US officials: "We realize that efforts, implied or explicit, to shape or change the PRC over several decades did not succeed"
Remarks and Q&A by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on the Future of U.S.-China Relations | The White House
Yeah because you outsourced the crap out of them and then acted surprised when they leveraged that economic power.
On the other hand, China is also probably the one country where they successfully kept the CIA out. Can't coup your way out of this one.
We also saw something that really stood out, which is that the PRC believed the United States was in terminal decline — that our industrial base had been hollowed out, that our commitment to our allies and partners had been undercut, that the United States was struggling to manage a once-in-a-century pandemic, and that many in Beijing were openly proclaiming that “the East was rising and the West was falling.”
Sullivan can't get away with this. He can't just say a banger line like this and continue on without addressing it.
I feel like this isn't surprising information. Quite a lot of the rhetoric and behavior coming out of China has signaled as much pretty openly for a while now.
Some more absolute bangers in an earlier talk from Sullivan where he admits that the whole free market bullshit they've been promoting can't actually compete with what China is doing. It's an absolutely incredible read, Sullivan claims that the American economy lacks public investment, as it did after World War II. And that China is actively using this tool.
last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations. A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind.
The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.
He also opined that the market is far from being able to regulate everything, and "in the name of overly simplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that produced them, were moved abroad."
Another problem he identified is the growth of the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial and infrastructure sectors, which is why many industries "atrophied" and industrial capacities "seriously suffered."
Finally, he admitted that colonization and westernization of countries through globalization has failed:
Much of the international economic policy of the last few decades had relied upon the premise that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open, and that the global order would be more peaceful and cooperative—that bringing countries into the rules-based order would incentivize them to adhere to its rules.
Sullivan cited China as an example:
By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.
The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.
In his opinion, all this has led to dangerous consequences for the US led hegemony:
And ignoring economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous—from energy uncertainty in Europe to supply-chain vulnerabilities in medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals. These were the kinds of dependencies that could be exploited for economic or geopolitical leverage.
Today, the United States produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China.
America now manufactures only around 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors, and production—in general and especially when it comes to the most advanced chips—is geographically concentrated elsewhere.
At the same time, according to him, the United States does not intend to isolate itself from China.
Our export controls will remain narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance. We are simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.
A nation of 330 million cannot control a nation that has 1 billion more people. Nations should also be free to choose their own destiny. A logical fallacy many in the West fall for is assuming the rest of the world wants to be like them and should be like them. If I have a 3000 or 4000 year-old civilization why should I take marching orders from a baby state that’s not even 300 years old like the US?
BRICS nations like China are desperately trying to move off the dollar, which is a major tool of US control. The problem is, nobody trust the Yuan, the Ruble, or any of their other fiat currencies. They can't trust each other, so the US remains the global currency hegemon. But that is a privileged position it basically only got because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. The US's position in this area will continue to erode.
There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D
What will replace it? My bet is on Bitcoin. A few smaller nations (Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador) have embraced it as a way to reduce the control the US has over their economies. The blowback from the world bank, IMF etc has been very telling. They do not like the idea of a country that doesn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of debt, restructuring, and subservience to the dollar. Throughout history, countries have had to choose between minting their own currency which many lack the political stability to do, or using the currency of another country as the expense of their own sovereignty. But now there is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a politically neutral currency that cannot be controlled by any nation state or even group of nation-states. It is immune to corruption and human error. It just works well to send money from A to B and nobody can cheat it. It's market cap is 850 billion dollars, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On par with Switzerland. Higher than sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than vietnam.
Bitcoin's fiscal policy is clear and predictable. 21 million coins will be minted. No more, no less. And if you have a private key, you can spend your coins. Nobody else can spend them. It has kept that promise for 15 years. 365 days a year. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day. Without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or a single hack. And there's no reason to think it can't keep that promise another 15. The incentives and security mechanisms built into Bitcoin the past 15 are the same it will have the next 15.
Anybody can use Bitcoin with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. With Bitcoin lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for pennies in fees. No credit check required, no middlemen, no nonsense. It doesn't matter if your country doesn't have stable banking infrastructure or a government constantly devaluing your currency. And it does all of this with less than 1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables, since miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity which tends to be made from renewables at off-peak hours.
In summary, he is saying China is not there yet, but they are going to get big enough to eat our lunch and we can't do shit about it, so we might as well start getting on their good side or we'll get fucked in the long term.
No, you need to read the remarks again. Paragraphs like this one do not support your interpretation at all.
The US is saying that China's economic trajectory has been too optimistic in the past and that the US needs to focus on domestic improvements, force China to play by the rules, and then facilitate the US becoming the leader.
Ah thank you for confirming my stupidity. I am dumb and will read the thing again.
China's time came and passed. Now it's going to decline as they reap the effects of their One Child Policy and authoritarian leadership.
Close up shop, boys. Looks like Godric@lemmy.world knows better than the entire US Department of Defense.
You should definitely call Biden and let him know all the Ivy League college educated generals, expensive million-dollar think-tank groups, and hundreds of experienced advisors are all wrong in their assessment of China.
Just a few weeks ago, Taiwan held historic elections without any major cross-Strait incident, in part because all sides — Washington, Beijing, and Taipei — worked to reduce miscommunication and misperception about their respective intentions. That is an outcome few may have foreseen in August of 2022, when most expected the cross-Strait situation to grow more tense, not less. But it’s no guarantee of future trends, and the risk remains real.
This approach has been the hallmark of Biden's foreign policy. They're working behind the scenes subtly and competently, making progress in ways that doesn't really track with the 24-hour news cycle and clickbait journalism. It's good to see the efforts paying off, but they really, REALLY need to work on their messaging.
Beijing has never cared much about the result of this Taiwanese election because the majority of Taiwanese support improving relations with China (see: votes for KMT, TPP). This entire claim of "tense cross-Strait relations" is a manufactured concern so Biden can knock a win.
The most significant recent tension in cross-Strait relations has been the declaration of the Taiwan Strait as international waters (induced largely by FONOPS declaring it as such) and the ending of some of Taiwan's special economic statuses for trade with China (induced largely by increased arms trade with foreign powers). Everything else is just posturing to save face on both sides.
That's nonsense, even if you pretend Taiwan is a part of China, which is clearly nothing more than a useful fiction for all parties, there is a space even at the narrowest point of the straight that is just EEZ. Which is a region that is free to navigate but the host country has exclusive rights to minerals, fishing etc within that region.
Imagine if US spent all that effort changing itself and improving the lives of the people living in US. Maybe it could be half as good a country to live in as China today. 😂
That's a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie for you.
If the US had embraced FDR's vision of democratic socialism instead of letting Capitalists be unfettered Capitalist, I think we would have more people be way better off then China today since we wouldn't have out-sourced anything to China to begin with (Unions and DemSocs wouldn't have allowed the outsourcing.)
But why would it do that, that'd be silly. The system is working fantastically for those who run it
indeed it is, rich people are making money hand over fist
"Electoral interference" is illegal, but "shaping and changing the PRC" is just business.
You are giving a very sinister lean to shaping and changing. I think its clear that they wanted China to be another Japan, not any number of failed coups in the middle east or Central/South America.
The only reason there wasn't a coup in Japan like a lot of other south/east asian countries is that after the aftermath of WW2 there was no need of one