Choosing Movies with China

My girlfriend and I have a simple system for choosing movies, since many -- ok, most -- of the movies we each want to see fall, to put it in terms of a Venn diagram, outside the area of overlapping circles of our respective strong interest. We alternate choices (who gets to pick), while maintaining some concern for each other's sanity by staying within some bounds (e.g., no, I wasn't going to see Sex & The City even if it was her pick, nor would she even think of suggesting I had that obligation per our system). 

But there is one twist to our system: "neutrals" -- movies that we both want to see. These don't count as the person whose turn it is using up their turn (he/she still gets to pick the next movie). And there's the rub. ok, it's not really a problem for us because we trust each other to be honest and reasonably objective. But the "neutral" element does present a sort of moral hazard, or at least would if we each had the goal of serving our own individual interest even at the expense of the other's, because, for a movie that one of us expresses a desire to see, the other has an incentive (from a purely selfish standpoint) to claim not to want to see that movie, so that it would count as the former's pick (and use up his/her turn) rather than as a "neutral". So when I see a preview of some movie about politics or war or boxing or something else I know she doesn't want to see (and she knows I know), I jokingly whisper to her, "That's a good 'neutral' ".
 
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China...er, I mean, with China? Well, although I'm certainly not going to claim that U.S. foreign policy is generally altruistic and anything close to completely unselfish (yes, we support some awful regimes so we can get their resources at reasonable cost -- lookin' at you House of Saud), the foreign and domestic policies of the Chinese government seem to have no moral constraint whatsoever on the pursuite of self-interest.
 
A quick list (not exhaustive) of components of Chinese foreign policy:
  • Enabling years-long genocide in Darfur and brutal oppression and denial of democracy in Burma.
  • Maintaining a constant, doomsday threat toward Taiwan if Taiwan should dare to declare itself to be what it is, and independent, sovereign nation.
  • Refusing to really pressure North Korea and Iran to halt development of nuclear weapons capability, and obstructing our efforts to do so.
  • Denying it's own citizens democracy and human rights.
  • Denying at least autonomy to Tibet (and pressuring other nations to shun the Dalai Lama).
Are China's leaders so selfish, in a personal sense and perhaps also on behalf of their people at the expense of others, that they have no interest -- feel no pressure of conscience -- to do the right thing on some or all of the above? Maybe. Or maybe they just know that doing the right thing is something they can "sell" if they withhold it, if they resist doing the right thing for its own sake, because the U.S. and others want so much to get China to do the right thing that we will count any such positive moves as bargaining chips that we are willing to redeem with concessions on one of the other issues above or on other issues related to our relationship with China -- Hey Chinese leaders, if yould be kind enough to ease back a bit on your robust, unconditional support of the persistently genocidal regime in Khartoum, we'll shut up about your denial of democracy and human rights to your own (1.3 billion) people, or maybe we'll complain a bit less about your management of your currency or rampant intellectual property rights violations.
 
The moral of the story is that, as a person or as a national government, you can choose to do the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do, but if instead you resist doing the right thing, you can use it as leverage to extract concessions from others and gain at their expense. Of course, the latter makes you an a**hole.
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Submitted by B Rational on Mon, 2009-04-06 18:35
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