The issue which is not addressed well in this article is: how much of the US' attractiveness to skilled immigrants was due to its economic dominance? The US economy was something like 40% of the world's GDP after World War 2 - why wouldn't a smart guy move to the US to take advantage of the economic opportunities in a large, rich, undestroyed by war, country?
The equivalent today is: China has been the fastest growing opportunity in the world for the past generation. They are, or will soon be, the largest economy in the world.
I also see a distinct oversight: the Nazi rocket scientists and Japanese medical experimenters.
The standard of living and professional fulfillment of highly skilled humans has pretty much nothing to do with "economic dominance" or lack thereof. I know a skilled Beijing-based PhD candidate who's thrilled to have just relocated to a very rich, quite small European country. The country in question could hardly be described as economically "dominant" (I suspect its GDP trails that of the Bay Area). But she'll earn 5x what she could in Beijing. And enjoy breathable air. And potable water right out of the tap! And her search results won't be censored by a dictatorship.
Whether or not China's the world's biggest economy, I don't see that the US has a shortage of skilled would-be immigrants. The US still has long green-card waiting lists, even for employment-related visa applicants (proxy for demand from skilled immigrants). The US could certainly let in more skilled immigrants at the margin, including (I'm confident) from China, which is enough for Noah's idea to be worth a try.
1) The US has been the golden destination since before 1945; public perception changes slowly.
2) Programs such as H1B
3) English is a lot easier to learn than Mandarn
From my view: I don't have a strong opinion, either for or against, Noah's proposals.
I do think that more skilled immigrants won't actually help the nation, society or Americans to any significant degree because of the cancerous American PMC/oligarchy.
What does it matter that there are more skilled incoming immigrants when the United States still cannot get its ridiculously expensive health care system problem resolved? That egregious economic practices are becoming ever more enshrined every day?
If the white collar professions were broken as the blue collar ones have been, then perhaps improvement can occur but as it is - having better skilled masses won't make any difference in the ongoing decline of this country.
>>>What does it matter that there are more skilled incoming immigrants when the United States still cannot get its ridiculously expensive health care system problem resolved?<<<
The uninsured rate for US professionals with graduate STEM degrees is probably something like 2%. There's zero doubt the US has many problems (like any country). But ability to attract highly skilled workers isn't currently one of those problems.
(Last time I looked the green card backlog is in the millions. Which isn't surprising for a country with some of the highest wages in the world for the highly skilled).
I don't deny the ridiculousness of the US's healthcare system and such, I just don't believe the US's problems have stopped the US from remaining a popular potential destination for immigrants. From 2010 into 2017 the US was (by some distance) the plurality choice of immigration destination in Gallup's World Poll (https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx); hard to see that having majorly changed in 4 years.
Why the competition between US and China must be a zero-sum game? This will just narrow our mindset and force the response from both countries into a loss-loss situation. It’s a real waste of resources and an increase in inefficiency for the whole world. Americans should be more open-minded and spend time in China to understand the country and its people.
Yes. But in fact, it's very difficult for them to do so! And more to the point, China's current leadership seems set on ratcheting up tensions, which forces the U.S. to think in zero-sum terms...
The Chinese are saying the same thing about the American leadership! That's why we should stop this zero-sum mindset to stop any eye-for-an-eye feedback loop. Ideology is all debatable but in the end, it's the action that counts. So, people from both countries should speak less about their ideology/believes but pay more respect to each other, and that is a real contribution to humanity.
Stop your ideological meddling in China's internal affairs, and the 'wolf warriors' will disappear. What does "One China " mean? Chinese citizens are horrified by the example of the Jan 6th Capitol riots. Learn how to govern your own country; the 'beacon on the hill' was finally extinguished by that reckless display of hyper-partisanship.
I tried it - It didn't sound ridiculous, though it did sound *partisan* .....Actual]y, we all need to submit to rule of law, ultimately maintained by a UNSC without veto, to end the zero-sum game.
But no doubt you will insist on a rules-based system that benefits yourself? I thought so. Scheming to steal the entire world's best talent for the benefit of the US? Absurd, if not criminal.
Is the status of Taiwan an internal affair for China? If so, why? Because the CCP says so?
I am sure the Chinese citizens were horrified by Jan 6. What about what happened to Hong Kong? Are they horrified by the way Christians and Falon Gong practitioners are treated in the PRC? Or the situation in Xinjiang? Or the Tiananmen Square massacre?
Is it "ideological meddling in internal affairs" to say that people in Iran should be free to practice Christianity, people in China should be free to talk about the events of 1989, people in Russia should be free to talk about being gay, people in the United States should be free to criticize problematic diversity initiatives, and people everywhere should be free to move to whatever country they would like to move to?
