Tuesday, February 25, 2020

转译文:中国是真正的亚洲病人

这个星期(2020年2月3号),强大的中国战车,在不同物种之间跳跃的蝙蝠病毒面前,遭遇挫折。中国正在努力控制疫情,重启经济。这也警示着全世界,在习惯于中国强势崛起的时候,也要明白没有任何东西是理所当然的,哪怕是北京的力量。
我们对新冠病毒的危害尚未完全明了。有迹象表明,中国当局依然在试图隐瞒事实的真相,目前的理解是新冠病毒比伊波拉和萨斯更具传染性,但不像它们那样致命,虽然也有专家说萨斯和新冠病毒具有类似的传染性。
中国对这次危机的初始反应是不及格的,武汉市政府躲躲闪闪,明哲保身;中央政府目前反应激烈,但是效果善乏可陈。城市封闭,工厂停工,但是病毒依然在扩散。我们希望政府最终能够控制疫情,治疗病患,但是中国共产党当下的表现,让人对它的信心大受挫折。北京抱怨美国拒绝让最近到过中国的外国人入境,但是这不能掩盖是武汉和北京的错误决策,才导致瘟疫的泛滥。
专家们预测,在经济层面,瘟疫很可能会导致第一季度中国经济增长面临短暂但明显的下滑,疫情结束后才能慢慢恢复。至于长期的后果,就是跨国公司的产业链转移出中国的倾向,会得到加强。贸易战与公共卫生安全相叠加,使供应链的多元化,更加符合公司的长远利益。
类似于新冠病毒这类事件,和它之前的SARS, Ebola, MERS,考验我们的体系,使大家去思考原来想象不到的问题。如果有一种像Ebola那样致命,像新冠病毒那样传播迅猛的瘟疫,美国该如何应对?什么样的国家和国际体系,才能把危害降至最低?
瘟疫能让我们思考地缘政治和经济的各种假设。虽然希望疫情对中国经济增长的影响是短暂的,但是我们依然看到金融市场和商品价格的波动。假设一场大瘟疫,或者更有可能的一次大规模金融崩溃,让中国经济经历长期的低增速,那么会如何呢?会不会影响中国的政治稳定,会不会改变中国对世界的态度,乃至全球力量的均衡?
长期来看,中国的金融市场也许比其野生动物市场更加危险。数十年来,政府推动借贷的成本累积,地方政府和本地银行之间的利益勾兑,高企的地产泡沫,大规模的工业产能过剩,中国需要一次大规模的经济整顿。当前,即使一个小的初始震动都可能引起一场“虚荣的焰火”,因为那些虚假的价值,膨胀的预期和错置的财产会垮掉。如果真是这样的话,中国执政者和决策者面临的问题是,他们的技术手段和政治权威,能否使危害降至最低,尤其是这将导致那些政治上彼此有联系的人遭受重大经济损失。
我们无法预知这种规模的灾祸是否会发生,或者什么时候发生。但是地缘政治和国际关系的观察者,商业领袖和投资者,都需要牢记,中国的力量虽然看似强大,其实很脆弱。一个更加致命的病毒,或者一次金融市场的恐慌,足以在任何时刻改变中国政治经济的面貌。
很多人担心新冠病毒会成为一个全球性的瘟疫。中国经济崩溃的后果也会以同样方式,冷酷的传播。全球商品价格大跌,供应链断裂,全球的金融机构没人会独善其身。中国和全球的经济复苏都会很缓慢,从而给社会和政治带来戏剧性的影响。
如果北京的地缘政治势力范围因此而缩小,给世界带来的后果也可能是惊人的。有些人会以为全球秩序会回到“单极”状态,因为唯一一个可能和美国抗衡的强国退出争霸游戏。不过对于美国政治而言,孤立主义会重新占据上风。如果来自中国的挑战减弱,那么很多美国人会认为美国可以安心的减少所承担的国际事务。
到目前为止,21世纪是一个“黑天鹅”的时代,从911到特朗普当选,再到英国脱欧,一系列小概率但高冲击力的事件重新塑造了世界格局。这个时代还没有结束,其它“黑天鹅”还会陆续到来,新冠病毒不太可能会是中国的最后一只。

