From the other side of the Silk Road: MSFS in Saudi Arabia (2012)

Georgetown Historian John McNeill on US-China Cold War Parallels

[GJIA] What similarities or differences do you see with the situation developing between the US and China now and that which developed between the US and the Soviet Union after World War II?

[McNeill] I don’t see a strong historical parallel. In the late 1940s the US had all of the economic advantages and most of the geopolitical ones. For a period the US possessed half of the world’s industrial capacity and had politically-assured access to most of earth’s oil and coal resources. In post-1945 USSR, meanwhile, people were literally starving in provincial cities. Its political system had some appeal around the world, and it acquired an important ally (for ten years) with the 1949 Chinese Revolution. But its political position was effectively circumscribed by US containment efforts. Today, the authoritarian and nominally communist PRC has a much stronger economic and political position than that of the USSR from 1945 to 1991, while the US economic position is weaker relative to that of the late 1940s.

Importantly, China and the US are economically interdependent in a way that the US and USSR never were. China holds trillions of dollars of US debt and could destroy public finance in the US in a week if it so wished. But China also needs the US to keep buying its products. Even after the US started selling grain to the USSR in the 1970s those two economies were never greatly intertwined. In both cases the pairs of countries were by some measures the two strongest in the international system, but beyond this, I see only a weak parallel.

Link to the full interview:
http://journal.georgetown.edu/2012/02/07/parallels-and-precedents-five-minutes-with-historian-john-mcneill/

China's Demographic Transition and the Hukou System

Google now has a cabinet position in Taiwan

More significant business-government interactions (also known as public-private partnerships) are an emerging trend in international relations. Google's having a cabinet position (minister without portfolio) in the current Taiwan government is significant evidence of this.

The google data center that is being constructed in central Taiwan will be a huge boon to the local economy.

Graphic is from the Taipei Times article: Cabinet reshuffle sees 16 new names

Madeleine Albright on the future of U.S.-China Relations

KGA: Based on your experience, both in office and from what you’ve observed in recent trips to the country, what do you believe is the likely future of the U.S. relationship with China?

MA: It’s hard to predict. President Obama is looking for partners, for countries we can work with. There are discussions about the Chinese helping the Europeans out of their debt crisis. We’d like to see China not only as a global power but as a power that actually takes responsibility and isn’t a free rider in the international system.

On the other hand, there continue to be issues such as the South China Sea. Secretary Clinton has suggested that there is a multilateral solution, rather than the Chinese unilaterally deciding that they have access to the sea and the islands and arguing with Vietnam and the Philippines. I was just in Beijing for the third high-level dialogue between a bipartisan U.S. delegation and the International Department of the Communist Party of China, and as a result of those discussions, I got the sense that there are actually a number of issues where we can see commonalities. For example, trying to deal with global problems related to the environment and energy.

It is one of those very fluid relationships that depend on who’s in power, and we’re going to see how that works with the transition in power in China this year, coupled with the fact that we have an election going on at home. In every election that I’ve seen the challenger tries to portray China in the worst possible way, and we’re already seeing that China-bashing going on. So it is a peculiar year to look at it all. The future of our relationship is still very uncertain, and this can be viewed as a threat or an opportunity- or treated as both.

As orginally published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs blog page on November 14, 2011. Please find the rest of the interview at the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs