What's Chinese for "Excrement of Bull"?

As all 2.7 regular readers of my blog know, the only thing I like as much as Republican-bashing and Islamism-bashing is...China-bashing. One might reasonably wonder if I just like bashing whoever is currently in power (the truth is, Bill Clinton spoiled me).

At any rate, I just finished reading "Losing the New China" by Ethan Gutmann, and it is an amazingly compelling piece of work. Many of its assertions that would seem almost absurd to most Western readers - do American businessmen really maintain money-losing businesses in China just so they can go there to hire prostitutes? - ring true to someone who has lived in Japan. The honest, often self-deprecating tone of the book makes it often seem like a confessional ("I kissed a Chinese woman while my wife was out of town," and all that). But actually, it's a searing indictment of the American expat business community in China, who work tirelessly to cover up that government's brutal authoritarian policies and aggressive attitudes toward the U.S. I believe nearly every word of it.

Which is why, after reading that book, I look at many pro-China news stories in a new light.

A case study: Consider this review of Peter Navarro's "The Coming China Wars." The review, by Martin Wetzel of the Financial Times, pooh-poohs nearly all of Navarro's assertions that China is attempting to overthrow Western power.

Now, Navarro's book might well be a worthless anti-China screed. But reading Wetzel's review, I'm struck by the easy twists of logic that he uses to make utterly empty "refutations" of the book's main points. For example, Navarro claims that China's well-documented piracy of intellectual property is a deliberate government strategy. Wetzel responds:

[Navarro] reinforce[s] the lie that China produces no innovations of its own but merely scavenges off the West. The idea that the country that invented gunpowder, paper and ketchup, among other things, has no intellectual property of its own is laughable, but Navarro asserts it as fact.

Gunpowder, paper, and ketchup? How about something from this century? The idea that China's government allows IP piracy in order to play technological catch-up is not exactly a crazy conspiracy theory - hell, we did it to Britain a hundred years ago. But with a clever turn of phrase, Martin Wetzel makes Navarro sound insane for saying what most of us already believe anyway.

Or consider this:

The obscurations go on, but it is the chapter on drugs that really sets the tone. "No single country plays more of a key role than China in the global production, transportation and distribution of … illegal hard drugs," Navarro writes, adding a long list of scary statistics to prove his point. He does not blame the Chinese government directly — but any reader who wishes is free to make the inference that the government of China is indirectly, if not directly, responsible.

Wetzel does a lot of sneering, but does he even once claim that Navarro is wrong about the drugs? Of course not, because he doesn't know if it's true or not. But that doesn't stop him from claiming:

To suggest that China is engaged in "an aggressive drive for global economic hegemony" is nonsense. To assert that the U.S. must respond with economic confrontation backed up by the threat of war is, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham, nonsense on stilts.

A few days ago, I might have believed Wetzel, or at least not scrutinized his article closely enough to realize it was...er...a bunch of "Blow-cow." Now, I find myself thinking, "How much time does Martin Wetzel spend in China? How important is China reporting to his career?"

And I was even more suspicious when I saw Wetzel's review quoted extensively on Amazon by a guy named "Bobby Fletcher"...a guy who, as you can easily see from his list of reviews, apparently only ever logs onto Amazon to call Falun Gong a dangerous cult, and to trash books that criticize China. (Think his name is really "Bobby Fletcher"?)

I think I just might go pick up a copy of Navarro's book.

The more and more I look at China, the less and less convinced I am that its government has any desire to reform. That doesn't mean it won't, but when you're the absolute rulers of the world's biggest country and your economy is growing at 10% a year, you aren't exactly used to being pushed around. The chance of China's leaders being slowly dragged toward reform seems nonzero, but pretty darn low. The chance of them doing everything they can to make sure America is no longer #1, including bribing U.S. businesspeople to do their shilling for them, seems...well...

...quite a bit larger...



Bonus Reading Guide: A hundred years ago, many middle-class white Americans were up in arms about imported cheap foreign labor (a.k.a. my ancestors). Immigrants were corporate floozies brought in by the Fat Cats to push wages down and screw the honest hard-working American. And what do you know, this attitude is alive and well. But why did it have to be posted on the supposedly liberal Huffington Post? What next: Pat Buchanan as a guest columnist?