“Wal-Mart With An Army”
While we’re playing soldiers in the sand lot that is the Middle East, the crouching Tiger is stalking our shores. America needs to be vigilant. While I believe that China’s entry into our western-styled economic trade community is good for the emerging global economy and good for the Chinese people in the long term, it will come with some risks of losing economic ground for America. I’m no expert, far from it, but it seems to me that economies are by nature limited in their capacity to create wealth. Some of the limiting factors cannot be controlled directly, but result from other factors and their interactions.
This said - China (or anyone in their position of a monolithic newcomer trading partner) must wrest at least part of their growing trade clout from the other players. America is surely first on the short list of potentials. Just as China played a long-viewed game in the middle of last century to politically annex Tibet, a move that cannot be unmade, so too will this un-Western like long-term strategy give advantage to China in the world markets. Unhindered by political pluralism common to Western Democracies, they can afford to sacrifice a certain level of civil discomfiture within to maximize economic potential without.
China can play the game of global Monopoly, but it won’t play with the same cultural assumptions in place; it will see the game differently and its moves will seem cryptic to others. Just as we are foiled by Islamic ignorance and denunciation of accepted Geneva Conventions during war, so, too will China foil us at our own economic game. They don’t know all the theory, and some theories don’t apply to a nation that can force its will on its own businessmen at the expense of certain civil liberties.
While attention is garnered over China’s attempt to buy a US oil interest, look for more subtle movements to have greater long-term impact. Our nation’s failure to look past the next fiscal quarter will harm us greatly in dealing with the patient tiger. American policy-makers have a history of being blind to the fact that other cultures see things differently and act accordingly. So arrogant is America that it knows the right way to do things, that it is hobbled by its own hubris. We’ll pay the price for that with China – mark my words.