Thank you mochiko, for further elucidation and the tie into to Russian policy. I do know that we are all just guessing at what trump will do. Maybe he will prove us all wrong. I am not hopeful but I am definitely hoping.mochiko42|1478823631|4096633 said:Chrono|1478804265|4096452 said:
Thanks Chrono, azstonie, LLJsmom. I guess the past few days have given us all much food for thought.
I would only add the caveat that most of what I posted is skewed by my individual perspective as someone who has studied / has an interest in political science and international affairs and who also has spent time & has close family in the US. So maybe I overanalyze a little!!
For your average person over here, Trump is a political unknown while Clinton is generally not very well liked. Most just see Trump as the business man / celebrity from the Apprentice, and they think that's entertaining. On the news last night they interviewed some people in the street here. Most did not know Trump very well and said , 'oh he's that businessman/celebrity, so he will have a practical business minded approach'. Whereas, on the flip side, Hillary Clinton is a known 'meddler' due to her decades of pushing China on human rights issues and diplomatic issues (and they held the Clinton Global Initiative conference in Hong Kong a few years back which involved NGOs, nonprofits and other groups which the Chinese government finds suspect).
Chinese leaders are not elected (partly why they can afford to be less worried about the ramification of any tariff because they are not directly answerable to the voters), but there is a leadership shuffle every 10 years at the Chinese Communist Party. The current leader Xi Jinping has spent a lot of effort in the past 9 years laying the bricks for his vision of modern China, and if American society is in turmoil (which it already seems to be: http://qz.com/833607/us-election-a-rash-of-racist-attacks-have-broken-out-in-the-us-after-donald-trumps-victory/) during the next Chinese leadership change (which will happen next year in 2017) then all the better.
Xi has promoted an increasingly intolerant & authoritarian policy that will brook no dissent (the recent Charities Law that was passed earlier this year, and the proposed Foreign NGO/nonprofit law, and now the new Cybersecurity Law which has made online anonymity illegal). If America swings closer to China's way of running a country, then it lends validation and tacit endorsement of the Chinese model, which China has been actively pushing to other countries that accept foreign aid as a less patronizing alternative to the Washington Consensus traditionally promoted by Western-dominated int'l agencies (IMF, WB, US Treasury etc).
To be honest, the values and raison d'etre that America traditionally believes in are very different to that of China and Russia, so when both the leadership of these two countries are happy about the outcome of the US election, that suggests something about the way the US is headed for the next 4 years.
Pulling a few interesting quotes from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/for-china-trump-s-style-brings-optimism-even-as-rhetoric-bites
“I see Sino-U.S. relations have a greater chance of thriving under the Trump presidency," said Ruan Zongze, an envoy at China’s Embassy in Washington between 2007 and 2011. “Trump is a businessman, and China likes dealing with businessmen as they are pragmatic and not ideologically bent. A businessman is capable of making possible what would otherwise be impossible from the standpoint of a pure politician.”
Michael Pillsbury, an adviser to Trump’s transition team who served as a defense official in the Reagan administration, said while the president-elect wants to strengthen the U.S. military, his main concern would be the economy rather than the movements of the People’s Liberation Army.
“Trump is not a traditional Republican conservative in the sense of the military challenge from China,” said Pillsbury, who is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. “He’s said very little about the PLA, China’s plans in space, the South China Sea: he’s focused more on American jobs.”
“In any other year, the Chinese would recognize they have much more to lose, given unbalanced market access, and be restrained,” he said. “But it’s a Party Congress year and nationalism may be stoked.”
“Trump doesn’t have a China policy,” Schell said. “Anything is likely with him, because he is not so much an ideologue as an opportunist. And this actually is something that the Chinese leaders understand.”
“We don’t really buy all that he said during the campaign,” said Ma, who sits on the public diplomacy advisory council of China’s foreign ministry. “Lots of lip service and hot air. Who knows what he believes? Perhaps he himself doesn’t know either.”
From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/world/asia/trump-president-asia-china-japan.html::::
Some economic advisers to the Chinese government were skeptical that Mr. Trump would follow through with drastic action that could prompt a trade war. After all, they said, American presidential candidates have been promising to get tough on Chinese trade policies for more than two decades and have invariably backed off after taking office.
“Nobody takes the electioneering that seriously,” said Andrew Sheng, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission who advises the Chinese government on financial policy. “People accept that the American consumers benefit so much from trade that it won’t change that much.”
Yu Yongding, a prominent economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, also had doubts. “All the things he said during the election were the talk of an amateur — I don’t think he was in earnest,” he said. “After he becomes president, there’ll be advisers at his side to explain to him what the exchange rate is, what capital flows are, what macroeconomic policy is.”
Maybe he will decrease the commitment to Pacific security issues,” said Shin Kawashima, a professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo. “But if he carries out such a policy, China will be much more authoritative and aggressive in the Pacific. And then most of the alliance countries and security experts in Washington will be against Trump’s policies. It is a little difficult for Trump to just change all the old policies.”
luckystar112|1478827550|4096677 said:Hi guys! I'm sure none of you will remember me...like so many other girls I basically just disappeared after I got married. lol.
I don't know...I've just been thinking so much about this election lately that I felt inspired to come here to see what some of you girls were saying about it. Like so many of you, I am not at all happy. I feel trapped, hopeless, and a bit scared for our future. I'm really just shocked that we allowed this to happen.
But above everything, I just feel so sad about Obama leaving.
It's funny because I was super active on these forums during the 2008 election, and I was 100% vehemently against Obama. Does Thing_2 still post here? I remember going back and forth with her about it quite a few times. I'm actually quite embarrassed by those posts. Hopefully they disappeared with the old forum.
But man, what a president. He was classy to the end. Always respectful, full of charisma, and actually gave a rat'sabout us. Even if you disagreed with this policies you had to respect his thought process. He had such a great way of making you understand his end goal. As time went on I found myself more and more appreciative of him as a man and as a leader. My heart broke every time he tried to make our country a tiny bit better and congress wouldn't let him. Or every time he had to give yet another speech after a mass shooting that fell on deaf ears. He gave it his all. I don't think we would have been so lucky to have that with either candidate this time around.
Someone over on Reddit posted this album of his presidency over the last 8 years, and I looked through it like
As for Trump...I don't know. I can't see myself having such a strong shift in political ideology again, and honestly--I don't want to. I don't like the person I was then. I don't want to have anything to do with that sort of thinking. So that's where I'm at now. I feel like we took a giant leap forward and now we'll be dragged a few steps back. I'm about to go off and read that other post about what we can do to fix this in a couple years, because I don't know about you--but I feel more fired up for "Hope" and "Change" than ever before.
Anyway, I thought I'd stop in and give my two cents.
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