Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the summer of 2020, otherwise a time of maximum disunity in the United States amid intersectional upris-ings, rioting, and widespread institutional deliquescence, a rock-like national consensus emerged from the political waves: Americans from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to Donald Trump, who vehemently disagreed on everything else, fully agreed that it was urgent to confront the People’s Republic of China, technologically as well as politically, within the United States, in Europe, and strategically across Asia and beyond. Within that consensus there were only stylistic differences, from Pelosi’s quiet assertion of the incompatibility of the regime with human rights anywhere on the planet to Trump’s truculent trade demands.  The break with the past is very sharp: from Nixon in 1972 to quite late in Obama’s presidency, the United States did much that accelerated China’s rise to wealth and power from the miserable poverty I saw everywhere in that country in 1976, while doing very little to oppose China, aside from resisting its claim to rule Taiwan. By August 2020, by contrast, the Administration and the Congress were competing in finding new ways of limiting Chinese power, from human rights’ legislation specifically related to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, to the compulsory sale of a China-based social media platform excessively popular with the young and exception-ally intrusive in its tracking.  With the Chinese navy engaged in threatening exercises off the coast of Taiwan even as the United States reiterated its promise of defending the island, all is set for rancor to explode in an armed clash. It is therefore urgent to try to understand what has happened, and why.  But to proceed one must first toss out any American-centered explanation of what has happened to US-China relations — of which there are many, from America’s hegemonic jealousy complete with ancient parallels (alas, no Thucydides Trust protects the brand) or American-white racial jealousy at the rise of the Han, or an American switch to geo-eco-nomics (the logic of conflict in the grammar of commerce) in response to the loss of plain economic primacy. The usual suspects blame the arms merchants and Pentagonal lobbies. The problem with all these accounts is that they monocausally attribute the new cold war, if that is what it is, to us. The reason why all American-centered explanations must be wrong as a matter of elementary logic is that relations between China and every other country remotely in its league (except Russia) have undergone exactly the same inversion, from amity to weary suspicion to increasingly vigorous defensive reactions, and it mostly happened on the same timetable or near enough. What we should be studying is not American behavior, but Chinese behavior. I will give four cases. I I was once engulfed in a Chinese wedding party in a vast Melbourne hotel whose inebriated celebrants noisily spilled out onto the main casino floor, handing out little boxes of assorted delicacies such as chicken feet to all and sundry, along  with cute little bottles filled with wolf-head kaoliang far more alcoholic than vodka. Suburban housewives turned from their slot machines to grimace comically at the chicken feet and  laughingly try the kaoliang, and everyone I saw at the hotel was just as indulgent with the invasion of tipsy Chinese that blocked the waiters and interrupted conversations at every table. My local friend, unbidden, explained the bonhomie: “They flew 5000 miles to hold their party in Australia and the least we can do is to be nice about it.”  In those days there was a lot of good feeling between Australia and China, as Australian exports to China rose every year to reach 30% of Australia’s total — and that 30% was also some 90% of the growth in total Australian exports. Not only were wedding parties warmly welcomed but also Chinese purchases of Australian firms, some in high-tech, as well as of Australian housing and land mostly unwanted by other foreign investors. Chinese tourists were also uniquely valuable, and not only because they accounted for much of the total growth in tourism but also because most other tourists were headed for the Great Barrier Reef, which was already under excessive pressure from tourist vessels, while the Chinese came for harmless