American geoeconomics pivoting to effect a better trade stance with China is an entirely reasonable monetary rebalancing, given the decades long reality of a market relationship wherein most of the transacted goods initiate with them, being sold to us, with far less of our more costly goods finding their ways on to their land. Their over one billion residents, as a whole, simply do not have the individual monetary spending power that the average American citizen employs, and with labor costs greatly connected to the average cost of living, China can exact a profit of its goods sold to us as it maintains a low labor cost. Due to lack of such labor-protective actualities in China, such as labor unions and a democratic reality allowing Chinese citizens to have power over their government, therein being empowered advocates over their economic livelihoods, the average factory working Chinese laborer’s return investment on their time and physical energy expenditure can be held to a pittance when compared to the wages demanded by the American factory worker.
This balance of economic power within China gives its ‘command and control’ central government near absolute power over its own market, and it exercises its dominance in artificially setting a control of wages. This prolongs an economic trade balance that basically feeds fuel to the longevity of the communist’s nations viability, prioritizing the well-being of the leadership over that of its people. Notwithstanding, its economic prosperity, due in large part to China’s global economic campaign to open up new energy, infrastructure, and telecommunication markets in Africa, South America, and India have created new engines of macroeconomics feeding a growth in commerce for its people, even if again, it has been a trickle-down monetary system that has largely and singularly advantaged the more educated Chinese citizenry class as droves of factory-working Chinese labor force remains an intact base engine of trade. China’s central planning government entity recognizes its economic disparity and has been making sizable inroads since the 1980s (under the auspices of Deng Xiaoping) towards an economic balance that is increasingly tilted towards the use of capitalistic levers.
But the sheer size of having the over one billion inhabitants is so enormous in comparison to its on-going market capitalization that such focus and momentum on increasing educational standards and opportunities for the average Chinese lags far behind in population proportion to the educational opportunities available to each American citizen.
For the time being, it appears that the Chinese government is more than complacent to continue to grow its central portfolio as it is messages to the world and its residents that it is an economic powerhouse. Surely it is, even if it be somewhat of a one dimensional prosperity engine. To the degree that its people begin to have real individual freedoms and constitutional protections, its economy will become more complex and enterprising, even wresting away monetary control from the higher echelons and introducing new found educational and financial hope and dreams into the bottom wrung of its society. This is the pudding in the American dream that has made it a real five-dimensional economic super behemoth: the ability for its people to get an education and create their financial pathway. Far from any utopian reality, America has prospered due to its government being subject to its people, rather than its people to the government. The American dream is an individual one that is protected by a ‘Bill of Rights,’ both defending the individual and empowering the individual to be as it were, a nation of kings, where all are equal. There is no other country on Earth that practices the wisdom of allowing individual economic freedom, or that has a series of checks and balances that favor such a construct.
China has not historically employed these levers of personal freedom protections, but mostly continues to bank on the enrichment of a few at the expense of its labor working class. That is a reality, not an opinion. It is something that ‘is,’ and not a constructive criticism of its government.
To this end, the use of geoeconomics tools and strategies to effectuate a better relationship between the U.S.A. and a detention-camp country like North Korea, itself an economically subservient proxy to China, cannot truly move forward due to the North Korean’s near complete reliance on China. In fact, China is like a train engine that keeps North Korea on economic life-support. Thus, North Korea is a satellite and bastard, stunted puppet of the Chinese government. It is held-down by a worn-out economic communist ideology that has isolated it from the global economy and will continue to do so until it chooses to integrate itself into a healthier global relationship with the nations of the world.
President Trump’s overtures as the number one representative of the world’s only true superpower have laid the groundwork for North Korea to begin a long, albeit, arduous climb to help itself create a new life for itself, even possibly enjoying a measure of the wealth that can be had if it drops its wrongful attitudes that have crippled its economy and people for so long. To be as sober as can be, no real immediate growth is projected for North Korea because it continues to sign up to its authoritarian style of management. Its people have no personal freedoms, no economic liberties, and no means of self-
advocacy. The government is not of the people, for the people or by the people, and any semblance of normal life and human ingenuity is continuously stamped down by its narrow-minded government creating a repetition of mental, cultural and economic poverty.
advocacy. The government is not of the people, for the people or by the people, and any semblance of normal life and human ingenuity is continuously stamped down by its narrow-minded government creating a repetition of mental, cultural and economic poverty.
The opportunity that the United States of America has presented to North Korea is unlike anything else. President Trump has shown the America’s real heart, the fruit of its prosperity in his peaceful opening to that nation. A great door has been opened for that nation. The question is, will North Korea enter the new balance and to what extent?
Comments