Submitted by Experience Not Logic Blog

Rich Brubaker wrote a pretty lengthy post on Albert Keidel’s newest policy brief for the Carnegie Endowment, China’s Economic Rise—Fact and Fiction. I completely agree with everything Rich said, but I also want to add my own two cents.

Though I tend to agree with a lot of the scholarship coming out of Carnegie, my interpretation of Keidel’s brief is probably skewed by where I found it. Drudge Report is a great source for offbeat news, but there is a definite editorial political bias emerges in the content and lanugage of the headlines. Planting a headline about China overtaking the US economy on Drudge Report is a sure fire way to whip up the passions of young conservatives. Thus it was that I read Keidel’s brief less objectively than I might otherwise have.

After reflection, and despite the rider claiming that CE does not take institutional policy positions despite being an institution dedicated to advancing policy, I think this is still a scare piece. In Rich’s post he seems to be implying that Keidel’s conclusions are supported by assumptions that are all too convenient and not backed up fully enough by figures. This was my impression, too. Unlike your typical Red China scare piece, though, this one tries to scare the US into working with, rather than against, China.

In this vein, one of the most interesting things I thought Keidel pointed out was “The payoff from engagement with autocratic regimes.”

Contrary to popular understanding, China did not “open itself” to reforms and global commerce in the 1970s. Rather, the United Staets, which had “closed” China during the Korean War, decided under President Richard Nixon to engage the highly autocratic authorities in Beijing. It might thus be more accurate to say that the United States and China both contributed to “opening” China. The subsequent benefits are obvious, including the evolution of China’s more sophisticated and decreasingly autocratic economic and political structures. This experience argues for considering the replacement of blanket U.S. sanctions against other countries with broad-based engagement, keeping an eye on potential benefits several decades hence.

Hmmm… I wonder who he’s talking about?