T U E S D A Y , J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 0 5China Or Japan -- What's The Difference?by Michael in New York on 6/28/2005 01:30:00 PMPaul Krugman weighs in on the debate over China buying upmajor players in our economy like Maytag and Unocal.Krugman compares it to Japan's buying frenzy of the 80s andthe xenophobic reaction to that.</p><p> Japan wasn't a big deal, hesays, because they were dumb and made bad purchases likeRockefeller Center and movie studios and lost lots of money.China seems much smarter, says Krugman, and therefore moredangerous.Talk about no moral compass.</p><p> Japan is a major ally and astable democracy for decades.</p><p> Mutual investments between usand Japan and England and Canada and our other allies is goodand stabilizing.</p><p> Fear of Japan was stupid fear of foreigners andnothing more.</p><p> But China, Mr.</p><p> Krugman, is a totalitariangovernment that brutally suppresses its own people.</p><p> We arenot at war with them, but the Chinese government is theenemy of freedom and decency.</p><p> And when a country like thatgains a strategic advantage in our economy and especially ourenergy industry, it is of concern.The people who can't tell the difference between China andJapan are the same people who can't tell the differencebetween Uzbekistan and France or Germany and Pakistan.NOTE: Krugman does indeed believe China's purchase could bedangerous for our energy policy and national security.</p><p> I washighlighting a secondary point of his that I thought was ratherbizarre.</p><p> In the 80s, the far right yelled and screamed that"foreigners," ie. the Japanese, were buying up our country.They were especially scandalized that the Japs would buyRockefeller Center and one of our major movie studios fromCoca-Cola.</p><p> I always thought that was narrow-minded racism,especially since everyone knew that Canada and Great Britianand Australia also had huge chunks of investment in the UScomparable to if not larger than Japan's (at the time) and wehad big investments in their countries.</p><p> But these created nohysteria because they looked like us.</p><p> The Japs were anotherthing altogether.Krugman referenced that hysteria and said Japan's investmentsdidn't matter simply because they wasted their money andmade bad choices and basically handed over lots of dough andpropped up our economy with little to show in return.</p><p> Theimplication was that if Japan HAD made savvier investments,that it WOULD have been dangerous, just as he says China'sinvestments today are now dangerous.</p><p> I think that's absurd.Interdependent investments among stable democracies like theUS and Canada and Great Britain and Germany and Franceand, yes, Japan are NOT a threat.</p><p> Krugman is lumping in Japanwith China and saying if the Japanese hadn't been so dimwittedthat the far right's cries of hysteria over "foreigners" wouldhave been justified.We've got growing trade with India? Great.</p><p> A major corporationin that country takes a majority stake in a major US company?Fine and dandy.</p><p> A totalitarian country invests in a strageticresource of this country? 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