China is the state’s largest trading partner. Merchandise exports have grown from $3.3 billion in 2003 to $16.7 billion a decade later.
Washington is the No. 1 state trading with China, even ahead of California. Last year, 49 percent of goods were airplanes and parts, followed by 31 percent in agriculture.
China is a major customer for some of the region’s iconic companies, including Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks and Weyerhaeuser as well as smaller firms. Imports from China are the backbone of the Puget Sound ports. Chinese capital is a big player in metro Seattle real estate. Millionaires from China are buying houses here, especially on the Eastside.
And yet the future contains danger as well as opportunity.
The United States and China were allies in World War II and bloody enemies in the Korean War. Later, after President Nixon opened relations with the People’s Republic, we were de-facto allies again, against the Soviet Union.
Successive American presidents have worked hard to manage China’s peaceful rise, which has been spectacular after Deng Xiaoping instituted reforms leading to a capitalist system under one-party communist rule. Marx and Mao would be scandalized but today China boasts the world’s second-largest economy.
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But Beijing doesn’t wish to be “managed,” either. It is once again a world power with many interests that are a source of friction with Washington, D.C., and its allies, as well as many other nations in Asia.
Not for nothing did Napoleon say, “When China awakes, the world will tremble.”
Taiwan is one potential flashpoint. Beijing has not ruled out using force to bring the breakaway province back to the motherland.
Another is China’s claim to vast areas of ocean that are either part of the global commons or also claimed by other nations.
China’s strained relations with Japan hinge partly on this, with the dispute over ownership of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. There’s also Tokyo’s resistance to fully admitting its guilt over invading China in World War II.
The roots go to economics and national prestige. The disputed maritime areas are thought to contain petroleum and natural gas under the seabed, and China depends on imports for most of its oil. But the Chinese leadership also expects the same dominance in its backyard that the United States enjoys in the Western Hemisphere.
So whatever the Obama administration has said publicly, the pivot to Asia is about containing China, reassuring allies such as Japan and the Philippines and preventing a violent takeover of Taiwan (still technically the Republic of China, where Chiang Kai-shek retreated after losing to the communists in 1949).
China’s military has become much stronger since 1996, when President Clinton sent two carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait as a warning.
Now, Chinese military leaders are perfecting robust “area denial/anti-access” strategies and tactics, including the use of “carrier-killer” missiles. American planners focus on “air-sea battle” by the Navy and Air Force to counter this. Considering that China is a nuclear-armed state, the risks of catastrophic escalation are enormous.
And don’t forget North Korea, a nuclear-armed rogue state that tries Beijing’s patience but remains its ally.
In economics, Beijing and D.C. also see things differently.
Beijing is a modern mercantilist, using such tactics as requiring companies that sell in China to produce there and share technology, protected strategic industries and manipulating its currency. Intellectual-property protection and the rule of law are uncertain.
The United States operates under a neo-liberal trade doctrine that demands every nation play by the same rules.
China faces tremendous obstacles. Its environment is a disaster, with help from the developed world outsourcing not merely its manufacturing but its pollution there. Many Chinese have become wealthy or middle class, but more remain poor than the entire population of the United States.
The Communist Party fights to retain its legitimacy and monopoly on politics. This is one reason President Xi Jinping is so concerned about official corruption and inequality. The party wants to be rewarded for creating the “Chinese Dream.” Yet it faces pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and a slowing economy.
Also, unlike the United States, China is surrounded by potential adversaries. It has endured thousands of years of invasions, not to mention humiliations by European colonizers and millions lost in World War II with Japan.
Americans don’t care about history. Chinese do, adamantly.
And yet, for all this, China and the United States are yoked together — in business, in debt, in the ability to make the world more peaceful and address climate change, or suffer the consequences together.
In this centenary of the Great War, many scholars and commentators have drawn parallels between that cataclysm and today. China as the rising power like Wilhelmine Germany; the United States like the dominant power, the British Empire.
The world before August 1914 was globalized, the nations tied by trade, too.
Taking this too far is risky. World War I had complex causes still being debated today and many more actors than Germany and Britain, both of whom were actually peripheral to the spark of war.
Still, it should give us pause. One real similarity between now and then is that the nations involved didn’t understand each other.
Source: Seatle times
