Search Results for: China

The U.S., China and the ‘Financial Balance of Terror’

Photo by Robert Baxter

This month, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, and a handful of other U.S. allies announced plans to join the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite American pressure not to. The multilateral fund is essentially China’s answer to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, organizations where the U.S. has long had more influence than China. China has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves—around $3.8 trillion in December—and wants to use some to fund infrastructure development projects in Asia. It’s clear enormous investment there is necessary. It’s also clear the U.S. is concerned the AIIB—and other new China-backed lending institutions—will weaken its influence. Below is a bit of background from the December 2009 Foreign Policy excerpt of Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen’s prescient book The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money:

Proverbs 22:7 instructs us: “The borrower is servant to the lender.” But the lesson requires some exegesis to fit smoothly into context. The burden of the U.S. foreign debt may be better explained by the oft-repeated Wall Street wisecrack, which we repeat: When you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has got you; when you owe the bank $1 billion, you’ve got the bank.

Neither side can walk away; we’re locked. The debt binds China especially and other governments that have the money. Selling the debt would send the dollar way down and thereby destroy the value of their dollar holdings and severely damage their economies’ massive export-based sectors. Worse yet, sell it for what? Their “reserves” are so huge that there is nothing else they can hold them in, not at that scale. From a Chinese viewpoint, it’s exasperating.

The U.S.-China economic imbalance has forced the two powers into a very intimate and not very desired embrace, something Lawrence Summers once called a financial balance of terror. This is all to the good: The two powers must learn to work as partners, and not just in economic matters — global warming and global order also need positive Sino-American cooperation, and they are much more important long-term issues. Sino-American partnership, in managing the complex mess of their imbalanced economic codependency, can constitute a good beginning for managing the utterly unhinged problems of world balance and order. We have no acceptable choice but to get good at it, and that will take some doing on both sides.

As money alters power relations, the United States is not simply becoming dependent — but it is no longer independent, either. That is a major change. And China is no longer helpless and cowed in face of the superpower hegemon; it has got a grip on it. Indeed, while the world peeks in, the two countries are realizing that they have thrown themselves into an intimate economic embrace with, to say the least, very mixed feelings.

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Robert Towne on Finding the Inspiration for ‘Chinatown’ at the Library

It was in Eugene, Oregon, in April of 1971 that I ran across a public library copy of Carey McWilliams’ “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land”-and with it the crime that formed the basis for “Chinatown.”

It wasn’t the compendium of facts in the chapter “Water! Water! Water!” or indeed in the entire book. It was that Carey McWilliams wrote about Southern California with sensibilities my eye, ear, and nose recognized. Along with Chandler he made me feel that he’d not only walked down the same streets and into the same arroyo-he smelled the eucalyptus, heard the humming of high tension wires, saw the same bleeding Madras landscapes-and so a sense of deja vu was underlined by a sense of jamais vu: No writers had ever spoken as strongly to me about my home.

The rapacious effects of a housing development in Deep Canyon nearby, and a photo essay called “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.” in the old West magazine provided, I think, the actual catalyst for the screenplay. The photos in West-a Plymouth convertible under an old streetlight in the rain outside Bullocks’s Wilshire, for example-reminded me there was still time to preserve much of the city’s past on film, just as McWilliams had shown me that it was my past as well.

—Robert Towne, writing for the Los Angeles Times (circa May 1994) about Chinatown, LA literature, and finding remnants of an older version of the city—in junk stores, garage sales, the warm dry itch of the Santa Ana wind, winding streets at dusk, and of course the work of McWilliams and Raymond Chandler. Towne wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film, which was directed by Roman Polanski.

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Monterey Park, CA and the Culinary Authenticity of Suburban Chinatowns

Monterey Park became the first suburb that Chinese people would drive for hours to visit and eat in, for the same reasons earlier generations of immigrants had sought out the nearest urban Chinatown. And the changing population and the wealth they brought with them created new opportunities for all sorts of business people, especially aspiring restaurateurs. The typical Chinese American restaurant made saucy, ostentatiously deep-fried concessions to mainstream appetites, leading to the ever-present rumor that most establishments had “secret menus” meant for more discerning eaters. It might be more accurate to say that most chefs at Chinese restaurants are more versatile than they initially let on—either that or families like mine possess Jedi-level powers of off-the-menu persuasion. But in a place like Monterey Park, the pressure to appeal to non-Chinese appetites disappeared. The concept of “mainstream” no longer held; neck bones and chicken feet and pork bellies and various gelatinous things could pay the bills and then some.

