Lots of readers have written in to ask:
Question 1) This episode of a Chinese boat ramming and sinking a Vietnamese craft, apparently inside Vietnamese waters, and apparently with rousing support of online commenters in China, sounds bad, doesn't it? Especially after the anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam, which followed expanded Chinese activities in the South China Sea and have raised tempers everywhere?
Answer 1) Yes, this is bad. China and Vietnam have a long, mutually suspicious history—a point overlooked by many Americans, given the Chinese-North Vietnamese collaboration during America's time in the vicinity. The last real war the People's Liberation Army fought was against Vietnam, and it lost very badly. (The Chinese suffered almost half as many casualties, in a few weeks' battle against Vietnam, as the U.S. did in its 10-plus years.) Presumably whoever is in charge on each side will find a way to calm this down rather than letting it unfold into another shooting war. Presumably.
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Question 2) This episode of Chinese fighters coming within 200 feet or less of Japanese military-surveillance planes sounds bad, doesn't it? Can't things go wrong when planes get that close?
Answer 2) Yes, this is bad. Recall that a commercial-airline passenger recently reported a brush with death when two planes came within five to eight miles of each other. Recall too that when a Chinese fighter hit a U.S. military-surveillance plane early in 2001, it was a major source of tension between the U.S. and China—who are on lovebird-type terms compared with the current bitterness between China and Japan. No one outside China considers the People's Liberation Army Air Force pilots to be among the best-drilled or most precise aviators in the world. It is easier to imagine something going wrong here than not.
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Question 3) This Chinese decision to bar state-owned enterprises from dealing with U.S.-based consulting firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, on the pretext that they are spying, sounds bad, doesn't it?
Answer 3) Yes, this is bad. It's obviously a tit-for-tat in response to last week's U.S. report that specific, named Chinese military officials had conducted commercial-secrets spying, not plain old fate-of-nations spying, against U.S. industrial firms.
The Chinese are saying: You want to enlist companies in the game of nations? OK, we'll target your companies too! Few people outside China may have an idea of the scale of some of these consultants' work inside China—and it's not strictly commercial. Every analysis of China's mass-urbanization future refers to a huge 2009 McKinsey study on the topic, "Preparing for China's Urban Billion." During my reporting on China's aerospace ambitions and its environmental-cleanup efforts, I kept coming across references to influential reports by Western (mainly U.S.) consulting groups. Some of these were pro-bono, some for pay; presumably all are now taboo for the big, state-owned firms. This is not good for anyone. [For the record: I have many friends, and some relatives, who have worked for these consulting firms, notably including Dominic Barton, now the global managing director/big boss of McKinsey. We became friends during the time our families both lived in Shanghai.]
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Question 4) This sweeping new security crackdown, especially in Beijing, in the run-up to the Tiananmen Square 25th anniversary and in the aftermath of the violence in Xinjiang—it sounds bad, doesn't it?
Answer 4) Yes, this is bad, though it should be more understandable for Americans than the others. Maximum security-theater overreaction to episodes of anti-civilian terrorist violence is a path the United States pioneered with our policies through much of the 2000s. China's big cities obviously can't operate with this kind of security shutdown of their transit systems, as shown in the picture at the top of the post. But for the moment, this is also bad.
As I've written a million times about China, the main fascination of the place is that its million-and-one contradictory realities are all simultaneously true. But at the moment, there's a higher proportion of the bad ones. As my friend Jorge Guajardo, former Mexican ambassador to China, observed:
