Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

Monopolies?

Capitalists?

If we had the same rules everywhere and effectively one global government then we could have free trade. But we have sovereign nations with their own national interests.

Therefore trade always has to be a deal. Either the deal is a good one or it is not. We have had problems before with Japan, for instance they like to grow their own rice rather than just ship in 'Uncle Ben's' rice from Uncle Sam. Rice grown in Japan by real Japanese people on real rice terraces is much more expensive than rice churned out by U.S. agri-business. But do the U.S. agri-businesses have a right to demand free trade, pushing the Japanese small farmers out of business?

What sense does it actually make to do that? The product - rice - can be locally sourced with a lot of human effort gone into the production of it. This keeps people in Japan gainfully employed in agriculture. Japanese consumers also prefer the local product, it is more to their tastes.

Should this protectionism go on forever? Well, yes, it is not as if the local rice farmers in Japan are going to be competing for global exports.

So we have something similar with China and every other nation. I think that China are doing very well in tech thanks to the Great Firewall of China, they have versions of Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and Amazon - the world is richer for this diversity.

What is wrong with the U.S. approach to protectionism? They could be honest about Huawei and state that they wish to have domestic companies do 5G just because they have national interest to do so. They could be honest about their own 'Great Firewall' which is what the NSA is and be up front that the government feels it needs to spy on the citizens lest any of them get revolutionary thoughts.

The rest of the world is fine about U.S. protection of the pickup truck market. We get it - the U.S. needs Detroit and Detroit needs pickup trucks as they can't make competitive cars.

If the U.S. was claiming that Toyota and VW trucks were unsafe that would be wrong, that is what is going on with the Huawei situation, there are these allegations that are not substantiated by facts.

It is ridiculous that the U.S. is struggling with trade given how rich the country is from a land/resources point of view, how the U.S. owns the world's reserve currency and how almost all oil/energy has to be traded in USD. No other countries have these perks.

China has no territorial ambitions beyond Taiwan. This is benign, a bit like Ireland wanting Ulster back rather than Britain wanting to enslave India. They may peg their currency and have this Great Firewall, however, who is to say that they are wrong in not wanting their great nation to be ravaged by global capitalism? We just need to strike actual trade deals with China in the West, affording the Chinese people and their leaders some respect.

Free markets have always come thick with caveats to suit whatever goals the authors/negotiators had at the time. The US, for example, generally prioritized investment access and largely got it. They also prioritized economic infrastructure, like the dollar standard and globalising the US patent system.

Meanwhile, agricultural markets were kept outside of the mix, which is a huge deal to many politically/economically weak countries. The line between a bad faith exploitation of the system (as you characterized china) and an acceptable exception was determined by political interests and power dynamics, not by principles.

What I'm saying is not that china "plays fair" or that the US does. What I'm saying is that it's a game where rules get made on the fly and power matters. There's a tendency to see your own priorities (patents stand out to me, in the US-China context) as obvious non-issues and rivals' priorities as huge compromises. I think it's wise to limit the moral reasoning which leads to finger pointing and conflict.

Meanwhile, there's always a lot of dirty dealing on all sides. Putting up trade barriers on national security pretexts or whatnot.

I think the Singaporean minister has the broad point right. The US had an incredibly central role in creating the current global trade setup. This reflected their power (and prestige, especially in Europe) at the time. The system wasn't a bad one and China has been a great beneficiary of it. A lot of the non-economic reasoning did come to fruition too. China is a far more open-to-the-world society today.

But... The size of China's current economy changes the political balance. They will demand a US-like role and unless that's accepted by the US, politically & emotionally, we're headed for a recessive period.

That's a big big stretch. It's more open than a big part of Western countries.

  1. There is a blanket ban on anything media related
  2. Select heavy industries
  3. Defence
  4. Agriculture *production*

The fact is to aurpass the US, you need to possess better if not technologically superior assets to project.

It boggles my mind why this military factor is often ignores by proponents of china maximalists.

The us can call upon a dozen carrier strike groups on a moments notice, port call literally anywhere that isnt russia or china, bases distributed globally and unknown next gen technology that isnt even being revealed but kept secret, if the us had sr71 in the 60s they have something in the works that guarantee they will be ahead.

Only now china has started producing f16 class jet engines domestically, but still decades behind in many power projection components.until china has projection that aurrounding countries will take seriously, its just another pipe dream, until china can prove itself on a world stage like the US has in its constant state of warring, only then will your financial institutions criticized by Chomsky crowd, be actually legitimized.

Much like your local mob or cartel, those who are perceived to have monopoly on violence, often backed up by real violent acts, have weight behind their words. Those who are in competition, risk elimination through in action, so they must constantly maintain high tension with skirmishes here ans there to remind the other side. If you think this way, it makes sense that the governments purpose is to maintain this monopoly on violence, or otherwise risk being overrun by other competing groups, much like narco economoies where the official government body is increasing being weakened through corruption, and losing the valuable monopoly on violence. The US has monopoly on world violence and china wouldnt be the first to challenge it and lose, much as did USSR. Only rarely in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the US simply could not out terrorize the population as did the taliban and viet cong,and thus lost the war.