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| China-hater and presidential adviser Peter Navarro |
After reading "Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action" by Peter Navarro, what struck you most was probably that the author was not afraid to speculate on the Chinese with the greatest malice, I bet. A stunning title like Death by China is not the only factor that would instill in you a sense of uneasiness and compel you to think about the true intention of this book.
A further cursory look at the chapter headings in the contents would add to the uneasiness that arises from the bottom of your heart: Death by Chinese Poison, Death by Chinese Junk, Death to America’s Manufacturing Base, Death by Currency Manipulation, Death by Colonial Dragon, Death by Blue Water Navy, Death by Chinese Spy. In the author’s description, China is like "death," haunting the United States and the West as a whole.
He wrote, “unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding world markets with a range of bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products, foods, and drugs.” He further wrote, “China’s perverse brand of Communist-style 'State Capitalism' has totally shredded the principles of both free markets and free trade… China’s state-backed 'national champions' have deployed a potent mix of mercantilist and protectionist weapons to pick off America’s industries job by job and one by one.”
In this regard, he coined the term “weapons of job destruction” to refer to “massive illegal export subsidies, the rampant counterfeiting of US intellectual property, pitifully lax environment protections, the pervasive use of slave labor” and “shamelessly manipulated currency.”
Enough! I don’t need to cite more. You will find that the author is innovative in inventing derogatory terms, which are often contrary to the common sense of economics, and the book is full of false and malicious accusations against China. Readers are led to believe that China is no more than a hell. Ironically, rarely can the reader find well-documented evidence in the book.
A book like this, full of illusionary masochism and groundless accusation, would have turned out to be that of a paranoid, rather than that of a professor of economics. No wonder the book failed to attract adequate attention of serious US economists and students of China long after it was published.
In China, in particular, nobody took the book seriously. Surprising to all, unfortunately, the author of this book became a close guest of the US president and later the director of the National Trade Council. What a world!
Read the rest here.
Deja vu. I am old enough to remember when Japan was the evil Asian empire, when the jokes were about cheap goods from Japan (before they became the best), when the great fear was that the Japanese plutocrats were buying up all the good US real estate, etc., etc.
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