Dear Friends,                                                                               At least know someone

Sun Tzu says: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I’m not a great fan of The Art of War, I prefer The 36 Stratagems: “Of the 36 Stratagems, running away is best.” (Not to mention: “Take the opportunity to steal a goat.”) I only know what Sun Tzu said about knowing the enemy etc. because Bob Dylan, whose great album Love and Theft came out on September 11, 2001, was asked in an interview what he thought Bush should do in response to the 9-11 attacks, and he quoted those lines, saying that he was sure that Bush was familiar with them. It’s hard to imagine what Dylan does not know, and has anyone then or since said anything more to the point?

Why bring this up now? Because Sun Tzu and Dylan are right, know your enemy and yourself; and American leaders have usually been spectacularly bad at both. If your enemy is China then knowing both is especially important. Both those books are Chinese after all. I’m not at all saying that the way China is in the relevant respects is a good thing – my ideal is a commune that can easily be seen in its entirety from a nearby hilltop – but if you’re going to make China your enemy then you sure as hell better  understand it.

Saying all this is largely irrelevant because everybody (including many of its own members) knows that the Trump regime makes knowing absolutely nothing about anything its main criterion for policy and action. Still, I think it’s a good idea for the rest of us to do a quick recap.

First, as the Chinese government is so fond of saying, China has been around for a lot longer than most of the rest of us, it has no plans for going away, and it’s really, really big. This really is an important claim and for at least two reasons. The endurance of China over how many centuries? is one of the elementary and astonishing facts of  human history. But the consciousness of that endurance by the Chinese people gives it a living power and one that the Chinese government is very good at harnessing, and endurance and size go together, China is and has always been really big.

And then, the Chinese government can be so successful in harnessing that power because it is a dictatorship. (Remember how the skies over Beijing suddenly became a radiant blue just for the Olympics?) The Chinese government really does not have to worry much if the price of eggs rises.

American administrations do have to worry about the price of eggs. And again, I prefer the American to the Chinese government just because it has to. But, back to knowing yourself, knowing the enemy, anyone who doesn’t know the difference in the Chinese and the American government’s attitude to the price of eggs, and what that difference means … well, hey!, leave China policy to someone else.

If Trump or a member of his regime said “if it comes to a fight, we will fight to the end” everyone would roar with laughter, and the Chinese are laughing at him with a host of memes including some very funny ones about Vance’s eye-liner. When an official of the Chinese government says it, believe it. The immediate occasion hardly matters, the Chinese state does not back down, as Taiwan and Tibet among many others know to their cost. This is not a good thing, but it is a fact. The power of China is that of an enormous rock, a megalith. What does an enormous thing, of enormous mass, enormous extent have, even if it’s just sitting there? Enormous potential energy. Yes, Ayer’s Rock and El Capitan can look down with benevolent indulgence on China. We shouldn’t.

So China’s invincible? No, of course not. But don’t think that the ordinary American foreign policy of bullying and brute force is going to work. And remember, Trump is only the inheritor of this foreign policy, and he’s not good at it. We’re seeing now in “real time” (do you know what that means? I don’t) just how bad he is.

So how should the US government “deal” with China? Hey, I’m only talking about tariff policy, you figure out the rest of it. Ok, what should the US be doing in its tariff policy towards China? Nothing. That’s pretty obvious isn’t it?

As it happens, The 36 Stratagems has many suggestions that might seem appropriate to the broader question, how should we “deal” with China? They’re pretty smart:

                                    Decorate the tree with false blossoms

                                    Disturb the water and catch a fish

                                    Lure the tiger down the mountain

                        Feign madness but keep your balance

That last one, do you think … maybe? … no! And it’s not madness, it’s stupidity. However the Trumpsters might seem to be using any of these stratagems it’s because they are doing, for real, what the stratagem says to feign.

Meanwhile, in that ideal commune I mentioned above, when we have to think, as we so often do, about our relations with the outside world, and ever more frequently with fear, we are forced to another stratagem, Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree, and with less and less space for the one of the 36 that is the best. Otherwise, amongst ourselves, anyone on that nearby hilltop with a halfway decent pair of binoculars can see that we’re doing ok.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

For The 36 Stratagems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems