Prospectiv A-z via The New York Review of Books

October 18, 2014

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Ruhi Yaman: Really? Am I to take this seriously? How does the US treat a Chinese leader of 35 years past visiting? Do they even do that? This is a plum piece of post colonial nonsense. I think the problem is that Orville Schell didn't get the pomp and ceremony he thought he'd deserved. So China wants the relationship on its own terms rather than those of the U.S. Well, it's a new world, Orville, in which you don't count for much. Cope!

John Wright: The Chinese are growing in hubris, but this will be their Nemesis.

Tom J. Cassidy: Change is coming to China, the C. C. P. notwithstanding. No one-party state survives the ten years after hosting an Olympics - ask anyone in Berlin, Moscow or Sarajevo.

Let’s just hope the powers-that-be in Beijing manage a smooth regime change – for once in their history!

Yang Zhang: This one is hilarious, but for the sake of China, I agree that President Carter deserved better treatment and warmer welcome, given that he is the most friendly former president to China.

Understanding the China Dream

In this video produced by VICE News, Orville Schell discusses the significance of former president Jimmy Carter’s recent trip to Beijing, where he was treated offhandedly by China’s leaders, and how the US might benefit from better...

NYBOOKS.COM

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  Prospectiv A-z .
  http://www.nytimes.com/.../unbowed-putin-chews-the...

  

  Making Merkel Wait, Finding Time for Truffles

  President Vladimir V. Putin kept Chancellor Angela...

  NYTIMES.COM|BY JIM YARDLEY

  
  
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  Prospectiv A-z .
  penna095 pennsylvania 11 hours ago
  In 1980 China was dust.
  In a single generation, "private equity" interests built their Communist Chinese partners into a dominant economy by transferring the American Industrial machine to The People's Republic if China.
  It remains to be seen if the United States of America can still be a dominant nation with a few Cayman Island billionaires, and 350 million coolies.
  
  Roger Albin Ann Arbor, Michigan 11 hours ago
  Wrong - "that China is rising to inherit the earth"
  
  1) One of the most rapidly aging societies on the planet.
  2) Population will start to decline sometime in the next decade.
  3) Faces the highly difficult task of moving from a middle-income to a high-income country.
  4) Is trying to develop a consumer economy by fiat.
  5) Has dreadful environmental problems.
  a) Has terribly damaged a significant fraction of its best farmland
  b) Has over-extracted ground water from the North China Plain
  c) Is killing millions of its citizens through air pollution
  d) Is highly vulnerable to climate change
  6) Is on the threshold of an epidemic of cancer and cardiovascular disease that will dwarf that experienced in the USA and Europe.
  7) Has a rigid political system that is clearly very susceptible to corruption.
  8) Its now better educated and more affluent population will expect more from the state - and in Taiwan they can easily see a prosperous, democratic Chinese state. 
  
  The convergence of these phenomena will put the Party under a great deal of domestic strain. The usual responses of authoritarian states in these situations are appeals to nationalism and more aggressive foreign policy in efforts to build social solidarity. The big challenge for the USA isn't going to be dealing with China's rise but rather with its relative decline. 
  
  Readers interested in a lucid and expert discussion of these issues should look at the final chapters of Odd Arne Westad's recent book.
  
  Neildsmith Ohio 11 hours ago
  "Americans, even in a battle-scarred inward-looking moment such as the present, are hard-wired to the notion of their country as a beacon to humanity."
  
  I wish this were not true, but I'm not sure this extends to all americans, Rather it seems to be an affliction of the elites. The rest of us are just hanging on for dear life while the elites go running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We are dragged from one disaster to another by people convinced of their exceptional ability to play and win geo-political games. 
  
  The American people are simply spectators.
  
  Frank Lincoln Ferguson Missouri 8 hours ago
  U.S. decline is less about China and far more about dysfunctional governance, a result of increased political polarization, an inability to address numerous economic, infrastructural and societal issues that are getting worse, and rampant inequity that includes a shrinking middle class and persistent poverty.
  The decline of the U.S. shows no signs of stopping because we have found the enemy and it is us. A ship of fools who continue to believe that America is exceptional. It is, but not in a good way.
  
  Larry Page Belmont, Utah 8 hours ago
  Here in the US, when our real estate bubble burst and massive fraud by our shadow bankers was exposed, the Wall Street criminal's got their bonuses, their bailouts, their free fed money, and continue on their multi-millions-making merry ways.
  In China, the guilty will likely be shot.
  I think I prefer the Chinese way.
  
  http://www.nytimes.com/.../roger-cohen-china-versus...

  

  China Versus America

  How Chinese “harmony” and American “freedom” produce the dangerous clash of two exceptionalisms.

  NYTIMES.COM|BY ROGER COHEN

  
  
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  Prospectiv A-z .
  Socrates Verona, N.J. 5 hours ago
  "The United States is an idea as well as a nation."
  