Free to talk about something is one thing, free to secede from the nation is another. The nation which can engender sustainable development AND eradicate poverty, can claim 'best government practice'. The results of the US-China competition should be clearer in decade. As for religion, there is only One God (who remains a mystery to us humans who can't even understand infinity...)....the time to believe in whatever religious nonsense, according to any particular man-made scripture you want to believe in, is long past.
Noah, Noah, Noah - The Chinese feel quite strongly that the US has been engaged in an ideological offensive against them since well before that movie was ever made
The "zero-sum" mindset stems from one nation (the PRC) trying to revise the rules of the international relations system which another nation (the USA) has a strong interest in preserving.
For decades, Chinese firms and state owned enterprises have flouted IP protections and international trade protocols with either the tacit or direct encouragement of the CCP. The CCP takes diplomatic and quasi-military actions to revise its status in the international system. In and of itself this is a mundane observation as all countries are continuously trying to press their interests. However, many try to do so within the present rules of the system. China is trying to revise the system itself to be more beneficial to it.
The US, which benefits from many features of the present system, wishes to maintain the system as is, only editing it marginally.
Both nations fundamentally want opposite things. Things which truly advance CCP interests would truly undermine US interests. Both powers can agree on token things but on substantive issues they have two competing and contradictory goals.
You can endorse one or the other but both countries have very different goals which cannot be reconciled.
Hi Luke, Great comment. May be at the government level the confrontation is inevitable. But at the local level, for normal people like you and me, promoting a more inclusive mindset would help. Rather than to paint the other side as evil state as what the mainstream media tries to do, may be people from each side can be more rational and open minded.
Thanks KY. Like you, I think a more inclusive mindset is important. For Americans we need to be mindful that the CCP is NOT China or the Chinese people (of all ethnicities). It is just not as representative of its population as the US government is of Americans.
When China acts, it is not the will of the Chinese people as embodied by elected representatives, it is rather the will of the CCP.
It is harder to divest American foreign policy from the American people because the President embodies the political will of a plurality of the 50 states (as per the electoral college victory). In Biden's case, he also represents the plurality of voters. So, at the very least, American international behavior is endorsed by a sizable portion of the American people.
To some extent, we have endorsed the present situation.
Actually when I talk to local Chinese living inside China, most of them speaks highly of the CCP, whether you believe or not. CCP do have strong support by the local Chinese as most of them experienced dramatic improvement in living standards over the past 30 years. The CCP actually received very high rating inside China by the modern Chinese whom nowadays have travelled outside China and have experienced the western world. This is just to share my observation and food for thoughts.
And who , pray, gave the US the power to decide how the "international relations system" should look or operate?
And who has the right to proclaim that another countries government will be only legitimate when it is "embodied by elected representatives"? (The added subtext of this judgement, of course, is that only certain types of elections are valid or acceptable.)
Prescriptive, self-interested proclamations like these do not make for a stable, workable -or even ethically justifiable - international order.
TN, I was merely pointing out that there is, at the most fundamental level, a "zero-sum" dynamic here. The USA wants the present international relations order preserved. The CCP wants it revised. This is an observation, not a normative statement.
However, what makes an ethical international order? One where every nation has a voice? Why is it wrong for the USA to dominate and suppress the agency of other countries at an international level but it is okay for the CCP to dominate and suppress the agency of dissidents in a domestic context? Is a "might makes right" mentality fine in domestic matters but somehow wrong on the international stage? Why the distinction?
You get to the heart of the matter though. The real question is how do we judge things as right or wrong in political affairs?
Interesting response. I agree that of the three, Politics is the most “zero sum” compared with Tech and Growth.
Dems and Reps can come to agreement on peripheral issues but core partisan beliefs are rarely compromised. When they are, those who compromise are often viewed as traitors by the base of their parties.
Also, Tech and Growth, although usually “win-win” in the aggregate, can still be “zero-sum.” A good example is the validated billions of dollars of IP theft that Chinese firms have taken advantage of at the expense of American ones. That represents substantial loss to owners of the stolen IP.
Many Americans have a critique against the unfair or anti-competitive business practices that the CCP fosters in China. The CCP makes Tech and Growth political and thus, “zero-sum.”
Sounds very much as if you're advocating the position that it's ethically justifiable for the US to unilaterally pardon psychopathic architects of genocide (e.g. WW2 Nazis) simply to gain intellectual and economic advantage from them.
Not quite sure how this position squares with the aim of "creating meaningful, substantive moral distinctions between ourselves and our rivals."
Quite frankly, an enormous percentage of the planet would be exceptionally grateful if the US would actually deliver on its existing promises of moral superiority, rather than spending its time cynically making new ones designed only to boost its "moral image" rather than take substantive actions that align with the promises.
