In a recent column, I expressed the hope that China would win its trade war with the US. One commenter responded as follows:
If you want to understand why Libertarians have lost political traction in recent years, the answer is succinctly expressed in that sentiment. And it doesn’t even make sense. Scott: How can you support in any way the most murderous, totalitarian empire in world history? And that is not hyperbole.
Libertarians ought to be for human liberty everywhere on Planet Earth. Yet apparently, they are for liberty for themselves: and screw Chinese, Hong Kong, Tibetan, Uighur, Taiwanese human beings as long as they–American “Libertarians”–can buy cheap Chinese widgets. It is not a good look; the hypocrisy is obvious to the non-tone deaf.
And never mind that working class Americans know full well the disdain Libertarian Wall Street apologists have for them.
At an emotional level, I understand the frustration with China. Under Mao, China was arguably the most brutal regime in world history, in terms to total damage done (not on a per capita basis.) While Mao is gone, the Chinese Communist Party remains in charge and human rights have deteriorated in recent years. So why trade with a country like that?
The answer is simple. Hundreds of years of human history strongly suggest that trade makes people better, both at the individual level and the national level. Countries that engage in international trade tend to be more peaceful than countries that do not. People in market economies tend to behave better than people in non-market economies. History shows that if you want to bring peace and freedom to the world, trade is one of the best ways of doing so. (Mainland Chinese who travel to Taiwan are surprised by how polite the people are. That’s because the Taiwanese grew up in a market economy.)
Of course history is complicated, and there are many exceptions to this generalization. But when dealing with public policy, we need to consider the outcomes that are the most likely. It’s possible that China will have an evil, expansionist regime in 30 years, despite being rich and open to international trade and investment. But I think that’s exceedingly unlikely. How many such regimes are there in the world today? Outside of oil rich nations there are basically zero, by which I mean zero that are also rich and open to trade and investment. It’s always possible that China will become an exception, but I would not count on it.
Of course the other side has arguments. Human rights have deteriorated under Xi Jinping despite China becoming more prosperous. Yes, but human rights are still several orders of magnitude better than under Mao, when China was a poor, non-market economy. The long run trends are still positive.
Another exception is Europe, which was partially open to trade during the first half of the 20th century, and yet fell into two world wars. Even so, Europe decided to become much more open after WWII, and has become much freer and more peaceful. So even that’s not much of an exception.
When making public policy, you must go with the most likely outcome. While history shows that free market economies are less likely to fight others and oppress their people, there may be a few cases where trade sanctions are appropriate. In my view, that would only occur when you are intentionally trying to make a country poorer. Normally, making a country poorer will make them more violent and repressive. But if you are already fighting them (say Nazi Germany), then trade sanctions will reduce your foes’ ability to wage war. In that case, sanctions are appropriate.
But as of today, we should be rooting for China to become a rich country, because in the long run that’s the only way to preserve world peace. Our current trade war is giving the hardliners in the Chinese government the upper hand, and sidelining the liberals. (Ditto for Iran, where sanctions have also backfired.) That’s exactly the opposite of what my commenter wants to happen. We tried trade sanctions against Japan in the 1930s, and that did not work.
It may feel good to “take a stand” against evil. But the best way to do so is to engage in mutually beneficial trades with the victims of the evil regime, which means helping the oppressed residents of the country you are trading with. If we had been trading with Cuba over the past 60 years, the Castro regime would likely be gone by now. It’s the average people who suffer when you cut off trade, not the leaders.
Now let me answer the commenter’s question:
Scott: How can you support in any way the most murderous, totalitarian empire in world history?
I strongly oppose that regime, and trade with the Chinese people is my method of opposing the regime.
If China wins the trade war, the US will be less likely to launch such foolish actions against other countries.
BTW, I also support the Hong Kong protestors, so I’m certainly no fan of the Chinese government.
READER COMMENTS
John Alcorn
Sep 30 2019 at 12:34pm
Another reason to encourage growth of prosperity in China: Prosperity fosters green preferences and environmental stewardship. Broad international prosperity increases the chances of international cooperation about green-house gases.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 1:09pm
Good point.
Todd Kreider
Oct 1 2019 at 10:54pm
If the emission targets of of the Paris agreement from everyone including the U.S. were kept and extended out another 70 years after 2030, the average global temperature would be decreased by 0.17 degrees Celsius.
There doesn’t need to be an international agreement – just have China and India keep growing.
stoneybatter
Sep 30 2019 at 2:28pm
Good post, but I challenge your choice of examples. You say:
But then one paragraph later you say:
It seems to me that Japan in the 1930s was much more similar to Nazi Germany (militarist, oppressive, nationalist to the point of racist, prone to invading neighbors and committing atrocities) than to today’s China. The US was right to sanction Imperial Japan. China is not nearly as bad as either 1930s Germany or Japan, which is why such sanctions are not appropriate in this case.
Mark Z
Sep 30 2019 at 5:41pm
It was because of the sanctions against Japan – particularly restricting trade in oil – that Japan attacked Dutch Indochina (to get oil there). That’s not to say they wouldn’t have been just as militaristic absent the sanctions, but the sanctions didn’t appear to reduce their aggression.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 5:51pm
See Mark’s reply. Also, would Japan have attacked Pearl Harbor if we had not had trade sanctions?
