They want the benefits of a free economy, not freedom itself

Pretty surprised to read The West is pushing back against China. It's working by Stein Ringen in the LA Times.

The West has been desperate to see China as a collaborative force, but Beijing has made it impossible to hold on to that illusion. When loans taken on by Sri Lanka became unserviceable, China took over the port in question and 15,000 acres of land around it on a 99-year lease, establishing a Hong Kong-style concession in a weaker country. Others caught in China’s debt trap include Zambia, which in late 2018 lost control of its main international airport, and Kenya, which is in danger of having to hand over its main port in Mombasa for inability to pay back its Chinese loan to fund a China-built, but unprofitable, Mombasa-to-Nairobi railway.

To make matters worse for themselves, when meeting resistance Xi & Co. revert to bullying. After New Zealand joined other Western countries in a stand against Huawei, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was unable to schedule a long-planned visit to China, and the launch of a much-promoted tourism initiative was abruptly canceled. Also in New Zealand, in a much-noticed case, professor Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury, after publishing a critical paper about China’s influence in the country, has found herself and her family on the receiving end of a campaign of intimidation she believes is orchestrated by Chinese authorities.

When the British secretary of defense made some critical remarks about the South China Sea, the chancellor of the exchequer found a planned visit called off. Norway has been forced to sign a treaty of friendship in which its government, otherwise a consistent voice in defense of human rights, commits itself to silence on China’s abuses.

But as the West pushes back, the realignment of power — not too strong a term — is finally starting to narrow China’s space of action. An immediate beneficiary is Taiwan, which sits on the contemporary fault line of totalitarianism and democracy. The danger that China will trample liberty underfoot there is less today than it was a year ago.

Winston Churchill in the early years after World War II said of Josef Stalin that he did not believe Stalin wanted war, just the spoils of war. The same can be said of Xi Jinping today. But now, the West is finding its voice against Chinese abuses of power. It turns out that speaking clear language to the giant works.

The Mandarin Class has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to undo an election which flatfooted them. Through deep state shenanigans and now impeachment, they have wanted to undo the choice of the people.

They spent a couple of years imputing chaos and stupidity and corruption. But with the, to them, surprising resurrection of the economy through reducing regulations, tax reform and tax reduction, even the Mandarins are having to acknowledge that perhaps there was no Russian collusion and perhaps in some respects Trump is doing a good job.

On the international front, they also have spent an inordinate amount of time bewailing Trump's amateur hour foreign policy, patiently explaining why nothing he was doing would work and why it was so dangerous to international norms. Except that the reality is that it was precisely those old international norms themselves which were the problem.

But they are beginning to acknowledge that while not everything works out perfectly in a smooth fashion with soothing voices in Swiss conferences, some of the longstanding issues such as NATO allies who don't contribute, China which free-rides on the global trading system, and the intractable Middle East, etc., some of these bull-in-the-china-shop actions do appear to be working. The problems may not be solved elegantly and with refinement. There may be some bruised feelings and shattered protocols. There may be more tactical risk than we might wish. But the problems do seem to be getting addressed.

Now the Mandarins are going further with the LA Times allowing to be introduced the idea that Trump knew what he was talking about and that he has gone about solving a heretofore intractable problem. We gave away the commercial store to China in our eagerness in the eighties to be part of the great reintegration of their economy into global trade and gaining access to a billion person consumer market. And they took us to the cleaners.

We have known all along that at some point China would and should take a seat at the Great Powers Table as a stakeholder and beneficiary of global trade and global relations. But for at least a decade too long or more the Mandarins of foreign policy have avoided upsetting the apple-cart and holding China to account. Ringen is pointing out that that needed to be done and it appears to be slowly working.

The larger issue, and unspoken of by Ringen, is that we know China is approaching a series of intersecting issues. Their population is aging and will begin declining. Their peak growth years are behind; they will continue to grow at a fast rate but it will be a declining rate. They have misallocated a significant portion of their excess capital from the past thirty years of growth and accrued debts which may be crushing.

Most critically, they have avoided dealing with the transition from a command politico-economy to a free democracy with a free market. For reasons Hayek discussed, a dynamic growth economy needs a free flow of information. Free information inherently implicates freedom. If they want to continue to grow the economy, improve productivity given an aging population, and address the burdens accumulated from misallocated capital, they need the type of freedom of information (speech) which implicitly overlaps with freedom in politics.

For any country, that is a tricky transition. For China, which has reaped huge benefits from the half of the economy which has been opened, it actually is especially challenging. They have stoked expectations (domestically and internationally) which cannot be delivered through the current system of economic freedom and political statism.

Perhaps we will start talking about that soon as well.