"The bulk of the prosecutions of the past three years…are related to a lack of candor, such as the failure to disclose ties to Chinese funding or institutions…"
Al Capone was only ever prosecuted for tax evasion. Can we then conclude that his crimes were insignificant accounting mistakes? A lot of tech-transfer espionage is really hard to prosecute. They may not even be criminal offenses --- a breach of NDA with some tech company may only be a civil matter.
So, there are two ways to interpret these prosecutions:
1) The prosecuted are basically innocent and just happened to slip up and say the wrong thing to an investigator or made an honest mistake and forgot to put some organization name on a form.
2) The prosecuted are actually guilty of espionage, but that's very difficult to prove (or can only be proved by revealing sources), so prosecutors go after charges that are easier to prove --- just like they did with Al Capone.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The question you should be asking yourself is: do you think that the three-letter agencies (TLAs) are good at their jobs or not? If you think they're competent, then you should be on the 2 end of the spectrum. If you think they're incompetent, then you should be on the 1 end of the spectrum.
When people think of espionage, they usually think of real cloak and dagger stuff where there's a clear spy like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. Instead, a lot of espionage is just bycatch stuff where an intelligence agent asks some scientist/engineer for a bit of info when they come home to visit their parents. I know someone who gets contacted by their country's intelligence agency when they return home, and the TLAs when they come to the US. The person isn't a "spy" in the sense of Ames or Hanssen. They're just a person who travels and possibly knows interesting things.
If some Chinese scientist travels home for the holidays, gets contacted by Chinese intelligence agencies, and hands over some info, it's basically impossible for the TLAs to prosecute them directly, but it's not impossible for them to have good reason to believe that they did it. In fact, if they did prosecute for espionage, they might have to give up information on how they know about the espionage! Of course they don't! You should expect them to get charged with making a false statement. However, there's no way for an outside observer to differentiate this from TLAs simply being jerks and/or incompetent. What you see is mostly a reflection of your priors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
First, there are brain drains and brain drains. There is a big difference between importing scientists from China and health care workers from, say, Nigeria. The latter kind of import may well hurt the exporting country. Many countries have many fewer educated people than they need, and are hurt hard by emigration.
Second, I'm all for immigration. But it may be worth noting that there is no shortage of, say, American-born corporate lawyers. I worked at a pretty fancy corporate law shop with about 40 lawyers, including a physics major, two math majors, and one math minor. Plenty of hard STEM talent here: all American-born. Funny that.
You get what you pay for, and STEM doesn't pay all that much, considering the alternatives. Our need for immigrant STEM talent is linked to our STEM pay scale, relative to the alternatives for native-born Americans.
I agree with Noah that trying to engineer a "brain drain" won't bring about the precipitous collapse of Chinese science (they're just too big). I have argued (on this blog among other places, as it happens) for a "steal their talent" policy on the part of the US for a couple of related reasons:
1) You can't have too much talent.
2)The CCP doesn't likely view the specter of Chinese talent flowing to the USA with much equanimity. Indeed, it's a virtual certainty those xenophobic, anti-Western, paranoid tyrants view such a development with extreme negativity. And so they'll react. Which is what you want. IOW, you want to make it as hard as possible for the CPC to govern/dominate/direct Chinese society. In short, you want to make it challenging for them to maintain a modicum of popularity and support among China's well-educated elites. Blocking said elites from pursuing overseeing opportunities is a good way to bring about this challenging environment.
Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship. Regime change really is the only long term solution (let's be blunt). But let's not kid ourselves: this three thousand year old civilization isn't going to allow us to tell it how to govern itself. >>Change has to come from within<<. But we can (maybe) hope to make this change arrive faster and happen more easily by doing what we can to make the status quo more difficult to maintain. Reducing the popularity of the regime is one of the few credible tools in our arsenal; hence the desirability of forcing Beijing to do unpopular things like, erm, blocking ambitious, well-educated Chinese people from seeking better lives abroad.
<<"Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship">.
Clouded with ideology. eg, a consensus one party meritocracy may well prove to be a better form of governance - to achieve *sustainable development AND common prosperity* - than an elected adversarial multiparty plutocracy. Different way of looking at "dictatorship"...which has the support of the people and is producing the desired results; the relative success of the two systems should be clearer in a decade.
The US strategy can be rephrased as simply "an outlet for speech is the best for smart people". Counter example for why that will be annoying: Hong Kong and Taiwan.
America isn't even bringing in the immigrants who have been approved. We currently have almost half a million immigrants whose documentation is complete and are just waiting for an interview to get in. It's weird no one is talking about that considering the current worker shortage. Over 8 million people are waiting to apply. We don't necessarily need to go out and find new people. Just schedule Zoom calls with all the immigrants who need interviews and actually start processing new applicants.
