Final Reflection

One thing that was on my mind going into this trip was the question of whether the US and China can avoid Thucydides Trap. This term refers to the situation when one super-power is threatened by a rising challenger and is a reference to Thucydides’ writings on the Peloponnesian War. It is through this lens that China is often described in the News, on either side of the political spectrum. Given this growing rivalry, I was interested to see what this “other system” is like.

Beijing was the first city we visited, and also the first place where I got to see this other system in full force. I was surprised to find that at Tiananmen Square, even though we were so close to the political center of chinese power, the guards and security didn’t carry any guns. This was the opposite of my experience of visiting the White House where I saw the most visibly well armed security of any place I’ve been. From talking to people, I concluded this was due to the fact that the police is not that powerful in China and all the physical might is held within the military, hence the police is very lightly armed. This helps to explain the contrast between lightly armoured police and the massive military parades held in China. Tiananmen Square was also very interesting when thinking about all the history that has taken place there, from the May Fourth Movement to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While every country has its own ugly history, here we see a divergence from the approach in the US. While our government certainly doesn’t take responsibility for everything it should, the population has more than enough tools at its fingertips to learn about these events and form their own opinions. This broader trend of informational freedom would continue across the trip.

The second place where I was really excited to see the chinese system was in Shanghai. As the financial capital of China, I was excited to see how it compared to New York, where I’ll be spending my summer. The first thing I noticed was how few people I saw out and about around their financial district. While this may have been due to bad timing on my part, the impression I got was that the heavy government involvement in markets reduced the importance of a place like a financial district. This is very different from the US where markets are more or less allowed to run wild. The most interesting experience I had in Shanghai was, however, talking to the hostess of a tea house. We discussed the trade war as they were interested to learn the american perspective on it which is not covered by chinese press. The main takeaway I had from the conversation is that the broader chinese perspective on the trade wars bases on the belief that China should not be expected to behave like a developed economy.

This question of whether or not to treat China as a developed economy and country will be the one which determines a lot of the interactions between the US and China. While I tried to answer this question on my own, I couldn’t come to a good conclusion. China is a massive country and so branding it in its entirety is hard, especially when its populous to include a number of developed countries, and poor countries within its borders, and at the end of the day much of the human experience is shared no matter what country you live in. I would love to have been able to have come to a nice clean conclusion on this topic, but there really isn’t one. I just hope that both the US and China do their best to avoid Thucydides Trap.