Why a 19th-Century Plan to Replace Black Labor with Chinese Labor Failed - Jay Caspian Kang (The New York Times Magazine )

Uma história que poderia ser brasileira, igualmente, mas tampouco foi... 

Why a 19th-Century Plan to Replace Black Labor with Chinese Labor Failed

Jay Caspian Kang

 The New York Times  Magazine – 29.8.2021

 

In the late 1860s, just a few years after the end of the Civil War, a group of plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta began talking to one another about a labor problem. Newly freed Black people made up the majority of the agricultural work force, but they were going against the party of the South’s white establishment and voting Republican. Some were simply picking up and leaving.

In 1869, an article published in De Bow’s Review cut right to the chase:

We will state the problem for consideration. It is: To retain in the hands of whites the control and direction of social and political action, without impairing the content of the labor capacity of the colored race. We assume the effort to restrain the political influence of the colored race in the South … has failed.

Efforts to recruit white labor had been hampered by the low wages and dangerous conditions on the plantations. The leaders of agriculture in the South needed a quick influx of workers that would keep the plantations running without bringing in anyone who might vote against the existing order. Their solution was to look to the Far East, to bring in Chinese workers (then known by the derogatory name “coolies”).

“Emancipation has spoiled the negro and carried him away from fields of agriculture,” an editorial in a Vicksburg newspaper read. “Our prosperity depends entirely upon the recovery of lost ground, and we therefore say let the Coolies come, and we will take the chance of Christianizing them.”

Thus began one of the strangest sales pitches in American history. Southern papers, politicians and plantation owners all began to broadcast a call to Chinese men — those already in the U.S. and those in China — to come work the cotton fields of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. The goal, according to Powell Clayton, then the governor of Arkansas, wasn’t just to replace lost hands, but also to undercut the remaining Black workers by flooding the fields with cheap labor — “to punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his old master, and to regulate the conditions of his employment and the scale of wages to be paid him.”

The scheme to recruit Chinese workers to punish and undermine Black farm laborers failed, but its history — detailed by the late sociologist James W. Loewen in his 1971 book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” — offers a useful parable for understanding how race has operated in America’s immigrant communities in the years since.

Loewen, who died last week at the age of 79, is best known for his recastings of American history in books such as “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “Lies Across America.” Those books should be read as interventions against widely accepted historical misconceptions — in “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” he corrects popular history textbooks. “The Mississippi Chinese” was his first book, and it lacks the polemic energy of those later works, but it presents a thesis about race that would go on to be replicated throughout the academy, and particularly in so-called “whiteness studies.”

This thesis, that race is a construct that changes based upon context, and can shift over time, is illustrated in the book’s epigraph, where Loewen quotes an exchange with a white Baptist minister he interviewed:

“You’re either a white man or a [epithet], here,” the minister says. “Now, that’s the whole story. When I first came to the Delta, the Chinese were classed as [epithet].”

“And now they are called whites?” Loewen asks.

“That’s right!”

Chinese laborers began to arrive in Mississippi roughly between 1870-1875. The first “wave” were mostly made up of so-called “sojourners” who came straight from China, alongside a few railroad workers who had just finished up the Transcontinental railroad.Despite their small numbers, there was great enthusiasm among landowners about the arrival of these early Chinese Americans in the Delta region. The expectation was that they would be docile, completely uninterested in politics, and industrious. They were also almost all male, and, according to Loewen’s research, had come from humble but not entirely impoverished backgrounds in China. (The maleness of Chinese workers in America would be cemented into law in 1875 when the Page Act effectively barred Chinese women from entering the country, under the pretense of prohibiting prostitution.)

The vision of fields filled with these new workers never materialized: The Chinese laborers refused the working conditions and wages that many Black laborers had left. Reflecting on this era, Clayton wrote, “the efforts to utilize Chinese labor proved a disastrous failure.” In a short while, he wrote, the Chinese workers “sagaciously learned the purposes for which they were introduced.”

The Chinese workers quickly found a new purpose: to start small grocery stores that served the Black population. A handful of Chinese migrants began buying small stores with even smaller rooms in the back where they would eat and sleep. To navigate the language barrier, the Chinese would sometimes provide their Black customers with a long stick to tap their purchases. When it came time to restock their wares, they would keep at least one of each item so that when wholesalers came by, the shopkeepers could simply point to what they needed.

These stores filled a hole in the economy that most white people did not want to touch and from which Black people were largely excluded. This often gave the Chinese something of a monopoly. By 1881, just about a decade after their arrival, Chinese names began showing up on lists of landowners in the Delta. These new store owners did not have the benefits of citizenship or any rights to speak of, but they did have several economic advantages over their Black counterparts. Wholesalers, for example, were willing to extend them lines of credit to start their businesses.

Because it was practically impossible by then to bring over women from China to start families, the Mississippi Chinese remained a tiny, insular community for decades. In the early years, many of their interactions were with Black people. The Chinese lived in the Black neighborhoods and oftentimes hired Black workers. A small number of Chinese men started families with Black women, but as the Chinese community grew, those unions were ultimately discouraged by both Chinese community members and white people who would sometimes end preferential treatment once a Black person was part of the family. As some Chinese grocers accumulated wealth and began interacting more with wealthy, white society, an internal divide was drawn between the rich Chinese and a smaller, lower class who still lived among, or had entered into relationships with Black women.

