Chinese Golem

PRESIDENT TRUMP BLAMES OBAMA, BUSH, CLINTON FOR CHINA DEFICIT: ‘THEY CREATED A MONSTER’
BY DAVID BRENNAN 

President Donald Trump attacked the past three presidents for U.S. policy on China, accusing his predecessors of allowing China to become one of the most powerful monster in the world.
Speaking with Fox News’ Steve Hilton in an exclusive interview that aired on Sunday, the president said he would not allow China to become a superpower or eclipse the U.S. on his watch.
As the trade war between Washington and Beijing escalated, Trump showed no signs of tempering his pugnacious approach to a rising China, vowing once again to address what he considered were unfair trade practices that had left the U.S. with a huge trade deficit.
In the past, President Trump blamed Barack Obama—one of his favored targets.

But on Sunday, the president said America’s China strategy had been wrong for decades.
“They took advantage of us for many, many years,” he told Hilton. 

“And I blame us, I don’t blame them. I don’t blame Xi. I blame all of our presidents, and not just Obama. You go back a long way. You look at Clinton, Bush—everybody. They allowed this to happen, they created a monster… We rebuilt China because they get so much money.”
President Trump’s tough stance on China became one of the hallmarks of his presidency, and showed no sign of diminishing. 

Last week, tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports took hold, increasing duties from 10 percent to 25 percent. 

President Trump ordered U.S.Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to begin the process of raising tariffs on essentially all remaining imports from China, valued at around $300 billion.
The last round of trade negotiation talks between U.S. and Chinese representatives ended with no breakthrough on May 10. 

An agreement was all but reached, but Beijing withdrew its support at the last moment. 

“We had a good deal, and at the end, they changed it,” he said. 

“And I said, that's OK, we're going to tariff their products, and we put a 25 percent tariff on their products.”
Speaking about Xi Jinping—who Trump had previously called a “friend”—the president said, “I told Xi, who's somebody I like a lot, but he's for China and I'm for us, right? But I told him, I said look, this can't be like a 50-50 deal, this has to be a deal—you are so far ahead from presidents that allowed you to get away.”
President Trump said he was committed to restraining the kind of economic growth that would see China’s economy surpass the U.S.'s and become the dominant global superpower. 

“Not going to happen,” President Trump said, “not going to happen with me.” 

Asked whether he thought that was Beijing’s ultimate goal, the president replied, “Why wouldn’t it be? I mean they’re very ambitious people, they’re very smart. They’re great people. It’s a great culture, an amazing culture.”
Later in the interview, the president said that China wanted “to take over the world.” 

Referring to the country’s Made in China 2025 project—seeking to move the nation toward producing high-value products and services—President Trump said he found it offensive that Xi would have such ambitions. 

“It was very insulting to me, because it’s not going to happen,” he told Hilton. 

“Not with me.”
“If Hillary Clinton became president, China would have been a much bigger economy than us by the end of her term,” he said, without any prompting him to talk about the defeated 2016 Democratic candidate.
A separate dispute over the Chinese tech firm Huawei added further fuel to the fire. 

The telecommunications company was at the forefront of developing 5G networks, but U.S. officials had warned that Huawei could serve as a Trojan horse for Beijing to tap vital communications networks in the west.
On Thursday, President Trump declared a national economic emergency over the issue and blacklisted the company, seeking to force all American firms to sever business ties with Huawei. 

The ban was having an effect, and on Sunday Google said it had suspended Huawei’s access to updates of its Android operating system, while chipmakers have cut supply lines.

Chinese Golem: Globalization Has Created a Chinese Monster

Xi Jinping's dictatorship isn't what the end of history was supposed to look like.
BY EMILE SIMPSON 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping speaks at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. 

On Sunday, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee recommended ending the two-term limit on the presidency, paving the way for Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely. 

This surely marks the end of an era — and not just for China, but also for the West.
For the West, the era in question started with the end of the Cold War, as old enemies became “emerging markets.” 

