Brooks on Fallows on China

I admire both the NyTimes' David Brooks and The Atlantic's James Fallows for similar reasons. Both guys seem to enjoy posing questions and exploring ideas more than arguing sides, and both seem to write with humility and openness about their own opinions. Both seem willing to be wrong, and willing to give credit where credit is due. Both are refreshing voices in our current information age gone wrong.

So.. I was happy today to read Brooks about a debate about China featuring Fallows (where he lived for several years, and about which he's written a series of very illuminating stories).

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation.

I post this because the biggest question that I went to China with—and I think, one that is going to be asked endlessly in the coming years—is what does China's inevitable rise mean for America? Will America respond out of undue fear or proper caution? Does one superpower's rise require another to fall? To what level will we tangle over resources? Can we commend and encourage the miraculous, rapid evaporation of Chinese poverty without abandoning our own human rights principles?

Seems like it's the geopolitical relationship that will matter more than any other over the next 100 years. Glad I got a glimpse.