HAS CHINA WON? by Kishore Mahbubani offers international perspective on "The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy." Mahbubani, currently a Distinguished Fellow at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute, draws on his diplomatic and scholarly expertise to craft a book one of whose goals is "to promote hardheaded, rational thinking on an inevitably complex and shifting subject." To that end, he raises numerous questions, such as
- Could America’s GNP become smaller than China's in the next thirty years? If so, what strategic changes will America have to make when it no longer is the world's dominant economic power?
- Is it wise for America to continue investing heavily in its defense budget? ... And instead invest more in improving social services and rejuvenating national infrastructure?
- Can America build up a solid global coalition to counterbalance China [and its Belt and Road Initiative, for example], if it also alienates its key allies?
- Does American society have the inherent strength and stamina to match China's long-term game?

Having read Geography of Thought many years ago, I find Mahbubani's advice - "the most important job for a strategic thinker is to try to step into the mind of the adversary' - to be consistent and refreshingly thought-provoking. His own intriguing claims are certainly debatable, as when he notes that "treating the new China challenge as akin to the old Soviet strategy, America is making the classic strategic mistake of fighting tomorrow's war with yesterday’s strategies" or "the contest with China was with a power that was 'non-Caucasian' ... [which is] driving the emotional reactions to China."

To be sure, this text offers what Fareed Zakaria describes as "views that most Americans will find challenging and controversial." All the more reason to stretch our students' critical thinking skills by reading and discussing an excerpt or two. Plus, looking at international reviews for HAS CHINA WON? like those in The Financial Times or The Australian Financial Review will provide additional viewpoints to consider. Recently, Mahbubani published a piece in The Economist (April 2020) which he began by saying, "The West's incompetent response to the pandemic will hasten the power-shift to the East." What do you think?

***Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Public Affairs!***

I stopped reading this book about 150 pages in, roughly halfway. I make an effort to not put down a book less than halfway through in order to be fair. Sometimes things start to look up after a rocky beginning. To be clear, I did not put this book away because it was poorly written. Indeed, it was excellently written. But I felt like the author has gotten it wrong when it came to his starting thesis. And unfortunately, if your starting thesis is incorrect, then some or all of your conclusions probably will be too.

The author has a very big bias in favor of China. This was evident throughout the Introduction when he basically said that China is the victim of cultural misunderstanding and that America was mostly afraid of powerful “yellow” people (his words, not mine) and mistakenly thinks that all Communism is the same as the Soviet Union was. But I carried on in spite of this obvious bias because the next two chapters were about the biggest mistakes so far that each of the world superpowers has made. I thought, maybe here is where we get a more evenhanded approach.

Unfortunately we did not. According to the author, China’s biggest mistake is that it gives too much power to local governments and Beijing is largely powerless to control them. For example, the author mentions that businesses are very wary of working in China because they feel that China takes advantage of them and threatens them with access to the Chinese market if they don’t comply to outrageous. His example is a business that states they had a contract with a Chinese company that they would utilize their services for a set number of years and then buy the company outright for X price at the end of that period. When that date came the company refused to sell. The business petitioned to the courts in Beijing and were told “well pay them more money then and buy the business”. The author attributes this to a lack of centralized leadership. That is blatantly false and biased. That is called extortion. If the courts had said “Sorry, this is an issue with the local jurisdiction” that would prove the author’s point. But they acted like a mob enforcer “Pay more money, then they’ll sell.” The author gives this kind of leniency to the Chinese government over and over again.

And still, I continued. I thought that perhaps when the author was describing the largest mistake by America that we would see the same leniency. We did not. The author spends the entire chapter demonizing President Trump and demonizing businesses for blaming it on American war culture. And then throwing in some demonization of America’s lack of social justice for good measure. Americans just want to believe that all Communism is bad, so that’s why we demonize China. Again, this is a flawed premise. The Chinese Communist Party is bad. They have upwards of 1.5 million people imprisoned in labor camps, another half million in re-education centers. Stories abound from survivors of these camps of the rampant abuse and rape that goes on. Defectors from the CCP are executed silently and immediately, potentially thousands of people per year. The CCP has launched genocidal massacres on Tibetans, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims within the past decade. Don’t try and blow that particular sunshine about good Communism up my behind, thanks all the same!

In the end, this author thinks China is a great place and America is inherently racist with a psycho for a President. To me, that indicates that all conclusions that he draws will be flawed. So while the author asks a lot of interesting questions, the answers will likely be unsatisfying.