What is China? It is a demon-revealing mirror. Hold China up against the United States, and the demons rooted in America have nowhere to hide. I did not buy it at first, but Friedman convinced me. In his latest piece for The New York Times, he lays it out plainly.
The Demon-Revealing Mirror
"In my view, the Chinese today are getting the best out of a bad system of government — by thinking long-term and executing on a plan to align their country with the economic trends of the 21st century.
But one of the weaknesses of China's system has been on dramatic display lately: the sudden disappearance and arrests of senior officials accused of corruption — so many that it could start to slow down the whole system here, if high-level bureaucrats fear making spending decisions that could land them in jail. Or as one Chinese economist put it to me, quoting a Chinese proverb: "If the water is too clear, there will be no fish."
And America? By doing no long-term thinking, appointing incompetent cabinet secretaries and having each new administration undo major initiatives of the previous one — like on clean energy — we're getting the worst out of a good system."
A laureate writer, bending logic the way you twist a Rubik's Cube. He takes a jumbled, mismatched set of squares and turns them, twist by twist, until a neat all-frontal pattern appears. I have not read widely, but AI does not lie to me. Scan Friedman's past articles and the picture is simple: he has written about China for thirty years, back and forth, yet the core never changes. He uses China to examine America.
His view of China, though, has shifted. Not from pro-China to anti-China, and not the other way around. He simply picks China up as a demon-revealing mirror and raises it toward America from time to time. He looks once, twice, three times. Look long enough, and he finally sees it: the celebrated superiority of American democracy and the myth of economic freedom are, in fact, magic cast by demons.
"Just look around. Trump is savaging America's scientific research budget and driving away the most talented foreigners who want to come to America to work, study and invent. Trump gutted the electric car industry in favor of gas guzzlers, while Democrats did not think it was a bad idea to leave our southern border porous, which helped to get Trump re-elected."
One could put it this way. The American demon is not President Donald Trump, nor the MAGA crowd; the ingredients are far more complex than that. As the Doctrine of the Mean in the Book of Rites puts it: "When a state is about to flourish, there must be auspicious omens; when a state is about to perish, there must be demons." Let me be clear upfront: I am not the one forcing the demonization of America. I am merely noting that ominous signs are indeed in the air right now.
Twisting the Rubik's Cube, turning black into white. AI current-affairs cartoon
Twisting the Rubik's Cube
However you slice it, Friedman writes with a magic touch. America gets a light tap, while China gets the knife: "If China were a person, it would have the upper body of an Olympic weight lifter — rippling with muscles that represent its export-driven advanced manufacturing economy — and the lower body of an Olympic skier who just crashed into a mogul, broke his leg and can now only hobble on a crutch."
Why the broken leg? "That lower body represents a domestic Chinese economy that is still so weakened by the explosion of its large, quarter-century-long housing bubble — which ravaged its middle class and left hundreds of millions of people with mortgages that are underwater or with wiped-out savings — that many Chinese are holding tight to every yuan they can.
I see the trick now. Friedman's long piece circles and circles to do one thing: twist out an America that is neat and white on top and a China that is uniformly black below. With that sleight of hand, he turns the demon-revealing mirror into a Rubik's Cube. Please applaud.
After the applause comes the landing. Friedman argues: "The only way we will restore some balance to the economic relationship between China and America (and between China and Europe) is not by begging Beijing but by rebuilding our leverage — by being serious again about our governance, by making cost-competitive products and by planning beyond next week and then executing on those plans."
Read it closely, and the whole closing passage sounds less like strategy than a muffled cry of despair.
Comfort in a Cube
No wonder Friedman treats China as part of the same Rubik's Cube as the United States. Honestly, if my own country were like America, I too would throw everything into twisting it right again.
Even a paper exercise in tallying gains and losses would bring some comfort. Two hundred years ago, China was exactly like this.
Deep Blue
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