“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

In the midst of the potential dramatic changes in the worlds financial order decided to revisit a three part series on the history of China's interaction with the world since Europeans taking to the oceans for conquest. The saga covers ups and downs of 2 dynasties and modern Chinese governments.

China trade: what a 200-year crisis reveals Asia Times Dec 15, 2019

The Americans, who now dominate global trade, economics, and finance, took over from the British-Dutch, who took over from Spanish-Portuguese domination.

What is behind the crisis between China and America? There is the present face: the clash of interests and visions and fears between the two countries, chronicled in the press every day. But there is also a longer, almost existential aspect in all this – China’s difficulty escaping its own history in dealing with the rest of the world. This spelled disasters in the past. But to see this we have to go back some 450 years.
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The Ming

It was the beginning of the first real global trading system, in which Spain distributed goods from all over the world and bought them with American silver. The Spanish silver at that time saved the Ming economy. Industrial output of silk and porcelain boosted production and the economy at a time when China was approaching a fiscal crisis because taxes were not enough to pay for state expenditures. Silver soon replaced paper notes, the value of which had collapsed in the previous years. China’s economy changed structure: it exported and imported more from abroad.
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In fact, silver from Spain buoyed the Chinese economy for some 60 years. However, from around 1620 and most consequentially after the 1630s, Spain was drained of resources. Now involved in the long 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), it had been bled almost dry in the long conflict against England and Holland.

Therefore, Madrid halted the “smuggling” of silver. This meant in fact that Spain was no longer buying silk from China. At the same time, Japan also stopped trading with China in silver. Still China carried on buying from outside. Then, China’s silver supply dwindled. People started hoarding it to save their assets and this made silver even scarcer.
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There were peasant uprisings. Li Zicheng raided Beijing, the last Ming Emperor hanged himself in the Beihai Park and the Manchu were called in to support the Ming and crack down on the rebels. They did put down the rebels, but didn’t relinquish the power and established themselves as the new Qing empire.

The Qing

Some 200 years later, in the 1830s, China was by far the richest country in the world. At the time, the then rising power England was thirsty for Chinese tea. In London and other English cities, water was foul because of pollution – it had to be boiled first to be drinkable. But even boiled it had a foul taste. Adding tea leaves to the boiling water made it pleasantly drinkable for the first time. Tea leaves were then a must for England and rapidly developing countries in Europe.

Yet China, mindful of the memory of the Ming Dynasty, was exporting tea leaves but not importing anything from Europe. The result was that in the 1830s, China held about 70% of all global silver, and its economy was about one-third to one-half of the global GDP.
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In a way, the Qing tried to learn the lesson of the Ming. The lesson of the Ming was that you cannot trade freely with the outside world or else all your wealth will be drawn out. However, the Qing solution didn’t work either: You cannot simply be an exporter without being an importer because it puts you on the margins of global trade and engenders military hostility from the rest of the world. Neither solution worked.

Lessons for now

What is the solution that China now tries to propose to the world? China is a net exporter, and it holds the world’s largest share of foreign reserves, although not nearly on the scale of the silver reserves of the Qing dynasty.
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All three historical examples seem to have one thing in common: China is not trying to integrate itself into the global trading system; it’s trying to establish its own system against an existing system.

In search of an alternate Chinese system of trade Asia Times Dec 12, 2019

Since the discovery of America, and most importantly since the establishment of Manila and the upsurge in trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade in the 1570s, world trade and the global economy have been centered around America.

The Americans who now dominate global trade, economics and finance took over from the British-Dutch, who took over from Spanish-Portuguese domination.The present trade system is the progressive accumulation of centuries’ worth of experience, knowhow and rules that have been increasingly accepted by most of the world.
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China needs a global view that is accepted and welcomed by the rest of the world. This global view actually already exists. China can try to challenge and replace it with its own view, the way the Soviets tried with Communism, or it can accept the existing global view. The first choice of course would put China directly in contrast with the existing world, even without its openly stating so.
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It was on a philosophical basis, the culmination of a few centuries of philosophical debate in ancient Greece, that Aristotle concluded that knowledge should be separated between, on the one hand, physics and, on the other hand, meta-physics – what is beyond the reality.

That separation was of seminal importance for Western thought as it set thinking about reality apart from thinking about religion. From reality-focused thinking came a very logical and straightforward, formal way of thinking that gave rise ultimately to logic, mathematics and technological applications derived from them. Metaphysics meanwhile became more and more removed from physics and its laws.

China trade: Blame Zhuangzi Asia Times Dec 18, 2019

Philosophically, early China also developed a system of logic that we could consider similar to the one developed by the Greeks. It appears, for instance, in Mo Jing, but the early development of logic was shattered by the philosophical push of Zhuangzi, who managed through logic to defeat logic. Zhuangzi’s victory may have also been helped by the rulers of the time, who were trying to concentrate power more efficiently and build more competitive states to ultimately annihilate their enemies and emerge as the sole power in the central plains of what it is now China.

The crucial passage is here, from The Floods of Autumn:

“Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking on the bank overlooking the river Hao, when the former said, ‘These fishes come out, and play about at their ease – that is the enjoyment of fishes.’ The other said, ‘You are not a fish; how do you know what is the enjoyment of fishes?’ Zhuangzi rejoined, ‘You are not I. How do you know that I do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’

“Huizi said, ‘I am not you; and though indeed I do not fully know you, you certainly are not a fish, and it is proven that you don’t know what constitutes the happiness of fishes.’ Zhuangzi replied, ‘Let us keep to your original question. You said to me, “How do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?” You knew that I knew it, and you asked me – well, I know it, right here, above the Hao.’”

Zhuangzi’s philosophy defeated the development of logic and created a slanted, not-level playing field in which those who were able to intuit and sense reality were better off than those who were not. This was unlike logic, mathematics and what we call science, in which the process is clear and everybody can see it provided they know some basics.

Intuition is more mysterious, and the senses are thinly defined. Some have it, and some don’t. Some sense the happiness of animals, like Zhuangzi; some really don’t, like Huizi.
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All of this, of course had very important consequences. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when Europe was fed up with religion and the absolute power that derived from religion, it had started to import from China a system of selection of meritorious administrators.

At the same time, having increased industrial production and systematic spread of technological knowledge, it relied more heavily on science, and rules created through science, which was considered above the rulers. These were rules that everybody could see, judge, and openly improve – and they were in contrast to the murky rules linking religion and power.
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In China, one element needed in order to realize that danger and the way to avoid it is a deep understanding of the drama that has followed the country for almost half a millennium. Beyond the economy, beyond strategic or technological crises, what’s needed is the ability to intuit that the old way of seeing and knowing things doesn’t work and cannot work.

My search did not show US media reporting this week China stating NATO should have been disbanded in the 1990's.

China blames US, NATO growth for Ukraine war The New Indian Express April 1, 2022

BEIJING: China is accusing the United States of instigating the war in Ukraine and says NATO should have been disbanded following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

“As the culprit and leading instigator of the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has led NATO to engage in five rounds of eastward expansion in the last two decades after 1999,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a daily briefing Friday.

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