Having said that, there are certainly good arguments both ways. These are not easy choices.
Of course China today is nothing like Japan in the 1930s. China has no plans to conquer any other country, or at least any other internationally recognized independent country. Taiwan is of course the big question.
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 10:51pm
And the sanctions on Germany in World War I (which were kept in place even after the Armistice) were a major factor in Nazi aggression, as the Nazis and many German people believed that they could easily be cut off from food imports and therefore the only way to ensure an adequate supply of food was to turn Eastern Europe into lebensraum. Fear of starvation is a strong motivator to overlook all kinds of crimes and aggression. It would be good for us not to stir up similar fears of being cut off from needed resources in the Chinese.
Warren Platts
Sep 30 2019 at 2:36pm
Hi Scott, thank you for the thoughtful post, but as you might guess, I respectfully disagree, for two main reasons.
First, you think we should double-down on the engagement strategy; but that strategy has had decades to play out, and has yet to produce results: instead the wealth has merely served to entrench the CCP leadership–a modern police state is very expensive–as well as provide the industrial capacity to beget the world’s largest rearmament since 1930’s Germany. Moreover, their new weapons systems are not designed to defend against Mongol hordes; rather they are specifically designed to counter American weapons systems. One must ask why?
Second, there is a strong theoretical reason to think that free trade will result in war: it creates Thucydides Traps. I am of course referring to Graham Allison’s thesis that whenever a rising power overtakes a ruling hegemon, war is the likely result. According to Allison’s research, he found 20 such historical examples from the last 500 years; war resulted 75% of the time. And the 4 exceptions that prove the rule do not bode well for future China/USA relations: (1) when Spain overtook Portugal, the two cultures, languages, and religion were the same or very similar, and thus they were willing to go along with the Pope’s admonition to play nice; (2) USA overtook UK–again, similar culture and language, both strong democracies and belief in liberal values; (3) Germany rising to be the #1 economy in Europe in the 1990s–I don’t see how that even counts, but again similar cultures and commitment to democratic values.
The 4th case was USSR versus USA. That is the sole example relevant to US-China relations. And war was averted not through engagement, but because of decades of military and geographic containment combined with constant economic pressure designed to retard the growth of the Soviet economy.
Unfortunately, because of the policy of engagement (some would call it a policy of appeasement), we are nearly at an inflection point where a Soviet-style Cold War strategy is no longer possible. Indeed, China could very well turn the tables on us: in the upcoming arms race, it could be China that spends us into the ground; the required military spending to keep up will simply become unsustainable. If history follows the same trajectory, the ensuing economic chaos combined with perhaps a few humiliating military defeats will destroy the reason for being of the United States itself. We will be ones who split into several countries as we retire from the world stage, leaving China as the sole superpower.
I will give Nixon at least some credit. He was at least self-aware enough to realize he may have created a “Frankenstein monster,” as he put it in his memoirs. If, after Tiananmen Square, we had actually followed the short-lived Wolfowitz Doctrine–the strategy to never again let another country get so powerful that they could become peer or better competitors, thus avoiding the Thucydides Trap–history would be very different today. The CCP–if they survived–might be mad as hell at us, but their capability to do much about it would be severely limited.
That is all water under the bridge, however, and now we are faced with a crisis. We no longer have the luxury of another 30 years to trust in the hunch that the engagement strategy will eventually work because the consequences for being wrong are too great. It could happen that the CCP/PLA machine will simply be stronger, more entrenched, and more belligerent than ever, but with an economy twice the size or more of the USA’s. At that point it will be game over. It is unthinkable…
Christophe Biocca
Sep 30 2019 at 3:05pm
Most of the examples would be from an era where war was frequent, so it’s not clear how much signal there is.
More importantly, if your strategy involves keeping China at below US GDP, you’re going to have to do more than just tariffs. At 4 times the population, they’re either already past the (PPP-adjusted) per-capita GDP they’d need or just need to match Croatia’s (Nominal) per-capita GDP.
HistoryRadiation levels would be very different today, or do you have a non-military approach in mind that actually would work?Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 5:57pm
Warren, You said:
“has yet to produce results”
So the greatest improvement in human welfare in all of world history is not “results”. I wonder what counts as results.
The risks you talk about are all very unproven. The gains are real and of overwhelming importance.
I also disagree about Soviet history. They collapsed because their system doesn’t work, not because of US military spending, or “containment”.
At this point China is already the world’s biggest economy. We need to deal with that fact, not pretend it can be changed.
BC
Sep 30 2019 at 8:35pm
“[The Soviet Union] collapsed because their system doesn’t work, not because of US military spending, or ‘containment’.”
Sure, but during the four decades between WW2 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, don’t you think NATO containment kept parts of Central and arguably even Western Europe from suffering the same fate as (Soviet-dominated) Eastern Europe? I’m pretty sure the people of West Berlin were much better off during the Cold War and are much better off today than they would have been had we decided that we should just let the city get absorbed into the rest of East Germany (which surrounded it on all sides).
