Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy

From Will Hutton's "The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy:"

    ...That is why the simple extrapolations of China's continued growth at current levels for the next forty or fifty years are misleading - and why it is wrong for so many western politicians, business leaders, and opinion leaders to present China as an ominous threat before which the west must change or wilt. This idea is normally a code for the proposition that ordinary Americans and Europeans should accept stagnating living standards and diminished welfare states and fend for themselves in acquiring the education and skills - more and more at their own expense - necessary to compete with China's advancing hordes. Those in the higher echelones of society, meanwhile, can continue to enjoy the trappings of growing inequality.

    China is not such a threat. Rather, it is a sophisticated civilization beset by profound and deepening problems that is making a difficult transition from peasant poverty to modernity. It requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which might be self-defeating, creating the very crisis we fear. China's vulnerability is not widely understood. Europe and the United States should stay open to China both in trade and in the realm of ideas...

    The relationship between the United States and China and that between China and the rest of Asia are delicately poised. Yet there are many problems - most tellingly the environment and global warming, which now threaten ecosystems to the degree that we are fast approaching a tipping point where humanity as a species may be in potential danger - that require an international response and appreciation of our shared fate. Both China and the United States must be part of the solution to these problems. My ambition for this book is that it will help tilt the balance toward more internationmal collaboration, a reappraissal of the so-called Chinese threat, and a recognition of the situation as an opportunity and above all a reaffirmation of  Enlightenment values and the importance of economics and pluralism at home...

The blog "Economist's View" by University of Oregon Associate Professor Mark Thoma has a post  "China's Economic and Political Future" with a long quote from the NY Times Book Review of this book by Jagdish Bhagwati. The post also has lots of comments.l

Comments

[louboutins]

hina as an ominous threat before which the west must change or wilt. This idea is normally a code for the proposition that ordinary Americans and Europeans should accept stagnating living standards and diminished welfare states and fend for themselves in acquiring the education and skills - more a

[christian louboutin]

ost tellingly the environment and global warming, which now threaten ecosystems to the degree that we are fast approaching a tipping point where humanity as a species may be in potential danger - that require an international respo

[ray ban]

point where humanity as a species may be in potential danger - that require an international response and appreciation of our shared fate. Both China and the United States must be part of