"China is Crushing the U.S. In This Economic War"

"China is Crushing the U.S. In This Economic War" -- that's the headline atop Sy Harding's provocative but sobering post in The Business Insider:

Over the last ten years China’s economy has surged past those of Canada, Spain, Brazil, Italy, France, and Germany, and is expected to pass Japan this year, to become the 2nd largest economy in the world, behind the U.S. 

Whether it’s manufacturing efficiency, high-speed rail-line technology, nuclear power plant construction, clean air energy technology, education, China is making impressive global inroads, even in areas where the U.S. still has significant dominance. Much of it has to do with China’s massive population, about which the U.S. can do nothing.

As Harding further observes, the Chinese have been making these strides while the US has devolved into endless partisan acrimony.   

But there's another dimension, too--and that's the military dimension.    As John Pomfret wrote in The Washington Post in June,  it's not hard to find evidence of deep suspicion of, and hostility to, America in the senior ranks of the Chinese military. Pomfret cited the words of 


Rear Adm. Guan Youfei of the People's Liberation Army:

Everything, Guan said, that is going right in U.S. relations with China is because of China. Everything, he continued, that is going wrong is the fault of the United States. Guan accused the United States of being a "hegemon" and of plotting to encircle China with strategic alliances. The official saved the bulk of his bile for U.S. arms sales to China's nemesis, Taiwan -- Guan said these prove that the United States views China as an enemy.

It's not hard to draw some ominous conclusions from that outburst.  

We might note that more than a century ago, Japan started to develop according to the slogan, 


Fukoku kyōhei,  富国強兵 which means, "enrich the country, strengthen the military."  We all know what happened in the first half of the 20th century.  But interestingly, the phrase originally comes from China.  And it certainly appears that the Chinese have reimported their slogan.  So we are seeing "enrich the country, strengthen the military," with Chinese characteristics.  

What's needed is the same thing for the US: "enrich the country, AND strengthen the military."