Red Sails: “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches. Much of the wealth was accumulated through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.

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The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

Michael Parenti

I stumbled upon this article during the scandal involving the Dalai Lama a couple of months ago. My – cynical – immediate reaction was to observe that we rarely hear anything about China’s persecution of Tibetans in the news these days, as the narrative refocused on Hong Kong’s forced integration, the repression of the Uyghurs, and now the increasingly tense atmosphere around Taiwan. Americans sure love to point out other countries’ human rights abuses, while doing little to combat them and forgetting about the issue as soon as another ‘crisis’ pops up – almost as if the concern is merely performative, designed not to help the abused, but to reinforce the American public’s self-perception as ‘the good guys’ versus the ostensive enemy-of-the-day, and to subtly undermine the sovereignty of the state in question.

The New York Times: “How to Fix the TikTok Problem”

The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.

Not to mention that our national lack of focus on cybersecurity defenses means that it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home’s Wi-Fi router — most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure — and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.

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A better solution would be to pass laws that force all of our tech to serve us better. Rather than engage in what Evan Greer of the advocacy group Fight for the Future calls “xenophobic showboating”, let’s get serious about demanding true security, privacy and accountability from all of the tech in our lives.

Julia Angwin

The debate around a TikTok ban has been heating up again, and the dispute somehow sounds more disingenuous and misleading than before. TikTok certainly had its fair share of failures in privacy and data handling practices, but the hearings in the US Congress seem focused on grandstanding and fearmongering against China, not on highlighting concrete issues and putting forward impartial solutions.

Nikkei Asia: “Inside the Trilateral Commission: Power elites grapple with China’s rise”

The effort by the Asia Pacific Group to disclose the discussions is not necessarily aimed at demystifying it to critics, however. Instead, the press has been invited to highlight a rift that may be emerging between Asia and the other wings of the organization.

We feel that the U.S. policy toward Asia, especially toward China, has been narrow-minded and unyielding. We want the people in the U.S. to recognize the various Asian perspectives, said Masahisa Ikeda, an executive committee member of the Trilateral Commission. Ikeda has been named the next director of the Asia Pacific Group, and is scheduled to assume the position next spring.

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If the Tokyo gathering demonstrated anything, it is that Asia’s elites are nervous that the world is heading in the wrong direction, fueled by the intensifying competition between the U.S. and China and the decoupling that awaits. And the problem, in the view of many of the participants, is America. Huntington’s injunction against an excess democracy is still embedded in the thinking of many of the Trilateral Commission’s members. But this time, it’s the U.S. penchant for exporting its ideology that is the main concern for many.

Ken Moriyasu, Mariko Kodaki, Shigesaburo Okumura

Fascinating article about a long-standing, but enigmatic group of prominent figures. It reads fairly like a conspiracy, one of those stories you hear about the ‘deep state’ pulling the strings of global politics from the shadows, but the message remains valid and concerning. As reported in several occasions, Asian countries are uncomfortable with US’ insistence that they should be taking sides in their newly-found drive to counter China’s influence in the region. And with good reason: China’s neighbors have much stronger economic ties to Beijing than to Washington, and the US doesn’t seem willing to offer any trade incentives of their own to compensate for the lost business with China.

The Wall Street Journal: “A Lab Leak in China Most Likely Origin of Covid Pandemic, Energy Department says”

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence”, according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

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U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

Michael R. Gordon & Warren P. Strobel

This article sparked another round of fierce Twitter arguments over the possible origins of COVID, with many quick to point fingers at journalists and scientists for suppressing discussion of this issue. I remain astounded at the American fixation with talking things to death and inability to handle uncertainty, which is the real issue here. In truth, there is no new evidence to discuss; the intelligence agencies involved declined to share any details about how they arrived at these assessments – not to mention their ‘low confidence’ in these conclusions, which further invalidates the statements.

Foreign Affairs: “Why India can’t replace China”

Start with the structural advantages. Commanding a territory that is nine times larger than Germany and a population that will soon overtake China’s as the world’s largest, India is one of the few countries that is big enough to house many large-scale industries, producing initially for global markets and ultimately for the burgeoning domestic market. Moreover, it is an established democracy with a long legal tradition and a notably young, talented, and English-speaking work force. And India also has some considerable achievements to its credit: its physical infrastructure has improved dramatically in recent years, while its digital infrastructure—particularly its financial payments system—has in some ways surpassed that of the United States.