“The rich Chinese won’t have much to do with the poor Chinese, and even less with the [epithet],” a white Delta businessman is quoted as saying in Loewen’s book. “Oh, they’ll take his money just like any of us will, but they won’t have anything to do with him socially.”

The wealthier Chinese may have made some inroads into white society, but for the first half of the 20th century, they still existed in a nebulous place whose contexts and restrictions were in constant flux. In 1924, Gong Lum, a grocer in the Delta town of Rosedale, tried to enroll his oldest daughter in a white school. She was rejected. Lum hired a lawyer and took the case to court. A district court found in Lum’s favor, but the Mississippi Supreme Court found that because the Chinese were not “white” they had to fall under the heading of “colored races.”This decision was upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

This setback proved to be only temporary and localized. Some smaller towns in Mississippi never barred Chinese students from attending white schools. By the early 1950s, other areas in the Delta had followed suit, educating Chinese but not Black students before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 prohibited racial segregation in public schools. With access to white schools, the children of the Mississippi Chinese went off to college at an extremely high rate and entered relatively high-paying professional fields, including engineering and pharmaceuticals. Most would eventually move away.

There are still descendants of the original migrant workers in the Delta, some of whom run grocery stores, but for the most part, the Mississippi 

“The Mississippi Chinese” was published in 1971 to great acclaim, much of which was well-deserved. There are, however, a few parts of Loewen’s analysis that don’t quite hold up to modern scrutiny. For one, he mulls over cultural reasons why the Chinese were able to start groceries and most Black people at the time could not, referring to American Black and Chinese cultural norms — when the clearer reason can be found in his own text: Many of the Chinese came to Mississippi with small but significant amounts of capital, and were able to secure goods on credit from wholesalers who often refused to deal with the Black population. Formerly enslaved people mostly lacked the capital, or the means to secure it, to start businesses. Wholesalers rarely extended them credit.

As deservedly influential as it was, “The Mississippi Chinese” should not serve as a singular template for understanding the trajectory of every circumstance in which an immigrant groups found and filled a hole in the economy — whether Korean liquor store and grocery owners in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the early generations of Irish laborers, or Jewish merchants. The currently fashionable impulse to turn somewhat similar histories into One Big Narrative flattens history and ignores what’s actually interesting. The idea of a fixed racial binary that eventually swallows up every incoming group might have made sense when Loewen was writing his book, but the demographics of the country have shifted drastically since then as millions of immigrants have entered a country where upward mobility looks much different than it did when the Mississippi Chinese first opened their shops.

The specific value offered by “The Mississippi Chinese” lies in its examination of white indifference. The Chinese in the Delta succeeded, in large part, because white people did not really think all that much about them, especially when contrasted with the malice they showed to Black Americans. Indifference and a little start-up capital, it seems, was enough.

There’s one other insight I took from Loewen’s book, although one he may have not anticipated. For the past decade or so, I’ve wondered why Asian American politics and discourse seems so preoccupied with the concerns of its most well-off and educated, latching on to issues such as representation in Hollywood movies, entry into Ivy League schools or the microaggressions of the corporate world. In the afterword to his book, Loewen writes that some of the Mississippi Chinese he interviewed objected to his emphasis on those who had intermarried with Black people. Why would he focus on them?

Loewen should not have felt a moment of remorse for this choice. His thorough reportage on those mostly poorer Chinese workers who went on to start Black families reveals a largely unspoken, yet intractable truth of immigrant upward mobility: Yes, the climb into the middle class oftentimes comes at the expense of Black communities. It also often requires you to abandon your own people.

Immigrant stories are told by the winners, which is why they tend to turn triumphalist, nostalgic and ornate over time. And in the case of the Mississippi Chinese or today’s professional Asian Americans, they are mostly told by those who took care to uphold the class and color lines — and who ignored or even tried to erase the evidence of those who did not.

 

Surprising Stat of the Week

 

There were 15 Korean churches in Montgomery, Alabama as of 2017, according to the Alabama News Center. This seems like an usually high number for any city that’s not a major metropolitan area or a military base. There are also somewhere between nine and 12 Korean restaurants.

What’s even odder is that the food they serve is exceptional — something I learned during a reporting trip to Alabama about six years ago. Los Angeles will always have the best Korean food in the United States, but Montgomery’s spreads are better than what I’ve found in Chicago, the Bay Area or most of New York City.

Montgomery’s thriving Korean food scene shows how the explanations for unexpected pockets of Asian migrants have changed since the publication of “The Mississippi Chinese.” Loewen said he first became interested in the Delta Chinese when he was enrolled at Mississippi State and noticed a number of Chinese classmates. He was curious how they got there and several years later, wrote a book about it. A lot of the Korean restaurants started showing up in Montgomery after around 2002, when Hyundai announced it would open up a plant there. More Korean companies, including the car manufacturer Kia, began setting up shop on the I-85 corridor.

When executives and workers from Korea came to Alabama, they needed some place to eat, which in turn opened up opportunities for Korean restaurateurs. Because those eateries were mostly catering to a fully-Korean, well-off customer base, the food they cook is pretty close to what you’ll find in Korea.

Um summit pela democracia, para a democracia, a convite dos EUA (que está com sua democracia meio deteriorada) - WP

 Opinion 

Biden will host an international summit on ‘democratic renewal.’ He should start at home

Opinion by 

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

The Washington Post, August 12, 2021 - 10:30 a.m. EDT

The State Department announced in a statement on Wednesday that the Biden administration will convene a virtual summit of democracies on Dec. 9, with the goal to “bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”

The summit will center on defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights. “We aim to show how democracies can deliver on the issues that matter most to people: strengthening accountable governance, expanding economic opportunities, protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms, and enabling lives of dignity,” the statement reads. “We also will show how open, rights-respecting societies can work together to effectively tackle the great challenges of our time, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and growing inequality.”