By the way, it took about 4 decades to win the Cold War. We’ve tried the policy of “engagement” with China for about 30 years, roughly since Tiananmen Square. Do you really believe that within the next 10 years or so we will see the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall: China allows Hong Kongers to choose their own leaders, allows Taiwan to determine its own status, agrees to recognize the South China Sea as international waters, allows Tibet to determine its own status, stops detaining Uighurs in concentration camps? That would just result in a “tie” with the Cold War containment approach.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 10:59pm
BC, You said:
“Sure, but during the four decades between WW2 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, don’t you think NATO containment kept parts of Central and arguably even Western Europe from suffering the same fate as (Soviet-dominated) Eastern Europe? ”
I do, and I supported the policy of containment. But it didn’t fall because it was contained, rather because it was falling behind economically
nobody.really
Oct 2 2019 at 10:38am
Ok, then here’s the money question: Should the West go to the aid of Hong Kong as it went to the aid of West Berlin? Should we be preparing the great “Hong Kong air lift”–in the full knowledge that doing so would provoke the giant nuclear power siting next door?
Mikk Salu
Oct 4 2019 at 3:07am
The Soviet Union collapsed because of nationalism in its periphery and because of a lack of willingness of Soviet leaders to crush it any more. In the past they were ready.
The Soviet Union was put together by brutal force and conquest. (Several nations in the Soviet Union had past experience of sovereignty, as well as Soviet vassal states in Eastern Europe.) After the conquest, they continued: Ukrainian nationalists were starved to death. Poles were shot and/or deported. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, again, shot and/or deported. Hungarians and Czechs were crushed with tanks. Etc, etc.
When I grew up in the Soviet Union, the world was very clear. From kindergarten to schoolclasses it was made obvious. There are two enemies: American imperialism outside and nationalism/bourgeois nationalism inside.
And when leaders in Moscow lost appetite to fought and destroy these nationalist opponents, Soviet Union collapsed.
Mark Z
Sep 30 2019 at 6:18pm
Defining US interests in such a way that they are inherently at odds with those of every other country in the world (such as insisting that we must keep everyone else poorer than us for us to survive) isn’t conducive to long run peace and stability, and it’s also impossible.
If China wants to be a ‘global superpower’ and spend 20% of their GDP on military, fine, let them, it’ll be to their detriment just as playing global hegemony has cost us so much.
In the next few decades, China will be facing a rapidly aging population and a Japan style demographic crisis, and as the people get wealthier and older, they’ll become *less* willing to fight adventurist foreign wars. The notion of an inevitable war with China is so implausible it could only become true if enough people accept it to make it self-fulfilling.
BC
Sep 30 2019 at 8:12pm
“playing global hegemony has cost us so much”
You think it was a mistake to defeat the Soviets and create a world in which, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s people lived under democracy? Interesting.
Just curious, are you old enough to remember the Cold War? I ask because I’m beginning to appreciate now how people that are too young to remember the Soviet threat may not truly realize how fragile, or at least unusual, the post-Cold War relatively free, global world order is.
artifex
Sep 30 2019 at 10:11pm
We did not create that world. Gorbachev created that world. Playing global hegemony did not make a Gorbachev come sooner. Therefore it is no justification for playing global hegemony.
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 10:38pm
How did the defeat of the Soviet Union lead to a majority of the world’s population living under democracy? All of the Soviet Union except the three Baltic countries returned to authoritarian forms of government, and suffered a deep economic crisis to boot (and the Baltic countries got significant support from Europe and eventually joined the EU–would we be so nice to a weakened China?). It’s far from clear that the fall of the Soviet Union was a good thing for the non-Baltic parts of the Soviet Union. Many of the central Asian successor states are even rated as less free than the USSR was by American NGOs.
According to this chart, the percentage of the world’s population living in democracies really started taking off in the 80s, before the collapse of the Soviet Union: https://ourworldindata.org/democracy. The real reasons for this was fast population growth in poor democracies like India (the number of people living in authoritarian regimes only fell by about 10% in the 90s), plus authoritarian regimes from Spain to South Korea attaining strong economic growth, which allowed them to stably transition to democracies. That is the key to a stable transition to democracy. Dictatorships that collapse under pressure almost never make the transition successfully. We should want China to become rich before it becomes a democracy, like Spain or South Korea, not collapse under stagnation like the USSR.
artifex
Sep 30 2019 at 10:54pm
Russia was a big part of the Soviet Union’s population so its becoming freer, which definitely happened, was a significant improvement. We would still have a majority living under democracy without the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but economic freedom is a much better metric than democracy.
artifex
Sep 30 2019 at 10:09pm
“First, you think we should double-down on the engagement strategy; but that strategy has had decades to play out, and has yet to produce results: instead the wealth has merely served to entrench the CCP leadership–a modern police state is very expensive–as well as provide the industrial capacity to beget the world’s largest rearmament since 1930’s Germany.”
Even putting aside the massive reduction in global poverty, which is enough results to justify any strategy, has it entrenched the CPC leadership? Its grip isn’t any more firm than under Mao. It’s more powerful than before because it leads a country that’s richer than before, but so are we. We don’t have a way to make China poorer without making ourselves poorer too.
