That said, I’m sure that China will engage in some neo-colonial practices in emerging markets. I probably should study up on the Belt and Road program, but my bias is to believe that a country with the nerve to tell its own poor people how many children to have will take a dim view of other poor countries’ liberties. The will pay to use China’s roads or face the belt.
It has been a long time since I thought of ‘spheres of influence’ but I do believe the US and LATAM will be a great deal more impervious to China’s ambitions than countries like Thailand and Vietnam as well integrated as they are into the current world economic order.
As the US finds itself paying more attention to its own resources and supply chains, I think it is more likely that we will ultimately look at China in the way we look at Saudi Arabia. Some few powerful American concerns will make several significant deals with China for strategic purposes, but the relationship will not go much further beyond that. Americans do not perceive China as an open and free society, and we have history, Taiwan and Hong Kong to remind us of that. I thoroughly believe that America’s openness will prove to be more adaptable.
It might be corny, but the exceptional life of Bruce Lee is instructive. He found the best of Chinese traditions in martial arts to be formalistic and non-adaptive, a top down idea of mastery that constrained creativity. He had to leave to expand these ideas and so developed a superior adaptive system. This became the foundation of American MMA. Similarly, as Brazilians opened up and adapted Japanese Judo to become BJJ, a superior system evolved. Today, after fewer than 50 years, Americans and the world have learned a combat format that beats 1000 years of traditional Chinese instruction. Perhaps China may learn an economic format that beats 300 years of free market capitalism in open societies, but I very much doubt it.
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