Customer Reviews

The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won

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1 star:		(19)

 

 

In The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (which I recommend to anybody who cares about global peace and prosperity), author Will Hutton says, "[China] requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which could culminate in self-defeatingly creating the very crisis we fear."

If you want to know such enmity and suspicion to the extreme, read The Coming Wars of China, which is simply a categorisation of the bad stories about China you can find over the internet. (Author's note: "Much of the research conducted for this book was done over the internet.") To give you an example, on page 137-138 the author uses the information on the Banqiao Dam found at Wikipedia - the Banqiao Dam was built in the early 1950s and crested and collapsed when Typhoon Nina hit in 1975 - to prove that it is not a good idea to build the Three Gorges Dam.

In fact, you know you are in for some catastrophic scenarios when you read the author's prediction in the form of a "News Release, October 25, 2012" on the first page of the Introduction:

- "Global stock exchanges were devastated this week by the worst collapse in history as a wave of panic selling followed...a Chinese government announcement that it would no longer finance the mounting budget and trade deficits of a 'profligate United States'."

- "It's been a tough year for Sino-US relations. In January, the US ambassador to the United Nations stormed out in protest over...[China's] veto to shield terrorist regimes such as Iran from diplomatic sanctions in exchange for oil. In March, China's president abruptly cancelled a state visit after the US Treasury Department branded China a 'currency manipulator.' During an unusually hot August that raised collateral fears of global warming, the US Pacific Fleet engaged in a tense, week-long standoff over Taiwan with China's [navy]."

- "Meanwhile, domestic unrest in China continues to escalate... A recent report released by the US Central Intelligence Agency has warned that should such domestic unrest reach a boiling point in China, the result may be 'sharper military conflicts with the United States, Taiwan, and possibly even Japan as Chinese leaders seek to unify the now increasingly fractured nation against a 'common enemy.'"

Of course, if you like betting, you can always buy the book now and check the validity of the author's prediction in the year 2012.

I would not, however, recommend that you do this. Instead, I recommend that you buy Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall, which is one of the first truly enlightening books on China because of the author's unbiased attitude and approach.

"[China] requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which could culminate in self-defeatingly creating the very crisis we fear" (Hutton 2006)

A line from the book? Hardly! Nevertheless, The Coming China Wars relates in an unmistakable to this quote, for it exemplifies in starkest terms the very enmity and suspicion that Will Hutton cautions against in The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face Her as an Enemy. If the choice of title for the book itself fails to communicate the line of thought that pervades the book, the reader need not go any further than the author's introduction, which he begins with a fictitious October 25, 2012, News Release, entitled "U.S.-China Chill Melts Down World Markets." It remains highly debatable whether or not, as the author claims, "China has put itself on a collision course with the rest of the world," or whether that purportedly inevitable course is not possibly the result of a larger combination of factors, including not least highly de-contextualized and emotional analysis for which the United States, in the eyes of the noted German journalist and author, Peter Scholl Latour, appears to have a near infallible inclination in recent years. The Coming China Wars merely helps to further cement this perception.

Navarro discusses eight major China Wars that, ironically enough considering his heavy-handed, one-sided analytical approach, he argues require "a better understanding of the complexities of the economic origins" so as to "lead to their peaceful resolution" (xix). These China Wars include what he describes as (1) the Not-So-Swashbuckling Piracy Wars, (2) The 21st Century Opium Wars, (3) The Air Pollution and Global Warming Wars, (4) The "Blood for Oil" Wars, (5) The New Imperialist Wars, (6) The Damnable Dam and Water Wars, (7) China's Wars from Within, and (8) China's Ticking Time Bombs.

It is not altogether clear why "any complete understanding of the coming China Wars" (p. 2) must begin with a discussion of the so-called `China Price', but that nevertheless is the starting point of the book. Navarro identified nine drivers that sustain what he calls the "weapon of mass production" - low-wage labor; lax health, safety, and environmental regulations; foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows; industrial network clustering; pervasive piracy and counterfeiting; undervalued currency; government subsidies; and protectionist tendencies. Without any truly contextual (e.g. attempting to understand the range of factors influencing the Chinese government's position on exchange rate system, or acknowledging the views of Nobel laureates in economics (Josephy Stiglitz and Robert Mundell) who cautioned against rapid re-valuation of the Chinese currency) or comparative (e.g. China's protectionist and purported neo-mercantilist tendencies pale in comparison to those of Japan in the 1980s and South Korea up to this day) frameworks, this first chapter holds little value except for the fact that Navarro relies on the implied causality of the China Price and export-led economic growth to pave the way for the arguments offered in the remainder of the book.
Perhaps the least controversial chapter in the book may be the one dealing with the issue of widespread piracy and counterfeiting, though the near two-page exposition of fictional scenarios seems intended more as page filler and sensational highlighting of the problems than objective, detached scholarly analysis (of which this book is largely devoid). The importance of this particular topic, however, is undeniable, as has been documented by recent headline-grabbing news surrounding pet food and toothpaste exports from China. The author aptly (although very briefly) discusses the problems related to enforcement of intellectual property rights in China in terms of the inherent economic logic that leads to a vast discrepancy between policy and lawmaking at the center and enforcement at the local level; highlights divergent forms of piracy and counterfeiting ("ghost -shift," reverse-engineering, and "start-up counterfeiter" scenarios); and argues that the legal system of pirate (in)justice will only be addressed in more coherent fashion following the emergence of Chinese businesses with their own intellectual property to safeguard.

Air pollution and general environmental problems are the subject of Chapter 3. The author puts emphasis on China's reliance on coal as a primary source of energy and the contributory effect thereof on rising levels of air pollution, the alarming and accelerating onset of desertification and dust storms - related to over-cultivation, overgrazing, and deforestation - and the resulting impact on China and the world. The problem of effectively combating environmental pollution in China appears also linked to a large extent to questions of economic logic. As Navarro notes, "local officials either collude with corrupt local businesses or believe that nothing must be allowed to slow economic growth" (p. 61). Curiously enough, the obvious challenge and importance of these issues notwithstanding, Navarro chooses to (conveniently?) ignore even a simple mention of the various steps the Chinese government has taken to begin to address these issues.

Chapters 4 and 5 address the issue of energy and raw materials sourcing. From the author's point of view, China's growing thirst for oil is based on an amoral foreign policy ("just business, no politics") characterized by a preference for bilateral contracting (p. 72) rather than coordination and cooperation at the international oil market level, holds the distinct possibility of an accelerated arms race (i.e. guns for oil), leads to a ready embrace of dictatorial regimes, and heightens territorial disputes in the South China Sea. How strange that in enumerating these concerns, it did not occur to the author to reflect on U.S. foreign policy. After all, the "Blood for Oil" part of the title for Chapter 3 seems rather more appropriate for the U.S. than the Chinese case. If, up to this point, the reader has failed to notice Navarro's distinct bias, it comes powerfully to the fore in his discussion of the so-called "new imperialist" wars and "parasitic African adventure" of Chapter 5. Critiquing China (rightly or wrongly) for "using its amoral foreign policy and diplomatic powers at the United Nations to protect African dictators and strongmen from all manners of international pressures and sanctions" (p. 96) certainly does not amount to claiming a moral high ground for other countries, including the United States, for even cursory overview of U.S. foreign economic and strategic policies will inevitably point out similar self-interested attitudes by the U.S. government.

