The single best report I’ve read on the US chips blockade against China—a strong overview of the issue but more important, it cuts through technical issues to show the true significance.

The US is telling China to accept defeat or go to war.

Some quotes:
nytimes.com/2023/07/12/mag… From @EmilyKilcrease1: “We said there are key tech areas that China should not advance in. And those happen to be the areas that will power future economic growth and development.”

I found a lot to like in Sullivan’s speech on the global economy (though much depends on the administration actually doing some key things he discussed that we haven’t seen so far).

However, I saw two fatal flaws—and I mean “fatal” literally. 1/
brookings.edu/events/the-bid… 1. Despite his protestations, the goal is to exclude China from global growth, or at least force China to choose between growth and development. That will cause destabilizing conflict, undermining 2/

In an otherwise excellent news analysis, this line sticks out. The Biden administration itself rejects this democracies vs autocracies formulation. 1/

https://twitter.com/JChengWSJ/status/1638707381981925379

According to the Biden admin, the world is divided not between democracies and autocracies but between countries that support the existing international order and the two autocracies (you know who) seeking to reshape it.
Biden’s 2022 National Security:
whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…
2/

This sounds profound to liberals who haven’t thought much about history and are grasping to understand why their abstract universalism isn’t working in practice. To a historian, it’s simply malpractice. Essentializing a nation isn’t explanation but the refusal to explain. 1/

https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1502451539591454723

That is clearly illustrated here. If this is what Russia “is”, then it cries out for historical explanation—how did it come to be like this? Might not subordination within an international hierarchy have contributed to this supposed civilizational personality? 2/

What is China’s position on Ukraine? Anxiety.
This is Party mouthpiece Renmin ribao during the daylight hours in China following the start of Putin’s aggression—no mention of Ukraine on the entire front page, a single oblique reference to the crisis buried far down (pic 3). 1/ (The Foreign Ministry’s bland statement of abstract principles has since been added but nothing else.)
It should be clear that the Chinese leadership just wants this to go away but they seem stuck. 2/

Normally I’d say this is great news, but the NYT coverage from @ktbenner instead fills me with dread. 1/
nytimes.com/2022/02/20/us/… The article opens by positioning as objective truth the nationalist conceptual framework that motivated the racist China Initiative in the first place. 2/

A conceptual feature of liberal US discourse on China is to see authoritarian features of the Chinese political regime as unchanging essence while waving away authoritarian features of the US political regime, such as the criminalization system, as errors open to correction. 1/

https://twitter.com/stephensemler/status/1484216618058235905

I think both of these are wrong. I would interpret authoritarian features of both systems as essential attributes. But I would also maintain that existence precedes essence: a different set of social conditions would produce a different essence in either political system. 2/

This was an important column from @RanaForoohar, making an essential link between economic dysfunction and populist politics, though the reversal of cause and effect means the solutions offered don’t really confront the problem. 1/
ft.com/content/99a3cf… The central idea is that wealth (NB: defined as asset values, not the economy’s production of use-values) has decoupled from growth, which is another way of saying that investment is creating bubbles rather than going to productive ends. 2/

A thread on the path to World War I. Parallels between UK–Germany conflict then and US–China conflict today—and the obliviousness of elites conducting it—make it urgent to learn this now largely forgotten history. Excerpts from J. Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. This arms race dynamic should be familiar: imagining that intensifying the threat you pose to your rival will lead to safe subordination of the other (“deterrence”) rather than unleashing an explosive spiral of insecurity and nationalism:

1. Since it pains me to write an essay without footnotes, I thought I’d do a thread on all the reporting, research, and thinking that stands behind this article.

https://twitter.com/jwdwerner/status/1413486461316337667

2. First, a bit more of my own thinking on the historical forces behind today’s global crisis of democracy. Both to explain the worldwide reactionary turn and to develop a strategy to revive democracy, we need a systemic conceptualization, not moralizing.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Biden’s pitch on public investment. It’s not just a misrepresentation of the US–China conflict. It’s also a child’s conceptualization of the global crisis of democracy: USA=democracy, but no one will like us if we’re not big and strong! And then they won’t want to be like us! 1/ As this and endless versions of the same op-ed show, the US elite does not take democracy seriously. Rule by the people requires not just a periodic option to vote but, first, a meaningful choice—real differences among candidates leading to different outcomes in governance. 2/

The liberal international order, functioning as designed on the single most consequential question it faces right now. I guess India and South Africa are sinister revisionist powers. 1/
law360.com/lifesciences/a… If we want to understand what’s going on in the world, the dominant US foreign policy framing dividing the world between democracies and autocracies is not very useful. As this episode illustrates, it’s the rich vs poor divide that is more often the salient distinction. 2/

1. The main thing happening here is everyone dressing up their pet priorities in anti-China rhetoric because, as Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing”. But underneath the opportunism there’s a very dangerous substantive issue.
washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021… 2. We should celebrate the breakdown of the neoliberal prohibition on setting economic priorities openly and democratically. But what’s emerging in its place is a bipartisan consensus around a nationalist industrial policy to hoard scarce global growth for the US.

Good news! Western commentators too often conflate Xi’s centralization with his reactionary politics. These need to be conceptually separated—in China and around the world—because progressive politics also requires overcoming fragmented politics, but for very different ends.

https://twitter.com/LiShuo_GP/status/1355465216914427904

A big reason Western commentators interpret centralization under Xi as nothing but authoritarianism is that don’t really know anything about how the Chinese state has operated for the last forty years. So a crude stereotype of monolithic Oriental despotism fills in the gap. 2/

Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/
ft.com/content/f10ccb… It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/