Alors. As I'm reading a book review of how China "will not just displace the United States as the major superpower [but] will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern," a thesis, to be sure, that warms the commie cockles of my anarchic little heart, I come across the following:
China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.Yes. I am certainly befuddled by the blurring of the public and private sectors, accustomed as I am to a strict separation of government and business.
Indeed, given the storied, historical separation of business enterprises and government, it is almost impossible to comprehend a foreign and alien system in which the boundaries between public office and private profit are so porous. Oh brave new world.
14 comments:
Yeah, well, noting that the same blurring routinely occurs here, only the other way around, would be too honest.
To be fair, though, American business interests probably are befuddled at their inability to operate with impunity via financial capture of the Chinese government. And China calls itself capitalist!
The main difference would seem to be not that the two are in bed, but which pitches and which catches.
Chuck Grassley thanks you for his socialized farming farm subsidy check.
You left out Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and the rest of the defense industry where the alleged barrier is at its most tissue-like.
HAR!
One quibble: you didn't make it absolutely clear that the moronic idiocy you quoted was from the Times reviewer, not the esteemable opionion or work of Monsieur Jacques himself. Robert Scheer interviewed him on ThruthDig, it was very good.
Hey Woo, isn't this guy supposed to be married?
IOZ:
I guess we should be concerned with a powerful China threatening to over take the US economically except we have more to fear from automation over taking our jobs and making human labour obsolete.
Nice to see you are still functional out here.
regards
Who would have thunk ex-SDSers would be so much like former Maoists? Also, the article is wrong when it says China "lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe." It lost its position after being colonized by Europe, particularly after Britain forced opium into the country. But you know, details, schmetails.
Let's also not forget that whether you're selling biscuits and gravy in Savannah, GA or lemonade in California, no one can do business without the gov't's involvement in the several states :)
Is that some sort of Eastern thing?
Enron, the Opium Wars were ramping up under, guess what, the European industrial revolution. Markets needed to be free!
Not, of course, that the Chinese hadn't been slipping already, but they were more of a case of being unable to catch up rather than, say, my people in the Ottoman Empire who couldn't govern worth a goddamn after they stopped the fratricidal cycle of civil war.
Look, you've got to think of those checks to Goldman-Sachs & Citibank et al as a kinder, gentler form of "shock therapy". We're just trying to nurture embryonic free markets, exactly what we tried with those dumb Russkies 20 years ago. Capitalism is a deelicate, precious flower.
-- sglover
nice post. thanks.
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