XVIII. Of Coal and Energy and Leadership: China's Broadening Advance, America's Deepening Dysfunction

Contents:

I. America's Deepening Leadership Dysfunction
II. China's Energy Leadership; The Clean(er) Coal Story
III. China's Broader Advance; Can America Now Lead Responsibly?

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I. America's Deepening Leadership Dysfunction

I didn't expect to be saying this anytime soon, not with China's "state capitalism" still operating under an unapologetically undemocratic model of government. But it's becoming difficult to deny. In many ways, in many areas, China's government is more efficient and effective than the current dysfunctional state of America's representative democracy. More now, thoughtful, informed observers, experts by their knowledge and experience, are venturing the same view.

Democracy as an established form of government is relatively new, historically speaking. It can be a progressive, idealistic, and often effective form of government--depending on the country's philosophical, legal and cultural foundations, their values and goals for government and society. But its more jaundiced critics have warned from the beginning that in its simplest form, plebiscite democracy, it suffers from serious flaws. Depending on the nature of its social and economic constituencies, it could easily devolve into a class or ethnic majority imposing their will on the minority until there resulted political instability, even rebellion. And more, that majority, especially if it were those with less wealth than a substantial minority, would vote itself more and more of everything wanted until it bankrupted itself. Those, among others, were human and structural weaknesses that had to be controlled, or at least contained.

(And it is hard not to see some of those weaknesses playing their part in the current crisis levels of national and local debt. And that features the uncomfortable dominance of China as financier of America's irresponsibly distended national debt, and the bankruptcy-threatening levels of public retirement and healthcare obligations blithely agreed to for peace and votes from state and municipal public employees.)

But in their practical brilliance, the response of the seminal thinkers and founding fathers was a representative democracy, a republic, where the representatives were to be as much statesmen representing the nation's interests as representatives of the narrower interests of particular, often provincial constituencies. There would be an executive function for leadership, and a bicameral legislature to represent those state constituencies, one branch to represent more the states' and districts' specific interests (with the number of representatives based on population), the other, to represent more the larger interests of their state and their country (with two representatives for each state regardless of population). All would be popularly elected. And then, there would be an appointed judiciary to hold all accountable--including the executive and legislative branches--to the constitutional requirements and limitations as they interpret them, and to the legislation passed in accordance with them.

That "balance of powers" has been largely effective.  And if our representative democracy has sometimes been an uneven and rocky road of political and social twists and turns, we've come out of each challenge a stronger, better government, a stronger, better society and nation. On the whole, it has functioned well enough to accommodated the development of the most stable, advanced and generous social democracy, and the most robust, productive market economy, in the history of the world. But it has done so largely in a more isolated, technologically nascent, economically regional, more backward global setting, a setting where other countries could not take advantage of our wrong turns and time-consuming, progress-retarding errors or politically dysfunctional transitions. The U.S. rose to what many Americans and others considered unipolar global strength and influence. But they were wrong, very wrong, and now everyone knows it.

Now things have changed. The wrong turns, clear errors, protracted delays, and failures to act--our political dysfunction--are now subject to a more broadly advanced world's less forgiving nature, and the finer tolerances of a more dynamic and responsive global economy. Consider those cautions and concerns about the weaknesses of democracy. It must be observed that even if a changing majority can and do sometimes indignantly rise as one and vote their clear self interests, the persistent challenge to the Republic has more often been about muting the political power of wealthier minority constituencies and business interests. A cynical disposition might even have posited that it was only a question of whether the self-serving policies and unregulated excesses authored and supported by the forces of wealth, or the appeasement of excessive demands of organized voting blocs, would first bring America to it's financial knees. But informed observers of the events of the last decade now reasonably conclude that both factional interests have been overindulged, and we now suffer the perfect storm of the worst that each portended.

Still, an objective, more historically complete and fair assessment might judge that, on the whole, those intelligently designed institutions, and the reasonably well executed and functioning principles on which they are based, have served America quite well--at least up until recently. But the question is about now, now and the future.

As much or more than any other time in our history, our two dominant political parties have now become internally dominated by the most extreme elements of their constituencies. This is particularly true of the Republican party and its resurgent, now dominant, right wing. Where once, both parties united behind the executive on matters if global importance, that is no longer the case. Where there was often compromise on legislation and matters clearly in the country's interest, that is no longer the case, either. Rather, in a time of clear, sometimes dire, national and global challenges--both economic and societal--the Republican leadership now says that its principal goals and priorities are to deny the Democratic president re-election, and to deny or reverse any legislation advanced or passed during his term in office. That's what it has come to.

If there have been times in our history when the dysfunctional polarization of party leadership and members has rendered our government less able to serve the best interests of the country--at home and abroad--it was clearly not at a time when so much was at stake, when effective, timely and balanced responsiveness was so critical to the nation and the international community that now looks to them for leadership. And it was not at a time when the ascendant economic, military and geopolitical power and influence of other countries was so clearly poised to take advantage of our internal weakness, even to threaten or eclipse our power and influence in the world. I am speaking, of course, of China, among others.

After ten years or more of naive, misguided American initiatives in "nation building," of trying to impose a Western model of democracy on other nations and cultures, we are now more humbled, more realistic in our ambitions, more open-minded about the realities and possibilities. And now, responsible thinkers in government, academe, and independent research groups allow that other, much less democratic models, even self-selecting, single-party, authoritarian executive leadership can serve their national and global responsibilities well, or at least effectively. Perhaps even more effectively than the Western model. And China's is the model they have in mind.


II. China's Energy Leadership; The Clean(er) Coal Story

But it is not as though China does not have its own economic, social and political problems. They are legion, and many are daunting. James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is a long-time observer and writer on China's ascendency and growing pains. His latest piece is on China's challenges and emerging international leadership in addressing environmental issues. But he introduces it by first making the necessary concessions about the national and international economic and geopolitical challenges it faces, and the fragile social issues it must negotiate. Mr. Fallows:

Through the past four years I've often suggested that China's vaunted achievements are less impressive, or at least more complicated, seen up close. Yes, Chinese factories make nearly all of the world's consumer electronic equipment. But the brand names, designs, and most of the profits usually belong to companies and people outside China. Yes, China's accumulated trade surpluses have made it the creditor for America and much of the world. But the huge share of its own wealth that China has sunk into foreign economies ties its fate to theirs. Yes, more and more Chinese people are very rich. But hundreds of millions of Chinese people are still very poor. Yes, Chinese factories lead the world in output of windmills and solar-power panels. But China's environmental situation is still so dire as to pose the main threat not just to the country's public health and political stability but also to its own economic expansion.

---"Dirty Coal, Clean Future," by James Fallows, in The Atlantic (December 2010) 

And there are many more problems than these: the lack of any meaningful healthcare services, retirement programs and employment outside the major urban areas, dissatisfied and restless minority populations, particularly in the western regions, border disputes with many neighboring countries, including some strong emerging countries, even some nuclear countries. No longer functioning as a communist country in its orientation to its markets and social services, it is governed by a self-determining, titular "communist" party that tries to oversee a developing market economy while also trying to provide the basics for its people through its singular brand of "state capitalism."

Even if nascent experiments with democracy are ventured in some countryside areas, the government is still largely insensitive to the wants and views of most Chinese people. The clear exceptions are the Chinese governments more basic sensitivity and concern for social and political stability, and strengthening programs that will strengthen the capability of the country: education, healthcare, its capacity to develop and deploy human and intellectual capital, and a more dominant, respected military and navy.

But Mr. Fallows is not here to bury Caesar, not in this piece. He is here to praise him, at least as far as it goes. But particularly in one pressing area of policy and technology development: the environmental challenge. And one project area in particular: Coal. Yes, dirty coal. And in so doing, he finds in the broader leadership capability and project success of China and its government, something to be impressed with, even respected.

