www.aiddata.org/china

This was an era in which World Bank economists were claiming that if you could just build a middle class in Russia that would inevitably produce liberal democracy, because formal model. It was a weird, weird time.

I mean sure, but the difference between $10 trillion and $18 trillion nominal is huge, particularly when we think about the combined nominal of the EU or of the G7. GDP (nominal or PPP) is crude, but it gives us some idea of mobilization capacity and the amount of $$ you can throw around overseas.

The 1990s saw a lot of convergence on ODA conditionality among the G7, so I don't think it's *quite* so implausible if the US had gotten really serious about it. But TBC: I'm trying to imagine the biggest delta, and it's certainly not "stopping China's rise."

The "convergence wager" discussed up-thread *is* the argument employed against these concerns, and it was a big deal in the 1990s, insofar as elites repeated it and seemed to believe it.

Sure, again we're talking about a (almost impossibly large) set of counterfactuals. So I'm trying to imagine what it would look like to build a coalition that limits Chinese growth by the mid-1990s. It wouldn't be "geopolitical," so it'd have to be on HR grounds.

If you reduce annual growth in China by 2-3% over 30 years that's a huge difference in relative power. Again, it's not "stopping China's rise" but it does markedly change the current global landscape.

Was some of that instrumental, i.e., a way of supercharging sectoral and union opposition to MFN? Sure. But it was a politically powerful objection -- remember, we're right only a few years out from Tiananmen and there's a lot of focus on CCP practices.

That's why I emphasize human rights, which was a big part of the debate prior to Clinton's decision to extend MFN to China.

So China still would've risen, but maybe not by as much and not by as much relative to other developing countries?

My gut instinct is that it could've shaved a few percentage points off the growth rate, which would have been distributed toward different countries w/ high K/L ratios; China might have soaked up less IP. Depends on how the U.S. pushed the rest of the industrialized democracies on Chinese HR abuses.

So the "but" was directed upthread?

You mean "and" not "but" I think

It seemed like this was where U.S. policy was going before 9/11.

VOID! VOID! VOID! VOID!

"I have been on two humanitarian-esque missions with the guard, which were awesome, doing the things you see on the commercial, helping these communities," says J. "And then you want me to go pick up trash and dissuade homeless people in D.C. at gunpoint. Like, no dude.“

* In case you're wondering, many South Africans follow US politics with intense morbid curiosity, has do hundreds of millions of people all over the world. They have to. We're a powerful empire in decline and all the more dangerous for that very reason.