By Saul Landau
Progresso Weekly
26 May to 01 June 2005 Edition
Bulatlat.com
“So what did you think of China’s recent economic foray into Latin America,” I asked a university student.
“Huh?” she replied.
“I read something about it,” said another, “but I don’t remember any details.”
“Why not,” said a third. “They make everything I buy at Wal-Mart. So why shouldn’t they invest in other places?” He shrugged, indifferent to the news. Indeed, Washington warns China over any moves on Taiwan, but has barely responded to its world wide economic initiatives.
A century ago, students might have known as little as today’s unscientific sampling, but US policy planners looked to a then weak and divided China as the answer to the country’s future trade and economic problems. Anxious exporters implored President William McKinley to act because “the Chinese market rightfully belongs to us,” a member of the Riverside NY Republican Club told Secretary of State William Hay. This low-wage labor source and vast potential market to the east would also supposedly solve the periodic depression problem, which in 1893, shook the country’s economic structure and motivated the elite to think about how expansion eastward would resolve that issue.
“Under the stimulus of a narrowing marketplace at home and widening market opportunity of an awakening China,” wrote historian Thomas McCormick, “America’s leadership made a conscious, purposeful, integrated effort to solve the economic crisis at home by promoting the national interest abroad.” It did so “by using America’s most potent weapon, economic supremacy, to begin the open door conquest of the China market” (China Market, 1967, p.19).
Indeed, in 1898, President William McKinley “took the Philippines” (not just on God’s command) because they made the ideal jumping off base for future China excursions. The US kept its naval base there for 100 years, when technology no longer required refueling stops. “East Asia is the prize for which all nations are grasping,” wrote Brooks Adams, John Quincy Adams’ grandson.
In 2005, the weak and vulnerable “prize” that feuding Europeans had carved up for imperial aspirations at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries now blankets all continents with its goods – and its capital. As the “made in China” label has become ubiquitous in US department stores and on the wings of commercial airplanes, Chinese investors also bought hundreds of billions in US paper. Perhaps, some farsighted Chinese planner back then thought that the United States would be China’s “prize!” Indeed, in early March a US Embassy official confided to a visiting businessman that he believed that Chinese leaders viewed the United States as a declining superpower whose time had passed and will be forced to share world power with other powerful nations, including China. To demonstrate how China’s strategic position has changed in the last two decades, the Embassy official explained that China not only captured the US consumer market, but has invaded the US’s traditional Latin American sphere.
He referred to two high level visits. In November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao signed 39 commercial agreements with five Latin American nations. Chinese investments in Argentina alone totaled some $20 billion. He then made an investment trip to the Caribbean as well.
In January and February, Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong followed his boss’s visit with his own entourage of officials and top business executives. During these two aggressive trips to pursue investment in strategic areas, China stepped into potentially contentious turf when they signed an accord with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez for future Venezuelan oil and gas exploration. Zeng also offered Venezuela a $700 million credit line for new housing construction to help reduce Venezuelan poverty, ignoring US whining over Chavez’s “authoritarianism.”
Chavez, who won three free and fair elections in the last six years, gets stuck with the “authoritarian” label while his pro-US opponents who staged a 2002 military coup, merit the “democratic” badge. This labeling mystifies those who continue to think logically.
