The (Coming?) Conservative Divide on China

JW Mason makes the point that rising Chinese wages are bad for Western capital heavily invested in China. I would extend this a bit by noting that the heavy Western investment in China should generate some interesting politics in the United States. However much neoconservatives and related militarists may be salivating over the threat of Chinese military growth, a substantial portion of what normally constitutes the US right would suffer greatly from any kind of military conflict with China. China presents a significantly different problem set for a right wing coalition than did the Soviet Union. The US had a very minimal economic relationship with the USSR, and Soviet ideology was seen as posing a threat to US global economic interests. This made a (bipartisan) alliance between militarists and US commercial interests both plausible and productive.

In the case of China there are certainly some grounds for commercial competition, but by and large they aren’t ideological. As long as the militarists are confined to doing nothing more than growling at China, things could work out. However, if the situation deteriorates to the extent that US investments within China (and by this I mean not simply FDI, but a wider range of economic relationships involving US capital and actors with the PRC) are endangered, a fracas could emerge within the GOP.