Kevin Rudd is the technocratic Australian Shadow Foreign Minister.

I grew up on a farm and my father said to me when I was about 10 -"Kev have you made up your mind what you are going to do in life?". Which to a 10-year old is a fairly confronting question.

"There are two great choices that you face". I said Dad what are they? He said "Is it going to be beef or is it going to be dairy?" China struck me as the third way.

ABC interview, July

In this forthcoming election foreign policy is the most substantial policy difference between the major parties. The ALP opposed involvment in Iraq, saying it was extralegal and a distraction from the War on Terror and the region.  Kevin Rudd was often the mouthpiece of that dissent. He's an unusually well qualified foreign policy spokesman, a former diplomat and fluent speaker of Chinese.

As his retro 2001 homepage outlines, Rudd grew up around Eumundi and Nambour, then excelled at ANU with first class honours in Chinese Language and History. He then joined the diplomatic service and served in Stockholm and Beijing. In a career path more reminiscent of Washington than Westminster, he left the civil service for Queensland state politics in 1988. As Queensland ALP Chief of Staff he helped to kick the stagnant and corrupt Nationals out of power. Rudd entered federal parliament in 1998, becoming Shadow Foreign Minister in 2001.

The interviews and articles online support the public persona that career path implies - a China wonk and Third Way left-winger, a regionalist used to maintaining a strict party line, and a gifted student with a touch of the arrogance of one used being at the top of the class.

That kind of scholastic erudition is often cut off at the knees in Australian public life, and earned him the caucus nickname Harry Potter. Nevertheless, he sensibly ignored quiet gripes he was a smart-arse and listened to President Hu Jintao's speeches to parliament without translation earphones. A touch of bragginess - mentions of his friends in Beijing - leaks through in the interviews. The average Australian will punish him for this if it's not under control - though current Foreign Minister and ex-diplomat Alexander Downer is pretty self-satisfied too. As was Gareth Evans, for that matter - perhaps it comes with the territory.

There are a few longer speeches available online. An broader address from 2001 starts by paying homage to ALP royalty.

Somewhere in the archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs lies a starry eyed letter from an equally starry eyed fourteen year old from deep within the Queensland veldt asking the Department's Minister how one went about becoming an Australian diplomat. The news had not reached Queensland in those days, or at least my part of it, that Gough in addition to being Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, was also, for a season its Foreign Minister. So back the letter came, signed by the great man himself, (I held it up to the light each morning to make sure of that) advising that is was probably a good thing that I went to University first and, having graduated, that I then write a letter of application.

The ABC interview quoted is unusually wide-ranging and informative. This is one of the stronger statements of One China I remember from an Australian politician:

it's been great to see Taiwan become a modern economy with rapidly and radically improved living standards for its 23 million people, when it comes to a formal declaration of independence of steps in that direction ... we do not think it is, good for the people of Taiwan, good for the people on the mainland or good for this region, including Australia, for that step to be taken when a high risk of the consequence of it would be war within our region.

...

[W]e are bound by the terms of our treaty of recognition of the PRC in 1972, which explicitly accepted Taiwan as a province of China.

This dismays foreign policy idealists, and seems indicative of the cautious line Labor would take with Indonesia or Myanmar. The focus on legality is at least philosophically consistent, and a theme he returns to.

One of the reasons I've been concerned about the Iraq war is that I get worried about the United States and John Winston Howard here at home thinking it is very clever and very smart to thumb your nose at the United Nations and the United Nations Security Council, the U.N Charter. Whatever the imperfections at least it is a bunch of rules which the world community put together half a century ago - and some rules are better than none.

This is also within a Labour foreign policy tradition going back at least to Doc Evatt, who helped build the UN. He mentions it explicitly in an interview with institution Laurie Oakes

if you're in any capital in the region from Jakarta to Beijing to Tokyo, one of the first names they bring up is Prime Minister Paul Keating - how is he, what's he doing, and they recall fondly his initiative in bringing APEC to the fore and taking Australia robustly into the region

Other interviews include on SBS and in grubby attack-dog mode on Seven.

The best politicians and writers enter the career after having a real job. As an ex-diplomat, Rudd skirts close to the line, but he certainly has an air of competence unusual in a Shadow without ministerial experience. We'll soon enough see if that competence is needed in a more serious task than haranguing from the opposition benches.

