Congress may be speechless/riled about China’s $18.5 billion bid to purchase UNOCAL, but neither the Post nor the NYT examines the depth of the US-debtor/China-banker relationship or the geopolitical consequences of curtailing China’s capitalist ascendancy either militaristically or by imposing restrictive trade policies as Chalmers Johnson did in these articles and in this recent interview with Saul Landau (third from the top).
America’s federal deficits are floated by importing $2 billion a day from East Asian financers as the United States is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, indebted to the same country it crows by moral imperative must be kept servile. Who will lend America the money to wage war against China – Japan?
Between 1992 and 2003, Japan was China’s largest trading partner, but in 2004 Japan fell to third place, behind the European Union (EU) and the United States. China’s trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan’s $1.07 trillion. China’s trade with the U.S. grew some 34% in 2004 and turned Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland into the United States’s three busiest seaports.
The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU’s emergence as China’s biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one.
Monthly Review, May 2005, Notes from the Editor:
With the failure of its three previous attempts since 2002 to topple the Bolivarian Revolution of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Washington has recently announced a new “containment” strategy for crippling the democratically elected and socialist-oriented government of Latin America’s leading oil power.
Assassination? In December, Chavez travelled to China and offered wide-ranging access to Venezuela’s oil fields. Lately, he’s been cancelling public appearances as intelligence points to threats upon his life, which he has answered by organising a response should it transpire. Apparently, the United States believes it can take Chavez out, impose the old regime, and simply return to business as usual.
”They think that by eliminating Chávez, they will destroy the revolution. But if they ever do manage to kill me, the Venezuelan people will make them pay dearly,” he told the audience at a public appearance in Asunción.
Chávez voiced a similar message during a recent episode of his weekly radio and television programme, ”Aló Presidente”, broadcast every Sunday, in which he stressed that in the event that he is assassinated, the rest of the leadership of the government and the armed forces ”all know what to do. The plans are already in place. We will not allow anyone to come in and take over our country.”
The lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
China’s gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent, easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China—the world’s oldest, continuously extant civilization—this time as a modern superpower? Or is China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in the Pacific.
Will they adjust?
For Japan, the choices are more difficult still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a long history in East Asia, always with disastrous outcomes. Before World War II, one of Japan’s most influential writers on Chinese affairs, Hotsumi Ozaki, prophetically warned that Japan, by refusing to adjust to the Chinese revolution and instead making war on it, would only radicalize the Chinese people and contribute to the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party. He spent his life working on the question “Why should the success of the Chinese revolution be to Japan’s disadvantage?” [51] In 1944, the Japanese government hanged Ozaki as a traitor, but his question remains as relevant today as it was in the late 1930s.
Why should China’s emergence as a rich, successful country be to the disadvantage of either Japan or the United States? History teaches us that the least intelligent response to this development would be to try to stop it through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and now it’s back. The world needs to adjust peacefully to its legitimate claims — one of which is for other nations to stop militarizing the Taiwan problem — while checking unreasonable Chinese efforts to impose its will on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events in East Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last Sino-Japanese conflict, only this time the U.S. is unlikely to be on the winning side.
Great post. Larry Gambone has a good recent one at the Porcupine Blog about how impracticable an overthrow of Chavez is, compared to the overthrow of Allende thirty years ago. I’ve also seen a lot of stuff recently on China’s “lend-lease” of Sunburn missiles to Third World states menaced by the U.S. I don’t know enough about military technology to form an independent judgment as to whether they could sink aircraft carriers. But if the U.S. is at risk of having its main instrument of force projection sunk to the bottom of the ocean over Taiwan or Venezuela, and U.S. leadership is aware of it, it sure changes the geopolitical picture, doesn’t it?
Thanks for noticing my cut and paste and the information. It would be difficult to draw the wrong conclusions using Johnson as a guide. Your work is some of the best on the internet. I’ve learned a lot from it in the short time I’ve known about it. I know jack about the military and the games they play, but I’m sceptical the Sunburn would ever be used except by the U.S. as an excuse to nuke the target of the month. It’s been around long enough I’d be surprised if the Navy hadn’t developed defensive tactics against it. The question for me in the event a nuclear attack was initiated by the U.S. is what sort of bang would the mainland be in for? I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be one.