A few notes on @TheProspect article on "The China Hack"

In general, it presents a critique of American political economy as overly dominated by corporations (including non-profits, that is, universities) that sell out US national interests (principally considered in the national security sense) for profit.
Much of the argument is based on US military contractors seeking profits in China and pushing the US government to allow transfers of what should have been obvious dual-use (commercial but also military) technologies.
The tone of the piece is harshly critical of prior engagement, but the policy recommendations are mostly limited interventions pushing for more engagement on better terms.
What the piece did not have as much on but made me think about were counterfactuals, especially in geopolitics.
It's a dyadic discussion--US & China--which is fine. But shifting the nature of that relationship, especially decades ago would have made a very different world. Europe and European firms likely would have been the beneficiaries with America and American firms less central.
1. The quick mention of the Soviet Union has the history a bit backwards--Nixon's overtures to China were about profits but also expanding US influence and alienating the USSR as much as possible, not a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
2. While I'd prefer government rather than corporate led engagement, one is left wondering about the course of history if the US ignored China. We'd have seen much more European-Chinese collaboration and engagement, with European firms coming to more prominence.
3. More tension in the cross-Atlantic relationships as Eurasia clearly becomes the world's core economic unit, even if US remained the largest individual country.
The China-EU trade deal that recently was signed is one sign of this in our reality, as is this German-Chinese agreement about standards. https://t.co/yChMLVxsw6
Corporations control too much US governance, including the relationship with China, which China came to understand and take advantage of. But if we did things differently, we'd have a different world.

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.

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