US Says China Must Address its Intentions: How it’s Power Will Be Used Is Of Concern
I just got back from a month in China. My wife is Chinese, so we stayed in the homes of friends & family, not hotels and tourist areas. Though that hardly makes me an expert, I feel like I got to see more of the “real” China than the average tourist or even State Department muckety mucks.
While there I engaged in a friendly debate with my brother-in-law, who is a member of the Communist party and an employee of the ministry of finance. I have no idea whether his views are mainstream or not, but he clearly thinks of the USA as an expansionist military aggressor. I argued that at least our military adventures are checked by democracy (though some would say the last election disproved that), but he didn’t buy it. So I pointed out that all the financial entanglement between the US and China (we buy their stuff, they loan us the money to do it) made a war between us exceedingly unlikely, at least compared to 30 years ago. He agreed this was probably true. Nonetheless, we were pretty much diametrically opposed on everything else.
However, he made at least one good point: if you look at a map, China is literally surrounded by the US military or its proxies. We have:
- A base in S. Korea
- A base in Japan
- Taiwan with high-tech weapons supplied by the US
- A base in Afghanistan
- A base in Kyrgyzstan
- A base in Tajikistan
He also talked about the US spy plane that was shot down over Hainan island in 2001. He pointed out that there are no Chinese spy planes flying off the coast of Florida.
I’m not saying I think we should give China carte blanche to expand as they see fit – it is, after all, a dictatorship that is unaccountable to its people (I pointed this out to my brother-in-law). But if the US were surrounded like this, how would we react?
Aside: as much hand wringing there is in the US about outsourcing to China, there’s just as much there about being too dependent on foreign capital.