The concern is that this event will be more than a dog and pony show, a conference with glossy programs but little in the way of substance. While the preview suggests this will be devoid of concrete agreements (the State Department describes it as “an opportunity to listen, learn, and engage”), there are a few things the administration can do to make the summit worthwhile.

First, Biden needs to be able to set an example and show how the United States is tackling issues such as corruption. While there are reforms contained in the For the People Act regarding “dark money” in our elections, there is much the administration can do without Congress to promote transparency and anti-corruption, such as filling all open inspectors general slots, expanding financial disclosure statements, beefing up the Office of Government Ethics and voluntarily including the president and vice president in the executive branch’s conflict of interest regulations. The administration can also speed up responses to Freedom of Information Act requests. These sort of reforms would help Biden cajole other democracies to eschew self-dealing and heighten transparency. It is always a good idea to put one’s own house in order before holding oneself as a model.

In that regard, it is essential that the United States addresses the deteriorating state of voting rights at home. Without this, the administration is in a poor position to talk about the threats to functional democracy. If by the time December rolls around and Congress has not passed significant voting reform — including protections against vote flipping and the politicization of election administration, increased access to the ballot box, and stiff penalties for threatening election workers — our defense of democracy will look hypocritical and empty.

Candidly, threats to democracies do not come solely from authoritarian regimes (although such regimes may help stir anti-democratic sentiments). Right now, the greatest threats to U.S. democracy are all internal — states that pass Jim Crow-style laws; a Supreme Court that eviscerates legal protection against voting discrimination; gerrymandering schemes that help shield incumbents from accountability; and, of course, a national party led by the former president who incited a violent insurrection.

Finally, the administration can emphasize disinformation as a topic for the summit, as it is a key tool that authoritarians employ to threaten democracy. The United States is awash in it — from anti-vaccine misinformation to ongoing attempts to incite another insurrection based on bizarre theories that the disgraced former president could somehow be “reinstated” later this month. Democratic governments that respect freedom of speech have few tools at their disposal to address this problem. However, transnational social media companies do — and they have failed to address the problem adequately and uniformly.

It may be time, if not to regulate these companies, then to apply public pressure on them to be transparent about their algorithms, to report on the full extent of disinformation spreading on their platforms and to create a body that would hold them accountable for enforcing their terms of service. In addition, there is a host of interesting ideas to improve the social media diet. The American Academy of Arts and Science has put out a detailed list of recommendations to do this, including creation of “civic media platforms”; exploring a “public-interest mandate” (as broadcast networks have) for Internet platforms protected from liability (in the United States, under Section 230); and research into the impact of social media on democracies.

There is no reason the summit has to be an empty exercise. If Biden can use the event to encourage meaningful voting reform and anti-corruption measures at home, and if it does meaningful work on the role of social media in attacks on democracy, it might be worth the time and effort it takes to put on such a gathering.

The Geopolitical Olympics: Could China Win Gold? - Graham Allison (The National Interest)

Sumary:

 I’m writing to share my article published today in The National Interest previewing some of the major findings of a forthcoming Harvard report, “The Great Rivalry: China vs. the US in the 21st Century.”

• As we watch the results of the Tokyo Olympics, it’s hard to remember when in the century-long history of the modern Olympics China won its first medal. Answer: the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. By 2008, it had displaced the US from an accustomed position—taking home 48 medals to the US’s 36. And while most betting sites have the US winning the most gold in Tokyo, as Yogi Berra taught us: “it ain’t over til it’s over.”
• In the geopolitical Olympics, China’s rise to rival the US has been even more dramatic. Who today is the manufacturing workshop of the world? Who is the number one trading partner of most nations in the world? Who has been the principal engine of economic growth in the decade and a half since the Great Recession of 2008?
• In the military arena, who has eroded America’s competitive edge in every domain of warfare to the point that “today, every domain is contested: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace”—in the words of former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis?
• Who is the largest producer and consumer of automobiles? Who does Elon Musk see as the largest market for Tesla and other EVs? In the technology likely to have the greatest impact on economics and security in the next generation—AI—who is the clear leader in facial recognition, voice recognition, integrated surveillance, and fintech?
• The Big Takeaway from the Report is that the time has come to recognize China for what it is: a “full-spectrum peer competitor.” But as the essay says unambiguously: for the authors of the report, this does not mean “game over” for the USA. To the contrary, it means “game on.” 

Part of a set of Transition Memos for the new administration prepared by members of the Harvard China Working Group led by the late Ezra Vogel and me, and supported by a grant from the Harvard Global Institute, the five chapters of the report along with other memos have been provided to those leading the Biden administration’s strategic reviews (as well as those who had been heading up plans for a second Trump term). After the Biden team and leaders of Congress have had the opportunity to use the memos and chapters in whatever ways they find helpful, they will be published later this year as Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center discussion papers. But since there have recently been a number of public comments and inquiries about the report, it seemed appropriate to preview some of the key findings.

If you have reactions, we will look forward to reading them.

Graham Allison
Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, Harvard Kennedy School
Follow me on Twitter

Complete Article:

The Geopolitical Olympics: Could China Win Gold?

In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower.

