Posts Tagged ‘United States’
“Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power”*…
After skipping last year (presumably to finish his best-seller Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future), Dan Wang is back with his “annual letter.” An excerpt…
… I think the US continues to systematically underrate China’s industrial progress for several reasons.
First, too many western elites retain hope that China’s efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, maybe even a political collapse. I won’t rule these out, but I don’t think they are likely to break China’s humming tech engine. Demographics in particular don’t matter for advanced technology — you don’t need a workforce of many millions to have robust production of semiconductors or EVs. South Korea, for example, has one of the world’s fastest shrinking populations while retaining its success in electronics production. And though China suffers broader economic headwinds, technology firms like Xiaomi continue to develop new products and enjoy rising revenues. Technology breakthroughs can occur even in a suffering society. Especially if the state continues to lavish resources on chips or anything that could represent an American chokepoint.
Second, western elites keep citing the wrong reasons for China’s success. When members of Congress get around to acknowledging China’s tech advancements, they do not fail to attribute causes to either industrial subsidies (also known as cheating) or IP theft (that is, stealing). These are legitimate claims, but China’s advantages extend far beyond them. That’s the creation of deep infrastructure as well as extensive industrial ecosystems that I describe above.
Probably the most underrated part of the Chinese system is the ferocity of market competition. It’s excusable not to see that, given that the party espouses so much Marxism. I would argue that China embodies both greater capitalist competition and greater capitalist excess than America does today. Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
Third, western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor. By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China. While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “2025 letter.”
Pair with “U.S.-China Economic Competition” (from Rand) and “The Outlook for China-US Strategic Competition in 2026” (an interview with Sarah M. Beran in The Diplomat)
* Lao Tzu
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As we grapple with geoeconomics and geopolitics, we might remind ourselves just how fast China’s rise has been: on this date in 1967, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai People’s Commune was established following the seizure of power from local city officials by revolutionaries. Shenzen was, at the time, a sleepy backwater, just off what was then the British colony of Hong Kong.
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong”*…
The founding fathers’ hopes notwithstanding, citizenship is under attack in the U.S.— and the intensity of the attack is increasing. On this 4th of July weekend, let us appreciate Kieran Healy‘s account of his path to citizenship…
In 1995, at the beginning of the last week of August, on the afternoon of an inhumanly hot and intolerably humid day, I arrived at Newark Airport to live in the United States. I was twenty two years old and about to start as a graduate student at Princeton. I have been here more or less the whole time since. I spent six years on an F-1 Visa while getting my PhD. After that, I lived and worked in Tucson for seven years. My conception of what counts as an inhumanly hot day changed. During that time I was on an H1-B Visa sponsored by my employer, the University of Arizona. Subsequently, I was granted Permanent Residency—a Green Card—through marriage. In 2009 I moved to North Carolina. My conception of what counts as an intolerably humid day changed. I am an immigrant to this country. I have made my life here. My two children are Americans. And now, as of yesterday [June 27], so am I.
When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths—as you please—about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.
If you are a legal permanent resident of the United States, you apply to be naturalized as a citizen by filling out Form N-400. Part 1 of the form asks for information about your eligibility for becoming a citizen. Parts 2 and 3 ask about your name, address, country of birth, and also identifying information about you including your race and ethnicity. In Part 4 you list everywhere you have lived in the past five years. In Parts 5 and 6 you tell about your marital history and your children. Part 7 is your employment and schooling. In Part 8 you document all the times you have been outside the United States in the past five years even though, as a Lawful Permanent Resident, the state already knows this about you. Frankly, it already knows all the other stuff about you, too. Every time you enter the country you are photographed and fingerprinted.
Part 9 consists of thirty seven questions designed, in the main, to establish whether you are a person of good moral character and also whether you understand, assent to, and are willing to swear to each component of the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. After filling out the form you go to a biometrics appointment where your identity is once again confirmed and you are once again fingerprinted and photographed. Then your citizenship interview is scheduled. At the interview you are assessed by a USCIS Officer on several points, including whether you can speak, read, and write English at a basic level. They also check once again whether you understand and are willing to take the Oath of Allegiance that will make you a citizen. Finally, you must also pass the Civics Test.
The test has one hundred questions. At the interview you are asked up to ten of them at random and you must get six right. There is a Civics Booklet and Study Guide for the test. It is eighty five pages long. Its index is also a list of all one hundred questions and their acceptable answers. The test covers the Constitution, the branches of government, some elements of U.S. history and geography, the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizens, and national symbols and holidays.
[The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that over 95% of applicants pass the test. A 2018 survey found that only about 1/3 of American citizens at large would pass.]
