Another thing i forgot to mention is that both east and western military structures have grown beyond a point where even a small scale conflict can destroy the economic system where both are build upon.
So even if the US defeats China then it loses anyway this applies both ways because the economic impact can destroy the world economic system.
So its in the intrest of both to avoid that at all costs.
However western policy and eastern policy are bound to eachother by the fact it will lead to a power exchange in the future unless its being tweaked and changed, wich is nearly impossible for the east as their cultural system and chain of command does not allow it keep in mind the goverment still has supreme rule and will not give that up.
Wich is a major downfall for the east.
While if the US would change its policy it will mean that it cannot maintain its current status, politically and military wich they cannot affort.
Wich is could be a downfall for the west.
And in this case china has always been self sufficent wich the US is not.
So a confrontation would mean a defeat for china but it would also mean a collapse of the western economic and structural system.
So both are bound to power exchange confrontation.
This has been said by several high ranked analysts, and its being debated around the world some say its bull....others say its possible and another group is saying that its possible.
However fact remains that most are based on the same principal wich i described above.
To beastmaster in three parts, part A-1 (I am limited in length in my responses.
Your post is concise, thoughtful, comprehensive, and logical it has taken me some time to respond to it in the respectful and detailed way that it deserves. Sorry if I have taken too long to respond.
This time I will go through each and every one of the point’s on a one by one bases. Which is not a miner undertaking, because of the number of issues and the different assumptions we both have when interpreting the same facts. Now to proceed, in order that you have presented them.
Point One, as to “Threads, It’s not that China is really threatened by US involvement in the region, but what they fear is losing political control over most of those regions. To the Chinese culture the boundaries of the sphere of influence is controlled by diplomatic might, economic cash flow and is save guarded by the military.”
I hope China does not feel threatened by the US because if it did, the US would have failed in both its intentions and perceptions. But why does China just assume that they should have control of their region (just like the Japanese before them) much less that they are in danger of somehow losing it or that the US should indorse the validity of that obsolete concept? It (the independent countries of Asia) has never been theirs (China’s) nor is it ours (The US), to lose. We have never had control of this region nor have we sought to control it. What we have sought is ever more productive and ever expanding cooperation between the various countries in the area, both to gain added cooperation with the US and to promote additional cooperation between those countries. As a purely practical matter, the time, effort, and resources expended in trying to gain some kind of an “illusion of control” (and illusion is all that it could ever be) over any group of unwilling people never pays for its self in benefits equal to the costs. But cooperation that leads to sustainable mutual benefit works much better, is much cheaper, and is far more attainable.
And to address a similar issue brought up latter in the post (slightly out or order) that the US is interfering in China’s relations and its influence with its neighbors (its sphere of influence)? As you remember China went through a rather long period of time first in upheaval where it had no influence on its neighbors except to spread chaos, which was then followed by a period of self-imposed isolation. During that time and even before, the US was establishing connections with the countries around China and looking for ways to cooperate with them. This was a time when China was effectively out of the picture. So from a very practical point of view it is the Chinese who is interfering with our already established relationships with these countries, not the other way around.
But all these nations are free and independent and can cooperate or not, or play or not play with anyone they chose to and we are not trying to stop them. They will make decisions based upon what they feel are in their best long term interest and it is in our interest that they are free to make their own choices. If China screws up by pushing too hard on them with its “Vision” whatever that is, forcing it upon people who don’t want it, they will value their relationship with the US even more. They are free to make their own decisions even when we think in our opinion they are poor ones as long as they are free to then later, if they chose to, change their minds.
Point Two, “So it’s not their nature to block outsiders as they bring new cash and opportunities which the Chinese very much like.”
What you are describing is very similar to the policy once followed by the Chinese, towards the British Empire and other foreign traders. A policy, where the Chinese government was willing to sell their highly sought after products to the British and others but would only take in return for their desirable products, Gold and Silver. The British and others were not allowed to sell their goods to the Chinese people (The ruling Mandarin’s in their unchallenged wisdom confidently pronounced, that “the West had nothing to offer China of any value”, not goods, not science, and especially not foreign (non–Confucian) ideas. Even though China at the time couldn’t make metal sewing needles among many other very useful things.
An economic action on the Mandarin’s part, which almost bankrupted the British Empire by draining it of its cash (causing economic deflation and a liquidity crisis) and hence led eventual to the first Opium War. You would think after that they would rethink their simplistic approach to world trade?
Point Three, as to “However it’s the save guarding of the vast resources witch they have in their reach and what they need to fuel their public and industrial system.”
Though this approach to economic advancement will at first seem to be quite effective, it only works when there are vast amounts of underutilized resource which have never before been utilized are first brought into play. But in reality this is not very efficient approach.
No one in the world has enough of everything that its needs to be the best at what they can be or to do what they can do the best. That is why free trade and access to and not the denial of, access to resources is so very important to the world’s prosperity and its peace. China’s thinking is, in a business sense, follows the business model of “vertical integration”, were the specific goal is to have complete control of each of the steps of the process required in creating wealth, from beginning to the end.
To the Chinese they believe that political control of some kind in essential to secure sufficient access to what they think they are going to need to continue to prosper. Not only is this not realistically possible in a very practical sense in the modern world, it is in fact less efficient as an economic paradigm. If it wasn’t, we would not of seen that the large business enterprises have abandon that concept a long time ago because it wasn’t as productive as specializing in doing what they could do best in their part of the wealth creation chain of activities.
The only way to insure assess to the resources for the word's needs and that they will at the same time naturally go to the people that can best make use of them (i.e. to the best creators of wealth at the best price for that step of wealth creation) is to insure the integrity of the world’s free trading system. That system is built just as much upon cooperation as it is upon competition. The alternative is that we fight like junkyard dogs over the scraps.
Point Four, as to “China's economic power still rises with major digits and will keep rising. Some might argue that this is a bubble effect, others might say that its to fast and uncontrolled, but others might say that this is a planned strategy.”
The question should be put differently, why and how it is growing so fast right now at this point in history, why has it taken until now to grow, and how long can they sustain this very wonderful high rate of growth? The related political question that goes along with it is, when the remarkable rate of growth stops as all such thing do the internal dynamics existing within China will change dramatically putting the current power structure in danger? People are willing to put up with a lack of political freedom when their material conditions are improving but they are less willing when the material condition are no longer improving.
To explain China’s raped economic rise and the eventual reduction from its rapid rate of growth that will someday come where to survive it will have transform to the next stage of a more mature economy, I have to explain a little bit about the history of wealth.
Wealth the single within all human societies and has been sense the beginning of time and will continue to be more important organizing factor into the foreseeable future. Wealth is best defined for our purposes by the “Futhurest” Buckminster Fuller in his book Spaceship Earth as "the access to sustainable human life support.” All societies desire wealth and will endeavor to acquire as much of it as possible (human life support) until they reach some factor in their environment that the lack of which then limits further growth (the theory of constraints).
We can generally divide human history and its drive for ever more wealth into three areas and track its evolution by the kinds of competition between people for those things that will limit their amount of wealth. The first area of competition between groups of people for what limited their access to wealth was for physical tangible assets, be it as simple as the access to good water, hunting grounds, and going on up the scale to eventually include things like mineral ores and the critical one in today’s world (that of energy).
But believe it or not, these things are much less important than you think and they are far less important overall than they were in the past. The temporary shortages of many commodities that are much in the news right now are not caused by sematic shortages as is commonly assumed but because of the unexpected increase in demand created by emerging economies that far exceeded the expectations of the suppliers. The necessary resources exist and will be provided but they takes several years in most cases for them to be developed and to then come one line to furnish the supply into the pipeline. And where they can’t keep up with demand we will then see substitutes created. The current rise in commodities prices are a temporary blip on a generally downward trend that has been going down now for two-hundred years.
The second phase of history began when the limiting factor to the creation of additional wealth was the ability to accumulation adequate amounts of capital. Only when large amounts of capital could be concentrated and held together could huge wealth creating projects like dames, railroads, and large efficient factories be created that took time to complete and had large but at the same time long delayed returns on investment for these large capital outlays.
This very fact ushered in the age of imperialism with its endless need for not only for more raw materials which had never before been seen but also for the captive markets to justify and to amortize the expense of those grand projects that took years to justify and the reliable markets to sustain them. This meant that the competition between groups of people were now for trade routes, colonies, and the pursuit of market captured monopolies of all kinds. But today we are in a completely new area, one which unfortunately most people have yet to recognize and so too then fully comprehend. Today the primary limiting factor to the creation of wealth is human acumen.
Though the first two factors previously considered have been the limiting elements in the creation of wealth in the past and they have not gone completely away, they are no longer the critical limiting factor (the critical path to the creation of wealth). Human acumen, in the form of drive, imagination, and most especially intelligence with the added freedom to use these facilities’ to their best advantage are the things that are in the shortest supply in today’s world. When you have the raw materials and the Capital to put them to work, what you need then is smart people and especially very smart people to put them to work in the best way.
Up until this point in history there were always more very smart people than there were real jobs that absolutely required in all honesty, very smart people to fill them. That is no longer true. Now we have more available physical resources and vast pools of available Capital in the world than we can be effectively and efficiently best be used within the previous employed pools of human participants. This is because there are not enough very smart people in place to put them to their best effect. (Intelligence it is defined for our use as; the ability to absorb, record, evaluate, organizes, and analyze information so as to use that information to effect the physical environment in a way that enhances human welfare). Welcome to the information age.
If you look around you, you will see that all the advanced countries are importing as many very smart people as the can get because they do not have enough of their own and always need more.
Now that you have the basics’ under your belt to understand the question in the proper way, the reason why that China is growing so fast is that they are finally able to utilize a large part of the vast human potential of their bright, industrious, and disciplined population. Where before as it was in their previous system they did in fact inhibited the use of the Chinese people’s drive, imagination, and intelligence. Since there is or at least there was, so much underutilized human resources within China that the world needed and that there was at the same time so much Capital floating around in the world looking for a good place to land and to go to work, it has landed in China when the time came when the Chinese government allowed it. And as there is still a large excess of underutilized human potential still within China as yet unutilized (one out of every four people living on Earth are not only Chinese but Chinese living within China) they will continue to grow even though they are not using those human resource in the best possible way.
When they exhaust their previously unutilized human resources their growth will slow dramatically. At this point in time, two thirds of their people are still living down on the farm and in effect living in the past and many of those people are not prepared to enter the modern world as fully productive participants. But nevertheless that day is coming and when it does they will hit the wall if they do not hit some other wall first like a political one. The question is when? At that point to get additional productive benefit from the Chinese people will require giving them more freedom and a fairer system to operate within so they can do what they can do best even better than ever before.
