While the China links have grown into industries like the Western MSM and Hollywood, places never conceived of being susceptible to them, the beginnings were in grubby, old-fashioned manufacturing.

It’s not a new idea: Japan moved from the “Jap crap” of the 1950’s-60’s to Westerners noticing by the late 1970’s that Toyota cars didn’t break down as much as those of GM, Ford and Chrysler.

But China has not established the same reputation over the last twenty years, as California has discovered with its repairs of the Bay Bridge damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake:

California selected the state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company, which at the time had no experience building bridges. Zhenhua’s 3,000 employees on the project included steel-cutters, welders, polishers, and engineers.
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In 2000 UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhasaan Astaneh-Asl said the new design was not earthquake safe. Chinese materials also proved troublesome. 

The Chinese steel was too brittle, experts testified, and in 2007 fissures began appearing in thick steel bars. In 2009, the company shipped from China the main bridge tower and 28 bridge decks. Engineers found hundreds of cracks in the welds, a violation of the contract, and every one of the 750 panels had to be repaired. In 2013, dozens of the long metal rods on the project snapped and the rainy season revealed other defects. 

Professor Astaneh-Asl refuses to use the bridge and on top of everything else, the project came in 10 years late and a full $5 billion over budget.

As that article explores in some detail, these sorts of deals were the product of the 1990’s boom in trying to get closer to China economically, diplomatically and culturally. Something NZ also believed in with its Free Trade Agreement of 2000. In America the wheels were well greased by people named Biden, Bush, Pelosi, Feinstein and company. And many others: from an article titled The Thirty Tyrants:

“The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

That was a statement made by a trade consultant to the NYT’s Tom Friedman for an article he wrote in 2009. Now I regard Friedman as somewhat of an idiot and I’m not alone in that on the Right and the Left. But he is good at sniffing for the winds of mindless management excitement.

During a recent conference of regional business leaders at which I was in attendance, an executive of one company was asked about tariffs and the global supply chain squeeze, and what impact they were having. He started his response by stating that “China, Inc. was another overhyped and destructive management fad.”
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So why did Bravo and so many other companies feel they had to try to make the China debacle work? Because their peers were committed to China, Inc. and they wouldn’t dare be the first company to concede that it was an awful fad.

Americans would get consumer goods at low-low prices and the Chinese would become more democratic and respect human rights. It hasn’t turned out that way, for many reasons:

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Money has often fueled traitors in history, but this is bribery on steroids:

In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”
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Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.

As you can imagine, Trump’s plans and actions to disrupt all this created enemies among the GOP and Democrat-supporting business class, just to add to all his other enemies in an American version of the “Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend”:

In November a video circulated on social media purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese think tank close to the Beijing government. “Trump waged a trade war against us,” he told a Chinese audience. “Why couldn’t we handle him? Why is that between 1992 and 2016, we always resolved issues with the U.S.? Because we had people up there. In America’s core circle of power, we have some old friends.” 

The article points out that the split between China Hawks and “Panda Huggers” existed inside his administration also. Meantime the American security and defence establishment had their own, additional reasons for turning a blind eye to China.

The piece tracks the history of how all this developed, starting with Nixon-Kissinger in 1970, but only really taking off during the Clinton administration after the USSR collapsed and then pushing into Bush II world, aided and abetted by Senators like Feinstein (D), who befriended in 1978 Jiang Zemin, the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of China and actually had a Chinese spy on her staff, and McConnell (R), whose shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP. Both grew very wealthy from their China links.

Mr Fukuyama and his now infamous End-Of-History bullshit gets a mention too, with all his tales of an end to conflicting political models. He should be asked about this guy, Wang Huning, who is his doppleganger, since he has provided perhaps the most influential intellectual arguments to go along with the money:

A relative unknown outside China, Wang has been the country’s top ideological theorist for more than 30 years. In December, the 67-year-old was one of just two top officials reappointed to join Xi’s Politburo Standing Committee, the decision-making body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). If Xi is the enforcer, Huning is the wily alchemist, a Machiavelli-like figure, more comfortable in the shadows than the spotlight.

In the manner of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, Wang spent time in the USA as a young man and seemed to enjoy identifying all the cracks in its systems, to the extent of writing a book about them, America Against America. One scary aspect is that it holds up well after thirty years, perhaps even better than that, judging by the further decay of US cities and society. And Wang certainly took lessons from it that he thought China needed to apply to itself from similarly falling apart: a new authoritarianism, a post-Maoist governance that is (supposedly) a sort of enlightened autocracy pushing loyalty, patriotism, family and turning youth away from corrupted social media – the China-owned app TikTok is not allowed to be used in China, reminding me very much of this scene from The Godfather.

Haig Patapan, an academic who has studied Wang in great detail, told me that “China’s turn away from liberalism” and its decision to double down on “’socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as a counter to western ideology” have been fueled by his philosophies…Wang’s increased emphasis on the relationship between strong social structures—including the nuclear family—and economic prosperity have actively shaped the policies of modern day China.

No economic advance is going to break through that, especially since it is merely a reinforcement of thousands of years of the Chinese culture of a strong, centralised, technocratic state under which people prosper within strong families. Xi Jinping has certainly pushed the former:

Xi placed himself in charge of almost every essential government body, which earned him the nickname “the chairman of everything.”
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On the last day of the [20th Communist Party] party congress, Hu Jintao, former party secretary and head of state (2002 to 2012) and the person who promoted Xi as a successor was escorted off the stage. Chinese state media claimed Hu had to leave early for health reasons.
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Xi concluded the party congress by presenting a new seven-person standing committee (the equivalent of a cabinet), which he staffed with officials whose best quality is their loyalty to him. 

Typical. Such degeneration is coded into Communist Parties, even though thirty years of changes dating from the late 1970’s and the elevation of Deng Xiaoping with his “Beijing Spring” and Four Modernisations, served to fool the rest of the world, especially the West. Now, to put it bluntly, The West Needs To Stop Believing China Can Reform Itself:

China’s economy today is as much a socialist one as it was under Mao since the state still controls all the means of production. Dikotter writes, “To this day, the land belongs to the state, a great many raw material resources belong to the state, major industries are controlled directly or indirectly by the state, and the banks belong to the state … 95 of the top 100 private firms belong to current or former party members.” To this point, the state-owned banks distribute capital as political goods to state-owned enterprises to pursue political goals. The Chinese government still follows the former Soviet Union’s central planning model by issuing an economic plan every five years. Capital is not allowed to flow freely in China.

You’d think something this obvious would get more attention in the West. Also this:

There is no moderate CCP leader either. Take Zhao Ziyang as an example. Zhao was premier from 1980 to 1987 and CCP general secretary from 1987 to 1989. After the CCP leadership ordered the People’s Liberation Army to violently suppress the Tiananmen Square protesters, Zhao was placed under house arrest until he died in 2005. The West has lionized Zhao as a moderate party member who paid a personal and professional price for trying to build democracy in China.

In the 1950’s he ordered the torture of farmers to obtain their food. In 1987 he said China would never copy the West’s multi-party systems and separation of powers. He told East Germany’s nasty leader Eric Honecker, that liberalisation would be restricted as soon as China’s living standards were high enough that they’d thank communism. He only sucked up to the Tiananmen Square protestors to gain power over Xiaoping – and failed.

Back to The Thirty Tyrants and the symbiosis that all this history has created between the American and Chinese elites:

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do.

Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

And for various reasons arising from within both China and America, the time of our modern Chinese-American tyrants may be drawing to a close.