Patience Not a Virtue as Our Problems with China Grow
Expectations are low for the state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington this week. The issues that divide the two powers are well known, from Iran and North Korea, through a menacing military buildup, to trade rivalry and technology theft. They have been thoroughly discussed in a wide variety of venues without resolution.
The Obama administration held its second meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in May. President Barack Obama talked with Hu on the sidelines of the G20 summit in November. The U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade met in December. Cabinet secretaries and senior American officials make regular trips to China, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visiting Beijing and Shanghai, respectively, last week. Not only have the topics of these meetings not changed in the last year, they have not changed in the last decade.
The Beijing regime, and those in the American establishment who support an appeasement policy toward it, are promoting the virtue of “patience.” Henry Kissinger, writing last Friday in the Washington Post, argued:
America has found most problems it recognized as soluble. China, in its history of millennia, came to believe that few problems have ultimate solutions. America has a problem-solving approach; China is comfortable managing contradictions without assuming they are resolvable.
His advice was to accept the Chinese view to avoid a new Cold War. It should be noted that as secretary of State during the old Cold War, Kissinger also thought of the conflict as a situation to be managed rather than resolved (won), as the U.S. was supposedly in decline then too.
“While America pursues pragmatic policies, China tends to view these policies as part of a general design … an overall strategy to hold China down,” writes Kissinger, who has made a personal fortune helping Western corporations contribute to Beijing’s rise through investment in Chinese science and industry. Yet, having started his career as a diplomatic historian, he must know that his hope for China “subordinating national aspirations to a vision of a global order” is too far fetched to serve as the basis for a realistic policy.
Two days later, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times echoed Kissinger’s sentiments, but with a significant twist about who is showing patience:
The world is always suspicious of the patience between China and US in dealing with questions of concern. Hu’s visit will showcase this patience to the people. History proves that overreaction and paranoia will only deteriorate a situation. The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world has shocked the US in recent years, and its media have combined an existing bias with new paranoia.
China has called its rise “peaceful” so as not to alarm America while it still had the power to easily thwart Beijing’s ambitions. But the aim has always been to overthrow U.S. “hegemony” and create a “multipolar” world of equal powers; at least until China’s continued growth make it first among equals in the 21st century, as had been the U.S. position in the 20th century.
The editorial cited the U.S. “media” and “certain citizens” as factions trying to stir up trouble. The ruling party’s advice to America was that issues such as “the value of the yuan, protection of intellectual property rights and military transparency in China” are merely “odd speculations and questions that both powers would do well to shrug off.”
Kissinger is not the only member of the old foreign policy establishment dismissive of those who do not want to shrug off China’s expanding capabilities. Consider Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served in the Johnson and Clinton administrations. He is more concerned about the threat from the American “right wing” than from China.
China does not need to overthrow American “hegemony”, America is doing a fine job of that all by itself;
After dominance in the world trade system in the Mid-later 20th Century, the US dollar was removed from backing by Gold and replaced with the Petro Dollar system. This has enslaved every US president and American Foreign Policy to Saudi Arabian Whims since 1973. We watch impotently as the House of Saud funds wahabbi terrorist training schools and can do nothing as we tied the US dollar to Saudi Petroleum sales.
The US federal Reserve wired trillions of dollars to Europe in 2007 and 2008, the Fed refuses to disclose who the payments went too or why. The US congress has thus far been unwilling to force disclosure of the largest transfer of Cash wealth out of the United States in History.
Conservatives and Liberals battle nonsensically as Corporations and Banking institutions send jobs and wealth overseas. Nafta was nonsense, and repeal of Glass Stegal in 1999 set the stage for banks to rape the American Taxpayer.
In all these events, Congress and the Presidency assists the continued collapse of the American Economy, either by legislation or by turning a blind eye.
US Voters base their decision on Emotion instead of rational thought, on marketing campaigns instead of reasonable debate and logic. This is the low common denominator that results in our slow downward spiral and will continue in the 21st Century, and will accelerate as we continue spite-Politics instead of thoughtful deliberation
The environment is that China is not increasing global stature by forcing America out, It is replacing the vacuum left by America due to 40 years of terrible economic and foreign policy decisions.
