China

David P. Goldman’s back! His piece in Law & Liberty, “China as It Is”, is educational and deft.

The geography of China meant that flood control could not be undertaken locally. It required the full resources of an empire across the 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtse Rivers, not counting tributaries. That was China’s equivalent of Manifest Destiny.

Michael Beckley of Tufts gives a mind-blowingly impressive 37-minute lecture on China hitting a great wall.

Spengler AKA David Goldman argues pretty persuasively that economic and demographic realities may force historic rivals India and China into alliance. That said, Goldman’s been such a Cassandra lately, you wonder if he’s almost not wishing for a bad outcome over China just to show he’s been correct.

“China-US Relations In The Eyes Of The Chinese Communist Party: An Insider’s Perspective” [PDF] by Cai Xia at the Hoover Institution, June 2021 (via Ambrose Evans-Pritchard).

Since the 1970s, the two political parties in the United States and the US government have always had unrealistic good wishes for the Chinese communist regime, eagerly hoping that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the CCP’s rule would become more liberal, even democratic, and a “responsible” power in the world. However, this US approach was a fundamental misunderstanding of the CCP’s real nature and long-term strategic goals.

2020, the good news, by Doron Peskin at Israel’s Calcalist