While the old Chinatown was all clutter, meats that still resembled animals roasting in windows, and chopsticks typefaces, the new, more privileged one wouldn’t be obligated to play games. It didn’t beg for attention, for there was a surplus of space in the suburbs, and nobody’s cooking smells had to disturb anyone else. Rather than being confined to the worst parts of town, these new immigrants generally possessed the freedom to go where they pleased.

With the rapid expansion of the transpacific economy, Monterey Park was inevitable, particularly in California in the late 1980s and 1990s. Once Monterey Park was established, the model spread through neighboring communities in the greater San Gabriel Valley just outside Los Angeles. The same thing was happening in Santa Clara County in the Bay Area, bolstered by a burgeoning tech industry and the relative proximity to Asia. Good schools, the stability of suburban life, and abundant space were attractive traits of Long Island, Westchester, and Connecticut, the outer rings of Houston and Dallas. These became the new centers of Chinese life in America, similar in function to big-city Chinatowns but different in their privilege and access to the newest overseas trends.

Hua Hsu writing in Lucky Peach about the rise of Monterey Park, CA and other suburban Chinatowns.

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Made for China

Longreads Pick

As American audiences tire of big budget spectacle, Hollywood has begun to tailor its blockbusters for the ever-expanding Chinese market.

Author: Shawn Wen
Source: The New Inquiry
Published: Aug 27, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,414 words)

How Local Leaders in China and India Shape Global Politics

Longreads Pick

All politics is local, even in the countries that are home to one-third of the world’s population. Antholis and his family traveled to China and India to explore how different regions operated, and how they each impact global politics:

The questions we asked fell into three categories: How do Chinese provinces and Indian states work? How do their leaders seek to balance local and national priorities and value systems? How do their citizens as well as their leaders view various global issues?

In Beijing and New Delhi, as in Shanghai and Mumbai, Chennai and Chengdu, Ahmadabad and Hangzhou, we often heard the same response: “Why do you care?”

The answer, in brief, is because local leaders are increasingly running much of India and China, which are home to a third of all humanity, from the bottom up. That is affecting how both countries act in the world, which means that these countries need to be understood from the inside out.

Source: Brookings
Published: Nov 5, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,839 words)

Mao Inc.: China’s Communist Party Turns 90

Longreads Pick

Does Zong, a member of the Communist Party, see himself as more of a communist or a capitalist? He smiles. “That’s a very German question,” he says. “I’m a pragmatist.” As such, he says, he fights for the rights of business owners and workers. “If there is anyplace in the world where socialism prevails, it’s Europe,” he says. In Zong’s opinion Europe, with its high taxes and welfare states, is a dead end. “People in your country should work harder,” says the richest man in China, sounding almost sympathetic.

Source: Spiegel
Published: Jun 27, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,096 words)

Women in China: A Social Revolution

Longreads Pick

When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.

Published: Jun 5, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,398 words)

Can China Discover the Urge to Splurge?

Longreads Pick

For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China.

Published: Nov 24, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,029 words)

How Baidu Won China

Longreads Pick

Robin Li—the 41-year-old, American-educated chief executive officer of the Chinese search engine Baidu—has a fan club. And each year at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, the members of the Robin Li fan club come out to get close to the object of their worship. When Li emerges from a dark blue sedan, the fan club mobs him, waving signs and screaming his name while Li poses for pictures with a tight, uncomfortable smile before darting into the building to rehearse his keynote address. The exuberance, club members say later, was coordinated by Baidu. “If I want to know about what happens abroad, I will use Google,” says one of the students. “Baidu’s information is influenced by the government so much.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,523 words)

Life in Shadows for Mentally Ill in China

Longreads Pick

“Professional psychiatrists in China are like pandas,” said Zhang Yalin, assistant director of the mental health research institute at Central South University’s medical school. “There are only a few thousand of us.”

Published: Nov 10, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,421 words)