It is hard to justify immigration policy that concentrates only on China. The same goal is achieved through allowing much more skilled immigration (say, 1/2-1 million per year) from all the autocratic regimes: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. The US will get even more talented people, but immigrants will be also more diverse making the policy more palatable to average American voters. Its national defense angle can be convincing for republicans, and its "good guy"/innovation angle should be convincing for democrats. Note: as a Russian I have a conflict of interest here.
You describe brain drain as mostly a myth, but in the past you've mentioned brain drain to the US as having a negative effect on Canada. Have you changed your mind on that?
> Of course, that effort would have to be paired with vigorous efforts to present the U.S. as a place where Chinese people can feel safe and free from racial discrimination. That will require cracking down further on anti-Asian hate crime, as well as stepping up rhetorical efforts to make Asian immigrants feel like America cares about them and can be their family’s permanent home.
This sounds right, but US Media loves shitposting that Chinese people live a miserable life. If this continues to happen, I don't believe Chinese immigrants feel like America cares about them.
Yah that'd be great. When I worked at SF, my American teammate once traveled to China. When he came back he said:
"I expected North Korea but I saw paradise. I can walk out at 2am without any problem."
China is far from paradise, but it is nothing close to North Korea for sure. I do hope people of the 2 countries use their own eyes to experience the other side, either from TikTok/Twitter/whatever or in person.
Can Americans go to China and experience it in an un-curated way? For all its faults, a Chinese citizen could travel to the USA and have largely unrestricted access to the country. I am not so sure an American citizen would have the same freedom to explore China.
> Can Americans go to China and experience it in an un-curated way?
Yes. To give you an example, when I was in college at Peking University, I had school friends from from USA, Canada, Israel, Japan, Korea, North Korea who are international students, just like me at Carnegie Mellon University. No different. International students live in better dormitory than local students though :)
Another example, my teammate at Tubi (an AVOD business based in SF, acquired by Fox). He had the similar concern before his travel, asked me a lot of questions such as: May I have access to internet? May I be tracked by someone? etc.
What we did to help him: Buy an international SIM card beforehand to make sure he still has access to internet (Google, FB, etc) beyond GFW. Teach him to download WeChat so that he can pay without cash. And most importantly, no one will ever track him, at all.
If you do not believe in what I say, search "american in china" in YouTube, there should be a lot of them.
All foreigners face restrictions getting into China because of the pandemic. But once you're in, there's generally pretty free access to everything outside of Xinjiang and Tibet. (Travel is certainly allowable in the latter two, as well, although it may be necessary to book through an authorized travel agency).
It's possible at the margins the Chinese are a bit jumpier than Americans when it comes to militarily sensitive areas, but I don't think the gap is huge. I live very close to some rather militarized zones in metro Beijing, and I've had zero problem despite the fact that I stick out like a sore thumb.
In any event it's not like North Korea. You won't find agents trailing you. They won't assign "minders" to you: China (pre-pandemic) was among the most visited countries in the world. But you may find CNN in your hotel room cuts out when the party doesn't like the story in question. And the hotel you're staying in is required to have a licence to rent rooms to foreigners.
You could before 2020. I spent a month in China in 2016, just wandering around and riding the trains into the countryside, up into Gansu. If I'd had more time I would have taken a train to Kashgar just to see it; I chatted with other travelers in Dunhuang who'd come the other way (traveling west to east) and it didn't sound like there was any impediment to traveling. I heard that Western travelers weren't allowed into Tibet, but I didn't try to go there myself. Fwiw I don't think Xinjiang was such a shitshow back then though; it's probably harder to go there now.
How could you curate the experience of millions of tourists every year?
No, quite simply, most dictatorships do not impact the down-to-earth experience you have while walking down a street or going groceries or having a drink with friends.
If Americans stopped getting their prototype of a country in a dictatorship from end of war Nazi Germany, they would understand that you can't judge the quality of the leadership by any individual experience, but only by very long term and aggregate results (and ON THAT, dictatorships perform really poorly)
They did/could from 2000-2020 and yet that didn't really change their mind. It doesn't help that thought leaders, trying to combat the myth that all of China is as modern as Beijing, seem to be creating a new one where modern China is a face and 1.3bn peasants still exist in Potemkin villages.
Hungarian Leo Szilard invented the chain reaction & wrote the letter sent by Einstein to POTUS that led to the Manhattan project.
The issue which is not addressed well in this article is: how much of the US' attractiveness to skilled immigrants was due to its economic dominance? The US economy was something like 40% of the world's GDP after World War 2 - why wouldn't a smart guy move to the US to take advantage of the economic opportunities in a large, rich, undestroyed by war, country?
The equivalent today is: China has been the fastest growing opportunity in the world for the past generation. They are, or will soon be, the largest economy in the world.
I also see a distinct oversight: the Nazi rocket scientists and Japanese medical experimenters.
The standard of living and professional fulfillment of highly skilled humans has pretty much nothing to do with "economic dominance" or lack thereof. I know a skilled Beijing-based PhD candidate who's thrilled to have just relocated to a very rich, quite small European country. The country in question could hardly be described as economically "dominant" (I suspect its GDP trails that of the Bay Area). But she'll earn 5x what she could in Beijing. And enjoy breathable air. And potable water right out of the tap! And her search results won't be censored by a dictatorship.
Whether or not China's the world's biggest economy, I don't see that the US has a shortage of skilled would-be immigrants. The US still has long green-card waiting lists, even for employment-related visa applicants (proxy for demand from skilled immigrants). The US could certainly let in more skilled immigrants at the margin, including (I'm confident) from China, which is enough for Noah's idea to be worth a try.
Consider these possibilities:
1) The US has been the golden destination since before 1945; public perception changes slowly.
2) Programs such as H1B
3) English is a lot easier to learn than Mandarn
From my view: I don't have a strong opinion, either for or against, Noah's proposals.
I do think that more skilled immigrants won't actually help the nation, society or Americans to any significant degree because of the cancerous American PMC/oligarchy.
What does it matter that there are more skilled incoming immigrants when the United States still cannot get its ridiculously expensive health care system problem resolved? That egregious economic practices are becoming ever more enshrined every day?
If the white collar professions were broken as the blue collar ones have been, then perhaps improvement can occur but as it is - having better skilled masses won't make any difference in the ongoing decline of this country.
>>>What does it matter that there are more skilled incoming immigrants when the United States still cannot get its ridiculously expensive health care system problem resolved?<<<
The uninsured rate for US professionals with graduate STEM degrees is probably something like 2%. There's zero doubt the US has many problems (like any country). But ability to attract highly skilled workers isn't currently one of those problems.
(Last time I looked the green card backlog is in the millions. Which isn't surprising for a country with some of the highest wages in the world for the highly skilled).
How many of those green card applicants are H1B?
I don't deny the ridiculousness of the US's healthcare system and such, I just don't believe the US's problems have stopped the US from remaining a popular potential destination for immigrants. From 2010 into 2017 the US was (by some distance) the plurality choice of immigration destination in Gallup's World Poll (https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx); hard to see that having majorly changed in 4 years.
Why the competition between US and China must be a zero-sum game? This will just narrow our mindset and force the response from both countries into a loss-loss situation. It’s a real waste of resources and an increase in inefficiency for the whole world. Americans should be more open-minded and spend time in China to understand the country and its people.
Yes. But in fact, it's very difficult for them to do so! And more to the point, China's current leadership seems set on ratcheting up tensions, which forces the U.S. to think in zero-sum terms...
The Chinese are saying the same thing about the American leadership! That's why we should stop this zero-sum mindset to stop any eye-for-an-eye feedback loop. Ideology is all debatable but in the end, it's the action that counts. So, people from both countries should speak less about their ideology/believes but pay more respect to each other, and that is a real contribution to humanity.
Have you heard of the "wolf warrior" diplomats?
Stop your ideological meddling in China's internal affairs, and the 'wolf warriors' will disappear. What does "One China " mean? Chinese citizens are horrified by the example of the Jan 6th Capitol riots. Learn how to govern your own country; the 'beacon on the hill' was finally extinguished by that reckless display of hyper-partisanship.
Neil, I want you look in a mirror and read your own comments out loud sometime, so you see how ridiculous you sound...
I tried it - It didn't sound ridiculous, though it did sound *partisan* .....Actual]y, we all need to submit to rule of law, ultimately maintained by a UNSC without veto, to end the zero-sum game.
But no doubt you will insist on a rules-based system that benefits yourself? I thought so. Scheming to steal the entire world's best talent for the benefit of the US? Absurd, if not criminal.
Neil,
Is the status of Taiwan an internal affair for China? If so, why? Because the CCP says so?
I am sure the Chinese citizens were horrified by Jan 6. What about what happened to Hong Kong? Are they horrified by the way Christians and Falon Gong practitioners are treated in the PRC? Or the situation in Xinjiang? Or the Tiananmen Square massacre?
Do they even know about these issues?
Taiwan is part of China., in the same way Hawai is part of the US. Now, imagine if Hawai decided on a communist government....
Is it "ideological meddling in internal affairs" to say that people in Iran should be free to practice Christianity, people in China should be free to talk about the events of 1989, people in Russia should be free to talk about being gay, people in the United States should be free to criticize problematic diversity initiatives, and people everywhere should be free to move to whatever country they would like to move to?