Graham Allison

The National Interest, July 29, 2021

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/geopolitical-olympics-could-china-win-gold-190761

The Tokyo Olympics offers an apt analogy for reflecting on the much more consequential geopolitical Olympics in which China is challenging the United States today. In the century-long history of the modern Olympics, when did China win its first medal? Not until the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Just a quarter-century later, in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China displaced the United States from its accustomed position as No. 1—taking home forty-eight gold medals to the United States’ thirty-six.

While the United States snapped back in 2012 and 2016, the outcome of this summer’s games looks to be tight. Most betting sites have the United States winning forty gold medals to China’s thirty-three. But curveballs and caveats abound: tight rules have banned spectators and excluded elite athletes who failed Covid-19 tests. Meanwhile, several favored U.S. Olympians have stumbled in early competition. Sportswriters can be forgiven for repeating Yogi Berry’s one-liner about baseball: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

In the geopolitical Olympics, China’s rise to rival the United States has been even more dramatic. Only two decades ago at the dawn of the twenty-first century, China did not even appear on the league tables of any geopolitical competition. Economically, it was classified as a “poor, developing country” (and thus allowed to join the World Trade Organization on terms reserved for developing economies). Technologically, with a per capita income at roughly the same level as Guyana and the Philippines, its citizens did not have enough money to buy advanced computers or cellphones, much less the resources to produce them. Militarily, it was for the Defense Department inconsequential, covered as what it called a “lesser included threat.” Diplomatically, it sat quietly, following Deng Xiaoping’s guidance to “hide and bide.”

But that was then.

In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower. Moreover, to paraphrase former Czech president Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so quickly that we have not yet had time to be astonished.

Who is today the manufacturing workshop of the world? Who is the No. 1 trading partner of most nations in the world? Who has been the principal engine of economic growth in the decade and a half since the Great Recession of 2008? By the yardstick that both the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund have concluded is the best single metric for comparing national economies, who has the largest economy in the world? 

In the military arena, who has eroded America’s competitive edge in every domain of warfare to the point that “today, every domain is contested: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace”—in the words of former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis? While the United States remains the only global military superpower, in the Department of Defense’s most carefully constructed simulations of conflict over Taiwan, who has won eighteen of the past eighteen war games—according to former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work?

Who is the largest producer and consumer of automobiles? Who does Elon Musk see as the largest market for Teslas and other electric vehicles? In the technology likely to have the greatest impact on economies and security in the next generation—artificial intelligence (AI)—who is the clear leader in facial recognition, voice recognition, supercomputers, and fintech—in the judgment of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (which is the leading AI company in America)?

Readers who hesitate before answering these questions will find bracing the forthcoming Report from Harvard’s China Working Group on the “Great Rivalry: China vs. the US in the 21st Century.” Prepared as part of a package of Transition Memos for the new administration after the November 2020 election, chapters of the report have been provided to those leading the Biden administration’s strategic reviews (as well as to those who had been heading up plans for a second Trump term). After the Biden team and leaders of Congress have had an opportunity to use them in whatever ways they find helpful, the chapters will be published later this year as Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Discussion Papers. But since there have recently been a number of public comments and inquiries about the report, this essay previews some of our key findings.

The specific assignment to which our report on the “Great Rivalry” responds was “to document what has actually happened in the past two decades in the array of races between China and the US.” The goal was to provide an objective database that could serve as a foundation for policymakers who would undertake a fundamental strategic reassessment of the China challenge. Five chapters drill down on the rivalry in five core arenas of power: economic, technological, military, diplomatic, and ideological. Each chapter begins by identifying criteria, metrics for assessing various races, and the best-unclassified sources of data on each topic. Each then summarizes the evidence about what has happened over the past two decades and concludes with a candid assessment of where the competitors now stand.

In offering judgments, we have made our best effort to follow the lead of judges in the Olympics: scoring results impartially according to established criteria. For example, in assessing where the United States and China currently stand in AI applications for voice recognition, we report the results of Stanford’s international challenge for machine-reading, where Chinese teams won three of the top five spots, including first place. In most of these races, this means reporting that China’s performance has improved dramatically. But as the report explains, these advances should not be surprising, since China has essentially been playing catch up, closing gaps by copying technologies and practices pioneered by the United States and others.

Nonetheless, for Americans—including us!—news about China overtaking us and even surpassing us in some races is unsettling. Indeed, as students of international security, we recognize that the international order the United States has led for the seven decades since World War II provided a rare “long peace” without war between great powers, and larger increases in health and prosperity worldwide than in any equivalent period in history. The impact of China’s meteoric rise on that order is thus a matter of deep concern. But as John Adams repeatedly reminded his compatriots as they fought for freedom against the most powerful nation in the eighteenth-century world: “facts are stubborn things.”

In brief, the major findings of our report across the five arenas are these. First, China is not only rising. It has already risen to a point that it has upended the post-Cold War order: geopolitically, economically, technologically, militarily, diplomatically, and politically. Washington officials continue straining to see China in our rearview mirror. They insist that it is no more than what they call a “near-peer competitor.” Reality says otherwise. The time has come to recognize China as a full-spectrum peer competitor of the United States. As such, it poses a graver geopolitical challenge than any American living has ever seen.

The difference between the terms is not just semantic. If our assessment is correct, the Director of National Intelligence’s 2021 Global Threat Assessment describing China as “increasingly a near-peer competitor” is wrong. And the difference matters. Ask American athletes in Tokyo about peer competitors.