Had America maintained strength instead of weakness, rational discourse instead of emotional brinkmanship, economic accountability instead of debt, and careful consideration of the actual playing field involving the Taliban and Al Queda, we would not be running like scared little children when the President of China comes to visit.
DONALD TRUMP expressed on several occasions his views on China, Obama and America.
It is worth listenting to. He deals with China and says we are being taken advantage of…they know it and are exploting it…OBAMA does not seem to care about this fact that China is not our friend.
Obama is not the complete blame by any means. Unfortunately everything aht Alex has said is true.
American voters are ..uninformed.. to be nice about it. They don’t care, they don’t listen. If we have a job today, we don’t care about tomorrow..then when tomorrow comes, we wonder what the hell happened
Yes, we are being taken advantage of…It should be AMERICA FIRST
alex….EXCELLENT!! A [developing] nation is never in position to take advantage, but rather granted the right of advantage. The Clinton administration (and the Greenspan Fed) is one of the very few administrations who have been able to significantly [reshape] America’s economy domestically and globally. The transfer of American dominance to China and other developing nations came on their watch and at their hands while the American people slept in a bed of ignorance and disconnect. Now they awaken in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter………and have no clues as to why America has, or is, losing its global economic dominance.
Analyzing a broad spectrum of polling data over the past four years, it actually appears that about 55% of Americans could care less what is happening to Traditional America….while they have a “fickle” and feigned fight over further socialist progressive transition.
Official White House Tapes of Meeting Between Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao
19 January 2011
Commence 09:15:09 EST
POTUS: Mr. President, allow me take this opportunity to extend the warmest possible welcome on behalf of the American people, I hope that this meeting can be productive and mutually……
POPRC: Lower!
POTUS: Ummm, excuse me?
POPRC: If you are going to bow like that, do it right! Bow lower!
POTUS: Oh, okay, sorry, didn’t realize I was doing it wrong. Is this better?
POPRC: Lower! And why you look at me like that, barbarian?
POTUS: Ummm, okay, I guess I can get a little lower? But aren’t you supposed to make eye contact when you bow? I mean, that’s how it was in the first Karate Kid movie and all that….
POPRC: Shut up! Bow lower! Can’t you do anything right? All I want to see is back of your head! Okay, I guess that best you can do, stupid barbarian dog. Now let’s get down to business.
POTUS: Um, okay, sure, yeah. Listen, I think we need to talk about this whole currency business. Some of my folks over at treasury….
POPRC: Shut up! What for you try to tell me about currency? You think currency is magic American credit card you just spend whatever you want and bill never comes due! Why you think you can talk to me about currency, you greedy capitalist pig-dog! I tell you, you no tell me! You understand that… Read the rest here…. http://beautifulletters-bls.blogspot.com/2011/01/chinese-president-hu-jintao-visits.html
Impose Tariffs on China
China is supporting the Ayatollahs and no one takes a blind notice because the cheap energy provides the fundamental resource to all the US companies based China. The US has to remove the exemption on CNOOC and other oil firms financing the regime.
It’s all abt power. China is moving up because they lie cheat and steal. And like most godless regimes (may I add the people that run those regimes? ’cause they need godless rulers to be godless regimes), well, fpr one how abt the dog food with mekamine in it.Did you notice no heads rolled? (Sounds like another little trap we were led into at home)You can go right now over on Harwin dr. in Houston and buy Gucci bags for $30 or less if you buy a lot. Who runs those stores?….Chinamen.
Theft makes knock-offs possible and slave labor makes them cheap. Not to mention that only the head guys in gov and their buds benefit. Let the low class worker starve , they say, we got too many anyway. Communism is supposed to be the proletariat totalitarianism. That’s dictatorship of the worker if you don’t know. So, why does this remind me of feudalism. It’s supposed to be democracy on steriods, ya know, better than a democratic republic. So why with all this money and hegemony are the poor workers starving and working in what we would call sweart shops.