The sanctions don’t make the CPC less powerful as a proportion of their country’s power. Why do you want to make the CPC less powerful anyway? Because they make the people living in China more miserable than they need to be? That’d be a pretty good reason, but the sanctions are going to make them even more miserable in practice. Wanting to make people living in a country less miserable only justifies measures that reduce their ruling party’s power if the measures don’t make these people even more miserable in other ways.
Or if you’re worried about the CPC invading other countries and making them miserable as well—forcing these countries not to trade with China will impoverish them and make them easier to invade. And not trading with China ourselves will impoverish our own military in the long run.
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 11:05pm
First, engagement contributed to lifting over a billion people out of poverty. That’s certainly a good result. From a utilitarian perspective, just because of the sheer number of people and dire poverty involved, I’d say it probably sums up to more than all the good things the United States has done in its entire history (though of course most of that poverty alleviation is attributable to domestic factors rather than US engagement policy).
Second, the Thucydidies Trap idea is interesting, but the passive formulation “war resulted” is a sleight of hand. War does not merely “result.” Someone has to start it. And the side that starts it is often the existing hegemon that wants to knock down the rising power, not the rising power. If a war between the US and China starts, I think it is much more likely that the US would be the one to start it. Thucydides wrote that nations go to war over interest, honor, and fear. Neither the US nor China has any interest in going to war, as war could quite well mean annihilation of both countries. But both honor and fear point to the US. The US draws much more of its national honor from military accomplishments than China (which has no modern military accomplishments or tradition). And Americans seem to fear Chinese more than the reverse. Perhaps we will avoid the Thucydides trap if we ignore these feelings of honor and fear and let our mutual interest in getting rich and not getting annihilated control.
Thaomas
Oct 1 2019 at 6:51am
Thoughtful, but missing a central point. War on trade with China or not, China will continue to grow more powerful GDP-militarily in relation to the US unless we unshackled our own growth with greater immigration, freer trade, and lower structural deficits, lower cost infrastructure investments, and fewer obstacles to urban density, etc. It’s not even clear that our trade restrictions will hurt China more than they hurt us and so may contribute to the increase in relative economic power.
Engagement may not “work” to produce a more liberal Chinese policy, but I see no downsides in trying.
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2019 at 3:18pm
There is also the question as to whether trade sanctions will do anything to change Chinese behavior toward human rights. The overwhelming analysis of history and empirical data suggest no. Indeed, the current trade war has encouraged Xi to double-down on his efforts.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 5:57pm
I agree.
Warren Platts
Sep 30 2019 at 8:25pm
It is not hard to come up with exceptions to that “rule”, if it is indeed a rule. Apartheid in South Africa is a clear example within my living memory. And no doubt it is the fear of economic sanctions that has so far prevented the PLA from more brutally cracking down on the Hong Kong protests.
Conversely, if it is the case that sanctions don’t seem to change behaviors much, it is equally the case that engagement doesn’t seem to change behaviors much. Granted, 10’s of millions of Chinese people have not perished under Chairman Xi like they did under Chairman Mao. Yet, still, millions of people have been rounded up–their crime being they follow the wrong religion. We have seen this movie before. It is a big deal. Can you imagine the global and domestic outcry if the United States rounded up a million Muslims and put them in concentration camps?
If it is the case that neither sanctions nor engagement changes behavior, we can nonetheless wargame the consequences under each scenario. If sanctions cannot change behavior (never mind the historical examples where the behavior was in fact changed), sanctions and engagement can both affect the capabilities of a country.
Engagement will tend to enhance the capabilities of a country to do what it wants. Sanctions will tend to have the opposite effect.
Conversely, sanctions and engagement will have opposing effects on the intentions of the target country.
Sanctions will tend to make the target country more outwardly belligerent; engagement will tend to have the opposite effect.
So we are faced with a strategic choice. If we impose sanctions, I agree with Jon that General Secretary Xi will likely double-down on inward oppression and outward belligerence.
But if we double-down on engagement as Scott would wish, what is the real evidence that inward oppression and outward belligerence will really decline?
Scott, you say you support the Hong Kong protesters and oppose the CCP. We know what the CCP wants: more engagement.
But what about the protesters themselves? They are the ones on the front lines risking their necks to protest against the most anti-Libertarian government in existence today. They ought to know what is for the best.
And they want sanctions!
I’ll bet on my twitter feed I have close to a thousand native Chinese speaking “followers” (they are really leaders) from Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, and to a person, they want sanctions! They love Trump because he is the first POTUS ever that has taken a real stand against the CCP.
What is the most disheartening, soul-killing response to the Hong Kong protesters are blog posts that say they hope the CCP wins the trade war! The editorials from the Global Times and Xinhua are pathetic; and the wumao 50-centers are mere cartoons. But respected American intellectuals who present reasoned defenses for the Communist status quo–that is a different story…
Ultimately, only the Chinese people can overthrow the CCP/PLA machine. And this is what sanctions can do: sanctions will destroy the international legitimacy of the CCP/PLA. And by doing that, we can also undermine the legitimacy of the CCP in the eyes of the Chinese people themselves. At some point the people will have to rise up an illegitimate government. Better sooner than later..
