the US dollar was overvalued,

>and as gold outflows continued, it became apparent that the United States would not

>have enough reserves to maintain convertibility.[3]

Given this, Nixon was smart to pursue softening relations with China, opening them up to new markets (which the economy was increasing going to need, which become clear at this point his presidency), between that, and Nixon softening relationships with the Soviets (so called `Détente`[4]) to, what I believe was to largely avoid a very costly arms race, which Ronald Reagan was happy to involve the US a decade later.

Fast forward a bit, and a rapidly White Collar emerging workforce with a strong pro business administration in the 1980s, and you have a recipe of Corporations who want to take advantage of this new trade partner (much of Nixon's and later administrations negotiations came to fruition in the Reagan years) to lessen the cost of production in manufacturing of goods, and saw new market opportunities, in particular for large domestic brands, such as Coca Cola, General Foods, And even AT&T[5].

This calumniated with China joining the WTO in 2001 and a fairly liberal expansion of US trade activity there after (US exports to China increased by 341 percent[6]), again, aligning incentives in such a way that kept these relationships alive.

Only since 2009 and in particularly the mid 2010s did the US - and I think many other countries in the EU - started to take notice of issues with their relationship with China, and the actual affects of all these decades of relentless openness with a country that did not always respond in kind, as we later found that they were stealing industrial secrets, saw increased activity from the Chinese intelligence services, and staunch protectionism[7][8][9][10][11][12], and ongoing human rights abuses[13]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split#Origins

[1]: http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Goh%20Soviet%20Card%20Openi...

[2]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.18...

[3]: https://udspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/4275/Ohlmach...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tente

[5]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18681026100390...

[6]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18681026100390...

[7]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technolo...

[8]: https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/why-chinas-technology-theft-...

[9]: https://ge.usembassy.gov/how-the-chinese-communist-party-ste...

[10]: https://www.csis.org/programs/technology-policy-program/surv...

[11]: https://thediplomat.com/2018/05/why-china-wont-abandon-its-c...

[12]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-companies-feel-unwel...

[13]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/ch...

Actually George W Bush was planning on taking on China aggresively in his first term till his administration was sidelined by 9/11 and they focused on invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and bombings in other countries. In fact they drew up war plans during Obama's first term and argued over the feasibility of attacking China. In the end they decided that the direct kinetic war window had closed and then proceeded the "pivot to Asia" plan of economic warfare on China by blockading it with the new trade pact TPP, and using other countries to box in China. -

George W Bush era

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

---

Obama era

"It was a DOD [Department of Defense] thing, but the White House grabbed it and announced it," says Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Obama's announcement also had the effect of giving the administration's Asia-Pacific pivot "a military hue," he says.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2013/0218/How-U...

Blackmailing and framing must be easy for people who don't care. From there, I guess it's how well you can cultivate an audience for it?

I wish states had left us alone. Some of the much older abuses are "public" like from Montreal, a few are well known and even joked about, the rest continue to rule the media ecosystem over me. Multiple music videos are released under the name "Billie Ellish" depicting forcible injections and it still doesn't get discussed.

Another lesson for us poor and abused.

I am interested in what you're trying to get at here, but I must admit, I am at a complete loss as to what you're trying to make a point about, other than a very general those in society without high visible status still aren't given proper attention, or at least in that ballpark.

Do you mean the US? What exactly do you mean about Montreal?

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