This report will have a different tone. I have been learning about an area of Chinese achievement that is objectively good for the world as a whole, including the United States. Surprising enough! And China's achievement dramatically highlights a structural advantage of its approach and a weakness of America's. It involves the shared global effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, of which China and the United States are respectively the No. 1 and No. 2 producers, together creating more than 40 percent of the world's total output. That shared effort is real, and important. The significant Chinese developments involve more than the "clean tech" boom that Americans have already heard so much about. Instead a different, less publicized, and much less appealing-sounding effort may matter even more in determining whether the United States and China can cooperate to reduce emissions. This involves not clean tech but the dirtiest of today's main energy sources—coal.

As we work our way through how China is dealing with this issue, the leadership it has taken, the successes it has achieved, it is difficult not to ask why similar or collaborative initiatives are not underway under the leadership or coordination of our U.S. government. And surely, it is not. And when I try to consider the likelihood of sufficient political responsibility suddenly emerging in our congress to move the U.S. to a more responsible and responsive posture, I find myself fighting off a dispiriting pessimism that inevitably rises up in response. Mr. Fallows lays out the challenge in his introduction to the article:

To environmentalists, "clean coal" is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world's energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal—in more-sustainable ways. The good news is that new technologies are making this possible. China is now the leader in this area, the Google and Intel of the energy world. If we are serious about global warming, America needs to work with China to build a greener future on a foundation of coal. Otherwise, the clean-energy revolution will leave us behind, with grave costs for the world's climate and our economy.

Consulting a range of people within and without China, including David Mohler, chief technology officer at Duke Power, and Julio Friedman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Fallows comes to understand the case and necessity of focusing on coal. It now produces 46% of all electricity consumed in the U.S. And from 1995 to 2008, "the absolute increase in total electricity produced by coal was about 5.8 times as great as the increase from wind and 823 times as great as the increase from solar." And coal remains abundant.

What becomes clear is that because of the more limited availability and potential, the slower development and higher cost, of other energy sources, we will have to rely on the use of coal for decades. The current limits of alternative, renewable energy sources is made clear by Ming Sung, a Chinese geologist and energy expert who had earlier worked in the U.S. for decades. During this extended period while renewable energy development and transition is taking place, he asks rhetorically, "will you turn off your refrigerator for 30 years while we work on renewables? Turn off the computer? Or ask people in China to do that? Unless you will, you can't get rid of coal for decades. As [U.S. Energy Secretary] Steven Chu has said, we have to face the nightmare of coal for a while."  

China understands the necessity to focus and take leadership on cleaner methods and technologies for using coal, while the U.S. is following well behind. But this is just the necessary transitional work that sets the foundation and provides the time for China's much broader research and development agenda in the area of alternative sources and technologies to provide cleaner, renewable energy. As has been widely reported, they appear clearly the leaders in the development of most sources of renewable energy.

But rhetoric aside, just what are they doing in the development of cleaner harvesting of energy from coal? From the article:

What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In "post-combustion" systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once "captured" as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. Refitting an existing coal plant can be very costly. "It's like trying to remodel your home into a mansion," a coal-plant manager told me in Beijing. "It's more expensive, and it's never quite right." Apart from research projects, only two relatively small coal-fired power plants now operate in America with post-combustion capture.

..."Pre-combustion" systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.

Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is "sequestration"—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn't just escape into the air. All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for "enhanced oil recovery," forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.

These efforts are in one way completely different from "advanced research and development" as we often conceive of it, and in another way very much the same. They are different in that the scientists and entrepreneurs involved do not seem to count on, or even hope for, the large breakthroughs we have come to assume in biological sciences and info-tech. Consistent with two centuries of incremental improvement in power systems since the time of James Watt, practical refinements and ever-improving efficiency are the goal. They are similar in the operational advantage conferred by doing. ..."Whenever you scale something up, there are always differences from what you planned," an engineer from a major American technology company told me. "It's never quite the same. China is building plants like mad, so they can afford to experiment. We are not."