Second, China has not only overtaken the United States in a number of significant arenas, including the size of its economy, but has established leads the United States is unlikely to recover. While many readers may find this hard to believe, they should consider the arithmetic. Since China has four times as many people as the United States, if Chinese workers were only one-quarter as productive as Americans, their gross domestic product (GDP) would equal that of ours. GDP, of course, is not everything. But it forms the substructure of power in relations among nations.

Third, if both nations continue on their current trajectories, by 2030, China’s economy will be twice the size of America’s. Moreover, in many other sports that the United States has traditionally dominated, China is likely to have sustainable advantages. Painful as it will be, Americans will have to find some way to come to grips with a world in which, at least in some realms, “China is No. 1.”

Fourth, in contests like the Olympics, winning the largest number of medals is essentially a matter of national pride. In core geopolitical rivalries, however, including GDP, relative military capabilities for potential conflicts (for example, over Taiwan), or leadership in frontier technologies like AI, if China succeeds in winning gold medals that we should have, the consequences for the American economy, American security, and the American-led international order will be profoundly negative. Anyone who has doubts about what life under Chinese rules looks like should watch what is happening in Hong Kong.

Fifth, contrary to those for whom these findings lead to defeatism, the authors of the Harvard report decidedly do not believe that this means “game over” for the United States.  Historically, American democracy has been slow to awake to great challenges. On the battlefield, had its greatest wars ended after the first innings, American colonists would have never become independent, Germany would have emerged the victor in World War I, Asia would now be a grand Japanese co-prosperity area, and Europeans would be speaking German in a Nazi empire. Had the United States not made the Soviet Union’s launch of the first satellite into space a “Sputnik moment” of awakening, the United States would not have been the first nation to send a man to the moon.

In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower.

Recognition of the magnitude of the challenge posed by what Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew presciently predicted would be “the biggest player in the history of the world,” is the beginning of wisdom. We believe it should—and will—lead the United States to mobilize a response proportionate to the challenge.

As the United States and China compete neck-and-neck in the Tokyo Games, the head of China’s General Administration of Sports, Gou Zhongwen, has made no secret of China’s goal. As he put it recently: the Tokyo and Beijing Games are stepping stones on the path to China’s becoming a global “sports power by 2035.” In pursuit of this mission, China sent its biggest-ever team to Tokyo with 777 athletes to America’s 621. Nonetheless, as she arrived in Tokyo, the CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee declared: “Team USA is ready” for everything. In sum, the game is on.

Americans have never shrunk from competition. Indeed, our market economy and democracy are founded on the proposition that fair competition will spur the rivals to run faster than they would do running alone. But for students of war and peace, the big question is: in the great geopolitical rivalry, can the United States and China can find a way to structure and manage constructive competition? Can the necessity for coexistence drive enlightened leaders to engage in peaceful competition in which each nation does its best to demonstrate which system—America’s democracy, or China’s Party-led autocracy—can deliver more of what human beings want? Since citizens’ lives in both countries depend on an affirmative answer, we must hope and pray that they can find their way to yes.

Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

O mundo precisa de uma nova Carta do Atlântico? A primeira, em 1941, era contra o nazismo. Agora é contra a China? - Richard J. Evans (The Wall Street Journal)

Essa tal de nova "Carta do Atlântico", do Biden e do Boris Johnson, é pura demagogia, aproveitando a mística da declaração de 1941, que nem tinha esse nome, e que se destinava a salvar a Grã-Bretanha numa das horas mais dramáticas da sua história, depois da Invencível Armada (destruída pelo próprio canal da Mancha) e da ameaça napoleônica (vencida em Trafalgar). Depois dos espanhóis e dos franceses, os chineses, e contra os americanos desta vez? Joe Biden está exagerando no seu populismo histórico, se rendendo ao que as esquerdas chamariam de "complexo industrial-militar": milhões de dólares canalizados pela paranoia irracional dos generais do Pentágono e pela inacreditável demência dos acadêmicos que caíram no conto de vigário de uma fantasmagórica "armadilha de Tucídides'. Pobre Tucídides, não merecia essa...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Do We Need a New Atlantic Charter?

Eighty years after FDR and Churchill pledged to defend democracy, President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson want to reenergize the special relationship for a very different world.

President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”

President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”

During a press conference at the conclusion of the summit between leaders of the Group of Seven on Sunday, President Biden discussed working together with allies, global vaccine donations and how the group plans to approach challenges posed by China. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

By Richard J. Evans

The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2021 

At a summit meeting in England last week, President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed a “new Atlantic Charter,” pledging their countries to work together on a range of issues, from combating climate change and preparing effectively for future pandemics to the defense of democracy and “the rules-based international order.” The agreement intends to “build on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago” in the original Atlantic Charter, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, at their first wartime meeting, held at a U.S. naval base in Newfoundland.

The much-publicized agreement reflects Mr. Johnson’s determination to reorient British foreign policy away from Europe in the wake of Brexit. For Mr. Biden it represents a renewed commitment to America’s traditional allies after four years of tension during the Trump presidency, with its policy of “America First.” As Mr. Johnson said in a statement, “Eighty years ago the U.S. President and British Prime Minister stood together promising a better future. Today we do the same.” But does the new Atlantic Charter really deserve the comparison with the historic original?