Free to talk about something is one thing, free to secede from the nation is another. The nation which can engender sustainable development AND eradicate poverty, can claim 'best government practice'. The results of the US-China competition should be clearer in decade. As for religion, there is only One God (who remains a mystery to us humans who can't even understand infinity...)....the time to believe in whatever religious nonsense, according to any particular man-made scripture you want to believe in, is long past.
Noah, Noah, Noah - The Chinese feel quite strongly that the US has been engaged in an ideological offensive against them since well before that movie was ever made
Have you heard of the Republican Party?
KY -
The "zero-sum" mindset stems from one nation (the PRC) trying to revise the rules of the international relations system which another nation (the USA) has a strong interest in preserving.
For decades, Chinese firms and state owned enterprises have flouted IP protections and international trade protocols with either the tacit or direct encouragement of the CCP. The CCP takes diplomatic and quasi-military actions to revise its status in the international system. In and of itself this is a mundane observation as all countries are continuously trying to press their interests. However, many try to do so within the present rules of the system. China is trying to revise the system itself to be more beneficial to it.
The US, which benefits from many features of the present system, wishes to maintain the system as is, only editing it marginally.
Both nations fundamentally want opposite things. Things which truly advance CCP interests would truly undermine US interests. Both powers can agree on token things but on substantive issues they have two competing and contradictory goals.
You can endorse one or the other but both countries have very different goals which cannot be reconciled.
Hi Luke, Great comment. May be at the government level the confrontation is inevitable. But at the local level, for normal people like you and me, promoting a more inclusive mindset would help. Rather than to paint the other side as evil state as what the mainstream media tries to do, may be people from each side can be more rational and open minded.
Thanks KY. Like you, I think a more inclusive mindset is important. For Americans we need to be mindful that the CCP is NOT China or the Chinese people (of all ethnicities). It is just not as representative of its population as the US government is of Americans.
When China acts, it is not the will of the Chinese people as embodied by elected representatives, it is rather the will of the CCP.
It is harder to divest American foreign policy from the American people because the President embodies the political will of a plurality of the 50 states (as per the electoral college victory). In Biden's case, he also represents the plurality of voters. So, at the very least, American international behavior is endorsed by a sizable portion of the American people.
To some extent, we have endorsed the present situation.
Actually when I talk to local Chinese living inside China, most of them speaks highly of the CCP, whether you believe or not. CCP do have strong support by the local Chinese as most of them experienced dramatic improvement in living standards over the past 30 years. The CCP actually received very high rating inside China by the modern Chinese whom nowadays have travelled outside China and have experienced the western world. This is just to share my observation and food for thoughts.
And who , pray, gave the US the power to decide how the "international relations system" should look or operate?
And who has the right to proclaim that another countries government will be only legitimate when it is "embodied by elected representatives"? (The added subtext of this judgement, of course, is that only certain types of elections are valid or acceptable.)
Prescriptive, self-interested proclamations like these do not make for a stable, workable -or even ethically justifiable - international order.
TN, I was merely pointing out that there is, at the most fundamental level, a "zero-sum" dynamic here. The USA wants the present international relations order preserved. The CCP wants it revised. This is an observation, not a normative statement.
However, what makes an ethical international order? One where every nation has a voice? Why is it wrong for the USA to dominate and suppress the agency of other countries at an international level but it is okay for the CCP to dominate and suppress the agency of dissidents in a domestic context? Is a "might makes right" mentality fine in domestic matters but somehow wrong on the international stage? Why the distinction?
You get to the heart of the matter though. The real question is how do we judge things as right or wrong in political affairs?
Henry,
Interesting response. I agree that of the three, Politics is the most “zero sum” compared with Tech and Growth.
Dems and Reps can come to agreement on peripheral issues but core partisan beliefs are rarely compromised. When they are, those who compromise are often viewed as traitors by the base of their parties.
Also, Tech and Growth, although usually “win-win” in the aggregate, can still be “zero-sum.” A good example is the validated billions of dollars of IP theft that Chinese firms have taken advantage of at the expense of American ones. That represents substantial loss to owners of the stolen IP.
Many Americans have a critique against the unfair or anti-competitive business practices that the CCP fosters in China. The CCP makes Tech and Growth political and thus, “zero-sum.”
Sounds very much as if you're advocating the position that it's ethically justifiable for the US to unilaterally pardon psychopathic architects of genocide (e.g. WW2 Nazis) simply to gain intellectual and economic advantage from them.
Not quite sure how this position squares with the aim of "creating meaningful, substantive moral distinctions between ourselves and our rivals."
Quite frankly, an enormous percentage of the planet would be exceptionally grateful if the US would actually deliver on its existing promises of moral superiority, rather than spending its time cynically making new ones designed only to boost its "moral image" rather than take substantive actions that align with the promises.