It was no great surprise to us when the young student we were talking with began describing China as a large chicken. Frankly our Mandarin skills were such that progressing the conversation to this point had seemed a linguistic triumph. The true meaning had presumably been lost somewhere in a tangle of tones and unlearnt vocab.

The young man, in the last grade of primary school, began to draw. The now familiar shape of the map of China quickly emerged, from the long curved eastern coast to the hefty chunk of Central Asia that makes up the outer provinces. Hainan and, of course, Taiwan, were incorporated in the south east of the map.

A few pen strokes more and Manchuria in the north east gained an eye and a beak. Two spindly legs stretched from the mainland to the islands in the south east, which also grew some claws. And there we had it: the People's Republic of China, a giant chook, balancing its bulk on Taiwan.

You hear quite a lot about Taiwan in the People's Republic. Taipei is always in the weather reports. There are cheery and appropriate couplets at the Chinese New Year's Eve variety gala, just as for every province. TV programs describe the unique flora of the island. Conversely, the attention is not disproportionate. Taiwan is just one amongst many provinces, each with their special attractions and problems. There's many things you don't hear about Taiwan, as well. Taiwanese newspapers and institutions are one of the relatively few sites and subjects seriously censored on the Internet.

For the reasons above I can't be sure of the precise day to day story locals get about Taiwan, of how much detail they hear of Chen Shui-bian and his compatriots. I'm not even sure exactly what they're taught about Taiwan in school. They study a lot of national history; colonialism, the downfall of the Qing dynasty, the war against Japan, the defeat and exile of the Guomindang. They study a lot of everything. Highschool students happily volunteer opinions on Taiwan very close to the official line. They seem quite sincere. Nationalism is heady fertilizer to grow a brain on.

To me, it's that historical narrative, of national unity and independence, that makes Taiwan so compelling to the Chinese leadership. Imperial China of the 19th century was in the unusual position of being both coloniser and colonised. The technological gap between China and the colonial, naval powers was mirrored by the decisive advantage in warfare China gained in Central Asia. The Qing Emperors finally consolidated their hold on the western frontier just as European pressure was generating treaty ports and Opium Wars. This crashed headlong into World War II, the war against Japan, and the civil war. China spent a century being torn apart by foreign powers and local warlords, before decisively reunifying under the People Republic. And the last enemy of that reunification was the Guomindang, entrenched in the former Japanese colony of Taiwan. Hong Kong and Macau are now back in the fold, and aggressive Han migration to Xinjiang and Tibet has woven the western provinces more closely into the nation. The obvious closing chapter of that shared national narrative is a return of Taiwan to the motherland.

It's not the only narrative available by any means. During the turbulent period of the Republic of China, and before World War II, Russia supported the secession of the province of Outer Mongolia, so it could gain a proxy state in the east, modern Mongolia. (Inner Mongolia failed in its secession and remains a province.) Mongolia, again, had been a Chinese frontier, and only completely conquered during the Qing. The completeness of this secession, demographics, and Great Power backing all meant that when the People's Republic was founded in 1949 the Communist Party chose to treat their new landlocked neighbour as a settled border. The nation of Mongolia was a done deal, with the lucky Mongolians managing to avoid decades of Maoist oppression, at the cost of enduring decades of reheated Stalinist oppression.

Until recently, the Taiwanese leadership shared the Chinese Communist vision of national reunification, and reinforced the One China narrative. The autocratic governments of the Guomindang retained seats in parliament for the mainland provinces. The rather delicate foundation for the diplomatic talks between Beijing and Taipei was "One government on both sides of the Taiwan strait"; in other words, both sides wanted to run the whole show. The new generation of Taiwanese democrats, including President Chen Shui-bian, are more focused on rights of self-determination. Regional self-government as a virtue in itself is a relatively new idea in Chinese political philosophy, and one in violent opposition to the One China framework of the PRC.

The Communist Party has tied Taiwan very closely to the national myth; there's little room for redrafting. Today's Chinese state is coherent and booming - it's not the fragmented disorder of the Republic. Hanging on so tightly to Taiwan makes it hard to accommodate any alternative approach without implicitly accepting self-determination, or its sibling, democracy. But once the principle is established, the entire narrative begins to unravel. If Taiwan, only returned to Chinese (Republican) control after World War II, was a crucial historic part of China, and it could separate, why not the Uighurs of the north-west, or the Tibetans of the south-west?

The projected solution to this bind is autonomy along the lines of the cities of Hong Kong and Macau. The crucial difference between those post-colonial settlements and Taiwan is 50 years of self-government backed by indigenous military force.  That's an almost textbook definition of a nation-state, and it's not something to be yielded easily. To resolve the issue by treaty seems to require a newer piece of legal fiction, a supra-national entity, a Chinese Union, where Taiwan gained a flag but kept its government, its military, and its sovereignty.

The Taiwanese leadership are restive at the legal limbo of their country, and there are various projected plans for declaring independence, in the expectation of Great Power backing. Though it's clear which side principles of self-determination would put them on, rich world diplomats sound almost queasy at the prospect. A flag and a passport seems a slim reward for the comprehensive carnage of serious hostilities across the Taiwan Strait. The leadership of the People's Republic of China, for their part, periodically make clear that this island off the coast, which their laws and their armies do not control, is a place they will wage frenzied war to have. Their schooling should have taught them they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

But oh so funny. He manages to save his umbrella - always important. The photographer was criticised in the Beijing Youth Daily for lying in wait to take the photographs rather than warn bike-riders of impending danger.

China is relatively new to the unrestrained nature of American capitalism, and cultural mores is one of the first things to get trampled on in exchange for the mighty dollar. Possibly because money means survival. Without it we don't have food, shelter or clothes. This pushes our desperate desire for survival, which often transcends morals, ethics and cultural norms, into the public sphere.

I am not sufficiently knowledgeable of Chinese culture to make a judgement that in this case capitalism trumped Chinese social norms. It may be as simple as the Beijing Youth Daily using an issue to be outraged about in order to increase their public profile and circulation. Derryn Hinch, Bill O'Reilly and numerous others have peddled their outrage on a switch for their own fiscal enrichment.

Adam has also suggested that;

Everyone in the world lives in the 21st century - just in different parts of the consumer spectrum, with different shipping costs.

If the photographer hadn't of taken those photos, then maybe someone else with a video or phone camera would have. Where once it took Graham Kennedy or Doug Mulray to bring us the crashes, bangs and sometimes "naughty" videos to our eyes - now it is on google video - 24/7 and often with the willing performance of the crashee. I don't think culture, or capitalism stand a chance in the face of ubiquitous recording technology.

The ABC reports that Australia is negotiating with China on how exported uranium will be used. Australia is the second biggest exporter of uranium, and China is facing an energy crunch. There is the chance for Australia to benefit technologically from its resources in this instance.

With worries of Peak Oil, and other emerging economies, such as India and Indonesia putting pressure on the world's energy supplies, China has started researching other forms of stationary energy. Namely pebble bed reactors.

Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

Australia will face its own energy crunch, and the centralised coal and gas system will not be able to be decentralised fast enough. A new centralised technology will have to come in until what we centralise now (water, sewer and power) becomes decentralised through new technologies and attacks/disruptions against centralised systems.

The pebble bed reactors look like a good technology to bridge that gap. In trading uranium, Australia is asking that;

There has to be very, very stringent safeguards so that all radioactive material can be accounted for, and none will be diverted to weapons production.

So I think there's a lot of detail that will have to be agreed to, which will make that process transparent. I don't think the Chinese will be shy or reluctant to go down that route. Their need is genuinely for electricity production.

China has enough nukes to cause everyone fits as it is. Instead of carrying on like doves, maybe we should extract a higher price from energy starved China - that of technology. Australia should muscle in on the Chinese research programs for pebble bed reactors and turn them into partnerships with Australian scientists, engineers and researchers. Programs with true technology sharing. That would carry benefits beyond dollar amounts for Australia.

Comedians often rely on pointing out absurdity for their humour. Fortunately governments provide a constant supply of absurdity buried in policy and legislation. Scott Adams has a brilliant little insight on China and censorship.

From the article ;

One of the things I love about China is that they set high goals, as in "Let's build a wall around the entire country" and more recently "Let's have Internet access but without the part where people can access the Internet."

If you know the history of the Great Wall, it was highly successful in keeping out animals. But invading armies just bribed the guards and walked through the gate. ... Something tells me that blocking all the unacceptable content on the Internet will be about as effective as the Great Wall.

Gold Jerry, Gold!

I can recall being surprised when I sent adam a link to a blogspot site when he was in China. He couldn't view it. Blogspot was one of the banned URLs. One million pictures of family pets and holidays cried out in unison.

From an SMH article titled; Rice and Downer in talks on how to contain China ;

China's military spending is a serious concern for the United States, and the Secretary of State wants Australia, Japan and the US to establish a joint position on how to engage China "about security in the region".

The article continues;

Condoleezza Rice gave this candid assessment before trilateral talks with the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, and Japan's Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, in Canberra next week. ...

Her comments are at odds with previous statements by Mr Downer, who has said that these ministerial meetings were not aimed at developing a China "containment" policy.

Australia has adopted a hole in the ground economy , much like the sheep's back of the 1950s were increasing demand for a commodity was the basis for an extended period of prosperity. Chinese and Indian demand for our extraction products have been behind the economic wealth of the last decade in Australia.

But why is the US so concerned about Chinese conventional military? Maybe it needs a bogeyman to justify the big budgets it forces on its taxpayers. The US could cut its military expenditure by 75% and still outspend China by a 2:1 ratio ;

• 466B - USA
• 65B - China
• 50B - Russia
• 46.5B - France
• 44.7B - Japan
• 38.8B - Germany
• 31.7B - UK
• 20.8B - South Korea
• 20.2B - Italy
• 18.3B - Saudi Arabia
• 17.38B - India
• 13.4B - Brazil
• 9.7B - Iran
• 9.3B - Australia

Australia in 2005 spends about 17B AUD on defence. With the US dollar being weaker these days, that is only about 25% less in USD.

Another way to look at the US defence budget is that inside their 11 trillion GDP, they are spending approx the productivity of a western nation of twenty million people on defence. The defence budget of the US with emergency spending added in, is nearly equal to the GDP of Australia. Essentially, the United States spends the productive output of Australia on defence.

An article in Foreign Policy by Minxin Pei argued that China's instability was political, not economic. Pei writes;

To most Western observers, China's economic success obscures the predatory characteristics of its neo-Leninist state. But Beijing's brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption, and widening inequality.

Dreams that the country's economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China's political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy.

But this ignores the economic success of authoritarian nations like Singapore and Malaysia. Even Japan has essentially been a one party government for most of its recent history. Singapore, Malaysia and Japan have not felt any destabilisation despite the authoritarian nature of Asian-capitalism popularised by Japan in the 1960s.

The other side of the coin is Indonesia who practised the authoritarian form of Asian-capitalism with Suharto family corruption and cronyism thrown in. The Indonesian people overthrew the Suharto regime and Indonesia has been making remarkable strides since as a democratic nation practising a market economy.

So what is the US trying to contain? I suspect it may be attacks on their defence spending and defence budget. While Australia needs to spend more on defence, the US could do with a budget cut.

cam

It occurred to me that a grand contribution to NaCFCWriMo would be a democratic Chinese constitution. Alas, no sooner did it occur to me than I realised what an overwhelmingly difficult task it would be. 1.3 billion people, 23 provinces (more or less), 5 autonomous regions, 57 years of communist rule, regional GDP per capita that ranges from Portugal to Kyrgystan, environmental and demographic problems, a colelction of scary border and sovereignty disputes, and the world's oldest continuous bureaucratic tradition. The only way to govern such a massive and diverse polity is surely with a very light central hand and a lot of regional leeway; but to offer such leeway is to risk the less eager provinces, such as Tibet, declaring independence, a result which would enrage the nationalist majority.

Working with existing constitutional arrangements is also difficult; in many ways they are still works in progress. Deng Xiaoping, for instance, though widely acknowledged in his time as China's political leader, never held the Presidency or Premiership. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao seem to have settled into Head of State / Head of Government roles in public, but the actual mechanisms and everyday policy decisions remain murky manoeverings amongst party commitees. The PRC does have a parliament, which could be given teeth instead of a rubber stamp.

Looking for inspiration in the constitutional arrangements of the Republic of China (nowadays Taiwan), the explicit document from 1928 is an interesting one, containing Five Branches of Government , including one for examining civil servants. However the constitutional arrangements in practice have been rather turbulent ones, with the constitution being suspended in Taiwan from 1947 to 1988, and progressive local parties considering it now rather out of date. Seeing as it was written with the land mass of late Qing dynasty China in mind, including claims to now independent (Outer) Mongolia, you can see their point.

Given all this, and though I remain confident in future government of, for and by the Chinese people, I have left a democratic constitution as an exercise for the alert reader, and simply changed the front page poll .

Paul Dibbs has an interesting article in the SMH on the changing power relationships in the Middle East and Northern Asia titled; As one nuclear flashpoint reaches a lull, another simmers away . Two paragraphs on South Korea's relationship with its neighbours caught my attention.

Paul Dibbs writes;

Japan's relations with South Korea are at a low point, partly over Japan's view of the history of World War II but also because of territorial disputes, which Seoul has elevated to the level of national pride, threatening the use of military force. This is occurring when, from Tokyo's perspective, South Korea is drifting from the orbit of the US alliance and getting uncomfortably close to China, as well as appeasing North Korea.

South Korea has been a neo-conservative dream. While practicing Asian-capitalism, South Korean youth are moving toward a credit and consumption based economy. Of the North and South-East Asian nations I thought it would be the first to adopt an American/Australian style of economy.

South Korea has also chucked out autocratic rule and in 1988 established a multi-party liberal democracy with firm separation of powers. If the neo-conservative view of foreign policy holds, then South Korea should be forging closer ties to the global trading system within US hegemony - as Australia has done - rather than moving toward China.

I tended to think of South Korea's relationship to North Korea as similar between West and Eastern Germany where ultimately the more modern, wealthier and democratic nation bought its former enemy - amalgamating them into their political and economic system - at great pain to themselves.

The North Koreans desperately need it since China and Russia have discovered it is more profitable to trade with the west than to prop up ideologically compatible but unsustainable isolationist regimes.

This speech in 2003 by Alexander Downer mimics many of the conservative view points of current Australian foreign policy and methodology but contains genuine concern for Australian interests;

Our top four trading partners, for example - Japan, United States, China and South Korea - would be directly affected by any security crisis [on the Korean Peninsula].

However, as per Australian GAPF foreign policy doctrine, Australia participates mainly through its bilateral relationship with the US.

As to Dibbs' claim that South Korea is drifting away from the US and to China seems to be predicated on South Korea not following or adopting US policy toward North Korea.

For instance this article by Lee Kyo-kwan in the Asia Time titled, Seoul and Washington closer to divorce ;

South Korea and the US have drifted so far apart on North Korea policy there is now speculation the longtime partners are getting close to divorce. ...

It is believed US officials no longer trust their South Korean counterparts on North Korea policy.

Kyo-kwan lists several instances where Roh has opposed US policy and pressure toward the Jong-Il regime. It appears the political conflict in South Korea over such a path is a similar one facing Australian foreign policy makers - accept US hegemony in foreign policy and work inside it, or strike out on an independent path;

In South Korea, the progressive camp continues to seek a security policy much more independent of the United States regardless of concern over the weakening partnership, while the conservative camp strives to resurrect the struggling alliance.

South Korea is the tenth largest economy in the world, we may have to ask ourselves, just how big does a country have to be to strike out on a foreign policy path that is independent to the US?

Apparently China has released a military white paper which defines their military goals over the next fifty years. They did so at the Bush Administration's insistence so China's geo-political strategies and policies could be more accurately judged.

A few things from the report: first, China spends $34 billion on defence. Australia spends $17 billion while the US tops the world with approximately $650 billion. IIRC Russia is the world's second biggest spender on defence with somewhere around $80 billion.

This is why I get annoyed when people talk of Australia as a middle power. Australia has the fifteenth largest economy on the planet, in terms of hard power it spends to about a quarter of current Chinese output and China gets mentioned in geo-political great power terms. Additionally Australia's military is a modern networked one, whereas China's is not - not yet anyway.

From the article:

The paper said China's military improvements are part of the country's overall modernization and economic expansion. The effort will continue apace, it added, seeking to "lay a solid foundation" by 2010, make "major progress" by 2020 and "reach the strategic goal of building informationized armed forces and being capable of winning informationized wars by the mid-21st century."

China has been shedding the manpower components of its armed forces and replacing them with the tail components such as highly specialised technicians. It has also been updating its antiquated forty year old air and naval assets with modern systems.

