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Inertia. Inertia is perhaps the best way to understand American public intellectuals, and the apparatus that they have built around themselves. Inertia is a good thing in the sense that it requires a quite substantial force to budge the intellectual from one space to another. Yet, depending on the operations of friction (and perhaps the slope on which inertia perches), an inert object once in motion may be unable to control its movement. An inert object may be "in the world", but it is principally oriented "in itself." That produces, again, both great strength but also, when in motion, a danger of loss of control in the face of external forces that may manage or regulate its path. Inertia is almost inevitably expressed as nostalgia.Here one understands the term in its morbid sense--from the Greek algos "pain, grief, distress" that focuses on its nostos "homecoming" in the sense of escaping back to or reaching back to an original place (neomai) (see here).
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It is precisely for that reason alone that the essay is worthy of a careful read. It gives one a sense of what the intellectual classes are fussing about. It suggests the nature and their perceptions of the world. But it also suggests their fears, their longings, and ultimately their efforts to preserve a network of privilege that might still serve as a buffer, irrespective of ideology, between those who manage and those who serve. The essay does make some interesting points, and some of its insights are worthy of substantial elaboration. Its fundamental insight is correct, though quite tentative. The difficulty is that the analysis continues to cling to an analytic lens that itself reflects a view of the world that was largely abandoned by 2016. In the era of the post global empire, one can hope for some sort of equilibrium and zones of intense competition; one cannot realistically seek to manage them back to a view of the nature and end goal of globalization as it stood before the start of the new eras in the US and China.
Beyond that, a few brief comments follow, the gist of which is this:
That was the world imagined in Mr. Friedman's most famous books. And perhaps one day the global collectives will get back to attempting some future form of that vision. But the reality around us now suggests a very different vision--one increasingly in evidence not just in the actions and sensibilities of China, but also those in the United States. Their respective dependencies feel this change even as they are incapable of understanding its character. Mr. Macron's recent pathetic visit to China (here and here) and Mr. Putin's humiliating role as a premier dependency (in the popular imagination here) speak to this shifting reality from converging global community to post-global empire. Intertwining remains important, and--to use the language of systems theory, structural coupling is of the highest importance. But these are now better understood in the shadow of the re-emergence of borders--territorial and abstracted, physical and functionally differentiated--between two quite distinct ways of translating the principles of capital and production, of work, duty, responsibility and its distribution of risk and responsibility between individual and collectives into the social relations around which human organization is elaborated. Post global empire, in effect, produces an ironic application of the motto of the European Union--In varietate concordia (united in diversity). As Mr. Friedman notes, both apex states are united in their commitment to principles of capital and productivity, but that unity has now been elaborated in two significant variations of organizing social relations (with a third emerging from the subordinated voices of dependencies on both sides of the new global divide). The task of this generation (unlike that of the post 1945 generations) is to develop mechanisms necessary to order the relations among these cousins. In that, trust is indeed important, as is intertwining, but the goal is no longer convergence but the orderly institutionalization of competitive but pacific relations between them. To that end, the fundamental insights of dual circulation relations may be useful. Unity now requires separate rooms in a house we all share.
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1. The essay was posted in Taiwan, and not on the Mainland of the People's Republic of China. That says more than virtually the rest of the essay--at least with respect to the core issues and values of liberal democracy: civil and political rights and a set of social relations built on them emphasizing individual autonomy and (markets based) choice. The tone suggests a heroism and adventurism in the face of a reality that has seen China empty itself of liberal democratic public intellectuals, and their apparatus of observation--a set of circumstances that is not reciprocated in liberal democratic states. As the author says: "Being back in Beijing was a reminder of my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know.. . we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come fro m this." ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid). That last point, anyway, more than less likely true.
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2. The author then veers toward the domestic violence set up of US-China relations--"The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast. . . — was just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is. The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war." ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid). That was enough of a prompt to take the opportunity to join other private sector liberal democratic grandees at the networking and socialization fest annually held for the privileged set from the West by an indulgent Chinese state apparatus. One cannot blame them, but one might smirk at least a little at the potential for naivete that privilege sometimes produces in these hothouse performance-networking--even if only for the press and in earshot of their Chinese hosts. "I found it helpful to be back in Beijing and to be able to observe China again through a larger aperture than a pinhole. Attending the China Development Forum — Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists" ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid). Let one be clear here--neither the event nor attendance were in themselves not worth the effort to attended and participate--quite the reverse. But self-referencing caravans of elite class aristocrats can sometimes produce unintended effects and certainly might create incentives toward self serving analytical flabbiness.
3. From this event, and other perambulations in the region comes the perspective shaping insight-- "the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool." ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid).The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the language that over the last several decades has served as the foundation both for the revolution in Chinese national policy respecting culture, society, and behavior, but also the foundational concept for equally transformative data based governance systems, the best known of which is Chinese Social Credit. That trust runs in two directions. The author, adopting an "insider voice" common to the discourse of inner circle public intellectuals tells us in a theatrically conspiratorial voice (as though to let one in, for a nanosecond, to the inner-sanctum), "More personally, being back in Beijing was also a reminder of how many people I’ve come to know and like there over three decades of reporting visits — but please don’t tell anyone in Washington that I said that. There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China." Ibid. Mutual demonization, it is suggested is crazy if only because the Chinese are so much like Americans in two critical respects so dear to the American elites since the time of the Protestant missionary efforts of the late 19th century: "I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China." (Ibid.). Of course work ethic and natural capitalism are quite contextually contingent, but a short essay can be forgiven for avoiding that gloss in favor of advancing a greater cause--and with which there ought to be some sympathy: the development of a better managed working relationship, but one that requires a substantial shift on both sides respecting the borderlands of their interactions.