"The bulk of the prosecutions of the past three years…are related to a lack of candor, such as the failure to disclose ties to Chinese funding or institutions…"
Al Capone was only ever prosecuted for tax evasion. Can we then conclude that his crimes were insignificant accounting mistakes? A lot of tech-transfer espionage is really hard to prosecute. They may not even be criminal offenses --- a breach of NDA with some tech company may only be a civil matter.
So, there are two ways to interpret these prosecutions:
1) The prosecuted are basically innocent and just happened to slip up and say the wrong thing to an investigator or made an honest mistake and forgot to put some organization name on a form.
2) The prosecuted are actually guilty of espionage, but that's very difficult to prove (or can only be proved by revealing sources), so prosecutors go after charges that are easier to prove --- just like they did with Al Capone.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The question you should be asking yourself is: do you think that the three-letter agencies (TLAs) are good at their jobs or not? If you think they're competent, then you should be on the 2 end of the spectrum. If you think they're incompetent, then you should be on the 1 end of the spectrum.
When people think of espionage, they usually think of real cloak and dagger stuff where there's a clear spy like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. Instead, a lot of espionage is just bycatch stuff where an intelligence agent asks some scientist/engineer for a bit of info when they come home to visit their parents. I know someone who gets contacted by their country's intelligence agency when they return home, and the TLAs when they come to the US. The person isn't a "spy" in the sense of Ames or Hanssen. They're just a person who travels and possibly knows interesting things.
If some Chinese scientist travels home for the holidays, gets contacted by Chinese intelligence agencies, and hands over some info, it's basically impossible for the TLAs to prosecute them directly, but it's not impossible for them to have good reason to believe that they did it. In fact, if they did prosecute for espionage, they might have to give up information on how they know about the espionage! Of course they don't! You should expect them to get charged with making a false statement. However, there's no way for an outside observer to differentiate this from TLAs simply being jerks and/or incompetent. What you see is mostly a reflection of your priors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Two points:
First, there are brain drains and brain drains. There is a big difference between importing scientists from China and health care workers from, say, Nigeria. The latter kind of import may well hurt the exporting country. Many countries have many fewer educated people than they need, and are hurt hard by emigration.
Second, I'm all for immigration. But it may be worth noting that there is no shortage of, say, American-born corporate lawyers. I worked at a pretty fancy corporate law shop with about 40 lawyers, including a physics major, two math majors, and one math minor. Plenty of hard STEM talent here: all American-born. Funny that.
You get what you pay for, and STEM doesn't pay all that much, considering the alternatives. Our need for immigrant STEM talent is linked to our STEM pay scale, relative to the alternatives for native-born Americans.
I agree with Noah that trying to engineer a "brain drain" won't bring about the precipitous collapse of Chinese science (they're just too big). I have argued (on this blog among other places, as it happens) for a "steal their talent" policy on the part of the US for a couple of related reasons:
1) You can't have too much talent.
2)The CCP doesn't likely view the specter of Chinese talent flowing to the USA with much equanimity. Indeed, it's a virtual certainty those xenophobic, anti-Western, paranoid tyrants view such a development with extreme negativity. And so they'll react. Which is what you want. IOW, you want to make it as hard as possible for the CPC to govern/dominate/direct Chinese society. In short, you want to make it challenging for them to maintain a modicum of popularity and support among China's well-educated elites. Blocking said elites from pursuing overseeing opportunities is a good way to bring about this challenging environment.
Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship. Regime change really is the only long term solution (let's be blunt). But let's not kid ourselves: this three thousand year old civilization isn't going to allow us to tell it how to govern itself. >>Change has to come from within<<. But we can (maybe) hope to make this change arrive faster and happen more easily by doing what we can to make the status quo more difficult to maintain. Reducing the popularity of the regime is one of the few credible tools in our arsenal; hence the desirability of forcing Beijing to do unpopular things like, erm, blocking ambitious, well-educated Chinese people from seeking better lives abroad.
<<"Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship">.
Clouded with ideology. eg, a consensus one party meritocracy may well prove to be a better form of governance - to achieve *sustainable development AND common prosperity* - than an elected adversarial multiparty plutocracy. Different way of looking at "dictatorship"...which has the support of the people and is producing the desired results; the relative success of the two systems should be clearer in a decade.
The US strategy can be rephrased as simply "an outlet for speech is the best for smart people". Counter example for why that will be annoying: Hong Kong and Taiwan.
America isn't even bringing in the immigrants who have been approved. We currently have almost half a million immigrants whose documentation is complete and are just waiting for an interview to get in. It's weird no one is talking about that considering the current worker shortage. Over 8 million people are waiting to apply. We don't necessarily need to go out and find new people. Just schedule Zoom calls with all the immigrants who need interviews and actually start processing new applicants.