In the search for "progress on coal," like other forms of energy research and development, China is now the Google, the Intel, the General Motors and Ford of their heyday—the place where the doing occurs, and thus the learning by doing as well. "They are doing so much so fast that their learning curve is at an inflection that simply could not be matched in the United States," David Mohler of Duke Energy told me.

But that is not the most interesting and promising of the options being developed. That status likely falls to one of the emerging pre-combustion technologies called "underground coal gassification." From the article:

[There has been] sponsored research on sequestration, on post-combustion capture, and on the "cleanest" of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies—"underground coal gasification." In this process, jets of air (or pure oxygen), sometimes with steam or various chemicals, are blasted into coal seams deep underground. They interact chemically with the coal to produce a gas that flows back up a pipe and can be burned. It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned.

"And this can be very cheap," Sung told me. "You don't have to mine the coal. You don't have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried." Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today's standard dirty power plant.

But in advocating the whole range of "clean coal" technologies, Sung and his team have the same problem Julio Friedmann has with carbon sequestration: it's not happening in the United States. There's one significant exception: the Texas Clean Energy Project, a plant being built outside Odessa. But otherwise, to see new technology in action and to influence the next dozen coal plants being built in the world, Ming Sung had to go back to China.

"For the last 30 years, we have not been able to build a coal-to-gas conversion plant in this country," a U.S. coal-company official told me. "China has done many. That is what we need to learn from them, all that production and operating experience." And in exchange? "We do have safety and environmental information that we can definitely provide."

If the U.S. and the West is to look for silver linings, we should not overlook China's willingness to share its research and manufacturing experience with us. Their willingness to partner with the U.S, even if it is now a one-sided sharing by them with us, is a clear industrial and geopolitical olive branch extended to the world. And more, it is a responsible public acknowledgement of their willing leadership and shared role in solving global issues. This is no small thing.

[Particularly germane to assessing the importance and implications of incremental gestures of cooperation is a new book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (2010), by Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a former member of the National Security Council, and recent speaker to our Naples Council on World Affairs. It is worth the read.]

But there are also the unavoidable judgments and implications about the failure of the U.S. to provide leadership in this area. It is due in large part to the inability of the U.S. political system to act timely and effectively, to make the kinds of commitments and investments that only a great country and government can make, and the lack of sufficient incentive, resources or foresight for American industry to go that road alone. The article concludes:

China's cooperation with the United States on coal is good news for the world. If the two countries had decided to make this another arena for demonstrating their respective toughness—if, as at the failed Copenhagen talks last winter, they had mainly exchanged accusations about who was more to blame for emissions problems—they would have guaranteed that the problems could not be solved. If that cooperation breaks down, Julio Friedmann said, "we'll end up paying twice as much to get the same learnings—and delaying the technology on both sides by another decade." Both sides seem to have looked for ways to keep the cooperation going. They have not been in the newspapers, but they deserve recognition for attempting to do the world's work.

But China's very effectiveness and dynamism, beneficial as they may be in this case, highlight an American failure—a failure that seems not transient or incidental but deep and hard to correct.

The manifestation of the failure is that China is where the world's "doing" now goes on, in this industry and many others. If you want to learn how the power plants of the future will work, you must go to Tianjin—or Shanghai, or Chengdu—to find out. Power companies from America, Europe, and Japan are fortunate to have a place to learn. Young engineers and managers and entrepreneurs in China are fortunate that the companies teaching the rest of the world will be Chinese.

The deeper problem is the revealed difference in national capacity, in seriousness and ability to deliver. The Chinese government can decide to transform the country's energy system in 10 years, and no one doubts that it will. An incoming U.S. administration can promise to create a clean-energy revolution, but only naïfs believe that it will.

"The most impressive aspect of the Chinese performance is their determination to do what is needed," Julio Friedmann told me. "To be the first, to be the biggest, to have the best export technology for cleaning up coal." America obviously is not displaying comparable determination—and the saddest aspect of the U.S. performance, he said, is that it seems not deliberate but passive and accidental, the product of modern America's inability to focus public effort on public problems.

"No one in the U.S. government could ever imagine a 10-year plan to ensure U.S. leadership in solar power or batteries or anything else," Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official who now writes the blog Climate Progress, told me. "It's just not possible, so nobody even bothers to propose it."

The Chinese system as a whole has great weaknesses as well as great strengths. Its challenges, as I have reported so often in these pages, make the threats facing America look trivial by comparison. But its response to the energy challenge—including its commitment to dealing with the dirty, unavoidable reality of coal—reveals a seriousness about facing big problems that America now appears to lack.

 III. China's Broader Advance; Can America Now Lead Responsibly?

In a recent Foreign Affairs article authored by four senior fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations, including Elizabeth C. Economy, Senior Fellow and Director for Asian Studies, the case is made again that the U.S. has shown neither the understanding or resolve to make the necessary investments in clean energy sources and technologies of the future. More, they warn, the zero-sum game so often played by competitive countries will not do; there must be world-wide collaborative efforts and shared technologies to meet this challenge efficiently and effectively. And their judgment is that the U.S. has fallen far short in that area, too. The article:

The world faces a daunting array of energy challenges. Oil remains indispensable to the global economy, but it is increasingly produced in places that present big commercial, environmental, and geopolitical risks; greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere; and the odds that the world will face catastrophic climate change are increasing. These problems will only worsen as global demand for energy rises.

Environmental advocates and security hawks have been demanding for decades that governments solve these problems by mandating or incentivizing much greater use of the many alternative energy sources that already exist. The political reality, however, is that none of this will happen at the necessary scale and pace unless deploying clean energy becomes less financially risky and less expensive than it currently is. This is particularly true in the developing world.

A massive drive to develop cheaper clean-energy solutions is necessary. Indeed, many claim that it has already begun -- just not in the United States. They warn that the United States is losing a generation-defining clean-energy race to China and the other big emerging economies.

They are right that the United States is dangerously neglecting clean-energy innovation. But an energy agenda built on fears of a clean-energy race could quickly backfire. Technology advances most rapidly when researchers, firms, and governments build on one another's successes. When clean-energy investment is seen as a zero-sum game aimed primarily at boosting national competitiveness, however, states often erect barriers. They pursue trade and industrial policies that deter foreigners from participating in the clean-energy sectors of their economies, rather than adopting approaches that accelerate cross-border cooperation. This slows down the very innovation that they are trying to promote at home and simultaneously stifles innovation abroad.

...China has invested in a wide range of clean-energy technologies, pumping unprecedented amounts of money into renewable energy and in 2009 leading the world in financing wind technology. Several of its companies are making big investments in electric vehicles. Three Chinese power plants currently under construction will aim to demonstrate carbon capture and sequestration on a commercial scale. China can also build highly efficient conventional coal plants at costs far lower than in the West.

Yet China's innovation in the clean-energy field is following the same pattern as in other sectors of its economy: the implementation of incremental changes in manufacturing processes that are usually developed abroad, rather than the achievement of fundamental homegrown advances. In the area of photovoltaic panels (which convert sunlight directly into electricity), for example, China has lowered the cost of finished modules and panels but has not made big advances in more technologically sophisticated areas, such as silicon wafer manufacturing. Such lower prices help already mature technologies spread more quickly but often fail to deliver transformative advances. The value of Chinese investments in research and development (R & D), meanwhile, is limited by an economic system that has trouble moving ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace.

--"Globalizing the Energy Revolution," by Council on Foreign Affairs senior fellows Michael Levi, Elizabeth C. Economy, Shannon O'Neil and Adam Segal, Foreign Affairs (November-December 2010).