The apex of hypocrisy and ludicrous argumentation, however, is undoubtedly reached in Chapter 6. The less than appropriate comparison with the Opium Wars of the 18th century to China's `role' in the narcotics game notwithstanding, the author implies, however irresponsibly, that the China of the 21st century aims to achieve what Britain managed to do through the Opium Wars - conquering markets for their product. The following quotes, more than any commentary, highlight Navarro's inherent analytical naïveté and bias: "Although China has conquered many an export market...the same cannot be said for hard drugs. At least in this particular "China War," the Middle Kingdom has lots of bad company" (p. 110); "Today, one of the most important roles that China plays in the global heroin trade is to provide criminal syndicates with the vast quantities of the precursor chemicals needed to turn opium paste into heroin" (p. 112); "China also clandestinely exports precursor ephedrine to Russia the `domestic production of methamphetamine in kitchen labs in quantities for personal use" (p. 121). For a moment, the author also seems to have switched profession, indulging the reader with a methamphetamine and ecstasy primer, stretching over a combined six and a half pages.

The remaining chapters, meanwhile, offer a welcome return to a more balanced analysis, following the extreme bias and implicit/explicit distortions of Chapter 6. A rather short Chapter 7 speaks to the environmental and ecological problems related to China's obsession with dam-building, while Chapter 8 covers the political economy of water pollution and water scarcity. In "China's Wars from Within" (Chapter 9), the authors puts forward the proposition that the distinct potential for "wars from within" is intricately linked to issues such as water pollution and scarcity, corruption, income disparity, rural dislocation, and issues further developed in this chapter. The high level of unemployment, for example, appears correlated with privatization (i.e. the smashing of the "Iron Rice Bowl") and urbanization.. In this context, challenges to the institutional structures of the CCP are increasingly beginning to manifest itself in open discontent and rising numbers of protests; oftentimes fueled by perceived excesses in corruption among party members and seemingly indiscriminate favoritism based on guanxi (a term which the author has managed to misspell throughout the book!). Though far less biased than previous chapters, the fact that the author tries to cover a wide range of issues in just 19 pages (from unemployment, rising popular discontent of the dispossessed, and indications of possible class wars to manifestations of corruption, ethnic strife and Muslim separatism) attests to the hasty compilation of this work, considering that it is all largely devoid of substantive contextualization (a critique which I shall return to shortly).
In Chapter 10, Navarro puts the finger on the problems and challenges posed by a rapidly ageing population, a largely under-funded pension system in China, a crisis-ridden health-care system, the political effect of environmental protesters (the discussion of which would have been better suited for Chapter 9), and China's "ticking HIV/AIDS time bomb" (pp. 188-198).

In the closing chapter, Navarro pulls out the final stops with his policy prescriptions for "how to fight - and win! - the coming China Wars." In discussing his prescriptions for combating China's global pollution, he goes so far as to imply that businesses of advanced industrial economies may "set up shop in China simply to avoid more stringent restrictions in the home country" (p. 202). Of course, no inkling of evidence is provided to even begin to entertain this claim, which may not hold up to strict scrutiny to begin with! On the notion of "China's immoral and opportunistic use of its U.N. veto as a diplomatic shield for all manners of outrage," he goes so far as to advocated the intensely naïve proposition that if "China's abuses of power continue," U.N. member states should "seek to strip China of its permanent veto" (p. 202).
Not to be outdone, in the last few pages, he then even deems it necessary to ever so briefly and simplistically comment on an ever-lingering bogeyman in the Washington establishment - the rise in Chinese military spending and the obvious potential for heightened conflict, if it is to grow at present levels.

As previously mentioned, I shall now briefly return to a critique of the overall style and research that went into this work. In the author's own words, "this book is a carefully researched attempt to break free from the chains of repression and non-fact-based rhetoric that has characterized so much of the current debate" (p. 211) and "[T]he primary research for this book involved analyses of tens of thousands of pages of material from books, newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, government agencies...international organizations..., "think tanks," and numerous websites and blogs" (p. 219). If the reader makes it through the book and resisting the temptation to throw it away after the first chapter, these comments are bound to trigger laughter. For such purportedly extensive research, the book offers nothing in terms of explanatory and objective analytical value. In fact, rather than steering away from non-fact-rhetoric, as Navarro claims, he did not hesitate to add further to it.

Of 217 pages, a grand total of 134 feature extensive, sometimes paragraph-long (in some instances even spanning an entire page) quotes of various sources. It becomes quickly obvious that the text following these quotes is merely a descriptive and biased attempt at further extending the message in the original citation. My personal favorite was that the author, in his arguably diligent research has put primary emphasis on websites and blogs, as the bibliography clearly attests. He did not even hesitate to draw on wikipedia as a source on two occasions - to define the notion of "realpolitik" (he did not even bother to look at the voluminous literature on realpolitik itself to provide an authoritative definition), and then in his discussion of China's dam building.
As the reader can gather from this review, I thoroughly disliked the book and found it highly one-sided, biased and devoid of anything even resembling substantive analysis. Books with tempting titles such as The Coming China Wars appear to attract a large audience, and thus contribute to a further misinformation of a readership that may lack the basic foundational knowledge to properly assess the message and arguments presented in such books. Yet, sadly, many authors simply feel the pulse and mood of the times and pander to the demands and viewpoints held by a majority with sensationalist, hastily compiled publications that do no one any real service. The Coming China Wars, if nothing else, deserves high praise for its obvious success in handily contributing to a intensification of already distorted viewpoints on China of people that do not have the grounding or drive to differentiate value-enhancing scholarship from useless, sensationalist, cut-and-paste style commentary.

This book is written for the American far-rightists: it's preachy rhetoric of protectionist policies is a sure-fire sign to stay away.

China should be looked at objectively. There are positives and negatives to China's current policies; but hey, this isn't any different from US policies as well. If this kind of a book came out about the United States, I'd bet the same people praising this book would come out denouncing that one as destructive and evil.

As for this one, I suggest passing on it. There are many books and documentaries that better chronicle China's ascendancy to becoming a global superpower and the subsequent problems that accompany this transition. The world must learn to embrace China and its change, and not become scared off by it, because this will only encourage recoil and reaction. This author's dialogue is dangerous for Sino-US relations.

This book is not from a serious academian. It collects a lot of prejudicious and furious views to attract the reader's eyes. None of them are durable and reasonable. It ignores the basic fact that the chinese gov is trying to make 1/3 of the world poor people rich. In history, the chinese people never start a war against other countries. We would expect a properous China certainly fits the US interest and helps the world peace and stability.
This is a not worth buying.

Good points: this book overviews China problems.
Bad points: Bias. Not a book to know China.

Peter Navarro's standpoint is clear: China is an evil enemy, so we need to see the potential of the "China Wars".

I feel that it will be a much better book if he changed his standpoint as : China is a friend, US and China co-exist. We need to apprciate how hard that the Chinese government is targeting these problems. We need to help China to solve these problems even faster.

In all, problems always exist. I belive that there are so many wars in the world because there are a lot of people try to make enemys, not friends.

This is a must read for Americans. Forget the negative reviews of this book, looking through them, it is quite obvious that it is a concerted effort by some Chinese advocacy groups. I have been in hitech for twenty years, and I have seen by what means China is "acquiring" our technology. It is obvious that China is out to conquer export markets just like the Japanese did in the 1980s. The underlying drivers for China's economic expansion according to Professor Navarro are:

1. Low wages
2. Counterfeiting and piracy
3. Minimal worker health & safety regulations
4. Lax environmental regulations & enforcement
5. Export industry subsidies
6. A highly efficient "industrial network clustering"
7. The catalytic role of foreign direct investment (FDI)
8. An undervalued currency

These factors are based on economic research. Curiously the critics of this book have not come up with a single critique to these basic facts, except for whining that there are not enough footnotes. It might be true that China historically did not start agressive wars as some critics of this book proclaim, though the indigenous people in Tibet, Taiwan and the Muslim regions might look at history differently. Mercantilist policies are just another form of warfare. Much of China's success has been abetted by our morally corrupt companies and their equally corrupt supporters in goverment. As Lenin said the capitalists will even sell the ropes to hang them with. I have seen the changes here in the US. There has been an immense influx of foreign Chinese in all big technology centers along the Westcoast of America just in the last ten years. Cupertino, the home of Apple Computer and where I live, has basically become a Chinese town. There has also been a vast influx of Chinese foreign students intruding in our universities. Just visit Berkeley. Are we paying for that, and who will control the research? As a US taxpayer do I feel that I am taken advantage of, you bet I do. The bad news for China is that centrally run economies and state run banks have never succeeded. I happily predict that China will implode worse than Japan.

This relentlessly one-sided polemic against China is what it is, without any pretense of objectivity or balance. Peter Navarro has pulled together charges and allegations, most of which are not new, and many of which have been discussed at some length in the press, to make the argument that China is a threat to the world. Even if the book is heavy-handed, intemperate, badly proofread and even unfair, it is a worthwhile antidote to many recent books about the China miracle. Notwithstanding its very evident point-of-view, we believe Navarro's case deserves consideration. He says China's miracle depends - to a greater degree than many experts and observers have been willing to acknowledge - on theft of intellectual property, ruthless exploitation of labor, drug trafficking and violation of the norms of diplomatic good conduct (for example, supplying dictators with weapons of mass destruction). However, take everything with a measure of salt. The author faced a reporting challenge and acknowledges that his sources include unverifiable Web content and anti-China propaganda organs.

I was mostly disappointed by the main thrust of the book. The author paints a very negative picture of China. The majority of the book is dedicated to explaining all the terrible and evil things that China and the Chinese Government are doing to surely gain control of world power, not only economically but militarily as well. He has many chapters on how China is doing everything from polluting the world, to spreading infection and disease to the world, playing unfair economically with massive counterfeiting, endless cheap and even slave labor used to flood the world with cheap goods, trade and tariff protectionism, and massive currency manipulation. His very last and only chapter on the "solution" to the problem can basically be summed up as a counterattack through our own "protectionists" measures, although he doesn't go as far actually saying that, in factuality that is what his "solution" to the war with China would be.

I'm not saying that I entirely disagree with all the author's accusations about China, but I would have liked to see a more balanced approach to the equation. In other words, I believe that a lot of the issues and problems he points out can be traced to our own doing and marketplace endorsement through globalization. For instance, just look at the nature of capitalism and the endorsement of globalization these days from the perspective of profitability, building economies of scale, driving the bottom-line of businesses, growth in businesses, and a total increase in global market share. It is my perception that China is responding to our capitalistic appetites and hunger for wealth and riches. Review my post ("Back to Reality") on how the U.S. has been exporting inflation and importing deflation. After all, isn't this the American Dream? The "Dream" has gone global and the whole system is hamstrung as the real beneficiaries of the game (those that are truly getting rich) are doing so at an increasing cost and disparity to the rest of the population. Russ Winter calls them the "Bully" and "PigMen" class. This growing disparity is true not only for the Chinese, but for Americans as well. I think it is actually more dangerous for Americans since many don't even know what is happening and are swallowing the whole "dream" hook, line and sinker. As the average citizens go deeper and deeper into debt and get caught up in bubble after bubble all designed to keep the consumer fat and happy, the strings continue to pull tighter and tighter until they one day will just snap under their own weight.

I think a better solution to the China conundrum would entail a fundamental shift towards sound economics (Austrian School) with less government intervention, manipulation, and regulation. As Mish Shedlock has stated on many occasions, the Fed does not know the correct level of interest rates anymore than it knows how to set the correct price for orange juice or TVs (Read: "Open Market Operations, Interests Rates, and Gold"). If the U.S. was to adopt such an approach, the Chinese would follow suit. The market is always right and truly free markets (Laissez-faire) always have a way of finding perfect balance and equilibrium in the end. As far as I can see, it is the only way out of this mess that Keynesian economics has created.

I picked up this book while passing through LAX. While in flight, I was surprised and quite frankly, annoyed that the book-- supposedly written by a professor at UC Irvine's School of Management-- had no bibliography; no references; was shoddy in terms of quality; resorts to polemical diatribe in arguing that China is a problem.

The sad thing is, there are legitimate reasons for which we rightly ought to be concerned about not so much the rise of China and other countries, but the demise of the US industrial might. Just the other day, Ford and GM's stock tanked, yet again, and the Fed is pumping money into the US auto industry now to prop up our ailing-- failing-- economy.

It has been a long time coming that our misguided policies over the past sixty-years (since the death, essentially of FDR) have finally led to the bankrupting of our economy. With the Fed now printing money left and right, it is not so much the Chinese we need fear, but those "enemies within" (enemies domestic) such as the author of this book whom we need to guard against. For people such as they go on perpetuating the myth that we have done nothing to bring these disasters upon ourselves, while insisting, instead, that it is everyone else's fault.

For the most part, the book itself should be dismissed, but the general premise on which it is written-- is this rising competitor, China, a threat to the US? In the face of our declining economy and moral authority we need to learn to ask the right questions of what actually has led to the decline of US power in the global arena. That will in turn lead to the right answers and help us gain insight as to why there have been all these "missteps" over the years to counter-- feebly at times and fearmongeringly in other instances-- the deleterious effects of our own policy fiascos.


Indeed, if ever there was a clear and present danger, it surely would be a book such as this. For lousy scholarship is the bane to the existence and continuation of our Republic as it obfuscates the truth and keeps us from critical self-examination. When we pay homage to such fears as may be stirred up by this kind of jingoistic pseudo-scholarship, it tends to lead to blind obedience and amounts to no less than an intellectual cop-out and in this case, industrial suicide of the assisted kind. For a people too lazy to think for themselves will always blink in the face of fear and be led down the primrose path by yet another Pied Piper, another Hitler rising up from our midst.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote:

Obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men


We know better and are better. The battle fronts here in our midst-- poverty of body, soul and mind; paucity of well-thought through policies and sound practices; practically non-existent leadership at virtually all levels; and failure on the part of both politician and body politic alike to preserve, protect and promote the Constitution and our most sacred values and ideals... the list goes on.

The sooner we learn to exorcise trash, PR and propaganda from our midst, the better prepared will we be to face the challenges that await us, as that will lead to the long-suppressed exercise of our freedoms and intellect, which in turn will usher in a new era of awesome creativity, the onrush of new solutions to age-old systemic problems. The result will be no less than a cultural renascence in which the arts, not pop culture, will flourish and free us from the bondage of our fears, ignorance and prejudices. It will be the rising tide that lifts all boats and spirits, an up swell that is the expression of all our pent-up, welled-up aspirations and frustrations as a democratic republic eager to live up to her noble character. We must first confront our ghosts, goblins and skeletons before going on a witch hunt or go looking for a bogeyman. Our enemies at all times have been both foreign and domestic; it is high time we recognized which is the worser, else we will be swallowed up, not by the Chinese, but by our own demons.

i have not read the book yet, just wanted to note something interesting i observed in the reviews:

it is clear that most reviews are negative on the book. ok fine; however, what is very curious is the length that most of the negative 'reviewers' have gone to state their case--entire essays! in fact, many of these 'essays' are so over the top with respect to their organization and "thoughtfulness", that it makes one wonder who has the time or desire to put forth such effort?? it's almost as if someone doesn't want you to read the book, rather than to subjectively enter their own, humble opinion.

i bought the book simply b/c of the ridiculous, over-the-top negative spin. this is not likely the work of the average amazon reader; the amount of time and effort and sheer amount of reviews on this particular book paints a different picture entirely. this is propoganda in reverse, and reeks entirely of spin.

whatever your personal opinion of china and it's policies, don't be fooled by utopian ideology of 'why can't we all just get along', e.g. 'hutton's china book'. china doesn't give a damn about people, US or any other--just look at how they treat their own.