It is hard to justify immigration policy that concentrates only on China. The same goal is achieved through allowing much more skilled immigration (say, 1/2-1 million per year) from all the autocratic regimes: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. The US will get even more talented people, but immigrants will be also more diverse making the policy more palatable to average American voters. Its national defense angle can be convincing for republicans, and its "good guy"/innovation angle should be convincing for democrats. Note: as a Russian I have a conflict of interest here.
You describe brain drain as mostly a myth, but in the past you've mentioned brain drain to the US as having a negative effect on Canada. Have you changed your mind on that?
I don't actually believe that this has had a negative effect on Canada.
I was just remembering this:
https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1154422954588954624
> Of course, that effort would have to be paired with vigorous efforts to present the U.S. as a place where Chinese people can feel safe and free from racial discrimination. That will require cracking down further on anti-Asian hate crime, as well as stepping up rhetorical efforts to make Asian immigrants feel like America cares about them and can be their family’s permanent home.
This sounds right, but US Media loves shitposting that Chinese people live a miserable life. If this continues to happen, I don't believe Chinese immigrants feel like America cares about them.
Would be nice if Americans were allowed to go to China and see for themselves!!
Yah that'd be great. When I worked at SF, my American teammate once traveled to China. When he came back he said:
"I expected North Korea but I saw paradise. I can walk out at 2am without any problem."
China is far from paradise, but it is nothing close to North Korea for sure. I do hope people of the 2 countries use their own eyes to experience the other side, either from TikTok/Twitter/whatever or in person.
Can Americans go to China and experience it in an un-curated way? For all its faults, a Chinese citizen could travel to the USA and have largely unrestricted access to the country. I am not so sure an American citizen would have the same freedom to explore China.
Hi Luke!
> Can Americans go to China and experience it in an un-curated way?
Yes. To give you an example, when I was in college at Peking University, I had school friends from from USA, Canada, Israel, Japan, Korea, North Korea who are international students, just like me at Carnegie Mellon University. No different. International students live in better dormitory than local students though :)
Another example, my teammate at Tubi (an AVOD business based in SF, acquired by Fox). He had the similar concern before his travel, asked me a lot of questions such as: May I have access to internet? May I be tracked by someone? etc.
What we did to help him: Buy an international SIM card beforehand to make sure he still has access to internet (Google, FB, etc) beyond GFW. Teach him to download WeChat so that he can pay without cash. And most importantly, no one will ever track him, at all.
If you do not believe in what I say, search "american in china" in YouTube, there should be a lot of them.
All foreigners face restrictions getting into China because of the pandemic. But once you're in, there's generally pretty free access to everything outside of Xinjiang and Tibet. (Travel is certainly allowable in the latter two, as well, although it may be necessary to book through an authorized travel agency).
It's possible at the margins the Chinese are a bit jumpier than Americans when it comes to militarily sensitive areas, but I don't think the gap is huge. I live very close to some rather militarized zones in metro Beijing, and I've had zero problem despite the fact that I stick out like a sore thumb.
In any event it's not like North Korea. You won't find agents trailing you. They won't assign "minders" to you: China (pre-pandemic) was among the most visited countries in the world. But you may find CNN in your hotel room cuts out when the party doesn't like the story in question. And the hotel you're staying in is required to have a licence to rent rooms to foreigners.
You could before 2020. I spent a month in China in 2016, just wandering around and riding the trains into the countryside, up into Gansu. If I'd had more time I would have taken a train to Kashgar just to see it; I chatted with other travelers in Dunhuang who'd come the other way (traveling west to east) and it didn't sound like there was any impediment to traveling. I heard that Western travelers weren't allowed into Tibet, but I didn't try to go there myself. Fwiw I don't think Xinjiang was such a shitshow back then though; it's probably harder to go there now.
How could you curate the experience of millions of tourists every year?
No, quite simply, most dictatorships do not impact the down-to-earth experience you have while walking down a street or going groceries or having a drink with friends.
If Americans stopped getting their prototype of a country in a dictatorship from end of war Nazi Germany, they would understand that you can't judge the quality of the leadership by any individual experience, but only by very long term and aggregate results (and ON THAT, dictatorships perform really poorly)
Probably not - you could not go to Tibet or Xinjiang
You can search on YouTube where alot of foreign YouTuber talk about their visit to Xinjiang
Great comments
They did/could from 2000-2020 and yet that didn't really change their mind. It doesn't help that thought leaders, trying to combat the myth that all of China is as modern as Beijing, seem to be creating a new one where modern China is a face and 1.3bn peasants still exist in Potemkin villages.
1.3bn peasants won't make China the 2nd largest economy.