In fact, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 was less about remaking the world than about fighting World War II. At the time it was signed, Britain and Germany had been at war for less than two years, and the U.S. hadn’t yet entered the conflict. But the Americans had already begun to help the British, notably through the Lend-Lease Agreement signed the previous March, which provided for the U.S. to supply Britain and its allies with war materials. A major purpose of the Charter was to prepare the American people for their likely future entry into the war by telling them what they would be fighting for. 

In this sense, the Atlantic Charter was more a propaganda statement than a program for action. Its eight clauses, echoed deliberately in the eight clauses of the 2021 Atlantic Charter, affirmed the right of peoples and nations to self-determination, the desirability of lowering trade barriers, the postwar disarmament of the “aggressor nations,” the freedom of the seas, and the necessity of social welfare measures and the alleviation of poverty.

The U.S. and U.K. also said they would not seek territorial gains after the war. Importantly, the defeated nations were to be included in the lowering of trade barriers, a conscious rejection of the punitive economic measures that followed the end of World War I. But the ambitious statement wasn’t signed by the leaders and had no formal legal power. Even the name “Atlantic Charter” wasn’t official; it was invented by the Daily Herald, a left-wing British newspaper, to describe what was formally known as the Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister.

• The Wall Street Journal

China vs Australia (and USA): Australian government cancels Chinese economic deals - World Socialist Website

Australian government cancels Chinese economic deals

Mike Head

World Socialist Website, April 24, 2021

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/chau-a24.html

Australia’s government this week took to a new level its support for the US-backed confrontation with China and also set a global precedent for tearing up economic agreements previously signed with Beijing.

The Liberal-National Coalition invoked new powers introduced last December in order to cancel two deals previously struck by the Victorian state Labor government under the umbrella of China’s massive infrastructure Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The 2018 “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) and 2019 “Framework” agreements were vague and non-enforceable, and had never actually been activated. That only makes their overturn by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government more clearly a direct and deliberate attack on the BRI.

Washington regards with hostility, as a threat to US hegemony, the ambitious BRI project to link China by road, rail and sea with the rest of the Eurasian continent, right across to Europe, as well as to help build infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific and Africa.

The four-page 2018 MoU merely agreed to “cooperation within the Framework of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative.” Much of the language in the MoU consisted of motherhood statements, such as “form synergy in cooperation,”

Likewise, the nine-page 2019 agreed to “jointly promote” that “Framework” without any concrete proposals. It contained more general statements, such as a desire to “enhance two-way trade”

Evidently, Victorian construction companies hoped for lucrative opportunities in China, while Chinese infrastructure firms could tender for Victorian government projects. Amid growing US and Australian trade war measures against China and the stepping up of the US-led military build-up in Asia, however, no projects ever resulted.

Marise Payne, Australia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. (Wikimedia Commons)

Nevertheless, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne formally declared these deals to be “inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy or adverse to our foreign relations in line with the relevant test in Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act 2020.” She gave no further reasons and provided no other explanation.

By further cutting across economic relations with China, on top of a series of bans on Chinese investment, and steps to stop reliance on “supply chains” from China, Canberra’s move points to the accelerating US-led preparations for a war against China to prevent it from challenging US power.

The White House was clearly involved in the decision. Asked if the Biden administration had been in touch with Canberra over the issue, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki did not deny it.

Instead, Psaki revealed how much Washington is preoccupied with combating China. “How we can work together as a global community and in a coordinated fashion as it relates to China is part of nearly every discussion the President has with a European partner or country in the region,” she said.

Morrison defended scrapping the Chinese deals, saying his government would “always act in Australia’s national interest to protect Australia” and “advance our national interests of a free and open Indo-Pacific and a world that seeks a balance in favour of freedom.”

Such provocative language declares China to be a threat to Australia and world “freedom,” when in reality it is the US and its allies that have conducted barbaric neo-colonial wars for decades, from Vietnam to the Middle East, and are now menacing China.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton added to the belligerence by saying Australia would not be “bullied by anyone” in exerting its sovereign rights. He denounced the Victorian government for betraying the “national interest” by signing the two documents.

This anti-China campaign has bipartisan backing within the parliamentary establishment. For its part, the Victorian Labor government readily accepted the cancellation of its deals. Federal Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese sought to outbid the Morrison government, saying a proper explanation was needed about why Victoria’s deals were scrapped but not the 99-year lease of the civilian Port of Darwin to Chinese company Landbridge in 2015.

The Darwin lease is particularly sensitive because President Obama personally rebuked Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 for allowing the lease of the northern Australian port to go ahead without consulting Washington.

Albanese’s stance is in line with his message at Labor’s recent national conference, where he said Labor governments were needed for periods of war and crisis, as a Labor government had proved by initiating the US military alliance during World War II. Backed by the trade unions, Labor’s conference passed no less than six resolutions denouncing China.

Murdoch media outlets and most others hailed the Morrison government for “standing up to” China. Some nervousness was voiced by sections of mining-related business, however, because China has become Australia’s largest export market over the past two decades, with iron ore sales and revenues soaring.

Today’s Australian Financial Review editorial criticised the government for “prodding” China “for no obvious gain on moribund Belt and Road agreements.” Malcolm Broomhead, the chairman of mining, oil and gas giant Orica and a BHP board member, told the Australian: “I just don’t understand the deliberate provocation of China which sits at odds with ‘we want to be friends.’”

Despite such qualms that the attacks on China are provoking restrictions on Australian exports to China, the ruling class as a whole depends heavily on US investment and on Washington’s support to pursue its own neo-colonial interests. That is why the Australian ruling elite has joined every major US war since World War II.

