Political Quotes

“I preface my remarks today about China with a recent article from The Economist, dated March 1, 2018, which, I think, does a very good job of crystallizing what the hopes and aspirations that we in the West had for China and what the reality has turned out to be. It points out that in March 2000, Bill Clinton divided the American opinion on China into two camps. The first, he said, was of the optimists, and the second was of the hawks and the pessimists. The optimists, as it describes it, have an eye on the future and can see China becoming the next great capitalist tiger with the biggest market in the world. That was the optimistic view. The Economist writes that the hawks and pessimists, who were stuck in the past, saw China as stubbornly remaining as the world's last, great Communist dragon and a threat to stability in Asia. As this article points out, it was not an either/or. It called it a both/and. It concludes that the China of Xi Jingping is a great mercantilist dragon that is under strict Communist Party control and that it is using the power of its vast markets to cow and co-opt capitalist rivals to bend and break the rules-based order and to push America to the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region. It calls this one of the starkest reversals in modern geopolitics. Indeed, the administration's national security strategy that President Trump rolled out just a couple of months ago states that China challenges American power, influence, and interests.…”