TRADING WITH CHINA IS A BETTER OPTION THAN IS WAR.

Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012) ("When foreign investment returned to China in the early 1990s..., it was at a pace and level never seen before in China's history. The combination of a dedicate and cheap workforce and the foreign hope of buying into China's own domestic development led to the country leap-frogging all others in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI). Over the course of the decade, China was second only to the United States in attracting FDI--a remarkable change, given that foreign investment of any kind had not existed in Communist China prior to 1980. Up to today the changes in China's economic system have to a large extent been driven by the needs created by foreign investors. For instance, a legal framework of ownership had to be created to serve those who wanted to invest in China. The same framework could then serve China's own embryonic capitalists. Similarly for stock exchanges, insurance arrangements, and quality control. China's bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), which finally succeed in 2001 (very much thanks to the goodwill of the United States), was intended to serve China's export potential, but also made the country sign up to stringent regulations concerning state subsidies (or rather the absence thereof), industry standards, copyright protection, and not least opening the Chinese market to foreign competition. The international drove the domestic in terms of economic change." Id. at 384-385 (emphasis added.) The international driving the US domestic may be become a reality sooner than many Americans think, let alone want. Protectionism, for instance, may make good rhetoric in US domestic politics, but it will not fair very well in the global economy where production inputs are readily moveable and where emerging consumer markets determine where demand resides. "By the latter half of the 1810s, Beijing began looking for more effective methods for upholding the emperor's 1796 total ban on opium import. But the imperial administration's new concerns about the effects of opium just as smuggling of the drug was becoming central to the British East India Company's China strategy. After almost two generations of a negative trade balance with China, the company has finally chanced upon a product that was not only popular there but also widely available form British India. For Britain, the China trade has suddenly turned both profitable and important in size. India had been a colonial enterprise whose cost-effectiveness many in Britain  doubted, but now it began generating income through a government monopoly on opium production. Meanwhile, private investors profited from selling the drug in China, especially after the EIC's monopoly on trade was abolished in 1833. In the 1829, the import of opium more than tripled. Beijing noted that large amounts of silver were flowing out of China as payment for opium and feared that inflation and state impoverishment would result." Id. at 39-40. "Both Japanese and Chinese nationalism took part of their core purpose from ideas adopted from the West. But even so they were very different in character. Japan developed a form of ethnic nationalism. in some ways similar to the new nationalism found in Germany and Italy, or in parts of Eastern Europe. Defining all Japanese as one ethnie, the state constructed a religion (Shintoism), an educational system, and an army that taught the new message: All Japanese were one, bound together by bloodline and territory (what the Germans called Blut und Boden) into one national state. In China such an ethnic nationalism was difficult to imagine. China had been everything, not just a group of people tied together by some form of inheritance. China was a culture as well as an empire, and it took as long time--really up to today--before Chinese fully began seeing themselves as one group, defined by where they live and what they look like. Still, the Chinese nationalism of the early twentieth century--centered on the state--as enough of a challenge to others, and especially to Japan, whose incursions into China were predicated on the absence of a viable Chinese state." Id. at 120-121. "During the first half of the twentieth century, China became internationalized. In 1900, both natives and foreigners saw the Chinese empire as a thing apart, but by the late 1940s the country had become integrated into a capitalists world of expanding markets and movements of people and idea. Foreigners in China played a significant role in this transformation. Coming from all parts of the world and representing all kinds of backgrounds and professions, they helped transform China (though not always in directions that most Chinese appreciated). They were missionaries and businessmen, advisers and adventurers, revolutionaries and refugees. While some came for short-term profits, many stayed in China and died there. In each single case they influenced and were influenced by their Chinese contacts, often in directions that would profoundly affect China and the world up to today." Id. at 171. "Things travel alongside ideas, and sometimes the materials travels faster than the idea it came from. In China in the early twentieth century, products from the industrial revolutions in Europe and North America reached the far corners of the country, handed down from imports to middlemen to county fairs, traveling merchants, or the town store. Bicycles, batteries, glass, telephones, lights, cotton, leather shoes, perfumes, wristwatches, photography, and radios--all things foreign and therefore modern created a sense of excitement in China just as they had done when they had been introduced a few decades earlier on the continents where they were created. Almost immediately the Chinese started to integrate such products into their own lifestyles and esthetics, and very soon the most advantageous of them were produced in China, for domestic consumption and then for export. Nobody who has studied the introduction of foreign products into China in the early twentieth century will be surprised at the speed with which the country was to become an export dynamo three generations later, when the political pendulum swung back toward enterprise values and interaction with the world. Although the willingness to adapt to rapid change also created resistance, the ability to find ways to integrate the Chinese with the foreign baffled many observers and made urban China seem well poised for being on the cusp of modernity." Id. at 176-177. "The US government banned Chinese immigration in 1882. It is the only restriction Congress has ever enacted directed against all citizens of a specific country. The ban lasted up to 1943, when Chinese officials managed to sufficiently embarrass their wartime ally to have it withdrawn." Id. at 224. This is a good, quick, overview for students interested in international trade, international business, international relations, or who increasingly see themselves more as cosmopolitan citizens of the global community rather than parochial  citizens of any given nation-state. I don't think we are in Kansas Toto.).