China

If you watched last night's Presidential debate, though "debate" would be a lofty way to describe it, you'd think Iran would be a topic of choice.  But, even for as much as the candidates would like to appear opposed they have such similar foreign policies you might as well flip a coin.  As a rational actor (for the most part), the United States' Executive Branch has dealt with countries with relatively little partisan bias over the last decade.  In fact, Obama seemed to be channeling Hans J. Morgenthau with his political vocabulary in his response to the question, "would you consider an attack on Israel an attack on the United States?"  By the way, neither candidate answered that question directly.  But there are some foreign policy topics out there that appear divided.  So, what is it about China that makes people say, "hey, yeah!  China's a 'cheater,'" or "let's get tough on China!"?  Well, if you're Mitt Romney, you know that taking a position against the incumbent will garner support from voters' ill-will toward President Obama on any number of other issues.  This is based on reports of manipulated currency value, industrial espionage over many decades, and other issues.  Whether Obama is on the opposite end of Romney's attacks is up to you to decide.

China's primary interests are within its immediate scope.  According to the International Herald Tribune's (NY Time's world edition) October 23rd 2012 front page, China doesn't have a party favorite, and they view Romney's rhetoric as simply that.

Rumors about China ought to be addressed:

1) Million-man Army?

False, it's approximately 2.3 million (or 200 waang where 1 waang = 10,000), and it used to be closer to 10 million than 1 million.

The flip side to this is that with only 4.3% GPD spent on their military, there's not much to fret over as far as overwhelming numbers are concerned.  Those number are likely to be less trained, and less equipped than the United States.  And the logistics of an overseas offensive would boggle the mind of any commander charged with the task.

2) Are the Chinese "cheating" the world economy?

Absolutely.

And they're doing it a lot of different ways.  The 14th Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said so.  Apart from resisting currency appreciation against the dollar to improve exports and domestic growth, they heavily subsidize these areas to ensure such business remains stable, which isn't completely out of line, the United States subsidizes lots of industries.  However, its industries are primarily concentrated on domestic standards like food supply, and imports like oil to keep the economy growth up.

On the flip side, no one said they couldn't play this way.  The international market is rarely regulated by rules we would consider laws that one could "cheat."  Their primary responsibility as a government is to their people and to themselves second to no other consideration.  Human rights violations aside, no one can tell them to behave.  World economic growth is only their concern as far as it effects them negatively or positively.

3) We are all going to be speaking Chinese soon.

No one knows the future, but just to give you all an idea about how unlikely that is, there are 8 significant Chinese dialects in the world, and the leading two Mandarin and Cantonese have been compared to how different English is to German.

On the other hand, China could strong-arm an exclusive language in China and over time unify the language base, but that's just the apocalypse conspiracy theorist in me playing devil's advocate.


In other words, you can love China, or hate them, or be completely indifferent, and have plenty of reasons why.