On China: "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Asians"

There seems to be a consensus forming that it is time to Teach China a Lesson. Good and Hard. I would like to dissent from that notion.

Oh, I believe that China's government and ruling class are a bunch of unreconstructed Commies. For sure. And that means, like everyone in politics, they lie about everything and nothing. All in a mindless worship of political power.

But I believe we should take the road suggested by Noel Coward in his WWII song "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans." Of course, I have no idea what Coward actually believed. But I certainly believe that being beastly to the Germans after World War I turned out to be a bad idea.

Of course, after World War II the idea was to make the rubble bounce, and we only changed our minds when we started quarreling with the Soviets, as victors tend to do. So we stood back when Ludwig Erhard restarted the German economy with a new currency -- even though all the experts said he was a fool.

Don't get me wrong. I think we should step back from the close embrace of China and practice a little Social Distancing. But it should all be done in a Hail Fellow Well Met kind of spirit.

In other words, instead of lots of rhetoric about teaching the Chinese a lesson, we should just apply the "iterative Prisoners Dilemma" strategy known as TIT-FOR-TAT. The strategy is simple. You trust and trade with people who demonstrate in their actions that they are trustworthy. You go out into the world ready to trust anyone. If they act in a trustworthy fashion, then you continue the relationship. If they cheat you then you stop trading with them. No Big Deal: you just step away.

Of course, China is not a normal economic counterparty; it is a government, and that means that it is basically untrustworthy, being run by politicians and bureaucrats. And, as we have seen in the Wu Flu epidemic, the natural instinct of a government is to cover up bad news and silence the messenger. Hey, all governments and politicians and activists do this. But Commie governments do it more, because they can.

My point is simple. We don't want to back China into a corner where its leaders think that the only way out is to, say, invade Taiwan. Or to declare the South China Sea a China lake. No, we want the ChiComs to figure that the best way to stay in power and enjoy all the lovely perks of power is to deal with the rest of the world fairly, face-to-face.

Mind you, I expect that China is going to face some nasty stuff in the future. For instance, I think that it is going to find that the cost of its Belt and Road Initiative is prohibitive, and not an economic benefit as I am sure it has believed up to now. And I dare say that the Brits will not be the last to decide they don't want the Chinese designing and running their 5G communications networks.

And, don't forget that the domestic politics in China is pretty fragile. I read a few years ago that there are something like 87,000 organized protests in China every year. And those would not be regime supporters doing their activist "peaceful protest" gig like we get here in the US, but real ordinary people with a beef.

Rather like the folks protesting in the US right now against the lock-downs and getting their Facebook pages censored by Facebook at the behest of Democratic governors. Imagine Facebook shutting down a lefty activist group! Hmm. Maybe our US politics is a bit fragile too!

Of course, all this fits into my Great Reaction and Lefts Errors notions, that the left's faith in politics and government as the royal road to justice and social peace is worse than a crime, worse than a blunder, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole point of social animals.

The lefty ChiComs think that China needs to strut its stuff in the world to make the world respect it. Actually, the opposite is true. All the Chinese need to do is be good global citizens -- although certainly not take any guff from anyone -- and then they will find in no time that China rules the world.

As it used to do.