Monday, February 24, 2020

Tyranny is fueling the coronavirus pandemic

On the other side of the world, one of the worst disease outbreaks in modern history is simmering. As of Friday, what is being called "coronavirus" (this is actually a name for a family of viruses including the common cold; medical experts are calling the actual virus in question COVID-19) had supposedly infected 75,567 people in China and killed 2,239 of them. Outside China, another 1,152 cases had been reported in 26 other countries, causing eight deaths, including recent outbreaks in South Korea and Iran. The director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Friday: "Our window of opportunity [to stop the outbreak] is narrowing."
It remains to be seen whether China and other countries will be able to control the outbreak. But one thing is clear: Authoritarian political systems are lousy at dealing with disease pandemics. We see this in China today and in the United States as well.
COVID-19 originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and as Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) horribly botched its initial response to the coronavirus outbreak: "China now faces international vilification and potential domestic unrest as it blunders through continued cover-ups, lies, and repression that have already failed to stop the virus and may well be fanning the flames of its spread."
One primary reason the Chinese government failed to contain the outbreak is because corruption and incompetence are inherent features of tyrannical rule. The CCP can't point to democratic elections to obtain the consent of the governed, so they instead rely on techniques like a massive patronage machine to cultivate loyalty. Political reliability is a major prerequisite for filling any of the millions of positions in the vast Chinese bureaucracy, which tends to inculcate a culture of blind order-following, telling one's superiors what they want to hear, and leveraging one's position for personal advantage.
At the same time, the CCP, like any tyranny, uses violent political repression to frighten the populace against challenging its rule. Both freedom of speech and freedom of the press are sharply restricted there — and anyone perceived as a threat to CCP rule gets a treatment straight out of 1984. There are reportedly about a million Uighur Muslims in horrific re-education camps in western China — essentially, the CCP is attempting to commit cultural genocide in a fit of paranoia.
The first person to call attention to the COVID-19 outbreak was a doctor named Li Wenliang, who told colleagues via social media that it looked like a SARS outbreak. This is the kind of honest competence that is absolutely vital in any rapid disease response, but tyrannies often try to suppress bad news rather than deal with the problem. So as Garrett writes, "for the so-called crime of rumormongering, Li and seven other physicians were brought before China's security police and compelled to sign a document admitting to 'spreading lies.'"
For the critical first few weeks, when aggressive quarantine measures might have stopped the virus in its tracks, the Chinese state first insisted there was no new virus, then that they had this situation well in hand — all while it continued to spread. When the epidemic became undeniable, the CCP looked like the liars they were, sowing panic as Chinese citizens wondered how bad it really was. When Li caught the virus and died on Feb. 6, heroically trying to raise the alarm to the end, flames of distrust and anger were fanned higher still — and foreign governments reasonably began to suspect they could not trust the numbers coming out of China.
Trust is a vital component of any efficient disease response effort. The population must believe that the government is not lying about what is happening, and that its response measures are based on science and reason — especially so people do not panic and try to flee, possibly spreading disease further by accident. The CCP has proved beyond any question it is not trustworthy, and is relying on yet more brutal repression, locking down entire cities and herding thousands into poorly-equipped quarantine facilities. So far these efforts have not successfully curtailed the virus' spread.
Americans should not take much comfort in our somewhat-less authoritarian system. The Trump regime's style of rule bears all the marks of typical tyrannical rule — the bureaucracy stacked with corrupt idiot stooges, the legal system corrupted to protect the president and his cronies from facing criminal charges, and inconvenient information denied by a howling propaganda apparatus.
As Michael Lewis writes in his book The Fifth Risk, the entire federal bureaucracy has been rotting under Trump rule, as he neither knows nor cares to take the most basic actions to keep it functioning. Most of the people running what remains of the American state are either committed ideologues (like the virulent racist Stephen Miller), interested parties, or career civil servants operating without official leadership. Only 35 percent of the key positions in the Department of Homeland Security that require Senate confirmation are currently filled. The department does not even have a nominee for secretary, deputy secretary, or general counsel. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has no nominee for deputy administrator or deputy administrator for resilience.
As Garrett writes in another article, "In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure." As a result, Trump's COVID-19 response has been flailing and helpless. "In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion," she writes. Recently The Washington Post reported experts at the Centers for Disease Control said 14 infected Americans who caught the virus on a cruise ship should stay in Japan for the moment rather than fly on a plane with hundreds of others and risk spreading it further. But the Trump administration higher-ups overruled the CDC, and all the passengers came back to California and Texas — the infected individuals separated behind plastic screening, but still posing an unknown risk.
Reactionaries often argue that ruthless authoritarian rule is more efficient than the democratic sort. But the world is getting a brutal lesson in how false that is. It was false in fascist Italy and Germany — the Nazi state was a chaotic disaster of corruption and incompetence — and it's false today. There is no substitute for democratic legitimacy and the patient, dull work of building and maintaining a competent, honest bureaucracy. The tyrannical idiocy of Donald Trump and China's communist dictatorship may get millions of people killed.

