China's State Press Calls For 'Building a De-Americanized World'

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Businessweek reports on some not-so-subtle commentary from China's official Xinhua News Agency on the U.S. budget showdown: 'It is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.' Key among its proposals: the creation of a new international reserve currency to replace the present reliance on U.S. dollars. 'The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising the debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized,' the authors write. 'The world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites.' The commentary calls for a greater role for developing-market economies in both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, adding 'the authority of the United Nations in handling global hot-spot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate.' The commentary concludes that 'the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.'" Meanwhile, U.S. Senate Leaders are claiming a deal is close to reopen the federal government until mid-January and defer the debt ceiling debate until mid-February.

Comments

Summary says it all

[muecksteiner]

The Slashdot summary already nicely shows why the Chinese do have a point of sorts:

"a deal is close to reopen the federal government until mid-January and defer the debt ceiling debate until mid-February."

In other words, the only thing they seem to be able to come up with is a deal to kick the can down the road for four months - and in the meantime, in all probability do exactly nothing about the underlying fundamental problems which have caused this mess in the first place.

You know, these pesky little details, like the U.S. habitually spending way more than it actually takes in tax earnings. As in: WAY more. A bit more could be argued to work in some lets-fudge-the-books-and-rely-on-inflation-to-make-it-work way, but the U.S. is light years from that sort of sustainable level. And no one wants to admit it.

The bit where the Chinese are IMHO wrong is that it will need any sort of centralised planning to achieve this replacement of the U.S. as hub of the global economy. That will just happen, inevitably. The fundamentals are gone, no way the U.S. can stay where it is. What will come afterwards is very uncertain - but things can stay the way they are.

Re:Summary says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank George W Bush junior for destroying the trust in the US around the world. Thank the Tea Party for making it look like the US is having a civil war of words over obamacare reminiscent of the slavery abolition talks during the actual civil war. At the end of the day Obamacare isn't going away, The Tea Party will be the losers, along with most of congress. The American people will win by finally having healthcare and being competitive with foreign nations who do. However the by the time it's in full force, the healthcare, welfare/disability fraud will probably have sunk the budget worse.

The US is on the road to ruin and all the gerrymandering possible is not going to save the republican party.

Re:Summary says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

$16.7 trillion is not a partisan issue. Toss the lot of them for not knowing the difference between deficit and debt. The deficit could be zero and we'd still be screwed. We need 50 years of surpluses.

Re:Summary says it all

[jfengel]

This is a problem that has been decades in the making. The Teapers and Bush II were the pointy end of a very, very long needle that goes all the way back to the founding of the country.

The problem is that Americans don't trust each other, and they never have. The battle lines here aren't all that different from the ones over which we fought a civil war. It was only an act of tremendous courage and foresight that let us even be a single country in the first place; the first draft essentially left us as a collection of weak, separate countries less closely bound than the EU.

America managed to prosper despite the fact that the country folk and the city folk seem to despise each other. They achieved it largely by ignoring each other, going on about their business and doing it very well, selecting their friends and associates. But as a world leader, we're required to work together, and our self-reliance turns into a weakness: we can't even be civil with each other.

The world can't rely on us, not as we are now. We've had better periods, when we established programs to look after each other, while keeping each other at arm's length by doing it through the federal government. These programs are the ones most under attack: national-scale programs are expensive and cause the deepest resentment. We end up fighting about them and hating each other all the more for it.

I don't know if any country can replace us. Our individualism has crafted the innovations that put us in this position. A de-Americanized world would advance a lot more slowly unless other countries can figure out how to do what we've done. But they may find that it comes at the same cost we pay of self-reliance becoming self-centeredness.

Re:Summary says it all

[Aryden]

The real problem is that pinheads like you want to keep pretending that the USA has a revenue problem instead of a spending problem. It's still possible to prevent the USA from having a Soviet-style collapse, but to do that we'd have to immediately cut government spending to less than it collects in tax revenues.

There are both problems. The US Government spends like a bored trophy wife, meanwhile, incredible sums of taxes are not collected from higher wealth citizens because of loopholes and offshore accounting.

Re:Summary says it all

[AmiMoJo]

Working together is un-American. The American Dream (TM) is that anyone can make it, but the assumption is for one person to get rich others must remain poor. Business owners are expected to maximize profits for themselves while keeping wages as low as possible, for example. Anything that might push wages up or interfere with someone getting rich, like unionising, is strongly discouraged.

