■"For U.S., Engaging China Is Delicate Dance: Mindful of Congress, yet Needing Beijing on North Korea, White House Picks Fights Carefully," by Jay Solomon and Greg Hitt, Wall Street Journal, 18 May 2005, p. A4.
■"Euro Zone Suffers From China Syndrome: Widening Trade Imbalance Takes a Toll on European Economies," by Marcus Walker, Wall Street Journal, 17 May 2005, p. A10.
■"The Chinese Connection: We're addicted to cheap foreign loans," op-ed by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 20 May 2005, p. A25.
■"Party Corruption Blocks China's Banking Reform," op-ed by George Melloan, Wall Street Journal, 17 May 2005, p. A18.
The first piece describes how U.S. officials like to think of our growing relationship with China as a series of "separate lanes": economic, human rights, North Korea, Taiwan and China's rising influence.
To explain policy coordination across multiple issues, some officials invoke the image of a highway with separate "lanes" and say U.S. action in each lane is largely taken on its own merits, without talks crossing into other lanes.
And this is considered "policy coordination"? A distinct aversion to linkages across categories? This is considered strategic thinking?
What happens? Naturally the economic lane is most contentious, and despite that Washington keeps trying to get China's help in the other lanes. Stupid, but there it is.
The Chinese "periodically try to cross lanes"óthose dastardly communists! The U.S. tends to threaten trade sanctions over human rights: a truly cut-off-our-noses-to-spite-our-face threat that no longer represents a viable pathway (I mean, we want to encourage China to be less connected with the global economy because that'll get us human rights there faster?).
Weíre not the only Old Core that needs to reconsider crossing lanes. The EU's trade imbalance with China is already an issue there, and certainly Japan's business elite is smart enough to realize that China is their future engine of growth just as muchóor more, over the long runóthan the U.S. Pretending the Old Core can maintain separate lanes with China is the fundamental rejection of the military-market nexus, which says it all begins with security leading to economic connectivity leading to political coordination. Acting like you can deal with these "lanes" separately is fine so long as China is basically disengaged from the global economy, like the USSR was way back when. But China is so far beyond that hump of connectivity that pretending the only linkages worth pursuing are punitive ones is self-defeating. Only offering pain for bad behavior in a relationship is the strategic equivalent of steering by your wake or driving by looking in your rear-view mirror. Don't tell me what you want to change about past behavior, but where you want future behavior to be located: where politics or security rules all choices or where economics defines relationships.
Separate lanes are something the China hawks in the Pentagon love because it allows them to cast China solely as "near peer" and ignore the growing interdependency of our two economies. Yes, to be a "realist" today is to argue for both war and a lowering of global economic growth, because if we all get rich we'll have to fight over that ever increasing pie, right? You know why the China hawks of the air and sea forces (and frankly, it's overwhelmingly the navy that fixates on this) hate my analysis in the Building? Because it reveals the illogic of their myopic focus on just one sliver of what they pretend is a "grand strategy" vis-‡-vis China but which really constitutes nothing more than their current bogey-man function in internal budgetary battles with the ground forces. America may need China economically, but the Big War crowd in the Pentagon need it desperately more for their planning "requirements," lest the Army and Marines get too much budget for all that labor-intensive nation-building.
I mean, why bother shrinking the Gap when you can sit back at home, dreaming up brilliant wars with brilliants enemies that require brilliant weapons systems and fantastically expensive platforms?
I say, thank God we're "addicted" to cheap foreign loans from China, because that flow of money is what allows the Chinese Communist Party to simultaneously effect all those revolutions at once (rural to city, planned to market, rigidly authoritarian to grass-roots pluralism, young population to aging). The only way for the Party to remain relevant in all this change isóof courseóto try to control it through patronage (thus the corruption). Eventually this corruption gets too expensive for China's economy, and that's when the Party's grip on power begins to erode, as it already is. The CCP controls politics in China all right; it's just that politics controls less and less in China.
Monday, May 23, 2005 at 5:30PM 