  But that idea has largely transmuted from democracy to dollacracy, although honestly speaking, the world's 'beacon of democracy' - founded on the embers of genocide and slavery - can at best be called a bunch of 'cognitive dissonants' yearning to be individually rich. 
  
  While China and the US are dramatically different, they are similar in a very regrettably human way - the leadership classes are both hopelessly craven and corrupt, lacking the idealism and humility and class of each nation's workers who line their respective leaders' pockets with gold and servants. 
  
  Both nations lean toward psychopathic capitalism in deference to human compassion, but at this point America's advantage in cleaner water, cleaner air and Richard Nixon's EPA give it a giant winning hand over China's environmental nihilism.
  
  It's hard for 'life' to be in harmony with dirty air and water; it's easy for 'death' to be in harmony with a polluted Earth.
  
  Brian NYC 8 hours ago
  There are degrees of exceptionalism and Chinese and American notions are entirely different in both theory and practice. Cohen’s attempts to draw parallels between the two, therefore, miss the mark. American exceptionalism unmentioned in polite company includes genocide (Native Americans), slavery, torture (Guantanamo), xenophobia (Chinese exclusion laws) predatory capitalism (2008 global crash). No such parallel can be found in Chinese history of the past 238 years. 
  
  Since WWII, the US has bombed Korea and China 50-3, Guatemala 54, Indonesia 58, Cuba 59-61, Guatemala 60, Congo 64, Laos 64-73, Vietnam 61-73, Cambodia 69-70, Guatemala 67-9, Grenada 83, Lebanon 83/84, Libya 86, El Salvador 80s, Nicaragua 80s, Iran 87, Panama 89, Iraq 91, Kuwait 91, Somalia 93, Bosnia 94/95, Sudan 98, Afghanistan 98, Yugoslavia 99, Yemen 02, Iraq 91-03, Iraq 03-, Afghanistan 01-, Pakistan 07-, Somalia 07-08/11, Yemen 09/11, Libya 11. No such parallel can be found in the world. 
  
  Cohen disapproves of the Chinese Ebola response, and yet the Council on Foreign Relations published a paper that indicates the Chinese “horizontal” approach is more effective than the West’s “vertical” approach (“Ebola and Cultures of Engagement: Chinese Versus Western Health Diplomacy”). And the Chinese aren’t conducting war exercises just beyond US coastal waters, but the US has been doing so off China's coastal waters with impunity. 
  
  US exceptionalism is a cultural myth used to promulgate state violence on others.
  
  Michael Williamsburg, Virginia 11 hours ago
  How many immigrants, legal and illegal does China have? This is a measure of where people want to live. Do they want peace and harmony, China style or the dysfunction and promise of America that immigrants to America confront.
  
  Dan Kuhn Colombia 8 hours ago
  America`s professed ideas ( professed over and over like some kind of mantra) are not bad. They are great. The problem is that they never were put into practice. Rather they were used to make the people follow like sheep, a warped reality. The promise was always there, but never fullfilled and was never meant to be fulfilled. America always has failed it`s working classes and poor. It was, and is, a nation built on Mafia Principals, the top gets all the rewards, the bottom gets all the grief.
  
  China is different. China has gone through a recent revolution and the government there realizes that order and good government are the only way that the country can rise from the ashes of that revolution. it has raised 500 million of it`s people out of poverty in the last decade. 
  
  The US has done nothing to compare to the good the Communist Party has done for China. While America goes from war to war, drives more of it`s people into poverty, fills it`s prisons, neglects infrastructure, health care, education and ignores exploding inequality at home, China is building that Shining City On A Hill that Reagon used to fantasize about.
  
  There is a lot to be said in having a country led by competant government, with a vision that does not stand on a base of war and conquest as America`s does. That the American government is not only disfunctional, but venal, corrupt and composed of self serving individuals is evident throughout the world. China is doing it right the US? Not so much.
  
  J. Cornelio Washington, Conn. 8 hours ago
  Americans, Mr. Cohen writes, "are hard-wired to the notion of their country as a beacon to humanity."
  
  I'm not sure which America Mr.Cohen inhabits but I'm pretty sure most Americans couldn't give a fig about any "humanity" which isn't a part of their own tribe. Moreover, should any part of that "humanity" be branded a "threat" by fear-mongering pundits or politicians, a whole bunch of Americans would happily deploy our multi-trillion dollar war machine (populated by kids form other tribes) to annihilate or, at least, soundly thrash any who dare challenge our "safety." 
  
  Before we assert the "beneficence of American power," we should be a whole lot more aware of the limitations of that beneficence.

  
  
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  Draghi Puterity “China as a liberal democracy would be a much more nationalist, much more dangerous country.”
  
  http://thediplomat.com/.../chinese-democracy-a-nightmare.../

  

  Chinese Democracy: A ‘Nightmare’ Scenario for US

  Image Credit: State Department PhotoChinese...

  THEDIPLOMAT.COM|BY ZACHARY KECK, THE DIPLOMAT