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 10:22pm
Apartheid would obviously have collapsed without sanctions, as every single white minority government in Africa collapsed. And there are no other examples of sanctions bringing down a bad regime. We haven’t even able to bring down the government of the tiny defenseless country of Cuba through sanctions. Instead, sanctions just make the people in the country poorer. The result is that people end up being oppressed by both their own government, and foreign sanctions, instead of just their own government.
The main result of Chinese economic growth is that a billion+ people are enjoying decent lives for the first time in history. This far outweighs any harm from extra “capabilities” that the Chinese government has developed, especially considering that the Chinese government is not particularly belligerent. While it has a bad human rights record at home, it has repeatedly renounced any intention to seek world hegemony (in contrast to US political leaders, who advocate US hegemony quite openly), and has never tried to overthrow another country’s government.
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 10:23pm
Also, people in Hong Kong and Taiwan supporting sanctions is not some great sacrifice, because sanctions would not affect Hong Kong and Taiwan. That’s as meaningful as Saudis supporting sanctions on Iran.
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2019 at 10:40pm
It is indeed a rule. And politics, just like anything, is dealing with what is likely.
Since you are going against the “rule,” there needs to be overwhelming evidence to suggest that trade sanctions will work, especially since all the evidence to this point has been that Trump’s trade war is not making China more free or liberal but rather less.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:06pm
Warren, You said:
“They are the ones on the front lines risking their necks to protest against the most anti-Libertarian government in existence today.”
This is wrong. There are a number of countries that are less free than China, most obviously North Korea. Is Saudi Arabia as free? I doubt it. What about central Asia? Much of Africa is less free. China is very un-libertarian, as you say. But it’s not uniquely evil in a way that would call out for sanctions, while we continue to trade with places like Saudi Arabia.
Jon Murphy
Oct 1 2019 at 9:52am
Even if it was correct, it is not obvious why one would want to sanction a people simply because their government is anti-liberal. Liberalism is founded upon virtues such as justice, courage, self-command, sympathy (“fellow-feeling”), etc. I see it as very cosmopolitan. By continuing to trade with illiberal states, it demonstrates the economic and intellectual superiority of liberalism: “Look how wealthy we are! And we want to share that wealth with you, too!”
By closing off trade, it sends a message of cowardice: “We are so weak we cannot even compete with you at all, so we must errect our barriers to protect ourselves.” If one is trying to project an image of stregnth, then I do not see how cowaring behind walls accomplishes that.
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 30 2019 at 8:20pm
Wow, aren’t we clever, we know the direction of history. (Hmmm, where have I heard that before? Bearded German fella, also an economist …).
This all seems based on the presumption that Xi and the Chinese communist elite cannot see this coming. Or can see this coming and can’t do anything about it. Or if they do do something about it, it will not matter.
Colour me sceptical. See also this post from Tanner Greer’s excellent blog on China, Taiwan, human cognition, patterns in history and other matters.
Actually, I think this presages a period of great danger. First, because the Western elites remain remarkably feckless about the deep (and entirely understandable) discontent within their own countries. (Shouting “racist! racist”, “xenophobe! xenophobe!” so ain’t helping.) It is all very well to criticise The Donald’s trade war, less good to pretend it does not come from serious discontent. (Or are we just going to wait that out too?)
Second, Xi and co clearly are working on a strategy to make sure the above happy scenario does not happen. And they too think they know the proper direction of history, and have the stark warning of the Soviet Union’s collapse right in front of them. Shoring up your internal dominance by seeking external dominance is an old trick. And a Chinese dominated world-order is one they can seek to remake to their satisfaction.
Here is a thought: perhaps the reason Xi has not cracked down on Hong Kong is precisely because there is a bit of a trade war going on, so he currently has less freedom to manoeuvre.
Back in the late C19th and early C20th, folk surveyed the astonishing expansion in trade and in mass prosperity, considered the disastrous costs of war and predicted a continuing era of peace since war between the Great Powers would be patently disastrous as to be not worth it and we were all obviously gaining so much from trade. It turns out that regimes feeling unsteady, that the pressures of commercialised modernisation were undermining them, were prepared to take all sorts of extravagant risks, because they convinced themselves that the risks were worth it.
Scott, the pressure of events you describe is real. That is precisely the problem, the cause for concern.
Of course, as a citizen of a democratic country of about 25 million people off the coast of Asia which the Chinese regime has clearly being making strenuous, and uncomfortably persistent, attempts to suborn, I have perhaps a bit of a different perspective.
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2019 at 10:41pm
I’m having trouble following you. You keep saying “this” (eg. “This all seems based on the presumption that Xi and the Chinese communist elite cannot see this coming.”) What is “this”?
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 7 2019 at 10:05pm
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:09pm
You said:
“It is all very well to criticise The Donald’s trade war, less good to pretend it does not come from serious discontent.”
Really? You think Trump launch a trade way because the America public wanted it? Have you seen the polling on free trade, which is strongly supported by a huge and increasing majority of Americans.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 7 2019 at 10:06pm
I meant the discontent that The Donald rode into office on rather than the trade war itself, which wouldn’t have happened if not for the former.