The ceremony room was the kind of place, if you are an academic like me, you might expect to be named “Salon C” or “Wabash Room” or “Sequoia East” and be the site of a sparsely-attended conference talk. The two main differences were the words stenciled on the slightly dropped ceiling, and the fact that the room was full up and alive with nervous energy. At the front of the room there was a large-screen TV. The person leading the ceremony—who, coincidentally, was the USCIS Officer who had interviewed me a couple of months ago—introduced himself and welcomed everyone. All the staff were dignified and low-key delighted. The ceremony opened with a two-minute video that consisted of Ken Burns effect pans over still images and with W.G. Snuffy Walden music underneath. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Immigrants arriving in the nineteenth century at various locations. And then photographs of the modern equivalents of those people. I began to worry that I might have something in my eye.
The room filled up. It looked just as you might imagine. Some people looked like me, which is to say a middle-aged Irish guy in a standard-issue blazer and tie. There was a guy from Ghana in an immaculate suit. A couple from Algeria held their baby son. A family from the Republic of the Congo had their three young sons sit in the guest area. The boys all wore identical red-white-and-blue check. A German man looked dapper in a lavender shirt. An Indian woman had a green and gold sari. A Chinese family all in a row. A Romanian delightedly offering to take pictures of anyone in need of a photo. A Mexican man in cream-colored linen. A Peruvian woman’s bold floral dress. A family whose two children were wearing tiny plastic Stars and Stripes cowboy hats. It looked like America.
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
But isn’t it more complicated than that? You know as well as I do that it is. So much more complicated. So much more painful. So much more dangerous. So much more messed-up. I will think about and work on strands and threads of that impossible tangle tomorrow, just like I have thought about and worked on bits and pieces of it since I came here. But I will not forget this moment. I will not forget what it felt like.
Now all standing, we raised our hands and took the oath. Once we stopped speaking, we were citizens. We watched a two-minute congratulatory video from President Trump. Even though the video was short, you could see that, in his usual way, he was improvising and riffing around what was on his teleprompter. The result was that he said some odd-sounding things, like how we had U.S. citizenship “like no-one has ever had it before”. It did not matter. The video finished. We filed out of our seats in row order to get our certificate of citizenship. And that was the end.
Afterwards people milled about in the room, delighted, shaking hands, hugging one another. I hugged my daughter. I hugged my friends who had come down from New York at the last minute on an overnight bus to be there. I counted my blessings. There was a little staged area in the corner where people could pose for photographs against a backdrop. At the rear of the room, volunteers were set up and ready to register you to vote if you wanted. People were smiling and crying. Children were running around meeting one another. We were gently reminded that there was another ceremony due to start in twenty minutes.
A new line began to form outside…
“American,” from @kjhealy.co.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoined us: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants…”
* George Washington
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As we remember our roots (and celebrate all that has– and can still- grow from them), we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, having been ratified by 38 states, was certified as adopted by the Administrator of General Services, Robert Kunzig. The amendment establised a nationally-standardized minimum age of 18 for participation in state and federal elections.
“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideals.”*…
In 2018, Lewis Lapham wrote a foreword for the re-issue of his 1988 book, Money and Class in America…
… The dream of riches has been the hallmark of the American experience ever since the first settlements in the 17th-century wilderness were set up as joint ventures backed by Divine Providence and British gold. Among the gentlemen adventurers offloading Dutch cannon and Geneva bibles on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, there were those who had come in search of El Dorado, betting their lives and fortunes if not their sacred honor on rumors of precious metal and grade-A beaver pelt. Others arriving with blueprints for a new Jerusalem were content to lay up stores of virtue awaiting heavenly reward after the long, New England winter in the grave. No congregation was at a loss for a sermon, a real estate deal, or a discussion about the nature of their newfound wealth—wages of sin or sign of grace, proof of the good Lord’s infinite wisdom or the result of a sharp bargain with a drunken Pequot Indian.
The framers of the Constitution, prosperous and well-educated gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, shared with John Adams the suspicion that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization,” agreed with James Madison that the turbulent passions of the common man lead to “reckless agitation” for the abolition of debts and “other wicked projects.” With Plato the framers shared the assumption that the best government incorporates the means by which a privileged few arrange the distribution of property and law for the less fortunate many. They envisioned an enlightened oligarchy to which they gave the name of a republic. Adams thought “the great functions of state” should be reserved for “the rich, the well-born, and the able,” the new republic to be managed by men to whom Madison attributed “most wisdom to discern and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.”
The words for their enterprise the framers borrowed from the British philosopher John Locke, who had declared his 17th-century willingness “to join in society with others who are already united or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name property.” Locke could not conceive of freedom established on anything other than property. Neither could the 18th-century framers of America’s Constitution. By the word liberty, they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.