Because AS I SAID,”Its all abt power. They’re jealous of us. They want to be us. Just like the Devil said in the Bible ” I will ascend to the throne of God!”
tha’s all
Don’t pay China back any of the money we owe them. Then we’ll see how much “patience” China has with us. We already ARE in a new Cold War with China. But far left liberals like Obama (who probably even secretly envies the Chinese-style of communism) are simply too stupid to see it. As usual, Obama will only make the situation worse, making it harder for the person who replaces him in 2012 to pick up the pieces to mount some sort of credible defense against these megalomaniacs with 1.3 billion followers.
It’s pretty obvious by now that the Chicoms would like to one day gain a coveted premier position among nations of the world. More realistically, though, they hope to tweak this new world order into existence, bringing it on as a natural evolution of the world system because of a weakened US. They are engaged in a Zero Sum game with us all the way.
Professional worriers like Gelb and Kissinger will always counsel compromise in regard to China, as they did during the Cold War. But the Chicoms will take any expression of compromise as a sign of weakness. Their mentality is a lot closer to the Soviets’ than it will ever be to the West.
The Chicoms regard military power as being largely offensive in nature. Despite some of the dubious assumptions they are apparently making about the capability of their military they want to use it ‘police’ Asia as Japan planned to do seventy years ago within their ‘special sphere’ of influence.
Looking to the long term, they know that tensions caused by their various behaviors could soon reach the point where their trade will be drastically reduced with the West. They are far too predatory for the current situation to be tolerated much longer. But, even if China is shut out from the rest of the world, other Asian nations within their sphere of influence will continue business as usual.
the fake Nobel Peace Prize is welcoming the dictator who didn’t allow a real Nobel to get his prize in Oslo???
Nauseating…
China needs a war – they have a lot of excess males they need to get rid of.
Supposedly we owe a lot of money to China. I have an idea: why don’t we send China the bill for the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of military intelligence and industrial R&D they have stolen from us? And also demand compensation for the billions in loses we have taken as a result of their piracy of our products? Those things do have a monetary value. Maybe we just could forget the debt and call it even. Or maybe I’m dreaming about how things would be if we had a real president…
I wouldn’t put too much into what Kissinger has to say
about China. He has a consulting firm that people use to
get access to the power brokers in China. He wants everything
to be smooth with our relations with the Chinese.
The old joke was that the Indians sold Manhattan Island for a handful of beads. . . then we sold the whole country for cheap knock off sh** at Walmart.
I think that China wants to be superpower. That explains for all there reasons for their military build up.
Grants for Single Mothers
Yep. Appeasement, abasement, and delusional assumption make a fine foriegn policy.
Two commies, a chinese and a kenyan/indonesian, discussing the fortunes of the West ! No wonder the West is in such dire state of affairs.
Our problem is not with China, that is an easy fix. Our real problem is our own crooked politicians selling our country out from underneath us. They tell us that the world is all inter connected with free trade. To h-ll with the other countries, it is time for us to look out for American`s. The only things our politicians are trading is American jobs, while their bank accounts grow and ours shrink. I thought we were free Americans, but we can not drill our own oil have to buy more expensive imported oil. We can not burn coal because of pollution but China is opening 2 coal fired energy plants a week, and we know China has stricter pollution laws than America. We have to buy fluorescent light bulbs made in China, that you need a hazmat team to throw away one of these new light bulbs because they are so toxic, but they save a little energy, while they kill you and your kids. Thanks to all you politicians that are getting rich while you dumb a-s tree huggers die poor with the rest of us.
China is getting more powerfull because there economy is in better shape than all the west apart from Germany and Australia. Of course China wants to become more powerfull every country does. the USA wants to maintain it’s powerfull position.
We should try and find common ground with china otherwise we will get sucked into a new cold war. Just think of all the money that was spent on the cold war.
Nuclear weapons, Korea, Vietnam, ect. That money could be spent (if youre a liberal) much better. Or think of the tax cuts (if youre a conservatie) that could have been had if we coperated with the USSR instead of always thinking we had to buy a better rocket or something.
I don’t want to see the same thing with China especialy when were running out of oil.
This is just wishful thinking. If you find a “common ground” with China and demilitarize yourself, you are just delivering yourself into enemy hand any time China decides to push its own “reset” button.
Enjoyed every bit of your post. Want more.