Friedman - China to America: Your imperial decline is showing

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https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/china-to-america-your-imperial-decline-is-showing/

China to America: Your imperial decline is showing
March 23, 2021 at 5:26 pm Updated March 26, 2021 at 7:41 pm
Paul Tong / Op-Art
Thomas L. Friedman By Thomas L. Friedman
Syndicated columnist

Sometimes a comedian cuts through foreign-policy issues better than any
diplomat. Bill Maher did that the other week with an epic rant on
U.S.-China relations, nailing the most troubling contrast between the
two countries: China can still get big things done. America, not so much.

For many of our political leaders, governing has become sports,
entertainment or just mindless tribal warfare. No wonder China’s leaders
see us as a nation in imperial decline, living off the leftover fumes of
American “exceptionalism.” I wish I could say they were all wrong.

“New Rule: You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if
you are a ‘silly people.’ And Americans are a silly people,” said Maher.
“That’s the classic phrase from ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ — when Lawrence
tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling
tribes, they will remain ‘a silly people.’ …

“We all know China does bad stuff. They break promises about Hong Kong
autonomy; they put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent. And we don’t
want to be that. But it’s got to be something between authoritarian
government that tells everyone what to do and a representative
government that can’t do anything at all.”

Maher added: “On a national level, we’ve been having Infrastructure Week
every week since 2009, but we never do anything. Half the country is
having a never-ending ‘woke’ competition. … The other half believes we
have to stop the lizard people, because they’re eating babies. … China
sees a problem, and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to
rename it.”

Yes, China has huge problems. Its leaders are not 10 feet tall, but they
are focused on real metrics of success. “China’s leaders are fierce but
fragile,” argues James McGregor, the chairman of the consultancy APCO
Worldwide, Greater China. “Precisely because they were not elected, they
wake up every day scared of their own people, and that makes them very
focused on performance” — particularly around jobs, housing and clean air.

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By contrast, many U.S. politicians these days are elected from safe,
gerrymandered districts and seek to stay in power by just “performing”
for their base with populist theatrics.

Whenever I point this out, critics on the far right or far left
ridiculously respond, “Oh, so you love China.” Actually, I am not
interested in China. I care about America. My goal is to frighten us out
of our complacency by getting more Americans to understand that China
can be really evil and really focused on educating its people and
building its infrastructure and adopting best practices in business and
science and promoting government bureaucrats on merit — all at the same
time. Condemning China for the former will have zero impact if we’re not
its equal in all of the latter.

At last week’s Alaska meeting between the United States’ and China’s top
diplomats, Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer
fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and
they don’t think the rest of the world does, either. Or as Yang Jiechi,
China’s top foreign affairs policymaker, baldly told his U.S.
counterparts: “The United States does not have the qualification … to
speak to China from a position of strength.”

Surprised? What did you think, that the Chinese didn’t notice that our
last president inspired his followers to ransack our Capitol; that a
majority of his party did not recognize the results of our democratic
election; that a member of our Congress believes that Jewish-run space
lasers cause forest fires; that left-wing anarchists were allowed to
take over a section of downtown Portland, creating havoc for months;
that during the pandemic the U.S. printed money to help its consumers
keep spending — much of it on Chinese-made goods — while China printed
money to invest in even more infrastructure; and that gun violence in
America is out control?

You think they didn’t notice?

Which brings me to the 2022 Winter Olympics, scheduled for China.

A rising number of voices are beginning to suggest that we boycott the
China Games. I have sympathy with that call, as we watch China crush the
infrastructure of democracy in Hong Kong and use incarceration camps to
brutally suppress Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang with utter indifference to
world opinion. How do we just ignore all that and focus on ice skating?

But here’s the thing: The competition that we really need to focus on
winning is not the 2022 Olympics but the 2025 Olympics.

Oh, you haven’t heard of the 2025 Olympics? They are not on your NBC
calendar? Well, they are on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s calendar. Xi
unilaterally declared the 2025 Olympics in 2015 and suggested that there
would be only two competitors: China and America. It was an initiative
that Xi’s government called “Made in China 2025.”

It was a 10-year plan to modernize China’s manufacturing base by
massively investing government resources to dominate what Xi defined as
the 10 key high-tech industries of the 21st century, and he was
implicitly daring America to go head-to-head.

The industries include artificial intelligence; electric cars and other
new-energy vehicles; 5G telecommunications; robotics; new agricultural
technologies; aerospace and maritime engineering; synthetic materials;
and biomedicine.

And just a few weeks ago, when China issued its 14th five-year plan, to
run through 2025, Xi basically doubled down on his government’s
investment in “innovation-driven development.” Message to America: We
will try to beat you at your own game so we will never, ever again be
dependent on you for high-tech goods.

My message to China is: Be careful. Some of your diplomats sound awfully
arrogant. As the proverb says: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a
haughty spirit before a fall.” America still excels in a lot of areas.

But my message to my fellow Americans is: We now have to return to and
commit even more to what was our formula for success.


And that is: educating our workforce up to and beyond whatever
technology demands; building the world’s best infrastructure of ports,
roads and telecommunications; attracting the world’s most energetic and
high-IQ immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses;
legislating the best regulations to incentivize risk-taking while
curbing recklessness; and steadily increasing government-funded research
to push out the boundaries of science so our entrepreneurs can turn the
most promising new ideas into startups.

On this front there is some hope, noted McGregor: “Congress has begun
sorting through the hundreds of China bills introduced in the last
Congress to forge bipartisan legislation to invest in science and
technology, R&D and U.S. leadership in the same technologies that China
has declared as the next frontiers.” And President Joe Biden is talking
about spending trillions!

Nothing could be more important. Because good ideas — respect for human
rights, democracy, an independent judiciary, free markets, protection
for minorities — don’t just win in the world because they are good
ideas. They diffuse and are embraced because others see them producing
justice, power, wealth, opportunity and stability in countries that
practice them.

American ideals infused every global institution in the 20th century
because we were powerful, and we were powerful because more often than
not we implemented our ideals.

But, if we as a country continue to act as we have of late — “dumb as we
want to be” — then our power will be diminished and with it the power of
our ideals. We will have steadily less influence on China and on the
world at large no matter how loudly we chant “USA, USA, USA.” So, let’s
make sure we win the Olympics that count.

Thomas L. Friedman is a regular columnist for The New York Times.