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 30 2019 at 8:23pm
Chinese subversion in Australia is headline politics at the moment. And very awkward for a Government with a very small majority in Parliament.
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 30 2019 at 8:27pm
This piece indicates the scale of Chinese subversion operations in Australia.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:08pm
Australia should push back.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 7 2019 at 10:03pm
Well yes, and there is pushback happening.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/australia/2018-07-26/australias-fight-against-chinese-political-interference
Marlow Mosier
Sep 30 2019 at 8:39pm
Just a quick comment on a minor point responding to the commentator Scott cited in the OP. The commentator wrote, “And never mind that working class Americans know full well the disdain Libertarian Wall Street apologists have for them.”
Since when have Wall Street corporate titans ever been advocates of libertarianism? In fact, they have been the primary instigator in the growth of the regulatory state. See Gabriel Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism”, which details how all the major US industries at the turn of the 19th century petitioned Washington for regulatory relief from more efficient market newcomers who were taking the major’s market share.
Warren Platts
Oct 1 2019 at 11:17pm
Good point! Koch Industries is famous for being about the top privately held corporation in the USA. They don’t need Wall Street!
BC
Sep 30 2019 at 8:54pm
Just as countries engaged in trade tend to be more peaceful and more free, people with higher incomes tend to commit fewer crimes. Indeed, in the 70s it was quite fashionable to view criminals as “victims of society”. Crime rates skyrocketed when criminals were viewed as people in need of higher incomes but, of course, correlation does not imply causation. If we were to reward criminals today with pay raises, do we think crime would decrease as criminals’ incomes rose?
Scott, do you think we should treat our friendliest, most democratic allies like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea the same way we treat totalitarian regimes like China’s? If not, then how should our policies towards those countries differ? The free-trade policy you seem to advocate towards China sounds exactly the same as the free-trade policy I’m guessing you would advocate towards Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. I’m also guessing you would also oppose military confrontation. So, where would the policy differences arise?
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2019 at 11:12pm
Several things:
First: this is not a valid comparison. Free trade is not comparable to criminality.
Second: crime rates were rising for decades before the 70s, too. As you said, correlation is not causation
Third: countries that do become more liberal start out with freer trade. So, in this case we do have correlation and probable causation.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:17pm
I strongly support Nato (unlike President Trump, who wavers) and I also support our alliances with democratic nations in the Pacific. I wish our president understood the value of multinational alliances.
I don’t support an alliance right now with Mainland China, unless they promise not to invade Taiwan, but rather settle the dispute peacefully. So that’s how I’d treat them differently.
I actually have an open mind on exactly where to draw the line on sanctions, but unless the Mainland invades China, then they aren’t even close to the line. I actually consider North Korea and Russia to be tougher cases, because Russia invades and conquers its neighbors and North Korea is a uniquely evil and dangerous place that violates nuclear treaties. But even there I’m not sure that sanctions actually help. It may be that they make things worse. But at least there’s a strong case for sanctions. Not with China.
As Trump get tough with China, he seems to want to get soft with N. Korea and Russia, although so far he’s held back because of strong pressure from Congress.
artifex
Sep 30 2019 at 9:57pm
“But if you are already fighting them (say Nazi Germany), then trade sanctions will reduce your foes’ ability to wage war. In that case, sanctions are appropriate.”
But the trade sanctions will reduce your ability to wage war even more than your foes’.
And that assumes that wanting to wage war against a country can be appropriate to begin with.
Mark
Sep 30 2019 at 10:11pm
It’s also unfair and collectivist to punish Chinese people or businesses that have nothing to do with their government because you don’t like their government’s policies. If someone decided to boycott all American businesses because of our internment camps for immigrants, we would rightfully think they are insane. In fact, we even consider it illegal discrimination to boycott Israeli business over the Israeli government’s human rights record. It is just as insane and discriminatory to boycott Chinese businesses over the Chinese government’s human rights record.
And if someone decided that all 300 million Americans deserved to live in third-world poverty in order to make sure that our government couldn’t afford a military, we would rightfully think they were evil. People who think that 1.4 billion Chinese should live in poverty to weaken the Chinese government are 4.5 times as evil.
Scott Sumner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:19pm
Without calling anyone “evil”, I must say that I wish more people thought about the issue that way.
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2019 at 11:39pm
There’s another question here that is worth addressing:
Does Trump’s trade policy toward China have anything to do with human rights violations?
The answer is a resounding “no.” I cannot recall a single instance where the justification has been used by the Administration. They’ve used many, and often contradictory, justifications, but none on human rights grounds.
So, that whole point Warren Platts raised originally is not much more than a red herring.
Jon Murphy
Oct 1 2019 at 12:11am
Here’s another thought:
If the goal is to punish China for human rights violations, then imposing tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States makes no sense. Exports are a cost, not a benefit. Indeed, if the accusations of currency manipulations and subsidies are true, the Chinese government isn’t even making money off exports.
Imposing tariffs makes no sense. Imports to China are the benefit of trade to China. But the Trump Administration is doing nothing to block imports to China; in fact, he wants to increase them!
Trade sanctions, like those imposed on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea affect US exports to those countries, not US imports.
Thus, Trump’s trade war is exactly backward if sanctions are the goal!
