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I hope they do retaliate. This nakedly extortive behavior is supremely off-putting, especially when coupled with Trumps victimhood narrative. "Woe is me, empire expansive, everyone abuses us" is turning me into a Chyna simp.
I'm heavily biased, but I believe this direction is not unique. Back when the Russian invasion on Ukraine was fresh, the 'China or US dominance?' question got me baffled looks across the board from a diverse group of friends/acquaintances (context: Poland). Very different attitudes today, with how Ukraine was treated, with Trump blatantly attempting to cannibalize ally industries, with Chynese hedgies bearing great gifts.
So what's your opinion on the South China Sea?
I know pretty much nothing about it. Chinese claims seem like a bit of a stretch. I hope the sea hosts a US naval humiliation.
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I kind of agree. If it was the US vs Russia or the Arab-Islamic world as second major power, I would much rather Europe throw its lot in with America. After all, those are both major expansionist powers who lay claim to large portions of historic Europe.
But in this conflict, I really have no truck with China haters. China is an increasingly civilised place; street spitting is almost entirely eliminated in the tier 1 cities, streets are clean, the food is good, infrastructure and most services work (reasonably well, given it’s still much poorer than most of the West). China doesn’t seek to rule Europe, Chinese like visiting Paris and buying their little Chanel bags and taking pictures in front of Big Ben. Mostly they are nice; they commit very little violent crime. They have a good sense of humor. They are capable of impressive artistic and architectural achievement.
What’s more, while they consider themselves much better than other third worlders, and dislike the Japanese and to a lesser extent Koreans, the Chinese have no significant ethnic hostility towards white people. Every Chinese child learns that the great Karl Marx invented communism. Chinese don’t even bear a significant grudge toward the British for the opium wars, despite the ‘century of humiliation’ rhetoric.
In sum, the Chinese are capable of operating an advanced civilization in which an increasingly large percentage of citizens have a decent quality of life. I don’t wish to be ruled by them, but I don’t think they want to rule me either. By contrast, Trump’s economic policy seems entirely motivated by capriciousness and greed; Americans of all classes are already richer and have higher QOL than almost anyone else (including all but a handful of European nations, Canada and Mexico); America’s issues with crime, ideology, drug abuse, infrastructure, racial unrest and immigration have little to do with trade policy and almost everything to do with domestic political decision-making by domestic elites.
But that’s the thing, it is the US vs Russia. And if Europe wants the US to continue holding off Russia, they have to be semi-hostile towards China in exchange. Objectively Europe doesn’t have any particular reason to be hostile, but if you have friends sometimes you get roped into their weird grudges.
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See, I'm opposed to China dominance- because they're dirty commies. I don't, on a fundamental level, trust them. But it needs to be said that Chinese allies mostly get to do whatever the hell they want, without the Chinese interfering too much in their politics. The same cannot be said for the USA.
I can understand the 'what's so bad about a Chinese century' argument. If they weren't communists, I might even agree.
Can you elaborate? Is your problem their lack of a democratic process, the CCP itself and how they govern their territory by degree, or something else?
Because if you're on the streets in Shenzhen and talk to people, if you deal with the average company there, they're all incredibly capitalist. People work for the best salary they can get, switch companies often, and found startups that buy parts and sell product directly on the open market. The average Chinese city dweller isn't a communist at all.
And if a government allows its people to get to that state - is the government communist in any meaningful way?
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Chinese people are civilized. The Chinese government isn't.
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Trade policy has changed the composition of the domestic elites who make bad political decisions. It's caused (in part) the specialization of the American economy into one of abstract symbol manipulation. Although it turns out that's probably the highest value thing anyone can do, the winners of a symbolic economy create an unmoored society. And the issues you list are all downstream from that: real physical and safety issues have become secondary to the symbol.
I don't think Trump's tariffs are good or will do much to reverse this trend. They are, however, a strong symbolic strike against the ruling elite, which will have unfortunate side effects on the material wellbeing of Americans.
Trump's tariffs are a tax on Americans who consume imported physical goods, and American manufacturers who use imported intermediate inputs. The class who mostly consume expensive real estate and their own sense of moral superiority will be relative winners.
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Could you elaborate more on the economy turning into one of abstract symbol manipulation?
You're talking about investment and the stock market, right - and the relation between unmoored, placeless capital and a lack of care for even the localized business environment?
That's a big part of it, yes. Finance is about abstracting away all the messy realities of the real world into a single self consistent symbol--money--so that humans can accurately act on knowledge of the real world without having to know any of its concrete details. Software is also a big part of it, as MadMonzer points out. And we are best in the world at both of them: there's no reason for us to make a lot of widgets when we can manipulate symbols to create information that's worth 100x as much. Trade policy has enabled us to make this tradeoff, and we do.
You can also frame higher education, law, and media as symbol manipulation industries, though I see their successes as more downstream of the symbolification of the US than a cause of it.
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America's main source of competitive advantage is software*. Making software is literally symbol manipulation.
Arguably America's second-largest source of competitive advantage is logistics, which is real-world-aligned, but doesn't have the mythopoetic status of manufacturing in real-world-aligned culture, and in any case naturally encourages people towards cosmopolitanism and has done since the Age of Sail, if not earlier. (Walmart and Amazon are the leading examples of American excellence in logistics, as well as notoriously harmful to local communities.)
Compared to resource extraction, manufacturing, or even tourism (where the local sense of place is part of what you are selling), software and logistics are about unmoored, placeless economic activity. This is true both of the doing of the thing, and of the type of financial services that finance the doing of the thing - financialisation is not the problem here. When America was a physical-things country, you had community banks which were as embedded in their community as the general store, and which financed farms and factories and such-like, and you had money-centre banks like JP Morgan which financed railroads and shipping.
* America's trillion-dollar companies and their core competencies are:
None of these are going to promote rooted capitalism, and none of them would promote rooted socialism if State-owned either.
It wouldn't be wrong to say that the entire point of logistics is the abstraction away of place.
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According to what standard?
The standard would be, extortion is when you abuse your power to benefit at the others expense. I do understand you can frame almost anything as merely hardball negotiations.
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