The Nation Magazine has a lengthy report exploring how the American left is approaching the rise of China:
Among progressives, there’s certainly no consensus over how to respond to the rise of China. “This drives a wedge right through the progressive community,” says John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Well aware that US policy toward China is driven by the multinational corporations and banks that invest there and by the military-industrial complex, which sees China as a rival and potential adversary, progressives know they have only limited power to affect national policy. Still, they debate choices: confront China or accommodate its rise? Slam China with tariffs and sanctions or invite its sprawling, state-owned enterprises to buy up US companies and build factories in the United States? Engage the ACFTU and other Chinese institutions or avoid them? And what about human rights, including worker rights, religious freedom and minority rights for Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs in western China? Will labor shortages, which have helped spark a wave of strikes and protests, lead China to give greater freedom to workers to organize, to secure higher wages and a better standard of living?
To answer at least some of those questions, I interviewed several dozen progressive policy analysts, economists, environmentalists, labor and human rights activists and officials, and academic specialists on China. Nearly all of them agree on one thing—namely, that to compete with China the United States must adopt a clear-cut set of industrial policies, investing in infrastructure, job creation, education and training, high-tech manufacturing, and research and development, especially in green technology.
“The first priority is to get our own house in order, so we’re not filled with so much anxiety that is easily transferred onto the rise of another country,” says Schell. But even on this point there is disagreement, because many activists on the left argue that it’s difficult to promote a US industrial policy—taxing the rich, subsidizing favored industries, spending a lot more on infrastructure and training—without simultaneously taking on the dominant ideology of neoliberal globalization and free trade, and that includes the China problem. “It’s almost impossible to have a domestic industrial policy without addressing the trading regime,” says Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect.