China had already started opening its markets to foreign investment since 1978 under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. 

But only in the 1990s did the private sector take off there, and Western firms promptly rushed in to profit from the breakneck speed of Chinese economic growth.
The beauty of the post-Cold War emerging market story was that it was apolitical. 

Recall the famous identification of the leading emerging markets by Jim O’Neill in 2001 as the “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, China) — four states from different groupings during the Cold War now viewed together as the leading protagonists in a new era of peaceful globalization under the Pax Americana. 

Some called it the end of history.
But this apolitical approach was premised on the assumption, inherited from the Cold War, that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, and that the extension of free markets would bring global convergence to the Western economic model, as the Washington Consensus predicted.
Confidence in globalization saw massive amounts of Western capital and intellectual property flow to emerging markets, above all to China. 

But few in the West registered the geopolitical significance of this at the time. 

Instead, they praised the economic growth story. 

And not without good reason: the integration of China into global markets lifted a billion people out of poverty. 

It remains a testament to the material benefits of removing geopolitical obstructions from the development of global business.
But this story of global cosmopolitan peace has been on the rocks for some time. 

Russian privatization in the 1990s ultimately produced a mafia state controlled by an oligarchy. 

More broadly — with a few exceptions, mainly in Eastern Europe, where democracy did take hold (current problems notwithstanding) — capitalism has expanded since the end of the Cold War in spite of democracy, not alongside it.
And nowhere is this more evident than in China. 

It’s now abundantly clear that despite the West’s pious belief in the transformative power of free markets to encourage “reform,” China is headed toward more, not less autocracy. 

Indeed, China has broken a path toward a new form of totalitarianism in which one man will sit atop a police state with access to ubiquitous data gathered about citizens by social media and online shopping platforms and a vast human and electronic surveillance apparatus to track their every move. 

Look no further than the ghastly “social credit score” system that Beijing wants to roll out by 2020 to get a sense of how wrong the idea has proven to be that free markets will bring about democratic change, or even minor liberalizing reform in China. 

A billion people may have been lifted out of poverty, but only to find themselves living under cyber-totalitarianism.
The geopolitical consequences of this realization could be very profound indeed. 

In the Cold War, the West faced totalitarian communist regimes whose economic model and political system were both alien to what the “free world” claimed to stand for. 

Of course, the link between capitalism and democracy was always tenuous, not least given the reality that many of the West’s allies were not democratic. 

But now, if it was ever in doubt, we know for sure that capitalism and democracy don’t have to go together: Capitalism is up for grabs, and you don’t even need to support the Pax Americana to plug into it

How does this end? 

We don’t yet know, but the question may well come to be the defining feature of a new geopolitical phase the world seems to have entered. 

Note how far removed from the happy story of liberal globalization is the language of the Trump administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy: “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
Admittedly, this comes in the context of a presidency that bizarrely refuses to carry out U.S. congressional sanctions on Russia for interference in the U.S. 2016 elections. 

But the more important point is that Western states and their citizens are becoming increasingly alert to the need fundamentally to reappraise the value of the integrated global capitalism they have more or less promoted since the early 1990s. 

I am not talking about a reappraisal in light of the inequality that economic growth has produced, or the massive outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that created rust belts on both sides of the Atlantic, which is a separate discussion. 

Rather, this reappraisal concerns the inconvenient truth, which surely now is undeniable, that the West’s own economic policy has encouraged, if unwittingly, the rise of deeply illiberal regimes in much of the former communist world.
What practical effect this produces in the foreign and economic policies of the West depends, on the one hand, on the extent to which the West is prepared to sacrifice material wealth in support of its public values; and, on the other hand, on the extent to which authoritarian states, above all Russia and China, attempt to export their values abroad. 

One could list any number of areas where this dilemma will play out, but the most important near-term litmus test will be whether the West responds to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a benign economic project, or as a geopolitical threat.