4. The author is not unaware of the differences that now make unattainable the old aspirations toward global convergence along the lines envisioned by the Americans in 1945. In the process, of course, there is a tendency to misread the strengths and weaknesses of both apex post-global imperial orders. But at least he is aware of the manifestation of the difference that ideological commitments produce: Ours is a robust, unruly, and sometimes chaotic liberal democracy grounded on the primacy of civil and political turbulence; theirs is an equally robust society built on the primacy of the collective and the necessity of putting stability and prosperity first. The role of the Communist Party, however, remains subject to current American catechistic representation. There is only so far the author can go without breaking group taboos. "I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. I
say this to explain that being in Beijing reminds you that China’s
stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state
and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a
regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building
seriously." (Ibid.). It did, however, provide an opportunity for elite group solidarity building within the apex influencer group in the US ("It makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation builder named Donald Trump."). Yet that is also precisely what both sharpens and dulls the analysis--the focus--not uncommon among elite analysis on both sides of the Pacific that tends to reveal more about their own internal jostlings than about the object about which they write.
5. The essayist confirms a theory he made famous in a prior work--about the flatness of the world, in the course of chatting with normal people in Beijing. It posits flatness from the seepage of CHatGPT into China, where the settled wisdom had been that China would beat the Americans to the punch ("Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have
begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local
Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it." Ibid.). He astutely ties the vectors of AI development to ideology. China focuses on ordering AI--face recognition, and monitoring applications--the United States focused on generative AI, which aligns with the American but perhaps less well with the Chinese political ideology. But that is just too simplistic to leave without comment. It is an excellent example of the semiotics of interpretation that signifies order out of arrangements of fact that are meant to serve as the incarnation of ideology. Everyone does it--at least in the context of managing mass opinion.
6. He also notes that self-referencing trope runs in both directions. And from that the fundamental question around which the essay was structured: "What exactly are America and China fighting about?" (Ibid). It is to that question that the rest of the essay is focused. . . . And he offers answers. First he proffers what he suggests are "old and obvious aspects"--the realpolitik of big power competition where the stakes are control of the world order the Americans created and then spend almost a generation attempting to walk away from in the course of their own self-indulgent play acting at cultural revolution while the Chinese have been undertaking a similar adventure with national characteristics. There is a twist--unlike old great power fights for dominance, this one is the product , and marks the success, of convergence based economic globalization. What Reform and Opening Up on the Chinese side and the convergence and intertwining policies of global markets did on the US side created something unique--not dueling civilizations (the Huntington model)--but rather a fight among two states though quite different, brought up in the same way. Or to put it in the terms that the author would understand--globalization made it possible for both the US and China to become the apex work ethic and capitalist states in the globe. Their competition, then, is not among strangers, but among two states socialized within the same set of core values. That of course fits in nicely with Friedman's now famous flat earth theory. The problem is the Friedman doe snot quite understand the profundity of what ge suggests. Stuck in the 20th century world of realpolitik, he can only muster the analytic depth that this permits, one which is quite shallow: "But in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment." ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid). The intertwining may be through trade and investment but it is fused through a commitment to the fundamental principles of capitalism--whether in the form unpacked by Adam Smith or that unpacked by Karl Marx. That is what unites them--what distinguishes them is on the one hand the bottom up autonomy based institutionalism of liberal democracy against the top down collectivism of the vanguard institutionalization of Leninism.
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8. That analysis is then coupled with a nostalgia for the truisms of the passing age of convergence based globalization. He argues: "no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately." ("What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?" ibid). The Chinese would agree--and so they developed the Belt & Road Initiative. The fact that no one country can own a supply or produciton chain does not mean that they can't control or oversee it. That, of course, is the principal organizational lesson of the modern multi-national corporation. It is also the lesson of China's Belt & Road Initiative and the America First project in its current iteration as a Rules Based Multilateral Order. Indeed, even as China and the US paw each other, they have divided the world into the functionally differentiated territories of the production chain. Arguments from out of the 20th century no longer work in the era of post-global empire. The only people with whom the argument here may resonate are the Russians, but they are trying to drag all of us back to the 19th century (with a surprising number of people quite willing to tag along for the ride). In missing the turn from the global to the post global and from the undifferentiated market to the territorialization of global production chains within dual circulation economies (on the Chinese side) and solidarity based groupings on the liberal democratic side, Mr. Friedman misses the real lesson from his trip: that both the United States and China are reshaping the world to suit a new vision of the global that no amount of trust building will change (The Ideological Territorialization of Post-Global Empire: "A World Divided: Russia, China and the West" (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy; October 2022)). One cannot lay the blame for this solely at the feet of the Chinese vanguard--American progressives played a role in shaping the current climate as well--one which Mr. Trump in his own boorish way merely made unavoidable and immediate. That said one can only share the author's hope that the emerging apex powers are going to have to find a way to live with each other.
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