China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia

The mighty Chinese juggernaut has been humbled this week, apparently by a species-hopping bat virus. While Chinese authorities struggle to control the epidemic and restart their economy, a world that has grown accustomed to contemplating China’s inexorable rise was reminded that nothing, not even Beijing’s power, can be taken for granted.
We do not know how dangerous the new coronavirus will be. There are signs that Chinese authorities are still trying to conceal the true scale of the problem, but at this point the virus appears to be more contagious but considerably less deadly than the pathogens behind diseases such as Ebola or SARS—though some experts say SARS and coronavirus are about equally contagious.
China’s initial response to the crisis was less than impressive. The Wuhan government was secretive and self-serving; national authorities responded vigorously but, it currently appears, ineffectively. China’s cities and factories are shutting down; the virus continues to spread. We can hope that authorities succeed in containing the epidemic and treating its victims, but the performance to date has shaken confidence in the Chinese Communist Party at home and abroad. Complaints in Beijing about the U.S. refusing entry to noncitizens who recently spent time in China cannot hide the reality that the decisions that allowed the epidemic to spread as far and as fast as it did were all made in Wuhan and Beijing.
The likeliest economic consequence of the coronavirus epidemic, forecasters expect, will be a short and sharp fall in Chinese economic growth rates during the first quarter, recovering as the disease fades. The most important longer-term outcome would appear to be a strengthening of a trend for global companies to “de-Sinicize” their supply chains. Add the continuing public health worries to the threat of new trade wars, and supply-chain diversification begins to look prudent.
Events like the coronavirus epidemic, and its predecessors—such as SARS, Ebola and MERS—test our systems and force us to think about the unthinkable. If there were a disease as deadly as Ebola and as fast-spreading as coronavirus, how should the U.S. respond? What national and international systems need to be in place to minimize the chance of catastrophe on this scale?
Epidemics also lead us to think about geopolitical and economic hypotheticals. We have seen financial markets shudder and commodity prices fall in the face of what hopefully will be a short-lived disturbance in China’s economic growth. What would happen if—perhaps in response to an epidemic, but more likely following a massive financial collapse—China’s economy were to suffer a long period of even slower growth? What would be the impact of such developments on China’s political stability, on its attitude toward the rest of the world, and to the global balance of power?
China’s financial markets are probably more dangerous in the long run than China’s wildlife markets. Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction. Even a small initial shock could lead to a massive bonfire of the vanities as all the false values, inflated expectations and misallocated assets implode. If that comes, it is far from clear that China’s regulators and decision makers have the technical skills or the political authority to minimize the damage—especially since that would involve enormous losses to the wealth of the politically connected.
We cannot know when or even if a catastrophe of this scale will take place, but students of geopolitics and international affairs—not to mention business leaders and investors—need to bear in mind that China’s power, impressive as it is, remains brittle. A deadlier virus or a financial-market contagion could transform China’s economic and political outlook at any time.
Many now fear the coronavirus will become a global pandemic. The consequences of a Chinese economic meltdown would travel with the same sweeping inexorability. Commodity prices around the world would slump, supply chains would break down, and few financial institutions anywhere could escape the knock-on consequences. Recovery in China and elsewhere could be slow, and the social and political effects could be dramatic.
If Beijing’s geopolitical footprint shrank as a result, the global consequences might also be surprising. Some would expect a return of unipolarity if the only possible great-power rival to the U.S. were to withdraw from the game. Yet in the world of American politics, isolation rather than engagement might surge to the fore. If the China challenge fades, many Americans are likely to assume that the U.S. can safely reduce its global commitments.
So far, the 21st century has been an age of black swans. From 9/11 to President Trump’s election and Brexit, low-probability, high-impact events have reshaped the world order. That age isn’t over, and of the black swans still to arrive, the coronavirus epidemic is unlikely to be the last to materialize in China.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Coronavirus Proves One Thing: China's Rise Is Built on Quicksand