China's white paper apparently is concerned about US-Japanese containment of China as Japan has been slowly changing its military posture over the last two decades with changing North Asian prosperity and political stability and instability. China has long had its eye on Taiwan anyway, and fears that Taiwan will be drawn into the US-Japanese containment arc.

For the best write up on the China-Taiwan issue I have seen, read adam's article: The Amputated Chicken which he wrote after living in China. From the article:

The Communist Party has tied Taiwan very closely to the national myth; there's little room for redrafting. Today's Chinese state is coherent and booming - it's not the fragmented disorder of the Republic. Hanging on so tightly to Taiwan makes it hard to accommodate any alternative approach without implicitly accepting self-determination, or its sibling, democracy. But once the principle is established, the entire narrative begins to unravel.

It is interesting to see China adopt the approach of drafting White Papers to lay out a consistent path that the state can stick to. Democracies have used public white papers for the same purpose. Unfortunately Australia's last defence white paper was in 2000, prior to September 11th, Bali, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Australia defence procurement has become more ad-hoc recently as purchases have required more purchases, for instance the Abrams begat the C17 and not in a clearly planned method either, though the RAAF had wanted a heavy airlift platform for a while. Another issue facing Australia is that many of its systems, especially in the air force, are facing block obsolescence, where the whole lot is obsolete at the same time.

Australia is bringing something like seventeen new systems and platforms online in the current decade, which is a huge transformation for a military and will set up, as well as limit, how the Australian military projects itself and its capabilities for probably the next twenty five years.

Consequently procurement should be highly focused and match the strategic and projection needs of the ADF very closely as poor procurement will have massive ramifications in the future, in both cost and lost capability, if it is done badly.

A new Australian Defence White paper would provide the under-pinning for this procurement but the Australian government does not want to revisit Australian defence and has not produced a white paper in six years. The United States produces one every four years, and now it seems, even Communist countries are releasing them publicly.

Australia needs an updated Defence White Paper. I argued we needed one in 2005 , we needed one in 2006 and we will need one in 2007. The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade agrees .

James Maan has an article on China in the Washington Post titled: A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty . He starts the article with, "The Iraq war isn't over, but one thing's already clear: China won." The Asian model for capitalism, or the Development-State as Chalmers Johnson calls it, has been around since Japan popularised it in the 1950s. A development-state tends to be autocratic and one party, generally that is the only way the state can override property liberties and people's concerns in order to develop at the ten percent a year pace.

Maan writes:

For authoritarian leaders around the world seeking to maintain their grip on power, China increasingly serves as a blueprint. We're used to thinking of China as an economic miracle, but it's also becoming a political model.

Again, if we look at the development-states such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Queensland; they were all autocratic political systems with one party rule. Even in Japan, which was more liberal than many of the others, one party-rule was constant, other than a three year period in the 90s IIRC.

Many Australians will remember Joh Bjelke-Peterson and the absurdities and corruptions of his police state, including Russ Heinze as the minister for everything; but this was so the political and property concerns of Queenslanders could be over-ridden and squashed such that development could continue apace. Even today some remnants of the development-state still exist in Queensland, such as the subsidy for petrol.

Indonesia has made the transition to a liberal democratic market-state with the overthrow of Suharto and his militarised development-state. Thailand has dropped back into constitutional chaos and is under a military state of emergency. Japan has continued the one-party rule, though one of the reasons the globe was awash in cheap money was because Japanese banks were lending at 0% to try and recover from all the bad loans they had made as part of the development-state model.

Korea has transitioned from a dictatorial development-state to a liberal-democratic development-state, as has Taiwan; and Singapore and Malaysia have both seen peaceful transitions of power without any significant change in political practice. So there is nothing to suggest that the Chinese Communist leadership will become permanently entrenched as the Chinese people become fatter and happier. The recent histories of the Tiger Nations suggest it could go either way.

As to the conflation with Iraq? That I don't understand at all, unless it was a sentence to troll me. China is playing the foreign policy game within the well understood rules of westphalia. It is agitating for increased territory and past grievances with Taiwan. It is building a conventional military to rival the current superpower and it is competing economically for resources. The US can play that game with both hands tied behind its back, if anything, after the innovations that have been thrown at them in the Middle East, US policy makers will probably let out a sigh of relief in having to deal with Chinese foreign policy.

Maan has written a bad article which ignores history and just shouts "bogeyman".

x-posted to Redstate