Stop blaming China for America's woes
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Economist Paul Krugman recently said China's trade surplus with the US had grown in the past decade even without the yuan rising sufficiently against the dollar. Before America's economic 9/11, however, its consumers seemed happy to get affordable Chinese goods year after year and its businesspeople were busy making profits from lucrative partnerships with Chinese companies. Don't the American entrepreneurs and intellectuals know that was made possible only because the yuan didn't rise against the greenback "sufficiently"?
The last two years have been full of economic woes for people in the land of plenty. The US is still struggling to come out of its economic recession. No wonder then that the American public is desperate to identify the problems and find solutions. But how can their leaders blame China for all their ills, which despite being a developing country helped maintain about half the world's economic growth last year? Why does China have to be made a scapegoat for America's domestic woes?
The international community, but for the obvious exceptions, has praised China's economic stimulus package and the importance of its robust economic growth. China's stimulus for its economy has created opportunities for Western countries' exports, too. The 2010 Shanghai World Expo will allow well over 200 countries and international organizations to showcase their products and technologies for sustainable living to 70 million visitors, a large majority of them Chinese. China would readily buy more advanced technologies from America, but Washington is reluctant to sell them.
We need to be clear that China's rise is good for the world economy. And we need to be clear that China does not possess any "weapons of mass economic destruction". Americans, no doubt, still remember the song, "Won't get fooled again." Hopefully, they will see through their politicians' desperate attempt to shift the blame for the country's problems to China in order to cover their own failures. And let's hope they will realize that peaceful and respectful cooperation between the US and China is the only way to mutual economic progress - and the world is counting on it.
The author is an economist and director of China Programs at the American Institute for Foreign Study, a US-based organization that has exchange programs with Nanjing University and American Institute for Foreign Study.
