We’ve sort of touched on this before but it is false to say that is exactly what they were doing because that means you’ve summed up Chinese-American partnership since 1971 in just one (1) decade, the mid 90s to the mid 2000s.
They weren’t liberalizing in the political sense in the 80s, and Jiang Zemin got to where he was by thoroughly backing a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. In fact, they weren’t even really liberalizing politically during that time period, no matter how much lip-service they gave it. Certainly some social liberalization came about but even then, when people had too much access to information, they started walling off the internet, for example. So while there’s a lot of evidence to support that idea, it was really a short piece in a long story.
And I’m not saying that everyone who believed that is a fool, everybody believed that, I believed that. But I’m just trying to put the history in the proper context. Just because we thought it was so doesn’t mean it was really so.
Ofcourse big business cares about quarterly figures, but that does not preclude the thinking that China opening up economically = they would liberalize.
The West had minimal trade with Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. If big business profits trumped everything, including national security, why didn't the West have free trade with the Soviets? Why are there sanctions on Iran?
It was always about cheap labor. The liberalizing the people was just a talking point to manufacture consent.
I'd say America did just fine and even fleeced China for the most part, apart from completely destroying it's own manufacturing in the process.
If the profits of business trumps everything, then why didn't it trump Cold War interests?Because the US thought poor destitute China would lay down and let them do whatever they wanted. The US did that to Cuba too until they drove us out of Cuba. At the same time this was happening there was a Cold War between the US and USSR. That is why we did not do business with them. We were too busy sanctioning them.
If the profits of business trumps everything, then why didn't it trump Cold War interests?
The US never wanted to takeover China, it just never expected China to become hyper nationalistic , expansionist and aggressive.
China is a massive country, with a massive population , run by 1 party that was ostensibly Communist and was never an ally, or neutral like India, post WW2. They supported the opposition in the Vietnam and Korean wars. They supported groups around the world that were opposed to Western powers and was allied to the Soviets to a degree, but there was Soviet-Chinese friction too and the US thought it could exploit this.Like I said earlier. At the time China was not our direct enemy or a threat. Russia was. That is why.
China is a massive country, with a massive population , run by 1 party that was ostensibly Communist and was never an ally, or neutral like India, post WW2. They supported the opposition in the Vietnam and Korean wars. They supported groups around the world that were opposed to Western powers and was allied to the Soviets to a degree, but there was Soviet-Chinese friction too and the US thought it could exploit this.
In any case, China was always going to be a serious threat to Western hegemony considering its size, homogenity and lack of any real domestic opposition.
Looking at China, it would be naieve to think that when they got rich, technologically advanced and influential, they were just going to sit by and accept Western dominance.
And all it took was bringing them tremendous wrath at the cost of the middle class, for the elites to learn a lesson that honestly any honest person could see 20 years agoAnd gave China "Most Favored Nation" trading status.
And allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization.
The CCP played our establishment epically.
Because they did do deals and set stuff up like in Bulgaria they made a lot of PC parts but the Warsaw Pact never had enough economic growth and size to sway the west. It had too many problems to really encourage mass investmentsIf the profits of business trumps everything, then why didn't it trump Cold War interests?
The US never wanted to takeover China, it just never expected China to become hyper nationalistic , expansionist and aggressive.
Because they did do deals and set stuff up like in Bulgaria they made a lot of PC parts but the Warsaw Pact never had enough economic growth and size to sway the west. It had too many problems to really encourage mass investments