China and Congress – Not Exactly a Love Affair

So, clearly I’m not anti-China. In fact, I’m very wary of painting China as the next, big, bogeyman. I don’t believe in simple solutions regarding trade, balance of power issues, or human rights. And, I think that it’s ridiculous to become locked in an “us” against “them” mentality.

This is a blog. Which means that I don’t engage in complex analyses here. That’s what good magazine and journal articles are for, or entire books. Rather, I engage in a form of hopefully thought-provoking commentary. With the understanding that the title of my blog says it all. Anyone who takes me or what I have to say too seriously does not understand the meaning of satire. Sometimes, I just like to be the opposing voice, because I find it productive. There’s a reason that the devil’s advocate has never gone out of fashion. Every time someone disagrees with me, it forces me to recalibrate what I think.

Oh, sure, I may get mad enough to spit nails, I might call someone a whiner, a douchebag, or an idiot (not necessarily to their faces). I might sulk for awhile. But eventually, when my mind clears, I’ll ponder why I got so mad about it in the first place. Did they have a point?

All of this is just a long introduction to the article below, and my admission that I do not hate China. I also do not purport to think that we could solve China’s problems with our own brand of “democracy”, whatever that means in an age of super delegates and government-business hand-holding. In fact, I don’t know how our own government would cope with having 5 or 6 times the population we have now. Can you imagine the state of things?

Anyway, I have been researching the instances of when and how China is brought up for discussion on the House and Senate floors. And here is what I can tell you: we are scared. Silly.

China is talked about as a threat, a cheater, a human rights abuser, an unfair competitor – almost in the same breath as it is talked about as a rising power, a world player, and our banker (China is one of the largest holders of our debt, in case you never read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, or any business section). We worry that China is graduating more engineers than us, that their students are better than ours, that they can speak English while most of us are completely in the dark about Chinese. We also worry that their economy will dwarf everyone else’s, and we try to leverage our relationship with India to counterbalance things. (Oh, don’t get me wrong, we are vaguely concerned about India, too. Just not as much.) We worry as they build up their military, yet we place them in opposition to us before they technically are. (That technique sounds familiar, and the results weren’t that great.) We’re worried about them ruining the environment for us, which is also sort of ironic.

So, when you hear anti-China rhetoric from all 3 presidential candidates, it shouldn’t be that big of a shock. Politicians must needs respond to public fears if they have any chance of getting elected. After Clinton’s China adviser quit, I knew we were in real trouble. Now I don’t know who to vote for – who is more reasonable on this issue? Anyone?

Indiana to Beijing

Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2008; Page A22

As part of her populist reinvention, Hillary Clinton last week criticized a Chinese business deal in Indiana that her husband’s administration had supported. Perhaps she should have consulted the U.S.-China Business Council’s study on U.S. exports to China before arguing that ties with China are hurting Americans.

That’s right, exports. The study tracks exports from each Congressional district to China. Between 2000 and 2007, 406 of 426 House districts clocked triple-digit export growth to the mainland. Note that the bulk were manufactured goods: Electrical equipment and machinery, power generation equipment, and aircraft are America’s top three export categories to China in dollar terms. In services, the U.S. ran a $3.7 billion trade surplus with China in 2006, the latest year for which data are available.

Take Indiana’s first district, home of the Magnaquench factory in Valparaiso, whose 2005 closing has Senator Clinton so ruffled. Between 2000 and 2007, the first district’s exports to China increased 307%, compared with a 65% increase for exports to the rest of the world. That amounted to $74 million last year.

Or consider the sixth district, home to the city of Anderson, the former corporate home of Magnaquench. The sixth district saw its exports to China grow 311% between 2000 and 2007, reaching $118 million last year. Perhaps not coincidentally, the city’s official Web site includes sections in Chinese (as well as Japanese and German). In both of these case studies, by the way, the exports are overwhelmingly manufactured goods.

Trade with China, like trade with any country, will at times lead to closed factories and displaced workers. But these latest data are a reminder that trade creates new opportunities, too. Rather than ratcheting up the antitrade and anti-China rhetoric, the presidential candidates would do better focusing on helping Americans seize the opportunities of trade. Pro-growth tax and regulatory policies would make a good start.

Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us, Tibet protesters.

I was scheduled to go to Kunming, China, in July as part of a thousands strong annual international academic conference. My panel’s topic? The cultural politics of disease prevention.  Specifically, I was scheduled to talk about bird flu, the sharing of samples, and all the politics that get involved in the implementation of health policies.

This morning I got an email from a colleague in Beijing, who speaks fluent Chinese, saying that she had received a message from the Chinese organizer that the conference was “postponed”. Not canceled, but postponed. Indefinitely. Hmm.

He was very sorry for any trouble – like having a $1200 round-trip ticket in hand already – and said that it was out of his hands. Which means that the government canceled the conference. Why?

If I had to guess, I would say it has something to do with the upcoming Olympics, their image, and all the young, passionate, slightly crazy protesters that basically made life hell for both China and their own countries. Academics, other than those in business, law and economics, are usually to the left. Which, at Berkeley, is a glaring understatement.

When I got to New York, and then to California, I had prior to that lived in mainly Republican strongholds: Indiana and New Hampshire. My family is Republican. And I always pushed against that, had arguments at the dinner table (even when we had guests over – classy!), and considered myself a hardcore Democrat.

After I moved to NYC, I still felt like a so-called liberal.

Then, I moved to Berkeley.

God, help me, but it turned me back to the center. I realized, from living here, that people on the far left really are as crazy as those on the far right. Basically, anyone who thinks that there are black and white answers to gray questions has got to be insane. Things in real life aren’t that simple; at least not over the age of 25. The last time I thought that things were as simple as ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, I think I was 8 and watching a Disney film.

So, it’s not that far-fetched to think that a bunch of academics and students descending on a place relatively near Tibet isn’t such a good idea. I wish that it weren’t so, but recently I heard someone who is a retired academic talking about sneaking into Tibet. Really? I fail to see how that helps Tibetans. I also fail to see if anything we yell about, in the end, will help Tibetans.

Human rights? While we have no universal health care and Guantanamo? Not to mention the little trouble over escaped pictures from Abu Ghraib. My grandmother had a saying: “Before you go to another woman’s house to complain, clean up your own.”

So now, thanks to all the protests, we can’t go to China this summer. Terrific. I suppose people will say that at least it forced the Chinese government to meet with the Dalai Lama. But, you’ll notice that he also said he no longer wants complete “independence”. Just more say, similar to Hong Kong’s situation.

Yet in the bargain, the protests also caused young Chinese people to show off their own brand of protest. These were not ‘government sponsored’, they were true expressions of a people with waning patience, tired of being considered the de facto ‘black hats’ of the East. Of the world. They are the new Russians, and they know it.

We all just seem to get farther apart, instead of closer together. And that, really, is the true shame. The Chinese government isn’t great, but China is not the devil. Honest. I promise. And neither are we. Well, maybe some of the crazy fringe groups.

大家各位好。我觉得外国人不可了解中国的历史，也不明白中国跟西藏的关系，对台
湾“一个中国”的政策。美国人特别是没思考这些问题，是因为我们不管历史。我
国有挺好的动机，可是美国的政府只管经济的事。我们怕中国已经站起来了，马上
当世界上第一国家。从WWII下手，我国把自己看成最主要的“保护自由”的国家。
我们不应该劝你们哪条路要走。我们也不听外国的意见。可是，我们都只有一个世
界，要联合，当真友。

President Hu’s Visit to the US

I find it a sign of the times that the Chinese leader’s first official visit in the United States was with Bill Gates. In China, a country ravenous for all things modern and desperate for the tools of economic growth, any deal with Microsoft is going to prove an interesting example of the new governmental/business negotiations. Is it possible to claim that Bill Gates has become more important to trade relations than George W. Bush. Maybe.

One of the main contentions between the two countries – beyond the revaluation of the RMB – is copyright law and protection. It’s a thorn in the Chinese side. In China, there is no real precedence for copyright. Until the past twenty years or so, Chinese people still had no real access or conception of “individuality” or “rights” writ large. And how could they? With so many people and a long history of “collectivism” and “Confucianism”, even the language is still peppered with sayings that began thousands of years ago.

When I once asked a language teacher how new “cheng yu” – or Chinese idioms/sayings – are formulated, I was told that they just aren’t. I thought I heard the reply wrong. I didn’t. There aren’t really any “new” sayings, the old ones are just recycled in new and creative ways. Interesting and informative as to how the Chinese think about things.

Knock-offs in China are wildly popular. And why not? Some are great quality and hardly distinguishable from their more expensive counterparts. Admit it. Given the choice of paying $70 US for a DVD collection of “Desperate Housewives” or $10 US, which would you choose if the quality was the same??? On grounds that it may incriminate me, I will opt out of answering this question myself.

When it comes to software, I think that it becomes and even more interesting debate. Bill Gates wants his software licensed for use in China. In an effort to stop pirating, the government is planning to make manufacturers install software before purchase of every computer. (As of now, they come ‘blank’ for all real purposes.) Bill has dollar signs in his eyes and Hu just wants to make the US business establishment and/or government happy on this issue. Both sides should know that even this effort will not stop the pirating of software. That has a history almost as long as the cheng yu.

I have a friend that does research on open-source software and the communities they create. I think that this little visit of Hu’s plays nicely into the question of copyright over open-source. The outcome will make a grand MBA research case someday, I’m sure.

But for now, as I look at photos of Hu and Gates striding along, all smiles, I am curious to see how this budding relationship develops. Bush should be a little wary that Hu visited Gates first; it says something. And at least there were no protesters at Bill’s house.