Phil H
Oct 1 2019 at 5:30am
I think Scott’s post is… entirely correct. The only nit I can pick is that I’m not sure the human rights situation is worse now than it was. The one child policy ended recently, and that’s about as big a step forward for human rights as one could possibly hope for. Obviously Xinjiang is a disgrace, but I’m not sure it’s not balanced out by improvements for the rest of the country. Trade and engagement have worked, massively.
Scott Sumner
Oct 1 2019 at 10:55am
Human rights are certainly much better than under Mao. Otherwise it’s a mixed bag, as you say.
MikeDC
Oct 1 2019 at 11:13am
I’m having a hard time swallowing the position that anything can offset throwing a million plus people into concentration camps.
I’m not even against the idea of balancing out the goods and bad, but at some point, aggregating “human rights” and balancing out the good and bad becomes ridiculous. If the bads are sufficiently bad, the only thing that can be done to make them right is to stop them, and I don’t see how the conversation can proceed beyond that point.
Phil H
Oct 1 2019 at 3:32pm
I certainly get what you’re saying, but the question, “Has the human rights situation in China got better or worse over the last ten years?” is a really important one! The answer to this question should affect how we judge the Chinese leadership, and how other countries should engage with China. So we’ve got to answer it somehow.
The main reason I posted this comment is because there is a mainstream belief in the media at the moment that human rights in China is getting worse, and I don’t think that’s true. I think most Chinese people are freer and less likely to have their rights trampled than ten years ago. If I’m right, that’s worth knowing.
Todd Kreider
Oct 1 2019 at 11:01pm
Freedom House rankings for China from 1 to 10:
……………………………2008….2012….2014….2016….2018
Human Freedom….…6.0……6.0……6.0…..…5.9…….5.9
Personal Freedom…..5.7……5.6…….5.5…..…5.4…….5.4
Economic Freedom…6.3.…..6.4……6.4……..6.5…….6.5
Phil H
Oct 2 2019 at 12:16am
Thanks, Todd, that’s interesting. I don’t know if those small numerical changes constitute trends in those indicators. If they do, then I still disagree: simply because of urbanisation, millions more Chinese people live in environments that offer much more freedom now. But you’re right that it’s good to look at authoritative sources.
Michael H Cardwell
Oct 2 2019 at 2:17pm
OK, I see what you’re saying, but I’d answer your question by saying that if there is anything particularly egregious (like concentration camps), the answer is that the situation has gotten worse, or that it’s still bad enough to merit a strong focus and response.
A related thing you need to think about is whether “most Chinese people are freer and less likely to have their rights trampled than ten years ago.” is due to the stance of the Chinese government or the stance of the Chinese people.
That is, if the people know that dissent will be met with government brutality, over time there will be fewer instances of brutality because fewer people will dissent. Not because the government allowed greater freedom, but because the people don’t want to be brutalized.
I think this actually points to an emphatic “NO” answer to your question. The Chinese government is no more willing to tolerate dissent from its views that it was before. The government still reserves the right to brutally quash any dissent it chooses. And it has done so. The seeming improvements to human rights have come because
People have stopped dissenting because they knew it’d get them in trouble.
The Chinese government has changed some views (like the one child policy). While this is a victory of sorts for human rights, my point is that it’s largely a change of convenience on the part of the government rather than a meaningful concession to and increase in the individual’s power and autonomy.
Phil H
Oct 4 2019 at 2:27am
Michael:
Yeah… I mean, I want to keep things factual. Either the Chinese government has committed human rights abuses or it hasn’t. I’m not really willing to engage in speculation about whether the government *would have* abused a less complaisant population. Which is why I take the figures that Todd K offered above seriously: I want to be empirical about these questions.
On the concentration camp question, I’m afraid my answer is a rather unpleasant one. Yes, the Xinjiang camps are a horrible violation of human rights. Yes, they merit a much punchier international response than China is actually getting. But I’m not convinced they represent a deterioration in the behaviour of the Chinese government, because ten years ago they were doing much the same thing in Tibet. You’ll perhaps recall, monks weren’t allowed out. They were monitored 24/7. And they set themselves on fire on a regular basis. The main reason I disagree with the mainstream view, the reason I don’t think the Chinese government is getting worse the same way everyone else seems to, is because I think people have forgotten how bad things were.
dede
Oct 1 2019 at 10:49pm
Spot on. That was the whole point of creating the CECA that morphed into the ECC and now the European Union: establishing a free-trade zone to avoid another war between France and Germany. For all the problems in Europe, this has worked and was worth it in and for itself.
My favourite quote from Bastiat remains : “Where goods and services do not cross borders, soldiers will” (he must have said it because I cannot find it in his writings).
dede
Oct 1 2019 at 10:53pm
Sorry : CECA is the ECSC in English… and I meant EEC rather than ECC!
Warren Platts
Oct 3 2019 at 2:00am
Scott: you said,
Sorry, but I must respectfully, yet vehemently disagree:
(1) The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that there are up to three million people interred in concentration camps for the crime of believing in a disapproved religion. No other country has come close to similar behavior since Nazi Germany rounded up millions of Jews. These camps come complete with crematoria and slave labor factories, the output of which is exported to the United States. (Just today another shipment from Hetian Taida Apparel was intercepted by U.S. Customs.) These camps could be turned into totenlagers overnight, and world would not know about it. Indeed, according to David P. Goldman, at least, that apparently is the plan. He writes, “Every Chinese in a position of influence, when asked about the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s far West, will say matter-of-factly, ‘We’re going to kill them all.'”
(2) The Chinese government apparently is still arresting people who express the wrong political views or meditate in a disapproved manner, testing their blood to produce an antigen profile, keeping them alive until some sick person with a lot of money needs an organ transplant, and then murdering these prisoners, stealing their organs, and selling the organs. The Nazis didn’t even do that.
(3) Fentanyl exports from China that kill 30,000+ Americans (more than the PLA managed to kill during the entire Korean War) every year are apparently state-sponsored. The CCP runs the most comprehensive police/surveillance state in world history. It is really, really hard to believe the government there “doesn’t know” about what is going on, or cannot stop it. After General Secretary Xi promised President Trump he would end fentanyl exports, Mexican customs seized an entire container-load of fentanyl that had originated in Shanghai. (That Chairman Xi is capable of bald-faced lies became obvious when he promised President Obama that China would not militarize the South China Sea islands they had invaded.) Moreover, exporting drugs as a weapon of war is a tactic taken straight out of the CCPs strategic playbook, Unrestricted Warfare (超限战), where on page 55 Generals Qiao & Wang list among many other forms of non-military warfare, “drug warfare (obtaining sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading disaster in other countries).” Granted, other countries like Mexico and Columbia export a lot of drugs; but their drug exports are not state-sponsored. If corrupt government officials are involved, they are only in it for the money. Even the Taliban, who export a lot of heroin, are mainly in it only for the money. But while Chinese people are certainly not averse to profits, apparently when it comes to fentanyl, they are not in it for the money: in classic PRC fashion, the product is instead being dumped in the North American market for far less than its market value–further evidence that the fentanyl exports are not the work of a few rogue chemists making the stuff in their kitchen sinks in order to put food on their tables or buy Maseratis, but are in fact a coordinated means of unrestricted warfare explicitly designed to kill people, and disrupt America’s industrial work force!
I could go on. But any of the above is singularly sufficient to justify sanctions as severe as those the world imposes on Syria. If these examples are not “uniquely evil”, then nothing is…
As for the supposition that sanctions will not change the behavior of the Chinese government, that is beside the point. Not imposing sanctions amounts to a tacit endorsement and normalization of such behavior. We are sending the message that such behaviors are no big deal, that there will be no consequences for other countries that follow China’s example.
As for the claim China is not out expand its territory, we do not have to ask the citizens of Tibet, East Turkestan, Hong Kong, or Taiwan about that. Unlike in Crimea, there was no referendum in Vietnam or Philippines that granted permission for China to invade their EEZs. If sanctions are warranted over the Crimea, they are warranted over the South China Sea.
As for the worry that sanctions will impose pain on innocent mainland Chinese civilians, the answer is: So what? According to China’s own strategic doctrine, there is no distinction between civilians, military, or government. It is all of a piece. To the extent that China’s population does not rise up to overthrow their uniquely evil government, they are complicit. The civilian population should be made to feel economic pain in order that they recognize that their government is an international pariah and is not legitimate.
Bottom line: If the above argument is not persuasive, then we are at an impasse: there is nothing left to talk about. The question will be settled through the rank expression of political power. I guess we will see you at the polling booth–if you “Libertarians” decide to show up…
Daniel
Oct 4 2019 at 11:36pm
I think there’s a few assumptions here that are probably wrong.
“Countries that engage in international trade tend to be more peaceful than countries that do not.”
There’s an implicit “cause and effect” here that I think is somewhat wrong, good faith genuine attempts to cooperate, will lead to trade and improve relations, bad faith political infiltration, and sabotage, favouritism, protectionism will lead to break down in trade relations. You trade with someone you trust, you eventually break ties with someone who’s taking advantage of you, before you end up married to them.
China could be infiltrating the west, supplanting a propaganda campaign, enabled by free trade, and our good faith, Maybe the US will be fine, but for some of us in smaller countries like Australia, or New Zealand, the movement of huge amounts of Chinese capital, leaves us economically dependant on them.
Recently there was a pro HK protest in Auckland University, The mainland chinese students got angry and “We’ve paid for the university – we’ve paid a lot – and we don’t want to see these kinds of things”, Notice how their argument is actually shows how vulnerable institutions are to chinese consumers “voting with their wallet”? combined with the CCP’s indoctrination programs, CCP buying western chinese-language media, these chinese consumers are not ready for western skepticism, democracy, and freedom of speech, they get highly offended, they take our culture of critique personally when they shouldn’t, and go back to China thinking we hate China & Chinese culture because they haven’t had the critical education.
I’m definitely a believer in free trade, but we’re not trading with individuals in china, every company in China is a SOE, they subordinated to the CCP, the market is highly manipulated (look at Chinese Ghost cities, Thames Town), were exposing ourselves to this huge systemic risk, even if we assume good faith.
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