The American political discourse is rife with fear-threat reactions regarding rising China, embodied most saliently in the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to East Asia and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s repeated promise to hold “currency manipulator” China responsible for its economic sabotage of the U.S. economy. Eagerly cashing in on the hype, last week’s Economist greeted us with the most lurid of covers heralding -- yet again! -- “the rise of state capitalism.” We are immediately informed by the subtitle that this is “the emerging world’s new model.” 
Read the entire column at World Politics Review.
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 7:06AM 
Reader Comments (3)
Oh for the good old days when China blamed us for everything. "Comrade peasants the CIA has poisoned the water, that's why rice production is low." Now, our desperate political candidates blame China for everything. Now we are the victims. The tricky Chinese "manipulate" the currency...darkly hinting that they can actually change the denomination of bills in our wallets. "Damn, I thought I had two twenties, now I only have two tens, must be those sneaky commies."
Hope the Chinese have enough sense to ignore this nonsense. Burt when one Presidential candidate accuses another of stopping meals from going to elderly Jewish patients in nursing homes...well, they must wonder what it would be like to sit across a negotiating table from a man like that.
This is a good lesson about US American history: I never have heard of Hamilton´s aggressive state interventionist economic policy which seems to be very similar to Deng´s economic reforms.In the view of many Westerners the USA was thought to be a entrepreunrial society without state interventionism. Interesting to learn how powerful the state had a role in the buliding of US capitalism and the rise of the USA to a world power. Newt Gingrich who complains about the secular, socialist, state interventionistic Europe should read this article.
Hopefully Obama and Romney will read it too.
Well, the bad und ugly Germans in the horrible secular, stateinterventionistic Europe managed it to keep their industrial base and a broad manifacturing industry vis a vis China.Germany today is the top model for all Europeans.We made this with a combination of austerity policy, deregulation, privatization and flexibiliziation of the markets.AND some sort of state interventionsim which promoted high-tech industries and not subprime-mortagage investments in housing and the creation of unproductiove financial markets.Howveer,, I find it interesting that Charles Kupchan in the Foreign Affairs demands " state-led investment on unprecendented scale"for the USA and that Tom Barnett is thinking of the good old days of US American "aggressive stateinterventionsim" in the economy. Why do you support Mitt Romney and call Obama "anti-business". The later has discovered that the US manifactirng base can only be revitalzed by state interventionsim.And that is true. You already have a totally market without unions, you already have flexibilization of the labour market (hire and fire), cour deragulation of the financial markets---your state interventionsim shouldn´t be the Newt Gingrich style: a moon base in outer space, but develop more your job market, research and development, your infrastructure on earth, etc.