From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:
The muddled economics of scapegoating
As the US stock market was dropping 1,000 points on Monday morning, US commentators were pinning the blame on China. The Chinese economy, they said, was slowing down: what had been the “engine” of worldwide economic expansion was running out of fuel. The clear implication was that China’s rulers were somehow responsible for the sudden evaporation of over $2 trillion in assets over three days of the market plunge.
This focus on China as the foreign culprit behind America’s economic woes is being broadcast far and wide by Donald Trump, the mercurial demagogue who has put foreigner-bashing at the center of the political discourse. China’s rulers are “smart,” he says, while ours are “dumb.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is slated to visit the United States and The Donald doesn’t want him to be feted at a fancy White House dinner: instead, he wants to feed him a Big Mac from McDonald’s because China has “sucked all of our jobs.”
Our jobs. Our inflated stock market prices. An American politician can’t lose by appealing to our sense of entitlement, and Trump certainly knows how to play that tune. Americans are never to blame for the consequences of their own folly: it’s always somebody else’s fault. That’s why the need for a scapegoat is a staple of American politics: today it’s the Mexicans and the Chinese, during the cold war era it was the Russians and the Japanese. Remember when it was cheap Japanese goods that were “stealing” our markets?
The portrayal of China as this sleeping giant that is now awakening to take over the world – and take our jobs – is, like most such conceptions, a total delusion. The Peoples Republic of China is weak in almost every sense: politically, economically, and militarily, the PRC is a paper tiger – as Mao Tse-tung liked to characterize the US – and its rulers are sitting atop a volcano.
Yes, China has made great strides since the dark days of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era: having abandoned communism and gone in for a form of state capitalism, the leaders of the no-longer-Communist Party of China have unleashed the natural entrepreneurial spirit of their people. In doing so, however, they have also unleashed the “creative destruction” that comes with capitalism – and, perhaps, they have also ensured their own destruction.
Of course the Chinese commies haven’t instituted laissez-faire: their “capitalism” resembles our own times ten, i.e., it is what we call crony-capitalism. It is driven, in short, by politics, not by the spontaneous order of the market: it is monopolistic, not competitive. The big industries are controlled by China’s version of the One Percent: the “princelings,” the children of the Communist Party elite who are flaunting their wealth and privileges in a society still officially committed to the egalitarianism of the Mao era. This is a surefire recipe for social unrest, and in spite of the Communist Party’s tight rein on the media we are beginning to see evidence of social turmoil boiling up to the surface. Although China is regularly characterized as a “totalitarian” state by human rights activists, there are an estimated 90,000 “mass incidents” – raucous protests that often turn into riots – each year.
The reasons for this are as multitudinous as the local issues that have been vexing China’s lower and middle classes – housing, land issues, official corruption, rising crime rates – but all are related to the system China’s rulers have constructed in the years after the fall of the “Gang of Four” and the discrediting of Maoist ultra-leftism. It is the same system that exists in our own country magnified a hundred times: state-privileged politically-driven capitalism.
To continue reading: China and the Return of the ‘Yellow Peril’
