Still Inscrutable After All These Years

Oh, those wacky Chinese.

Today the press is laden with stories about how the president went over to China and successfully reached agreement on carbon emissions or some similar topic that is supposed to offset global warming by 2025 or 2525 or some other year that Obama will not be our president.  The content of the agreement really doesn't matter, so please don't dash off to your local newspaper; finish this piece first.

I don't know what your first reaction was, probably a yawn.  Greenpeace members probably lit an ecologically-friendly candle and ate some tofu to celebrate.  Energy companies looked, listened and then went back to what they were doing.

Me, well, I'm kind of a chipmunk, so I asked myself the usual question: "Why?"  In this case, actually, "Why would the Chinese bother to make some kind of unenforceable agreement on suppressing their own industry, or building a clean infrastructure, and why would they do it now?"

I had to turn to Corollary #1 of my FTM rule that governs everything on earth (follow the money), which is "follow the power."  The Chinese don't care a bit about global warming; they don't intend to cut back their industries, and they certainly have no reason to be seen as doing so.  Therefore, we need to peel back their layers of inscrutability to answer the question.

The Chinese leaders want one thing -- power.  Nothing they do challenges that notion, and the only time they retreat from a power grab is when it is politically inappropriate to be seen as aggressors.  They are patient, and if takes them a century to conquer the world, whether by troops or by hacking the Internet, they will do so.  And  they certainly don't want anyone poking their noses into their oppressive human rights pattern.

So this is the logical rationale: In order to weaken the USA, they are trying to weaken the strongest force here, and strengthen the weaker force to oppose it.  In this case, they are propping up the weakened part of the government (Obama, beaten to a pulp in the elections and a lame duck to boot) by giving him a perceived "victory" that he can wave in the face of strength (the incoming Congress, Republican, not particularly pro-Chinese, united for the moment, and strong).

Sure makes sense to me.  The emissions agreement as far as the Chinese is concerned was always going to be a piece of useless paper they regarded as trash.  China saw this as an opportunity to foment conflict at the upper levels of American government and, for that matter, its society.  What they don't want is a strong, united American government deeply suspicious of Chinese motives.  So they need to try to mellow the perceived strength of the new Congress by giving a "victory" to its biggest adversary -- Obama.

I sure wouldn't put it past them.  If Xi Jinping and his team are sitting around a table going "Obama wants a global warming agreement.  What should we do?", their conversation is naturally about what hurts America the most. "He just got beat up in the election.  Let's try to pick him up so he can fight Congress and maybe they forget about us, our hegemony, our oppressing our citizens for a while, while we annex Quemoy and Matsu" (Sorry, 1960 election flashback).

Time, tide, and Chinese inscrutability are everlasting.  We need to factor all of them in.

Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton