How Not To Challenge China

By Moon Of Alabama

November 20, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - "Moon Of Alabama" -  The headline of a recent Bloomberg column by one Tyler Cowen is:

Covid Is Increasing America’s Lead Over China.

Its remarkable only for its fervent nationalistic delusion.

This paragraph stands out:

There is one other factor that people are loathe to discuss (with one exception). Yes, the U.S. has botched its response to Covid-19. At the same time, its experience shows that America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact. It had long been standard Chinese doctrine that Americans are “soft” and unwilling to take on much risk. If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?

This comes at the same day as a similar delusional State Department policy planning paper sees the light.

The Elements of the China Challenge (pdf)

Axios calls it a "Kennan-style paper". In 1946 George Kennan, then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, wrote his 'Long Telegram' that defined U.S. Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union for the next decades:

Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as "undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face". In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:

• The Soviets perceived themselves at perpetual war with capitalism;
• The Soviets viewed left-wing, but non-communist, groups in other countries as an even worse enemy of itself than the capitalist ones;
• The Soviets would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
• Soviet aggression was fundamentally not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but rooted in historic Russian nationalism and neurosis;
• The Soviet government's structure inhibited objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.

Kennan later said that his paper was misunderstood and that the hostile containment policies that were based on it were wrong and self defeating.

But the China paper which the State Department published is not comparable to the 'Long Telegram'. It is a propaganda piece that reflects the naive views of the outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompous.

Pompous' premise is that the Chinese people hate the Communist Party of China that runs the country and that China is not a democracy. But that is not what the people of China believe:

Charted below are the survey results from 20 countries, and they illustrate some startling beliefs — not least that 73% of Chinese consider China to be democratic, whereas only 49% of Americans believe the same about the U.S.

Read this thread to find out why that is the case:

ShanghaiPanda @thinking_panda - 9:24 UTC · Sep 15, 2020

On twitter, as a Chinese, the most frequently asked question for me is, why don't you oppose the CPC? Why don't Chinese support western style democracy? Why do Chinese people support President Xi, who has no votes? Now, I'm going to tell them why.（1/N）

Also this one.

The recommendations of the State Department paper listed by Axios are not practical steps but pure ideology:

The blueprint: The paper lays out "ten tasks" for the U.S. to accomplish.

1. Promoting constitutional government and civil society at home.
2. Maintaining the world's strongest military.
3. Fortifying the rules-based international order.
4. Reevaluating its alliance system.
5. Strengthening its alliance system and creating new international organizations to promote democracy and human rights.
6. Cooperating with China when possible and constraining Beijing when appropriate.
7. Educating Americans about the China challenge.
8. Train a new generation of public servants who understand great-power competition with China.
9. Reforming the U.S. education system to help students understand the responsibility of citizenship in a complex information age.
10. Championing the principles of freedom in word and in deed.

Note especially the points 7 to 10.

They have nothing to do with China. They call for domestic propaganda, more domestic propaganda and even more domestic propaganda.

How brainwashing and stupidifying one's own people is supposed to challenge China is beyond me.