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If India really is the promised land, however, these examples should be joined by many others. International firms should be lining up to shift their production to the subcontinent, while domestic firms boost their investments to cash in on the boom. Yet there is little sign that either of these things is happening. By many measures, the economy is still struggling to regain its pre-pandemic footing.

Take India’s GDP. It is true—as enthusiastic commentators never cease to point out—that growth over the past two years has been exceptionally rapid, higher than any other major country. But this is largely a statistical illusion. Left out is that during the first year of the pandemic, India suffered the worst contraction in output of any large developing country. Measured relative to 2019, GDP today is just 7.6 percent larger, compared with 13.1 percent in China and 4.6 percent in the slow-growing United States. In effect, India’s annual growth rate over the past three years has been just two and a half percent, far short of the seven percent annual rate that the country considers to be its growth potential. The performance of the industrial sector has been weaker still.

Arvind Subramanian & Josh Felman

The article presents a range of valid points, from the uneven playing field, where the government may change existing policies or enforce them selectively to favor “national champions”, to large income inequality, dampening domestic demand. But I would argue there’s a more straightforward reason for the reluctance to replace China with India: having been reliant on Chinese manufacturing for decades – and now being caught in the crossfire between rising Chinese ambitions and American sanctions – companies are not keen to repeat the experience in India. While the country may be a democracy on paper, its institutions are increasingly leaning autocratic, internal religious tensions are rising, and its foreign policy strives for a kind of vocal non-alignment that won’t win India any long-term friends.

Noema Magazine: “The Clash of Two Gilded Ages”

Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations”. Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system. Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners. Whereas Biden pledges to “build back better”, Xi dubs his campaign “common prosperity”.

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Robber barons like Stanford publicly championed free-market principles while privately benefiting from state-supplied privileges and protection. And yet, American capitalism boomed for reasons similar to China’s: a particular type of corruption came to dominate the economy. I call it access money, the purchase of privileges by capitalists from those in power. This transactional form of corruption must be distinguished from extractive corruption such as embezzlement, extortion and petty bribery. The latter existed during the early stages of capitalism in both America and China, but they were steadily brought under control through administrative reforms and increased state capacity. Access money, on the other hand, exploded.

Yuen Yuen Ang

Interesting perspective on the similar internal challenges that the US and Chinese societies are facing (among them, a certain breed of ‘new money’ taking over government structures and manipulating them for their own benefits) at a time many stress their overt differences. As some have noted, the ‘winner’ in this East vs. West competition will ultimately be the country who best manages internal struggles and builds up its domestic strength for the long haul. The danger though is that one – or both – of the rivals, failing to properly address internal woes, would conjure up fears of the other power to manufacture a sense of shared threat for the public and keep them distracted, thereby leading to increased economic and possibly military conflicts.

U.S.-China Perception Monitor: “Possible Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and China’s Choice”

In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China’s backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are “no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies”, but “our interests are eternal and perpetual”. Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible.

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A just cause attracts much support; an unjust one finds little. If Russia instigates a world war or even a nuclear war, it will surely risk the world’s turmoil. To demonstrate China’s role as a responsible major power, China not only cannot stand with Putin, but also should take concrete actions to prevent Putin’s possible adventures. China is the only country in the world with this capability, and it must give full play to this unique advantage. Putin’s departure from China’s support will most likely end the war, or at least not dare to escalate the war. As a result, China will surely win widespread international praise for maintaining world peace, which may help China prevent isolation but also find an opportunity to improve its relations with the United States and the West.

Hu Wei

A clear and concise argument against Chinese support for Putin, but I fear that we are overestimating the weight of rational arguments in foreign policy – after all, a full-scale invasion of another country is hardly rational in terms of costs vs. benefits. Indeed, other channels support the ‘no-limit partnership’ with Russia for its supplies of energy, food and other raw materials, and to potentially rely on Russia’s nuclear arsenal as deterrence in the event of a conventional war with the US in the South China Sea. Publicly China has declined to ‘take sides’, which roughly translates into tacit support for Putin. A position that resulted in a frosty atmosphere at a recent EU-China summit and that is unlikely to change substantially in favor of Western interests.