The Chinese government reacted angrily and lodged a formal protest. Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the Morrison government of “political manipulation and bullying” and setting a “bad” global precedent. He said China had signed BRI cooperation documents with 140 countries and 31 international organisations. “Australia is the first and only country to tear apart an agreement.”

Last year, the Chinese embassy issued a 14-point complaint against Australia’s discriminatory tariff and other economic measures against Chinese companies, including the ban on the teleco giant Huawei. That ban, imposed in 2018, was demanded by Washington and mirrored by other US allies.

More widespread cancellations of China-linked economic, educational and cultural agreements by state and local governments and universities are looming. So far, Payne said she had reviewed more than 1,000 existing or proposed deals and decided to cancel only four—the two with China and older Victorian agreements with Syria and Iran. Later, after landing in New Zealand, she said she expected further such decisions.

Universities have until June to submit their lists of exchange and other agreements with overseas universities and other entities. Already, the US-aligned and government-subsidised Australian Security Policy Institute is calling for the shutting down of the dozen or so Confucius Institutes on Australian campuses.

The rapidity of the shift against China is underscored by the fact that in 2017 Turnbull’s Coalition government reached its own BRI agreement with the Chinese government. Then trade minister Steven Ciobo said: “Australia supports the aims of initiatives such as the Belt and Road that improve infrastructure development and increased opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Over the past three years, the Australian government has become a frontrunner in measures against China, including the far-reaching, anti-democratic “ foreign interference ” laws passed in 2018, that Washington regards as a model for similar provisions internationally.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality in Australia and New Zealand is today, April 24, at 4 p.m. [AEST] holding an online meeting in opposition to the drive to war against China. Register here. 

O FMI agora se preocupa com a concentração de renda nos EUA e acha que as políticas públicas devem colaborar para reduzi-la

 

