With last week’s resolution of the standoff with China, U.S.-Sino relations again will be put under the microscope. Hardliners on Capitol Hill, angered and emboldened by the incident, will oppose renewal of trade privileges for China (not a pleasant prospect for the wireless industry); support advanced arms sales to Taiwan; and oppose China’s bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Others see the dustup as an unfortunate bump in the road, one unworthy of jeopardizing a long-term relationship that is key to both sides for economic and geopolitical reasons.
President Bush got an earful from all sides, and all things considered, handled the matter in masterful diplomatic fashion. But the return of the 24 U.S. servicemen and women is not the end of the story. In fact, for Bush and future administrations, it is an eye-opening prologue to a future of networked nations that will deal with each other in a borderless global economy that will reduce even the mightiest of armed countries to interdependence.
In that world, information will leverage everything: education, health care, economic growth and, perhaps most importantly, democracy-even in repressive regimes with huge emerging markets, like Communist China. Isolationism is no longer an option, and engagement is a given. Today, bits of information-some carried by wireless technologies-flow relentlessly between nations that may not even officially recognize each other.
As such, any talk of trade retaliation against China-as political payback-is foolhardy.
It’s in the United States’ long-term interest to ensure that as many pagers, mobile phones, computers, routers and servers as possible make it into China. Indeed, if it really wants to stick it to China and show the Asian giant it means business, America should flood the land of 1.3 billion people with complementary prepaid cards for mobile-phone and Internet service. No doubt, China will continue to try to control information proliferation. But it won’t catch everything.
“Control over information will slowly shift from the state to networked citizens, and virtual public spaces will allow many to communicate at once,” Nina Hachigian, a senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, wrote recently. “The Internet’s ability to provide a flood of new ideas makes it the most formidable challenge yet to a key source of power, once practiced by Chinese governments for centuries: the power to shape public opinion in a way that leads citizens to accept the CCP’s political legitimacy.”
Prepaid diplomacy may be the way to go.
