IS CHINA A THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES?

     From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512         1151        189       712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

          25       2414    10578        1582        119      144

Mar     2        1989      9490       1726       110      194

          31       1115      12301        3950       458       58

April   6         906     11787         4211        631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59 

         26         607     12348         2399     3842     101

June    1        287     10637         2346      3205      95

            2        514     10984         2394      2899    110

            9        401     10240         2693      2213    120  

          10        452     14097         2484       6138    127

Summary:  Just when you thought we were getting close to ending this pandemic, yikes!  But here is what is happening around the world, especially India.  They have been undercounting deaths, and every so often a large area just lumps them to the daily tally.  Bihar officials just did that, so if you subtract their anomalous number, the actual national daily deaths drop to 2197.  That also explains the sudden World death total for the day, about 4000 previously uncounted deaths skewing the total.

On the international front, President Joe Biden has begun meeting with his counterparts at the 47th G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, U.S. and European Union) Summit in Cornwall, a beach resort in the UK.   If you were wondering, Biden is 6 feet tall while Boris Johnson is 5'9".  Oh, behind Biden is Johnson's new wife, Carrie.  They just got married at the end of last month.  She is 33 and he is 56.

The G7 represents 40% the global GDP and 10% the world population.  The official gathering will occur Saturday morning, when the obligatory leaders' photo will be taken.  6500 police officials will be ready to handle the protests.  While the G7 doesn't have any power to do anything, they did in 2002 set up global funds to combat malaria and AIDS.  This year, in addition to COVID-19 and global warming, the big deal with be a tax deal.

Also invited were leaders from India, South Korea and Australia.  The G7 in 1997 became the G8, but Russia was suspended in 2014 when it annexed Crimea.  There is an obvious absence, China, which has never been asked to join.  The excuse is that it is not yet an advanced economy.

As such, let me start the subject of the day with Bill Maher (the guy on the right) comparing the USA to China.  Mind you, Ian Bremmer of GZERO Media, says Maher is wrong.  You need to watch both.  He has a point in that there are reasons why hordes from China want to leave for the U.S., while no one from here is doing everything possible to move to that country.

China has built 87,000 dams controlling the flow of rivers into 18 countries:

The geopolitics of water is certainly becoming a concern:

Jim Gordon has made a powerpoint case for how the U.S. is swiftly falling behind China.  You really should click on that, for the progress China has made is astonishing!

Walk through the New Century Global Center in Chengdu.  It is the world's largest building, and a shopping center.  Click on that link, for you will think, how can this be happening in this city, and not Los Angeles or Chicago or Dallas?

Chengdu has a population approaching 15 million, and is 1200 miles from Shanghai, 1000 miles from Beijing, and home of China's Giant Panda Breeding Center.

From the New York Times:(April 9, 2021)

‘Strategic ambiguity’

When Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing in 1971 to negotiate the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and China, he came bearing multiple requests — about the Vietnam War, nuclear arms, the Soviet Union and more. Kissinger’s Chinese counterpart, Zhou Enlai, had only one focus: Taiwan.

The U.S. needed to recognize the government in Beijing, not Taipei, as the only legitimate China, and the United Nations needed to expel Taiwan, Zhou said. Kissinger agreed to those terms, and President Richard Nixon triumphantly visited China the next year.

Still, the U.S. did not abandon Taiwan. Even as it refused to recognize Taiwan, it continued selling arms to its government and implicitly warned Beijing not to invade. The policy is known as “strategic ambiguity,” and it has endured since the 1970s.

Now some U.S. officials and foreign-policy experts worry that it has become outdated, as my colleague Michael Crowley explains. They think that President Biden may need to choose between making a more formal commitment to Taiwan’s defense or tempting China to invade.

This goes on and on, but here are three more tidbits: China has a population of 1.4 billion.  Taiwan, 24 million.  U.S., 328 million. They have cracked down with force in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Sure China is a threat, but today mostly on human rights.

While climate change poses an existential threat, Foreign Policy recently wrote:

     China Doesn't Pose an Existential Threat for America.

• Concerns over China's rise are overblown.
• However, they are seriously challenging us in terms of the economy and technology.
• China lacks sufficient arable land, has a rapidly aging society, imports too much energy, is burdened with extensive corruption, has an inadequate social safety net and is stifling the population with controls.
• The notion that Beijing is deliberately attempting to control other countries by entrapping them in debt is unsupported by the facts.
• Not a single nation has adopted a Chinese type of governance.
• The opening seems to be in working together on climate change.

China is certainly not a military threat.  Xi Jinping is having problems just controlling what is under him.  Their economy remains metastable.  They just desperately increased their birth limit to 3 babies.  I long ago stopped going there because Beijing's air pollution is so bad that my lungs were being affected.  Even Shanghai now has problems.

Yet, I have an uncomfortable feeling that they, and many other countries of the world, are moving ahead, while we remain stagnant.  The information above shows this vitality in China, but, for example, travel to Busan, South Korea, and you see advancements that scare you into truly wondering why our infrastructure is so poor.  I live in Hawaii, and nothing progressive is happening here.  It's more than embarrassing.  So yes, maybe, there is a threat, but is it internal, not external? THUS, MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS US.  So back to Pogo.

The USA, with Hawaii being just one example, lacks the will to move forward with enterprise and imagination.  Is it our political system?  Or is the problem larger? 

On May 29 I posted on the decline of democracy.  Is a more authoritarian form of governance the solution to a better long-term future?  I would hope not, but I'm puzzled today on what we can do to move forward.  

There is a book on poetry entitled The American Rut.  Unfortunately, it only describes the condition and does not provide a solution.

Help.  I don't have an answer.  Any recommendations?

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