VIEW IN BROWSER    Dear Colleague, Tomorrow here in Washington is the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. Among the many crises on his plate, inequality is perhaps the most pervasive. Heather Boushey, an incoming member of President-elect Biden's White House Council on Economic Advisors, carved out a blueprint to address this very issue in our latest edition of F&D. She writes that workers and their families on the wrong side of the many US economic disparities are there for several reasons—including a stubborn reliance by policymakers on markets to do the work of government, and the racism and sexism, sometimes written into law, that blind policymakers to injustice and to economic sense. Interested in learning more? Jump to the 1800-word piece or download the PDF. I've also included the full article below. ### The COVID-19 pandemic is shining an unforgiving spotlight on the many inequalities in the United States, demonstrating how pervasive they are and that they put the nation at risk for other systemic shocks. To stop the spread of the virus and emerge from a crushing recession, these fundamental inequalities must be addressed. Otherwise not only is a slow economic recovery more than likely, but the odds grow that the next shock—health or otherwise—will again throw millions out of work and subject their families to fear, hunger, and lasting economic scars. Before the pandemic, the United States was in the midst of a decade-long recovery from the Great Recession, which began in December 2007. But not all Americans experienced that recovery in the same way. The top 1 percent emerged as strong as ever in terms of wealth, regaining what they had lost by 2012. As of March 2020, however, US working- and middle-class families had barely recovered their lost wealth, and many families, especially those of color, never recovered. Even amid a strong recovery, the United States was burdened by extraordinary economic and racial inequality. Today, stark differences among US workers and their families make the current recovery neither U- nor V-shaped but rather one that resembles a sideways Y, with those benefiting from a stock market recovery or employed standing on the branch of the Y that points up unaffected by the recession, and those on the bottom branch facing perhaps years of struggle. And there are stark differences of race and class between the upper and lower legs of that sideways Y. This recession provides an opportunity for policymakers to address these inequalities with transformative policy changes to produce a healthier and more resilient economy that delivers strong, stable, and broad-based growth and prosperity. Disparities abound Workers and their families on the wrong side of the many US economic disparities are there for several reasons—including a stubborn reliance by policymakers on markets to do the work of government and the racism and sexism, sometimes written into law, that blind policymakers to injustice and to economic sense. This article will identify specific causes of economic inequality in the United States and then explain how to address them. Markets: Beginning in the 1980s, conservative economists began to make the case that unfettered markets were the only way to deliver sustained growth and well-being. This ideology, with modest exceptions, has governed US economic policymaking ever since. But it has not delivered. Moreover, the supposedly neutral and fair rules that govern markets have in fact shifted economic risk away from corporations and the wealthy toward medium- and low-income families. This has never been more apparent than now, when the coronavirus has caused mostly low-income workers to either lose their jobs or have to work in employment that exposes them to the risk of contracting and spreading the disease. Tax cuts, weak public investment: President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which benefited largely the better-off, is only the most recent manifestation of a tax-cutting philosophy that has governed US fiscal policy for decades. These measures have starved the nation of resources that could be used to fund basic governmental functions and critical public investments. As a result, public investment as a share of GDP—the value of goods and services produced in the United States in a year—has fallen to its lowest level since 1947. Eroding worker power: The ability of US workers to bargain for higher wages and benefits and better and safer working conditions has been sapped by years of anti-union court and administrative rulings. And in 27 states, right-to-work laws make it harder for unions to form. As employers gained the upper hand, wages stagnated, and worker safety has suffered, especially during the pandemic. Economic concentration: US antitrust policy and enforcement have allowed industries across the United States to become increasingly concentrated, giving large businesses market power to set prices, eliminate competitors, suppress wages, and hobble innovation. What’s more, there is evidence that this is dampening firms’ investment. Some are thriving in the midst of—indeed because of—the pandemic, while small businesses struggle to survive. Measuring the economy: Before the 1980s, when US economic inequality began its upward trajectory, growth in GDP was a reasonably reliable indicator of the well-being of most Americans. But as economic inequality has risen close to its 1920 levels, the benefits of GDP growth have gone disproportionately to the top 10 percent of earners, while income growth for the vast majority of people has been slower than that of GDP—in some cases, none at all. For that reason, GDP reflects mostly how the better-off are doing. As GDP recovers in the coming months, therefore, it will give policymakers false signals about whether average Americans are recovering. Racism and sexism: The disparate health and economic consequences of the coronavirus recession reinforce the reality and history of racism and sexism in the United States. The median earnings for a Black household are 59 percent of those of a White household, and for men and women of all races, a median woman earns 81 cents for every dollar earned by a man. The results of job segregation are apparent, with health care and service workers on the pandemic front lines. Despite being essential, some of these jobs—in which women and minorities are overrepresented—are the least likely to have benefits such as paid sick time or employer-provided health insurance. These problems are largely the result of decades of failed policies supported more by ideology than evidence. A distorted economic narrative that lionizes markets has led to the weakening of public institutions and the acceptability of less funding for democratic institutions of governance, greater economic concentration, reduced worker power, and the discriminatory effect of laissez-faire labor rules. The role of policy choices in arranging the market structure is unmistakable and enduring. Building a strong, equitable economy Transforming the US economy requires policymakers to recognize that markets cannot perform the work of government. The first step is to eradicate COVID-19. It has to be the first priority, not only for public health but also for the US economy. Beyond that, encouraging a strong and sustained recovery that delivers broadly shared growth also requires the United States to address its long-term problems: a costly health system that leaves millions with insufficient care, an education system designed not to end inequality but to preserve it, lack of basic economic stability for most families, and climate change. Major public investments are required to deal with each issue. While it is not necessary to worry now about paying for them, the nation should put in place significant tax increases, primarily or entirely on the wealthy, to begin investing in these long-term solutions. The country should tax the enormous wealth concentrated at the top that is being saved, or kept overseas, and not being invested in the economy or in solving societal problems. Policymakers also must address the economic concentration that has created monopsony power (a single or handful of buyers or employers) that keeps wages down and threatens small businesses, which are the lifeblood of innovation and economic dynamism. The first step is to ensure that the recession and the programs designed to help businesses survive the crisis don’t exacerbate this trend. Thus far, federal policies to address the economic downturn have provided far greater aid to large businesses than to small ones. Policymakers also must ensure that federal government funds are directed to productive uses that support workers and customers, and not to rewarding wealthy shareholders. Corporations receiving aid should be barred from issuing dividends and carrying out stock buybacks, and banks should be required to suspend capital distributions during the crisis to support lending to the real economy. Even more fundamental to addressing excessive concentration is strengthening US antitrust enforcement, which is weaker than it has been in decades. The antitrust laws themselves also need to be bolstered, particularly with respect to the rules governing mergers and exclusionary conduct. Legislators should consider creating a digital regulatory authority to enforce privacy laws and enhance competition in digital markets. The country also needs to better understand who benefits, or does not, from recovery policies and what further actions are needed. Because overall GDP is not up to that task, income must be disaggregated at all levels to measure progress or lack thereof for all groups—which would enable the United States to lay the groundwork for understanding what other actions are needed to ensure more people benefit from the recovery. US economic inequality is firmly tied to the issue of racial inequality. The unmistakable message of the Black Lives Matter movement is that Americans of color never have been able to trust government to act on their behalf. Government must work to ensure that low-income Black, Latinx, and Native American people can both develop and deploy their talents and skills in the economy. Taxing wealth, which is disproportionately owned by White Americans, is one solution. But for that to address racial inequities adequately, the proceeds of the wealth tax must benefit the majority of the nonwealthy. The proceeds must be directed to the most urgently needed investments, such as in COVID-19 testing and treatment in communities of color, in policies that expressly and progressively support low-wage workers and care workers, and in engagement with minority-owned small businesses. Otherwise, pervasive inequities will be further entrenched. A significant reason for the gender earnings gap is the lack of a national paid family and medical leave policy and the absence of a national program to ensure that families have access to quality, affordable childcare and prekindergarten education. Families with children that do not have access to paid leave and childcare—or cannot afford them—have little choice but to put careers on hold. This happens to women far more often than to men. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to accomplish both of these goals, and these measures should get serious consideration in the next Congress. Reason for optimism There is reason to believe that the United States can enact policies to transform its economy and society. Until recently, some of the conversations taking place among policymakers and around dinner tables—inspired by COVID-19, the deep recession, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the recent presidential election—would have been relegated to the edges of public debate. Today that is not the case. Yet the US political system is beset by deep partisanship and a constitutional and electoral system that makes it far easier to block transformative policies than enact them. But I am an optimist, and I still believe that the country could be at an inflection point, with the advantage going to those who develop and advocate progressive policies to reduce inequality and build an economy that produces strong, stable, and broad-based growth. ### As always, if you have any comments or feedback about this article, or if you have ideas about future contributors and topics to explore, please do write me a note directly. I would love to hear from you. Take good care and see you next week, Rahim Kanani Digital Editor, F&D rkanani@IMF.org _____ Surprise a colleague: forward this email First-time reader? Sign up here Update your profile for tailored content View all IMF newsletters