ALIENS NEEDED, NOW!

The aggressive emergence of China with respect to its international trade control and terrritorial ambitions coupled with a surprisingly rapid military build-up has been unsettling for most of the world which is now perhaps wishfully thinking that the extent of Chinese (and Russian) international meddling would be limited to hacking and coopting various modern media with deceptive propaganda.

The grim reality is that China took advantage of US naivety to infiltrate the most capable research institutions and innovative corporations to steal intellectual property. This allowed China to accelerate its basic industrial economy past the customary research and development growing pains to quickly establish a military capability that appears to be on par with the best. Thanks to decades of the US encouraging and welcoming Chinese students to their institutions, China has an educated and capable research and development system through which they can likely maintain technological parity with, and perhaps even eclipse, that of the United States in defense, manufacturing, and research.

Aside from the obvious ecnomic oppotunity that welcoming China to the WTO created, there was probably a greater psychological change that occurred when the US Clinton Administration normalized trade with China. The signal from the White House was something like “hey, these guys are okay, lets all just work together to build a better global economy.” This encouraged businesses to outsource to China and almost certainly lowered security concerns amongst industry and academics as they began to work more openly with Chinese nationals. It almost certainly also gave some tacit approval to Israel, Singapore and other nations who are believed to have regularly transferred sensitive technology to China.

Unfortuantely, as with all conflict, the failure was in understanding the ideology; the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To somehow think that China would simply acknowledge the gift of trade presented to them by the Western democracies and then calmly realign its politics in deference was obviously foolish. The CCP has seized upon the opportunity to further entrench itself as the only responsbile, capable, and benevolent leaders for China and the rest of the developing world.

Cutting off trade to China would certainly be the most obvious way to make the point that it is not the greatness of the CCP that has uplifted China, it is being allowed to trade with the Western democracies that led to the economic success of China. However, the complexities of disengaging trade with China might not yet be an effort the West is ready to pursue, even though I am sure Latin America would be a great contender to replace China as the preferred source for outsourcing and trade in general.

So, why do we need aliens? We need something to unite the world so we can focus on humanity and not nationalism. China could certainly have used its progress over the past few decades to lead the world in a great new way, but they have simply adopted the same old power politics approach to nationalism and control that will lead to more armed conflict, new economic conflict, more threats and damage to the environment, and simply more divisiveness.

Personally, I find my feelings towards China as disappointing more than anything else.

C’mon Mars, attack already!