It's just not in the nature of American society to work together and support each other, beyond small local communities. Almost every debate comes down to "why should I pay for someone else?" or "if it doesn't directly benefit me it shouldn't be funded".

Re:Summary says it all

[muecksteiner]

Well, actually, Thatcherism was not all bad. She did have her good sides: she destroyed the extreme trade unions, which had long lost sight of their purpose, and had turned into a cancerous growth that strangled the country. She gave Britain a new sense of moving forward. She got the finances in order. And she had the guts to stand up against the Warsaw Pact for, as it were, western values, in times when few in Europe were willing to. Also, she, as a person, was definitely not of the worst sort you see as a politician. As in: she took no bribes anyone was ever aware of, and was, at least on a personal basis, fairly honest.

However, as Tyrion Lannister so famously said in GoT, nothing before the "but" in a sentence counts. :-)

Even after taking all the undoubted merits of her tenure as prime minister into account, I still think she did more damage to the fabric of British society, than good. The main areas in which the Thatcher era was, especially in hindsight, disastrous are the following:

- It is all good and fine to shaft the kind of parasitic "caveman commie" trade unions she was dealing with. Shaft them well and thoroughly. That much was good conservative instinct, and good politics. But a truly great politician would have realised you have to put something else in their place afterwards, lest even worse stuff will fill the void in the medium term. But nothing was done, and labour relations, and with them the gaps between the classes, have grown alarmingly worse ever since. Amongst many other institutions, a functioning market based society needs something like trade unions, like it or not. If not in name, but in function. Basically destroying them was a very short-sighted and petty-minded victory.

- Overall, she was (and due to financial constraints, up to a point had to be) hell-bent on undoing a lot of the institutions aimed at increasing social cohesion which had been introduced over the previous decades. Such as the school system, which was much, much better when I was a kid, than it ever was afterwards. And arguably, the terminal decline of the state run school system started in the Thatcher years, during which everything that cost the government money was seen as an unnecessary expense. Even if in the long run incurring said expenses maid perfect sense - schools are a prime example of such an expense. But during the Thatcher years, the pendulum swung too far back. After excesses of state regulation, nanny state antics, and wasteful spending (there is a reason the movie "Brazil" was done in Britain, of all places), suddenly lots of sensible things were also thrown out of the window, along with the bad stuff. Perhaps inevitable in such circumstances, but still extremely damaging. Especially as few since then have really tried to repair this damage.

- Her tenure saw the birth of the modern financial sector in Britain, which has turned out to be a much worse cancer on society at large than any leftist structures could ever have been. And I'm saying this as a fairly conservative person who is not against banking, or even the financial industry per se. Far from it. But the anti-social, uncontrollable monster that is now the City was hatched in the "bugger thy neighbour, if there is profit in it" and "greed is good" era of Thatcherism, and has grown ever since.

- She herself was a more or less decent person, but the majority of chaps who got to power in her wake were not. Amoral, greedy little persons, to an alarming extent. Since she was boss at the time, I hold her at least partially responsible for this.

- And there is also something she is personally responsible for, with her jingoistic attitude towards all the other components of the UK - in particular, the Scots. When I was a kid (and I am Scottish), being pro-independence in Scotland was a quaint notion held by some university types. The high-handed and arrogant manner in which Thatcher in particular dealt with the early stages of the devolution process did a lot of damage to the Union, and to the

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but reality called, and Uncle Sam, I found out that China is the bitch, which you fed until she weighed 300lbs, that's now pegging your skinny ass with a 16 inch strapon you had it make.

I heard that India is taking your calls (at a call center no less) but it keeps talking until you tire out and can't manufacture shit.

No real reserver currency alternatives

[Dorianny]

China and many other nations would love to see another currency supplant the U.S dollar or at the very least have a credible alternative, but the truth is that currently there is no currency that could do that. The Chinese renminbi is not free floating, the euro is not even guaranteed to survive, Japan is too leaden with debt which puts into question the future stability of the yen, and finally the British sterling, Canadian or Australian dollars etc are simply backed by too small of a economy to be considered serious contenders.

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[Dr Max]

"Yeah that's cool sweetheart" says china "you two look good together, but first can you give those trillions of dollars i loaned you back."

Re:DOH. Because China's most likely to get screwed

[palemantle]

Or in short: the US will fulfill its obligations to allies and creditors who've played the game in good faith. To China and others who've gamed the system-- well, that's another story, and in the next days and weeks, we may very well see, what action the US can use, to re-balance the sheets.

I'm not seeing any evidence to support that. Going by recent history, the US seems perfectly happy to trample over its allies to secure its putative interests.

Re:DOH. Because China's most likely to get screwed

[jcr]

the US will fulfill its obligations to allies and creditors who've played the game in good faith.

Nope, not even close. The USA will default on those debts by inflation.

-jcr

Re: Everything they say is true.

[Aighearach]

No they don't, Europe gets a lot of its energy from Russia. You don't have the monopoly you think you do.

There are not many countries that would prefer to be under Russia's thumb, however loudly they complain about the US.

Re: Everything they say is true.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are not many countries that would prefer to be under Russia's thumb, however loudly they complain about the US.

Historically not. This is because it was widely known that Russia would screw you over hard.
With the recent revelations about NSA it is pretty clear that the US us following the same fucked up realpolitik and that you have to think of dealing with US in the same way as you think about dealing with Russia.
While both nations have a lot of wealth it is generally more beneficial to deal with other more idealistic nations.
It may seem like it is naive to be "soft" and kind hearted but in the long run people learn that they can trust you. I have seen this a lot in the business sector. Companies that makes sure that everyone involved benefits form the deals makes it in the long run.
Those who screws people over only lasts until word gets around. They do great for a decade or two until everyone else realizes that there is more money in working with other people.

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[gtall]

The U.S. government couldn't reasonably ask U.S. business to leave China. First, they don't give a rat's ass whether its China or India, and second, U.S. companies don't give a rat's ass about what country the U.S. government thinks deserves their investment. And if the U.S. government tried to do such a thing, they could expect to spend the next 5 years in court litigating the proposal.

Re: Everyone open your firewalls

[Joce640k]

Let's hope so.

I don't mean they should hand the world to the Chinese, but change is definitely needed. Big change, not Obama-sized "change".

OTOH I don't see where that change could possibly come from. The people don't look like they're going to revolt anytime soon, and the NSA is busy making revolt ever more difficult.

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[TWiTfan]

China has no intention of fighting a *military* war. They're just sitting back and letting the U.S. bankrupt itself on a ridiculously over-sized military that it doesn't need, thus winning the *economic* war without firing a shot.

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[Greyfox]

Kinda like what we did with Russia? If our schools were better we might learn from history. Heh heh heh

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[Grishnakh]

Here's an article with a picture of that billboard:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/09/2760221/mysterious-pro-secession-billboard-appears-in-missouri/

Whoever created it obviously hasn't looked at a map lately. Even if you assume that they really meant MS (Mississippi) instead of Michigan (MI), Missouri is only barely contiguous with the other states there, separated by Arkansas, and joined to Oklahoma by a tiny stretch of border. Is there some reason they don't want Arkansas in their new country? Is it just because Clinton came from there? Anyone from the area care to comment?

Also, why'd they leave out Alabama of all states? I would have thought MS and AL would go hand-in-hand. And the northwest portion of FL (the part bordering southern AL) would probably want to go with them.

Anyway, it sounds like a great idea to me. Imagine how well the rest of us will do without those states (and most importantly, their voters) holding us back. Maybe we could even dump ObamaCare and replace it with true universal healthcare like the Europeans have.

Re:I'm Sorry, China

[MaWeiTao]

China is doing a great job of accumulating it's own massive debt. At some point it will probably turn into a race to see who gets there first although I'd give China the edge because I think their economy is not sustainable. For at least a decade some have suggested that China has been exaggerating it's economic growth and from what I know I tend to believe it. Sure things are great, for a very small subset of the population. Meanwhile the majority is exploited in the name of economic success.

Not that China doesn't think ahead. They're currently Africa's largest trading partner. And while America blindly throws far more money at Africa than China does, China is building infrastructure. So the average African is exposed directly to the benefits of a relationship with China while the US, ironically gets little recognition despite the fact that in all other ways they do more. Of course, while China does all that, they're stripping Africa of every resource they can get their hands on.

The US is in the difficult position that they're the world's military. Everyone bitches about a supposedly imperialistic America, but every time something goes wrong somewhere they expect Americans to show up guns blazing. And the European defense industry is only happy to have America as their biggest customer.

Meanwhile, China has been working hard to build their own military might. So while they're currently playing aloof they clearly have other ambitions. Or at least they're hedging their bets. But if I had to guess I'd say their end goal to replace the United States. However, while China has more to gain economically, I'm convinced if their economy took a dump they'd turn to a militaristic approach. There's nothing like a foreign enemy and a cause to distract the people from domestic problems. And their are perfect regional targets that I'm not convinced the US will stand up to defend.