Bobo’s Chinese Fireworks on a Clear Day

Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s Public Enemy may come at you as if he were a tommy gun exploding like fireworks on the Fourth of July. David Brooks, meanwhile, slips in with wet penny loafers that leave marks on your hardwood floor, pretending to be Fred Astaire dancing with a typewriter.

Bobo escapes domestic political fireworks to cover a conference on China-US relations. His Chinese Fireworks Display conflates the Fourth of July and China, home of the fireworks we’ll see tomorrow. He uses it as a segue to attack a Democratic Party-led government’s spending.

Brooks omits to mention most of our current debt the Obama administration inherited from Mr. Bush. He avoided such questions when Shrub was spending on two wars like a drunken Bush in Dallas on a Saturday night. That profligate spending was enabled by approving it via the "supplemental" process, rather than ordinary budgeting process, thereby avoiding open debate about those wars and what they cost.

Mr. Bush did that while cutting inheritance, gift and income taxes on the wealthy because, well, his family has been wealthy since John D. Rockefeller shipped his first barrel of Pennsylvanian crude oil from his offices in Cleveland, OH, and because those cuts mean he inherits more of it when his forebears pass on.

Of more interest than Bobo’s topic – ordinarily a valid and important one, given China’s dominance over East Asia and our debt – is his attempt to imitate Marcy Wheeler. He offers an "unlive" blog of a conference that pitted opposing speakers’ predictions about China’s role in our future. The speakers were historian of the moment Niall Ferguson and longtime East Asian correspondent and Atlantic commentator James Fallows.

Niall Ferguson is the enfant terrible of economic, imperial and military history. Well-born in Glasgow (his parents were a medical doctor and teacher of physics), he graduated with top honors from the University of Oxford. He went on, in a typically British way, effortlessly to earn his doctorate and turn his dissertation into a major book. He was a multi-millionaire by his mid-thirties, having produced best selling histories, television shows, and columns for the Daily Mail and the Financial Times.

In his politics and zeal, Ferguson is a neocon and a contrarian, the intellectual opponents of Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. He’s still in love with Margaret Thatcher and is adept at revisionist history backed up with intense, but creatively used research. He’s America’s imperial historian, imitating Britain’s imperial poet, Rudyard Kipling. Apart from his teaching, he’s a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Mr. Ferguson thinks America should rise to its "liberal" imperial obligations instead of shrinking from them like Chamberlain hoping to escape Munich by only giving away Czechoslovakia. He compares China to Wilhelmine Germany,

a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships,

with all that implies for ignoring its power and ambition. Founding chairman of the New America Foundation, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, a Rhodes Scholar and former editor of Harvard’s, Crimson, has actually lived and worked in China and covered Japan and East Asia for three decades. (A partial bibliography is here.) According to Bobo, Fallows,

agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing.

Ferguson, ever the frustrated rugby player, shot back,

You’ve been in China too long.

Perhaps Mr. Ferguson, who teaches at both Oxford and Harvard, writes histories and produces television versions of them, hasn’t been there enough. In any event, Mr. Fallows is more sanguine about Chinese intentions and the prospect for its relations with the US. However optimistic Chinese leaders may be about managing their domestic problems, they have a bird’s eye view on America’s debt problem:

the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy.

I agree with Bobo, that Fallows has the better, less intentionally dramatic argument. China is now a world player. It will be a bigger one relative to us as we continue to outspend our resources. The situation is reminiscent of the demise of England’s empire, which Ferguson laments, as it ceded lost power relative to the US after the First and Second World Wars.

China’s relations with us are symbiotic, but needn’t stay that way. Whether they do depends as much on the US – and especially this administration – as it does on how China manages itself and our debt.