| Table Talk tackles China
BY MATT GETTY Foreign policy experts at last Wednesday’s Table Talk Lunch in the Kay Spiritual Life Center agreed that an emerging China poses both a potential threat and an opportunity for the United States. They just differed widely on what’s likely to push it one way or the other. According to Bert Keidel, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the situation calls for a “hands-off” approach, but for Carolyn Bartholomew, commissioner of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, that would ensure the waking giant’s development into a menacing global power. In Keidel’s eyes, China is currently not a global military threat, a splintered authoritarian state ripe for democratic revolution, or an egregious violator of human rights. The recent missile buildup along the Taiwan Strait, he assured the audience, reflects merely China’s desire to return Taiwan to its “natural state” as a part of the mainland, rather than an attempt to establish itself as a global superpower. Reported human rights violations in the country, he argued, result from growing pains rather than an overly repressive regime. “You cannot have this kind of rapid growth . . . without enormously wrenching changes.” Bartholomew, on the other hand, recommended that the United States adopt a more aggressive policy toward China to enforce fair-trade agreements and hold the government accountable for its human rights’ record. She argued that capitalism has failed to foster the hoped-for democratic reforms throughout the land. “We need to be careful to differentiate between the people and the government,” she said. “The people of China are clearly uncomfortable with what’s going on there.” On the issue of trade, Bartholomew cautioned that China’s failure to effectively enforce intellectual property laws threatens to worsen the already grossly imbalanced U.S.-China trade relationship. “Today, intellectual property violations in China currently cost our economy $13 billion a year . . . 90 percent of the software and 95 percent of the movies in China are pirated.” Though they disagreed on nearly every point discussed, Keidel and Bartholomew’s diverging positions ultimately stemmed from a difference in ethical opinion rather than discrepancies over the facts. The Table Talk Lunch Series is sponsored by the Kay Spiritual Life Center to foster campus discussions of ethical and social concern. The next discussion, “Domestic Violence: Causes and Costs,” is scheduled for Oct 20. |