"We may not build hospitals in 10 days with forced labor, but we are better able to create conditions where we don’t have to."

Despite China’s incredible economic success as of late, it’s important to remember that it is still fundamentally a communist country. Recent events have been a stern reminder.

Freedom can be messy, but it’s nothing like the mess an authoritarian regime creates when it fears losing power. The disturbing outbreak of the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China and the communist government’s response to it should be a reminder of the consequence of a system based on state control, without rule by the people and a vibrant civil society. Many are impressed by the fact that China built a 1,000-bed hospital in 10 days—by employing about 7,000 people who worked around the clock.
However impressive that feat might be, it’s important to consider how dangerous the virus has become and the lack of communication and coordination that could have taken place to avoid having to take such extreme measures.
The virus initially broke out on Dec. 8 in China’s Wuhan province. Instead of immediately informing the public and bringing awareness to a potential outbreak of a highly contagious disease, the local governmental authorities waited three weeks to inform residents.
The Chinese government also actively attempted to suppress information about the outbreak as it escalated sharply.
“That’s clearly unacceptable, especially in light of the SARS experience, when a Chinese cover-up also occurred, and in light of the high domestic and international travel rates of the Chinese people today,” wrote Peter Brookes, a senior fellow for national security affairs at The Heritage Foundation. “To minimize the spread of any potential epidemic, a host country must not only respond rapidly, but provide full transparency to advise not only its own citizenry, but the international community as well.”
While these actions (or inactions), so far at least, have mostly affected the people of China alone, a raging pandemic could have global consequences.
A century ago, a flu epidemic killed more people than died on all the battlefields of World War I combined. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that some estimates suggest about one-third of the entire world population was infected at some point.
We may be better at treating and containing disease these days, but this is still serious stuff. The Chinese government in Beijing was clearly more focused on saving face for the regime than efforts to successfully contain the virus. Even now, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening in China as the economy is being roiled by shutdowns and infection and death rate numbers seem untrustworthy.
That’s not to mention the smattering of images and videos coming out of the country, some of which may be fake or misinformation, but it’s hard to trust any official pronouncements, given Beijing’s clear attempts to suppress news from shining a light on the situation.
It’s notable—given China’s clear economic advancements of the past few decades, thanks to its abandoning communist economic theories—that the regime has not let go of its absolute power over society.
China is still communist, and communism, as it’s practiced in the real world, is about absolute control. If anything, the economic advancements are now working alongside an authoritarian retrenchment as President Xi Jinping seizes more power and the Chinese Communist Party uses its increased technological prowess to create more tools for tyranny.
So, while China has more economic and technological ability to treat a disease, it’s more tightly controlled system makes Chinese society less able to counter a controllable outbreak. That factor distinguishes Chinese society under communism from the American system, in which free speech is a protected right and a vibrant civil society allows information to spread quickly. 
“The government has tightened its grip on the internet, the media, and civil society. It has deeper pockets and a greater ability to control the flow of information across the country,” wrote Li Yuan in The New York Times, comparing China of today to how it was during the SARS outbreak. “As a result, many of the media outlets, advocacy groups, activists and others who held the government accountable in 2003 have been silenced or sidelined.”
We may not build hospitals in 10 days with forced labor, but we are better able to create conditions where we don’t have to.
As with the repression of likely millions of Muslim Uighurs and the crackdown on Hong Kong protesters, the coronavirus outbreak is a reminder—especially for those around the globe who are indifferent to the threat of China—of just how different a free society is from the Chinese communist one.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."