Their point is well taken, of course, but should not be taken as dismissive or disapproving of the emphasis on increment improvements that have resulted both from research and operational efficiencies in the use of coal. For the reasons well articulated in the Fallows article, it is critical that emphasis remain, but as part of a larger energy research agenda that also emphasizes major technological breakthroughs in the use and cost of alternative, renewable energy sources for our future. And while the article makes the case for greater world-wide research investment, it also emphasizes the need for collaboration and sharing.

Even with extremely ambitious programs, no one country will produce the majority of the clean-energy innovation that the world needs. Different countries' efforts need to be tightly connected so that they can build on one another. U.S. utilities, for example, will need to utilize Chinese advances in clean-coal implementation; Indian solar manufacturers will need to benefit from basic research done in the United States in order to meet their government's targets; and Brazilian biofuel engineers will need to be able to tweak the inventions of Danish enzyme companies to make them work with local sugar cane.

And as the Fallows article points up, the Chinese have shown themselves willing to to do just that. So have some American interests: some in private industry, some in independent research organizations. But what of the U.S. government and its agencies? Not so much, it appears. Federal government policy, legislative, and research initiatives have so far fallen short of what is needed. And if the U.S. were to follow more misguided strategies, more zero-sum competitive approaches, the article concludes it will be the worse for all.

The alternative is not a world in which the United States dominates the clean-energy field alone, or even one in which another country solves the United States' problems for it. It is more likely to be one in which the cost of clean energy does not drop as quickly as needed, particularly in the developing world, and in which massive markets for clean-energy technologies do not materialize. In that case, the United States and the world will both lose.

In another article in the same edition of Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Economy changes the emphasis and speaks to the broader examples and issues of "coping with China's foreign policy revolution." Again, she notes their efforts in the area of cleaner and renewable energy sources and technologies, but so much more, as well. Ms. Economy:

After decades of following Deng Xiaoping's dictum "Hide brightness, cherish obscurity," China's leaders have realized that maintaining economic growth and political stability on the home front will come not from keeping their heads low but rather from actively managing events outside China's borders. As a result, Beijing has launched a "go out" strategy designed to remake global norms and institutions. China is transforming the world as it transforms itself. Never mind notions of a responsible stakeholder; China has become a revolutionary power.

...At the heart of this next revolution is Beijing's plan to urbanize 400 million people by 2030. In 1990, just 25 percent of all Chinese lived in cities; today, that number is almost 45 percent. By 2030, it will be 70 percent. Urbanizing China will allow for a more effective distribution of social services and help reduce income disparities. An urban China will also be knowledge-based. No longer content to have their country be the world's manufacturing powerhouse, China's leaders have embarked on an aggressive effort to transform the country into a leading center of innovation. Beijing is supporting research and development; recruiting Chinese-born, foreign-trained scientists to return to China to head labs and direct research centers; and carefully studying the models of innovation that have proved successful in the West.

China's new cities will also be green. Beijing is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the clean-energy sector and is providing subsidies to domestic manufacturers to encourage the sale of clean-energy products. Already, China is among the world's leading manufacturers of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, and it is poised to capture significant segments of the global market in clean-energy transport, including high-speed rail and electric vehicles.

Finally, China's urban population will be wired. China is already in the midst of an information revolution. Over 30 percent of Chinese people use the Internet, and most of them are in cities. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42 percent of urban Chinese reported having access to the Internet in their homes, representing a 14 percent jump since just 2008. In absolute terms, more people are wired in China than anywhere else in the world.

...In the 1990s, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin launched his country's first "go out" policy, encouraging the country's state-owned enterprises to go abroad in search of natural resources. As a result of Jiang's initiative, China's trade with the resource-rich countries of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa exploded between 2001 and 2007, growing by 600 percent. Tens of thousands of Chinese companies now operate throughout the developing world, often rejuvenating previously moribund economies with their investments...

