China and the United States – A Comparison

The Castle Report

Darrell Castle draws a comparison between China today and America today. Transcription / Notes CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES—A COMPARISON Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday January 25, 2019 and on today’s Report I will be attempting to make a comparison between China and the course it is charting for itself in the world today and America and the course it is on. For much of America’s historic years of friendship with China, that country was an impoverished third world backwater looking for allies in its struggles, but the two countries once stood together against common foes. When the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor Hawaii was attacked on December 7, 1941 the Chinese had already been fighting the Japanese Empire for 10 years. The two nations faced a common foe together. After World War ll China changed from a primitive third world country to a primitive, communist third world country. Mao’s Cultural Revolution brought with it the death of millions of China’s intellectuals and peasants who were suspect or somehow did not fit the communist ideal. Instead of its historic friendship with America, China had the collectivist idea of communism and that ideology dictates that all communist nations work together for the defeat of the West and the triumph of international communism. That’s why the communists used to constantly refer to each other as comrade since the idea of individualism was hateful to communists. President Nixon and Henry Kissinger changed much of that with their trip to china in the early 1970’s and with Mao’s death in 1976 the Cultural Revolution also died. China started to change as its potential and its failures became more and more obvious. The new China was more likely to act individually in its own best interest and as a competitor in trade with other countries of the world whether communist or not. In about 43 years since Mao’s death China has made itself into a powerful economy capable of challenging the United States on many levels. Most of the progress and the results of that progress are obvious for anyone to see if they look at it. China is close to the United States in super computers and in other areas of science such as genetic engineering and genomics. Unfortunately China does not have a history of the significance of the individual Chinese that America once had of the individual American and as a result the genetic engineering efforts have led it into cloning and other forms of genetic manipulation of humanity. The more rapidly it advances in science and computing the more the speed of advance increases so progress is exponential. The economic system of China has developed in at least a partial free market way. By that I mean that it seems to me that the Chinese government has said to its people, look you let us run the government as we see fit and play our international games and we will let you work, build businesses, have jobs and otherwise get as rich as you are able. We will guarantee that you will have a job even if we have to create the jobs by building ghost cities that no one lives in. As a result the Chinese government is left alone to do what it wants and there aren’t one billion peasants threatening to descend on Beijing with pitchforks. To get a clearer picture of what I mean let’s compare some things between China and America today. The United States is now about 22 trillion in debt on the books with an unknown but astronomical debt that is usually called unfunded future liabilities. The debt makes the United States vulnerable to the policies of the Federal Reserve especially higher interest rates. In addition to the debt the United States runs huge trade deficits each year especially with China which means much more money flows out than in. China, on the other hand, runs a large economic surplus which allows it to invest heavily in infrastructure for modernization purposes and to keep close to full employment.