But unlike our present-day makers of money and law, the founders were not stupefied plutocrats. They knew how to read and write (in Latin or French if not also in Greek) and they weren’t preoccupied with the love and fear of money. From their reading of history they understood that oligarchy was well-advised to furnish democracy with some measure of political power because the failure to do so was apt to lead to their being roasted on pitchforks. Accepting of the fact that whereas democracy puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not, the founders looked to balance the divergent ways and means, to accommodate both motions of the heart and the movement of a market. They conceived the Constitution as both organism and mechanism and offered as warranty for its worth the character of men presumably relieved of the necessity to cheat and steal and lie.
The presumption in 1787 could be taken at fair and face value. The framers were endowed with the intellectual energy of the 18th-century Enlightenment, armed with the moral force of the Christian religion. Their idea of law they held to be sacred, a marriage of faith and reason. But good intentions are a perishable commodity, and even the best of oligarchies bear comparison to cheese. Sooner or later they turn rancid in the sun. Wealth accumulates, men decay; a band of brothers that once aspired to form a wise and just government acquires the character of what Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool,” a class of men insatiable in their appetite for more—more banquets, more laurel wreaths and naval victories, more temples, dancing girls and portrait busts—so intoxicated by the love of money “they therefore imagine there is nothing it cannot buy.”
…
The divisions of race and class were present at the American creation. The planting of colonies in 17th-century America conformed to medieval Europe’s feudal arrangements of privilege and subordination. The aristocratic promoters of the project received land as a gift from the English king; the improvement of the property required immigrants (God-fearing or fortune-seeking) skilled as fishermen, farmers, saltmakers and mechanics. Their numbers were unequal to the tasks at hand, and in both the plantation south and merchant north the developers imported enslaved Africans as well as what were known as “waste people” dredged from the slums of Jacobean England—vagrants, convicts, thieves, bankrupts, strumpets, vagabonds, lunatics and bawds obliged to pay their passage across the Atlantic with terms of indentured labor on its western shore. The prosperous gentry already settled on that shore regarded the shipments of “human filth” as night soil drained from Old World sewers to fertilize New World fields and forests. By the time the colonies declared their independence from the British crown, the newborn American body politic had been sectioned, like the carcass of a butchered cow, into pounds and pence of prime and sub-prime flesh.
All men were maybe equal in the eye of God, but not in the pews in Boston’s Old North Church, in the streets of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, in the fields at Jefferson’s Monticello. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination divided the Massachusetts flock of Christian sheep into damned and saved; Cotton Mather in 1696 reminded the servants in his midst, “You are the animate, separate passive instruments of other men . . . your tongues, your hands, your feet, are your masters’s and they should move according to the will of your masters.” Franklin, enlightened businessman and founder of libraries, looked upon the Philadelphia rabble as coarse material that maybe could be brushed and combed into an acceptable grade of bourgeois broadcloth. His Poor Richard’s Almanac offered a program for turning sow’s ears if not into silk purses, then into useful tradesmen furnished with a “happy mediocrity.” For poor white children in Virginia, Jefferson proposed a scheme he described as “raking from the rubbish” the scraps of intellect and talent worth the trouble of further cultivation. A few young illiterates who showed promise as students were allowed to proceed beyond the elementary grades; the majority were released into a wilderness of ignorance and poverty, dispersed over time into the westward moving breeds of an American underclass variously denominated as “mudsill,” “hillbilly,” “cracker,” “Okie,” “redneck,” Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”
Nor at any moment in its history has America declared a lasting peace between the haves and have-nots. Temporary cessations of hostilities, but no permanent closing of the moral and social frontier between debtor and creditor. The notion of a classless society derives its credibility from the relatively few periods in the life of the nation during which circumstances encouraged social readjustment and experiment—in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, again in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s—but for the most part the record will show the game securely rigged in favor of the rich, no matter how selfish or stupid, at the expense of the poor, no matter how innovative or entrepreneurial. During the last 30 years of the 19th century and the first 30 years of the 20th, class conflict furnished the newspaper mills with their best-selling headlines—railroad company thugs quelling labor unrest in the industrial East, the Ku Klux Klan lynching Negroes in the rural South, the U.S. army exterminating Sioux Indians on the Western plains.
Around the turn of the 20th century the forces of democracy pushed forward an era of progressive reform sponsored by both the Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. During the middle years of the 20th century America at times showed some semblance of the republic envisioned by its 18th-century founders—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a citizen army fighting World War II, the Great Depression replaced with a fully employed economy in which all present shared in the profits.
The civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s were expressions of democratic objection and dissent intended to reform the country’s political thought and practice, not to overthrow its government. Nobody was threatening to reset the game clock in the Rose Bowl, tear down Grand Central Terminal or remove the Lincoln Memorial. The men, women and children confronting racist tyranny in the South—sitting at a lunch counter in Alabama, riding a bus into Mississippi, going to school in Arkansas—risked their lives and sacred honor on behalf of a principle, not a lifestyle; for a government of laws, not men. The unarmed rebellion led to the enactment in the mid-1960s of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, eventually to the shutting down of the Vietnam War.
Faith in democracy survived the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; it didn’t survive the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. The 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a sequence of ferocious and destabilizing change—social, cultural, technological, sexual, economic and demographic—that tore up the roots of family, community and church from which a democratic society draws meaning and strength. The news media promoted the multiple wounds to the body politic (the murders of King and Kennedy, big-city race riots, the killing of college students at Kent State and Jackson State, crime in the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark) as revolution along the line of Robespierre’s reign of terror. The fantasy of armed revolt sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for heavy surveillance and repressive law enforcement that over the last 50 years has blossomed into the richest and most innovative of the nation’s growth industries.
By the end of the 1970s democracy had come to be seen as a means of government gone soft in the head and weak in the knees, no match for unscrupulous Russians, incapable of securing domestic law and order, unable to disperse the barbarians (foreign and native born) at the gates of the gated real estate in Beverly Hills, Westchester County and Palm Beach. The various liberation movements still in progress no longer sought to right the wrongs of government. The political was personal, the personal political. Seized by the appetite for more—more entitlements, privileges and portrait busts—plaintiffs for both the haves and the have-nots agitated for a lifestyle, not a principle. The only constitutional value still on the table was the one constituting freedom as property, property as freedom. A fearful bourgeois society adrift in a sea of troubles was clinging to its love of money as if to the last lifeboat rowing away from the Titanic when Ronald Reagan in 1980 stepped onto the stage of the self-pitying national melodrama with the promise of an America to become great again in a future made of gold.
In 2018, the few optimistic voices at the higher elevations of informed American opinion regard the advent of Trump as a blessing in disguise, one that places the society in sufficiently dire straits to prompt the finding of a phoenix in the ashes, the best chance in two generations to resurrect America’s democratic life force. I like to think the same thought, but I rate the odds of rescue at 6-1 against…
On our nation’s birthday, bracing reading: “Of America and the Rise of the Stupefied Plutocrat.” Eminently worthy of reading in full.
And for an apposite (albeit curiously complacent) take from 1925, Sherwood Anderson‘s thought on the U.S. at the 150-year mark: “Hello, Big Boy.”
* Edith Wharton
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As we make birthday wishes, we might recall that on this date in 1862, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young Oxford mathematics don, took the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church College– Alice Liddell and her sisters– on a boating picnic on the River Thames in Oxford. To amuse the children he told them the story of a little girl, bored by a riverbank, whose adventure begins when she tumbles down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world called “Wonderland.” The story so captivated the 10-year-old Alice that she begged him to write it down. The result was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” with illustrations by John Tenniel.
Readers in or around Oxford can join the celebration.
“We shall go wild with fireworks”*…
Every Fourth of July, half a million people trek out to San Diego’s parks and beaches to watch the Big Bay Boom, one of the West’s biggest fireworks displays. But in 2012, the show became an international punchline when a glitch caused 18 minutes of pyro to go off in a blinding, deafening 30 seconds. It would become one of the loudest, most epic fails in Internet history, tweeted and viewed around the world…
On this pandemic-attenuated Fourth, a blast from the past: “An Oral History of the Great San Diego Fireworks Fail of 2012.”
On vaguely-related note, this short video, reputedly the most watched news clip ever:
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As we light the fuse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
Use it or lose it.
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing”*…
What did the United States look like to Ottoman observers in 1803? In this map, the newly independent U.S. is labeled “The Country of the English People” (“İngliz Cumhurunun Ülkesi”). The Iroquois Confederacy shows up as well, labeled the “Government of the Six Indian Nations.” Other tribes shown on the map include the Algonquin, Chippewa, Western Sioux (Siyu-yu Garbî), Eastern Sioux (Siyu-yu Şarkî), Black Pawnees (Kara Panis), and White Pawnees (Ak Panis)….
See a larger version of the map and learn more about it and about the history of Turkish maps of North America at “The Ottoman Empire’s First Map of the Newly Minted United States.”
* C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
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As we ponder perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1918– four years and a day after joining World War I as allies of Germany– that the Ottoman Empire surrendered and signed an armistice with the Allies at Mudros, ending the war in the Middle Eastern Theatre.
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