Atlantic Monthly: "Managing China's Rise"

That said, the Chinese military in particular doesn't have the longest reach. Do they even have an aircraft carrier?

'Managing' is a poor term, to be sure. 'Dealing with' is more apt.

now, india, india is the one i think we need to a)invest in and b)to watch

OTM about India, though -- cf. Thomas Friedman's new book, "The World Is Flat," which I am finding fascinating and revelatory. Outsourcing will change our lives and economy in ways that terrorism could never even dream of.

I mean, even if they don't start lobbing missiles at the US they can cause a shitstorm by invadint or lobbing missiles in their own part of the world and they wouldn't need aircraft carriers to do it. They can stir up shit and pretty much assume that the world will come to them instead of the other way around.

But now I just accept that every other month will have a scare piece in it.

Since you didn't actually read the article, I will take it that this is a testimony of the success of the Atlantic marketing dept. (That cover, hmm, inscrutable Oriental, almost.)

That said, the Chinese military in particular doesn't have the longest reach. Do they even have an aircraft carrier?

This is addressed in the article. Gist = they intend to become a regional superpower and thus are focusing on building up counters to the US Navy -- lots of submarines, for instance, to make putting a US carrier group in too close a dicey proposition.

There was one issue that was so appallingly militaristic (I believe it was the one with the "10 things our military is doing wrong" article where, on the one hand, sure all 10 things suggested would work, but ye gods I wouldn't want my name on such acts) that I considered cancelling my subscription in disgust.

Hmm, I'm going to maybe look back and try to find that one, don't remember it. Was it one of those little USA Today-ish one-pagers they stick in before the main articles? Maybe they were some of the recommendations Michael "Anonymous" Scheuer has advocated in fighting Islamist insurgents -- James Fallows seems very taken with Scheuer take on that matter.

Does the article mention if China has nuclear subs?

Interesting. Might chew this one over with my dad a bit. And yeah, do they in fact have nuclear subs? (I feel like I should be bowing to an icon of Rickover.)

*checks article*
China has no nuclear subs now, just old diesel ones which Kaplan suggests can be used to mine nearby seas and quotes a WSJ reporter as saying ocean conditions in those seas would make detecting the subs difficult. Further, "seventeen new stealthy diesel submarines and three nuclear ones" are to be deployed "by the end of the decade". Also, Chinese military is hard at work developing long-range cruise missiles for the purpose of hitting carriers.

Much of the article is more concerned with the political and economic angles than the military one. I don't think Kaplan makes it seem like war is inevitable or desirable. It's more like, here's how it's being planned for and how it might go down.

But yeah, anyone who thinks we're going to do a lot of "managing" of China is hitting the hookah a little hard. I think we (and by "we" I mean the West in general) are in for a period of wary coexistence. Not another Cold War exactly, since we're so economically codependent, but a lot of clear-eyed circling and sniffing. (Also, Russia seems like a joker in the deck; a strong Chinese-Russian alliance would be a hell of a thing. History isn't on the side of that happening, but who knows?)

The value of China's currency, the yuan, is currently pegged to the U.S. dollar, which means that the Federal Reserve is effectively managing the Chinese economy, at least in part, when it raises or lowers interest rates. There has been much speculation among economists of late that China is likely to revalue the yuan. But a complete adandonment of the peg is unlikely. Many currency analysts think that China is more likely to select a different peg, or manage the yuan by allowing it to float within a certain range against the dollar. As it is now, the peg has given Chinese exports a great competitive advantage in world trade, and fed feverish growth in the domestic Chinese economy. Many economists fear that if the current yuan peg is left in place, China's economy will overheat, driving up domestic inflation and causing the much-dreaded "hard landing" scenario where China's economy slides into recession or even depression and takes most of its major trading partners with it.

Lurking behind a revaluation is also the prospect of massive inflows of speculative "hot" money from currency traders, which could provoke a currency crisis similar to what happened along the rim in 1997. Keep in mind that amid all this, the Chinese banking system is still at the center of a planned economy and doesn't have the same level of market controls as many of the other Asian central banks did eight years ago.

The Peoples Bank of China manages the yuan by buying and selling dollars on the foreign exchange market. Chinese central bankers then take those dollars and invest them in dollar-denominated assets, mainly U.S. Treasury bonds and agency debt (like mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). China's investment in dollar assets in turn finances the U.S. budget and trade deficits. Any major shift in China's investment activity -- namely, a selloff of U.S. Treasury debt -- would cause interest rates to shoot up (a selloff by any major market player drives prices down quickly, and bond prices move inversely to bond yields).

For the U.S. government, a realignment by China would mean financing future fiscal obligations at much less attractive interest rates. That costlier debt service must be paid for out of the federal budget. With the budget already in deficit, higher interest rates mean borrowing even more money at unattractive interest rates in order to keep the government running and keep from default (think of it as akin to using a credit card with an 18.9% APR to make payments on a student loan with a 2% rate or less -- it's painful, stretching your obligations further into the future at greater cost). For consumers, the primary short-term impact would be a jump in mortgage rates. As we all know, the housing sector has been one of the linchpins of the U.S. economy in recent years, driving much of the continued surge in consumer spending during the slowdown of '01-'03, and as it goes, so goes the rest of the economy.

The economic stakes are simply way too high for there to be any sort of overt military engagement between the U.S. and China, especially in the near term. Economic realities can always shift, of course. But I think they are such that for the time being they can enforce "peace."

Oh god -- Battle Beneath the Earth, with Kerwin Matthews! Filmed and starring mostly UK types with bad accents and makeup jobs. A sick favorite of mine in the bad movie stakes.

http://www.liberalsagainstterrorism.com/drupal/?q=node/1137

-- phil-two (philtwo

Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle. IE, an Intercontinental Ballistic missile w/more than one warhead, IIRC either 3 or five in the trident that margaret thatcher blew all that money on in the '80's - , anyway, when the missile reaches the top of its trajectory, the warheads seperate, and go to different targets.

http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/latest-digest.html

An email of mine got quoted on their blog! http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/more-on-zuckerberg-and-chinese/382261/

which one are you?

this is basically what people that study mandarin for several years in university sound like-- even the basics of pronunciation never quite mastered, tones disregarded when producing actual speech, very limited vocabulary, the same sentence patterns repeated over and over again. so.

I'm the least interesting one (ABC).