“GORKY” PUBLISHED A REVIEW ON STEPHEN ROACH’S BOOK “UNBALANCED: THE CODEPENDENCY OF AMERICA AND CHINA” ISSUED BY THE GAIDAR INSTITUTE’S PUBLISHING HOUSE
The relations between the US and China have become strained of late though the longstanding partnership between these two countries used to expand just recently. In his book “Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China” issued by the Gaidar Institute Publishers, economist Stephen Roach deals with the factors behind that crisis and its implications.
The Russian edition was published last year, while the first English-language edition came out in 2014; the book has been updated and reprinted since then, in particular, when Donald Trump became the US President (Stephen Roach wrote the Introduction to the Russian edition in January 2017). This very fact is evidence of the existence of a deep-rooted problem in the relations between the two countries which entered the painful stage not in 2020 or even 2019.
The author of the book shows how the US and China entered into a marriage of convenience forty years ago when the Americans started to invest little by little in the Chinese economy, including by way of relocation of their enterprises to China, in order to consume in an uncontained way goods made in China. According to Stephen Roach’s definition, the two countries have become the End Producer and the End Customer; both the countries were consistently developing those relations by promoting them to a new level. Having bought a vast volume of the US Treasury securities, China has become an important factor behind the domestic financial and economic situation in the US.
However, too close relations, as it often happens in any relations starting from the personal ones, give rise to numerous problems. According to Stephen Roach, China and the US are not only friends and partners, they have become the twins, to be precise the Siamese twins. It is known there is an entwinement between ordinary twins at the psychological and physical level. The more so, with the Siamese twins this entwinement is more powerful and stronger; they both run fever and shiver together, especially, if they were “sewed together” at the age of reason and each had its own bunch of diseases.
One can read the full text of the review here.
The author of the book shows how the US and China entered into a marriage of convenience forty years ago when the Americans started to invest little by little in the Chinese economy, including by way of relocation of their enterprises to China, in order to consume in an uncontained way goods made in China. According to Stephen Roach’s definition, the two countries have become the End Producer and the End Customer; both the countries were consistently developing those relations by promoting them to a new level. Having bought a vast volume of the US Treasury securities, China has become an important factor behind the domestic financial and economic situation in the US.
However, too close relations, as it often happens in any relations starting from the personal ones, give rise to numerous problems. According to Stephen Roach, China and the US are not only friends and partners, they have become the twins, to be precise the Siamese twins. It is known there is an entwinement between ordinary twins at the psychological and physical level. The more so, with the Siamese twins this entwinement is more powerful and stronger; they both run fever and shiver together, especially, if they were “sewed together” at the age of reason and each had its own bunch of diseases.
One can read the full text of the review here.