John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DON PITTIS IN CBC NEWS
“A long trade war could threaten Communist Party legitimacy
“Looming U.S. election offers China short-term clout but it faces long-term dangers”
There is a grain of truth behind this analysis, but it is only a small, small grain.
I think the idea of the CPC losing face in China through a long trade war and "breaking the unwritten social contract" is largely theoretical. Indeed, it is largely wishful thinking.
It's the kind of stuff we expect from American "think tanks" whose fantastical outputs are always constructed on some element of plausibility.
China has built an entirely new model for national growth and development, and it works, absolutely. The many intelligent people running companies and organizations in China understand that.
The system has delivered. Indeed, it has delivered one of the great miracles of our age. I rank the rise of China in a few decades as being as remarkable as the coming of personal computers and the Internet.
Let’s take just one example of many. China now has 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail in operation while we have none, and China is a very mountainous country making such construction far more demanding. The trains are fast compared to ours, but China’s just announced a new mag-lev train which travels at close to 600 kilometers per hour.
The train will revolutionize travel, likely making Elon Musk’s dingy sewer pipes in the ground irrelevant and eventually eliminating some forms of air travel. But speaking of flying, China is building more than two hundred new airports its planners calculate will be needed in just over fifteen years.
I think very few of our people have a grasp on the gigantic achievements in China. A temporary set-back in trade cannot overshadow these immense achievements, and it will be temporary, remembering that the United States is significantly hurting its own people with higher prices and other consequences as a result of Trump’s economic illiteracy, with his very own constituency likely being hurt the most.
The Chinese, far more than is the case for us, take the long view. Trump represents an unpleasant occurrence which must be endured for a time, and the Chinese are very good at doing just that.
This analysis also overlooks the rather intense patriotism of many Chinese. I say that having known many Chinese students studying in Canada. Their patriotism is not based on parades or speeches, but reflects deeply in-bred attitudes of a society with more than two thousand years of history.
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Response to a comment:
Remember that the United States is significantly hurting its own people with higher prices and other consequences as a result of Trump’s economic illiteracy, with his very own constituency, those of modest means (his big “wall” supporters) who search for bargains, likely being hurt the most.
Farmers in the Midwest aren't doing too well either with the loss of huge soybean sales to China. And those smart mandarins running China will keep looking for political vulnerabilities to specifically target as retaliation.
And Trump has shown us, again and again in all his initiatives, a pattern of shooting off his mouth, acting rashly, and then quietly backing off.
He really is a rather cowardly lion.
