Protect Thy Mote

"I heard that there's going to be a 14 percent increase in the Chinese defense budget. That's a lot... China should undertake to be transparent about what that means." - Condoleezza Rice

What it means is this: imagine the globe for a moment. Take all the oceans. Up to 12 miles from all the coastlines of the world paint the seas a light blue. In the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean allot no such space. This is where our Navy can go with impunity. Nobody can stop us. Running about 300-400 miles inland is the combat radius of the jet fighters aboard the 12 American US carriers, six of which are always at sea and all of which have about 80 combat-capable aircraft. That's the force projection capability of the United States.

With the help of regional allies, we've assigned ourselves responsible for the security of all the lighter shade of blue. We're also responsible for the security of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, most of Western Europe, the Caribbean basin, and now we're adding a lot of Eastern Europe to the mix to. Don't forget Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. We're everywhere because no one else is. We want [our] oil and commerce to move unhindered, so we've assigned ourselves police it.

In case you hadn't notice, and I'm sure you did, that darker blue abuts a lot of other peoples stuff. It causes incidents sometimes, such as when an EP-3 Orion electronic eavesdropper flying 70 miles off the coast of China had it's wing clipped accidentally by intercepting Chinese fighters.

China's economy is growing at over 10% per year, almost 70% of which is based on exports. Like every modern economy, it's extremely dependent on foreign hydrocarbons for economic expansion. Should it be a surprise then that

"By 2010, China's submarine force will be nearly double the size of the U.S. submarine feet. The entire Chinese naval fleet is projected to surpass the size of the U.S. fleet by 2015." - American Shipbuilders Association

Mix this with the idea of "offensive realism," one of the most compelling foreign policy theories I've ever read, and the future looks a little scary. As one power rises and another weakens, historically they almost always come to blows as the rising power encroaches on the weaker ones old turf. America has a lot of old turf. John Mearsheimer makes the case in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Great powers need to prove their respective strengths and the only way to do it is to actually fire shots. Furthermore, he argues, that states must constantly expand or face perennial insecurity.

In an insightful piece written by Paul Kennedy from Harvard, he waxes on Europe deconstructing it's military while every powerful nation in Asia is rapidly expanding theirs. He concludes with a question about Europe's pacifism and Asia's militarism that I think can equally be applied to the feigned ignorance fueling Condoleeza Rice's quote at the top.

This leads to an obvious, final question: What do naval strategic planners in the one continent assume about the future of the world that the planners in the second continent do not? Why is Chinese public television showing programs about the rise of Elizabeth I's navy at the same time that the British Ministry of Defense is mothballing or scrapping warships with names that go back over 400 years?

So what is it American strategic planners assume about the future of the world that they want the Chinese to admit in spite of their promise of a "peaceful rise"? Perhaps she's looking for a confession that, as the Heritage Foundation assumes, that the "peacetime expansion of China's military capabilities betrays a clear intent to challenge the United States in the Western Pacific and establish itself as the region's predominant military power."

Honestly, maybe that's not a bad thing. If indeed that is the case, and it likely is to a degree, open communication about mutual desires and fears of the future can only be a good thing.

One Chief

The always accurate Mr. Cheney today, in referencing Democratic congressmen acting on the will of the people to pull out of Iraq, that, "the United States military answers to one commander in chief in the White House, not 535 commanders in chief on Capitol Hill." Technically, he's right. But then his logic follows that the Congress must fall in line behind Presidential policy and thus they "expect the House and Senate to meet the needs of our military on time, in full and with no strings attached."

The President answers to the 535 men and women on Capital Hill. The President is the Executive, he makes sure the law and policy is carried out. And like any CEO, he answers to a Board of Directors. A freshly elected Board of Directors still covered in the raw stench of campaigning and opinion polls. Who's powers include [Article II, Section 8 of the US Constitution]:

To declare war, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

So yes, there is but on Commander-In-Chief "when called into the actual service of the United States." Guess who calls them into service? Three guesses:

A) Captain James T. Kirk
B) The US Congress
C) Lake Michigan

Mr. Cheney, the military answers to one Commander-in-Chief who executes the foreign policy of the United States as prescribed by the US Congress, who in turn answers to the people. I expect that you will fulfill their wishes with no strings attached.

The American Dream

Things made a bit more since today after having a class with a group of teachers and later with a group of principals with the same topic of conversation. What are the differences between American schools and Chinese schools? I begin by having them participate telling me what they imagine American classrooms looking like. Universally, they sounded like this:

• In American classes, students lounge around on the floor during classes.
• At most, there are 20 students per class.
• American students are more talkative in class, but that's to ask deep and penetrating questions.
• American students and teachers are always great pals.
• American classrooms are "more open," meaning few if any rules.
• American classes are extremely fun, involving lots of games.

More importantly, they all - every one of them - unhesitantly believed American education was better. An example was a principal who told me that 20 years ago educational scholars from China visited America and American scholars visited China. Both teams came to the conclusion that they well disciplined Chinese classrooms were better and the undisciplined American classrooms were worse. In those 20 years, however, no Chinese citizen has won a Nobel prize while Americans have won many.

With that, what we're doing out here makes since. I've often complained about feeling like the foreign teachers are expected to be English-speaking clowns. Come in, play games, make the kids have fun and love English and like magic the language will sink in. Disciplining children is not allowed. What we're doing, it seems, is recreating the Chinese image of the American classroom setting. They want us to come here and do to their students what they think was done to us. They want that magic spark that we were given to rub off on the next generation of Chinese.

Unfortunately, this image of the American classroom is incorrect. While Montessori schools and small private schools do exist, they are rare and most American students endure something very similar to the Chinese classroom.

While most American teachers would love the conditions that Chinese people are describing, the apathy and attitudes of American students prevents it from being a reality. I often corrected their notion of a rules-free zone by outlining each behavior associated with Childhood - horse playing, running, touching - that American teachers spend an extraordinary amount of time preventing for liabilities sake. Thus American teachers daydream of complicit and obedient [and imaginary] Asian classrooms where students want to learn and beg for three hours of homework a night.

In coming days and weeks I want to look at this issue more deeply. I want to more clearly identify, by the numbers, where the strengths of the Chinese classroom are and where the strengths of American education are. I'd also like to explore the idea of why, despite the huge number of science graduates in China, there have been no Nobel Prizes.

China: Economy 101

If you want to break things down into impossibly simple models, there are two competing views of where China's economy is going. The first, and one I give a bit of credit to, is presented in Ted Fishman's book China, Inc. In it he lays out how and why China is providing the proverbial Perot suction cup noise of industry fleeing not just America, but everywhere, to find a new home in China. A seemingly endless supply of docile unskilled laborers, infrastructure to move the goods, a government that's only talking of putting the breaks on uncontrolled growth at any environmental cost, a knack for copying coupled with laughable copyright enforcement, and a legal transfer of technology on a scale never before seen all conspire to give China an edge over any other country on the planet.

The first issue is the biggest. The sheer population of China is mind boggling. Fishman points out that the discrepancy between the official population of China [1.3b] and the unofficial estimates [1.5b] constitutes 2/3's the population of America. With that you have the largest migration in human history of people leaving the countryside in the interior to work in the coastal boomtowns, often trailed by a trail of savings from the villages to start small businesses. Labor is cheap and plentiful. College graduates work for less than $250 a month. Chinese companies don't need expensive machines to make cheap products more efficiently... it's easier to the labor. Fisher sites an example of an automobile company in Shanghai building luxory Jeep knockoff's for $8000 - with hand tools.

Eating lunch the other day my friends and I watched for half an hour as barrows of thrown out electronics dished out of the trash were brought to small workshop where the wires, casings, and other components were neatly shredded off and dropped into massive piles. Without a single any sort of Think Green-style motivation, China is probably the largest recycler on the planet. No task is too small or menial because no wage is too small.

Fisher sends out the warning over and over again that no business is safe from China's growing economy, especially as they move into more and more advanced technology like wide-body airplanes and their first indigenous jet fighter.

And then there's the other fear...

Economically, "too much of a good thing" really means something. Too much low interest money typically leads to inflation. Rising living standards in China mean rising costs of living, which means higher wages, which again adds inflationary pressures.

That's clearly dawning on Chinese leaders. `China's investment growth is too high, lending growth too fast, liquidity excessive and trade and international payments very imbalanced,'' Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on March 16 at a Beijing press conference. He added that energy efficiency and environmental-protection issues haven't been properly resolved.

When even China's No. 2 official uses words like `unstable,' `imbalanced,' `uncoordinated' and `unsustainable' to describe the economy, you have to wonder why investors aren't paying more attention to the risks and are still buying ever more Chinese stocks.
-William Pesek

In the same article Pesek goes on to address longer term deflationary fears with business costs rising because of environmental degregation, volatility, and rising labor costs. Even the Asian Development Bank is saying that, "Should investment continue to run at more than 20 percent a year, what has been a source of growth for many years could turn out to be a curse."

My own thoughts side more with Fisher. I've been to Manila, I've lived in America during a recession, and I know what a growing economy feels like. I see the cranes on every street building new high rises, thousands of kids at my school getting a solid Western-style education. Though there are plenty of BMW's running around, most of the growth is building a budding middle class. It's no bubble that people hoping to get wages commensurate with their skills and beginning to get suckered into the consumerist game one cell phone, one DVD player, and one computer at a time. It looks and feels like almost everyone is getting a piece of the pie, even if only relatively more from starting point of worse squalor. On a street level, what else would you look for to check for a healthy economy?

Economists and market-types always like to talk about "market corrections." Well, folks, this is the biggie here. 1.3 billion consumers. 1.3 billion producers. All moving from the idle slack of horrific misrule dating from Qing Dynasty on through the wonderfully inventive ideas of Mao Zedong [it was only fifty years ago Chinese were melting their farm tools in useless backyard steel furnaces]. Here they are, arriving by the train load to work, buy, and join modernity.