China's urbanization push will only intensify the country's outward drive for more natural resources. More cities, more roads, and more infrastructure will mean more steel, more copper, and more bauxite. China accounts for approximately one-fourth of world demand for zinc, iron and steel, lead, copper, and aluminum. In mid-2010, according to the International Energy Agency, China surpassed the United States as the world's largest energy consumer...

The next wave of "going out," however, will take China far beyond investment in natural resources. As China becomes an innovative, knowledge-based economy, its leaders are encouraging their cash-rich state-owned enterprises and investment funds to take stakes in or acquire foreign companies, particularly those with desirable technologies. Where Chinese products are competitive, Chinese firms are jumping in feet first.

...In April 2010, Chinese Rear Admiral Zhang Huachen, deputy commander of the East Sea Fleet, baldly declared that the country's naval strategy had changed: "We are going from coastal defense to far sea defense... With the expansion of the country's economic interests, the navy wants to better protect the country's transportation routes and the safety of our major sea-lanes." In reality, Zhang's pronouncement was merely the coming-out party for a strategy that had been on the books as early as 2007.

---"The Game Changer," by Elizabeth C. Economy, Foreign Affairs (November-December 2010)

Ms. Economy concludes by entreating American leaders to develop an "America First" strategy for determining it's longer-term interests and goals--where it needs to be as a nation, realistically--and then to craft a plan of how to work with China to get there. Her concluding thoughts:

Although China's leaders have laid out their vision and put change in motion, both domestic and international pressures may well produce an outcome far different from the one they anticipate. All revolutions are inherently unstable, and China's is no exception. The United States needs to be ready, and that requires more than simply reacting to Beijing's more active foreign policy; it demands a U.S. policy toward China that looks inside China's domestic revolution to anticipate the future challenges and opportunities for the international community that will arise as a result of it.

As China seeks to remake global norms and institutions, it is also essential that the United States continue to assert its own ideals and strategic priorities and continue to work closely with other like-minded nations. Ultimately, however, the United States will succeed only when it can clearly articulate its own economic and political priorities and then ascertain how China can best help meet those objectives. The United States' China policy should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The article goes on to offer several suggestions for approaching our next steps in this process. But for all her thorough and revealing analysis, these suggestions disappoint, providing largely generalized platitudes for America in fashioning her response. Most important is Ms. Economy's well-founded plea for a realistic appraisal of whatever America's needs and goals may be. And more, that realism is necessarily defined and limited by what can be accomplished "work[ing] closely with like-minded nations," and realistically ascertaining "how China can best help meet those objectives."

And that, she makes clear, is the only way America is likely to succeed in meeting her needs and goals. There can be no going it alone; there can be no cowboy diplomacy or tactics. It is now necessarily about international community and shared leadership, or at least much more so. And remember, India, Brazil and others, are also ascendant. They too will deserve and demand a place beside the U.S., the E.U and Russia at the table, and expect their voices to be respected.

In closing, let me again raise the obvious, concerned questions, and again remind you of our discomfiting, present reality: the parochial and self-serving partisan mindset, the narrow, zero-sum political priorities and goals, of our party-polarized and disabled congress. Does one feel a sense of hope that they are prepared to rise above ideological or partisan, party politics long enough, thoughtfully enough, to even appreciate how ineffective they have rendered our government in addressing a range of our nation's critical domestic and international responsibilities? Have they or the president begun to prepare the American public for the changing future that will likely be our children's and our grandchildren's as a result? What are the required conditions for them to finally recognized the necessity that America now strike a new pose of shared global leadership and cooperation, and soon start to assume those roles? 

For it appears now clear that if we do not share openly in that global leadership, and cooperate in that global advancement, we will be left more out of that leadership and left alone to a more halting U.S. advancement.

© Gregory E. Hudson 2010
First written and posted: December 2010

[Posted also to Hyde Park's Corner]