Friday, February 14, 2020

ABCs of trade

The annual 2019 trade figures for the United States came out last week, heralding some encouraging news. America’s enormous international trade deficit actually declined slightly from 2018. This was the first decrease in six years, with the deficit in goods and services dropping 1.7%, to $616.8 billion.
Better yet, America’s bilateral trade deficit with China fell for the first time in four years, dropping a hefty 17.6%, to $345.6 billion.
These are promising numbers and they show that tariffs on Chinese products are successfully moving the needle on U.S. trade flows. In fact, America’s 2019 imports from China actually fell $87.4 billion from the all-time high set in 2018.
At the same time, America’s trade deficits with other competitors did increase in 2019. The U.S. goods deficit with the EU rose 5.4%. The deficit with Mexico climbed 26.2%. And the deficit with Canada increased 41.9%.
Overvalued dollar
Companies like mine — that manufacture goods in America’s industrial heartland—would like to see these trade deficits begin to decline as well. But that will require more than just tariff action, since America’s overvalued dollar BUXX, +0.04%   continues to make U.S. exports more expensive overseas.
Clearly, though, economists were wrong in predicting that tariffs would kill global trade, increase inflation, or cause a recession. My company, which competes directly with China in fabricated metal parts and assemblies, has seen firsthand that the tariffs are helping domestic industry.
There are two key justifications for the tariffs.
First, they’re providing relief for domestic companies like mine that have suffered from subsidized import competition. America’s steel companies are currently investing some $13 billion in new steelmaking across the nation. That investment is creating higher-paying jobs in rural areas.
Advanced industries are seeing benefits as well. Roughly a dozen solar manufacturers are now investing in U.S.-based production. First Solar, FSLR, +1.19%   for example, has announced a $1 billion facility in Ohio that’s expected to create 500 jobs.
Geopolitical strategy
Second, the tariffs underpin an important geopolitical strategy. Now that Beijing has become a major strategic competitor—and is making a bid for global hegemony—the tariffs can help to reduce the trade profit that keeps driving China’s rise.
With the tariffs underway, the United States should pursue an “ABC” strategy: “Anywhere But China.” The tariffs are already helping to drive production out of China and into other countries. That’s a good thing. But in order to constrain China’s rise, the United States should continue to encourage manufacturing to move away from mainland China.
Since 2001, the United States has suffered trillions of dollars in cumulative trade debt with Beijing. That has cost an estimated 3.7 million U.S. jobs and reduced the quality of employment in America’s workforce.
At the same time, the United States has become progressively more reliant on China for prescription drugs, key industrial metals, and military hardware. And Chinese companies brazenly hack U.S. steel companies and wind turbine manufacturers while Chinese agents steal America’s research in biomedical science, wireless technology, and aerospace engineering.
Predatory trade
China happily uses this predatory trade to fund a brutal regime that persecutes religious and ethnic minorities. It also uses forced labor to boost manufacturing output. It rarely enforces weak labor standards. And lax environmental regulations have allowed Chinese factories to continue releasing ozone-depleting carbon tetrachloride into the atmosphere, in violation of international agreement.
In the face of such wanton behavior, the United States should do everything possible to limit China’s rise. That in itself would justify tariffs on Chinese exports. “Anywhere but China” should be the overriding approach as the United States reduces its dependence on China and encourages increased production at home.
If something can’t be manufactured in the United States, it should be made somewhere other than in China. That common-sense approach should be the “ABC” of future U.S. geopolitical strategy.
Zach Mottl is chief alignment officer of Atlas Tool Works, in Lyons, Ill. He serves on the board of directors of the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) and is a past chairman of the Technology and Manufacturing Association of Illinois.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Not Your Father's Cold War

