Tom Friedman, writing in today’s New York Times, warns that the U.S.-Chinese trade and technology confrontation threatens to fracture the process of economic globalization, which he and I and others have been writing about for decades. In the context of U.S.-China relations, if that happens, he writes, both nations will be poorer for it.
I agree that globalization is at risk and it may not be possible to save it. That’s the real significance of the U.S.-Chinese confrontation. The concept of globalization arguably started with the Marshall Plan, which was the U.S. effort to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. The thinking was that deep trade and investment ties, combined with similar values, would contribute to prosperity and hence peace for everyone involved. There was also a presumption that the appeals of democracy and human rights would be allowed to spread.
We extended globalization to include Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which have boomed and all of which have accepted and perhaps even celebrated democracy. We had concerns about Japan’s surge in the late 1980s, but in the final analysis, Japan has chosen to live within the broad constructs of the post-World War II order.
Now comes China. I was there when normalization and modernization started in 1979 so I’ve been watching this for 40 years. Everyone involved hoped and thought that China would develop economically and that the Communist Party would tolerate a certain measure of human rights at the grassroots level as part of a process called “peaceful evolution.” No one thought the Party would allow itself to be put out of business, but we thought it would tolerate a bit of diversity. Moreover, we saw the Internet as a tool that would give voice to an emerging middle class. Those hopes endured until just recently.
Now we are waking up to a different reality. President Xi Jinping is wiping out all traces of Western thinking and is using technology as a means of control, as widely reported. He is creating the most technologically advanced police state in history, as experts concluded at a recent event of the Overseas Press Club.
He also is exporting Chinese means of control and values to the rest of the world. And his party-state has been particularly aggressive even inside the United States, as I chronicle in my book, “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States,” available here,
So now that China has emerged as the world’s second largest economy, after us, and it has wealth and sophisticated technology, we suddenly recognize that China is using its power in ways that are undermine our own democracy and national security, not to mention supporting authoritarian governments around the world with loans and advanced espionage and surveillance technology. One reason Nicolas Maduro has been able to survive in Venezuela is that the Chinese government has lent him $60 billion. China is also extending military influence quite aggressively. One of the subtexts of its vaunted One Belt, One Road Initiative is that it is security access to ports through Asia, Africa and now even Italy and Greece.
President Trump is rightfully concerned about the power of Huawei, which has stunned the American leadership by coming up with 5th Generation wireless technology before we could. It has obvious surveillance capabilities. Trump is starting down the path of denying Huawei and other Chinese entities full access to American technology.
All this is starting to erode the concept that China and the United States can co-exist in the world. If China is projecting power and values around the globe that we feel cannot be altered or stopped, then it is possible that, one by one, the underpinnings of globalization will start eroding. We have, in effect, merged our economy with China’s so there can be no rapid “decoupling,” which I hear some pundits talking about. But step by step, we could see a bifurcated world order develop in which control of technology is contested, not shared. I don’t always agree with Friedman but he is right that addressing our worries about China represents the single largest concern that Americans face today.