Key point: Beijing and Washington seem to be set on a path of confrontation that will only be heightened by social media and new technologies. The question is who can out compete who?
The United States and China are locked in a rivalry over trade, technology, military control of the South and East China seas, and increasingly over ideology and human rights. The two countries have been in a cyberwar for years already, featuring Chinese attacks on the Pentagon’s personnel system and the U. S. Navy’s ship maintenance records. There is a military build-up on both sides in the direction of great power conflict. Yet, neither side sees it remotely in its self-interest to initiate a violent clash. In short, this is a cold war, but vastly different from the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
China’s cultural genius and geographical capacity surpass that of the Soviet Union. Whereas the northern coastline of the Soviet Union was ice-blocked for much of the year, and historic Russia has been a frigid and insecure land power with few natural frontiers, infusing an all-encompassing and debilitating “cynicism” into its national spirit, as Joseph Conrad observed, China, with a shoreline in the temperate zone extending 9,000 miles along one of the world’s major shipping lanes, constitutes a mineral-rich continent, able to be both a land and sea power. Moreover, China’s 3,500-year-old succession of dynasties, of which Mao Zedong’s is only the most recent, has bequeathed it with a legacy of institutional order and self-confidence appreciably greater than Russia’s. Russia produces few exportable consumer goods, even as China’s fifth-generation mobile network, led by Huawei Technologies, constitutes stiff competition for our own, with a revenue of $122 billion in 2019. There is, too, China’s key role in supply chains for the world’s most desired electronic products; famously the Apple iPhone. There is not the old Soviet Union that could produce hydrogen bombs and little else.
Whereas the original Cold War was principally about gaining an advantage in the game of nuclear annihilation, this cold war will be principally about cyber and computer dominance, ranging from a plethora of consumer products to naval warfare, since naval engagements of the future will be about which side’s intelligent battle system can incapacitate the other’s first. The first Cold War was about bigness: tank battalions and nuclear warheads. This second one will be about microscopic smallness: silicon chips and electronic circuitry.
While the original cold war signaled the apex of the Industrial Age, the U. S.-China cold war heralds the second phase of post-industrial globalization. The globalization which lasted for three decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall had the effect of unifying the globe and creating new middle classes through free trade and the exchange of ideas - from management practices to scientific knowledge. This second phase, more friendly to pessimists, will be about dividing the globe into different political, trade, consumer, and technological domains. After all, globalization was never a conflict-free security order, as originally advertised, but merely a value-neutral, temporary stage of economic development.
In the original Cold War, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger moved closer to Communist China in order to balance against the Soviet Union. This time there is less hope of moving closer to Russia to balance against China, since China and Russia are now allying, rather than on the brink of military conflict with each other as in 1969, two years before Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing.
But not everything is different than during the first cold war and not everything is harder. Some things are eternal. Diplomacy remains paramount and human rights remain a critical, underappreciated tool of leverage.
Indeed, the original Cold War featured summit meetings, nuclear weapons treaties, hotlines, and the Helsinki human rights process. Precisely because the United States and the Soviet Union could not agree on the question of which side history itself was on, they decided to draw rules and boundaries around their struggle, to keep it from literally going nuclear. However, President Donald Trump has thus far eschewed traditional diplomacy with China in favor of a narrow dialogue over trade. Because Trump has obsessively reduced the U. S.-China cold war to one contentious topic, he has exchanged general confidence building across a range of issues for a zero-sum stare-down on just one issue, thus undermining progress on the South China Sea, the oppression of the Muslim Uighur Turks in western China, and so forth.
The plight of millions of Muslims in Xinjiang Province is instructive. The U. S. Congress is uniting across partisan lines to condemn the Chinese regime’s treatment of this minority. But while a laudable action, it may also be a sterile one, since it will only encourage Beijing to dig in its heels. Given an on-again, off-again trade war coupled with the absence thus far of a general, continuous dialogue between the two adversaries, Congress’s action will appear to President Xi Jinping as just another American assault on China’s legitimacy. After all, while the Muslims in western China represent a human rights issue to us, to the Chinese they represent a strategic issue: because for centuries western China was the weakest and most unstable part of China’s internal empire, and stabilizing it along with China’s other border regions is what gives China the luxury, rare in its history, to concentrate on sea power. Thus, China’s brutal clampdown in Xinjiang and its aggressive naval expansion in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean are integrally linked.
The benefit of a wide-ranging and confidence-building dialogue with China, of the kind pursued by Washington throughout the middle and latter parts of the Cold War with both Beijing and Moscow, is that a human rights issue like the treatment of the Uigurs can be brought up and discussed, with the possibility of some improvement in the situation that will not be seen as a concession by the Chinese, and not trumpeted as such by us.
Moreover, absent such a sustained, wide-ranging dialogue with Beijing – which to its credit, the Trump Administration is now poised to establish - our posture toward China will gradually assume a purely military aura. This could alienate liberal elites which largely bought into the original Cold War. But an emphasis on human rights and personal freedoms – given  China’s high-tech Orwellian system - will rescue us from this fate. It will also provide an edge in a struggle that will be more difficult than the one against the Soviets - since as technology dominates the new cold war, and, as supply chains decouple, China’s ability to satisfy global consumers will likely be equal to ours.
This second cold war, conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media, is only in its beginning stages. The aim, like in the first Cold War, is negative victory: not defeating the Chinese, but waiting them out, just as we waited the Soviets out: because at some point, as its middle class matures and continues to expand, mainland China may face its own equivalent of the internal upheavals that have roiled Hong Kong, Latin America, and the Middle East.
There are fundamental differences between the two cold wars. But in order to prevail we must concentrate on the similarities: the need for open-ended dialogue and focusing on our strong suit - liberal values in the face of increasingly intrusive technologies. For this cold war could end with echoes of 1989: with one side’s domestic order proving more resilient than the other’s.
Robert D. Kaplan is a managing director for global macro at Eurasia Group. His most recent book is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first CenturyThis first appeared earlier in January 2020.

Thursday, February 6, 2020

转:李文亮被训诫书曝光 为众人抱薪者已冻毙于风雨


北京时间,2 月 6 日,因感染新型肺炎,武汉市中心医院医生李文亮抢救无效去世。

李文亮这个名字出现在公众的视野不足一个月。2019年12月30号,李文亮在同学群里提到,“华南水果海鲜市场确诊了7例SARS”“最新消息是冠状病毒感染确定了,正在进行病毒分型”。

2020年1月1日,武汉警方发布通报称,一些网民在不经核实的情况下,在网上发布、转发不实信息,造成不良社会影响。公安机关经调查核实,传唤8名违法人员,并依法进行了处理。两天后,李文亮收到警方的训诫书,警方认定“华南水果海鲜市场确诊了7例SARS”的言论,不属实。



 
湖北,武汉,市中心医院,李文亮医生,已经确认去世了。下图这是他的病房前……他的妻子,在湖北老家,健康没有问题。(记者 李微敖)

1月12日,李文亮因发烧、咳嗽在武汉中心医院呼吸与重症医学科监护室接受隔离治疗。直到2020年的2月 1 日,李文亮才在个人微博公布了确诊感染的消息,“今天核酸检测结果阳性,尘埃落定,终于确诊了”。

这则确诊的消息何尝不是李文亮对自己吹哨人身份的一个自证。

可如今他去世了,身后还有一个也不幸感染的妻子和一个还没出生的孩子。

“那美好的仗我已经打完了,应行的路我已行尽了,当守的道我守住了。 从此以后,有公义的冠冕为你留存。”

蛾摩拉城配不上义人。

再见英雄,为众人抱薪者,已冻毙于风雨。

特朗普将如何输掉与中国的贸易战

 编者:本文是 保罗·克鲁格曼于2024年11月15日发表于《纽约时报》的一篇评论文章。特朗普的重新当选有全球化退潮的背景,也有美国民主党没能及时推出有力候选人的因素。相较于民主党的执政,特朗普更加具有个人化的特点,也给时局曾经了更多的不确定性。 好消息:我认为特朗普不会引发全球...