轩辕传奇神石低配图:美惊呼：美国的命运笼罩在中国的霸权主义阴影之下

美国的命运笼罩在中国的霸权主义阴影之下
America's Fate Under Chinese Hegemony: A Review of Eamonn Fingleton's Jaws of the Dragon

正文:
The news has recently hit the press that China's economy, measured on the purchasing-power basis that adjusts for price differences between nations, may surpass the U.S. in only another five years or so.

最近有新闻对大众报道说, 中国的经济，如果以在考量国与国之间价格差异为前提，以购买力为衡量标准，或许将在下个五年超越美国

Surprisingly, China has still shown no signs of morphing into the cuddly liberal and democratic nation,devoted to American ways from Coca-Cola to democracy, whose eventual appearance has been assumed by American policy for thirty years now.

令人惊讶的是，中国仍然没有丝毫向民主国家演变的迹象。从美国的可口可乐公司就可以看出美国政府一贯致力于民主进程的推广（美国可口可乐公司把原汁运送到其他国家，兑水后就能变成产品销售），而且该民主推广政策已经维持了30年。

Our policy during this period has, after all, enthusiastically cooperated with China's efforts to build up its economic power--which entails,of course, every other kind of power, including the military kind. So our assumption of a benign China had better be right, or else we have been abetting the creation of a monster. A hostile China will be arguably even worse than the USSR, because it will not do us the favor of sabotaging its economy by adhering to a dysfunctional economic ideology.

在这段时期内，我们的政策积极的配合了中国经济力量的建设，当然也包括其他力量，例如中国的军事力量。因此，我们设想中国是一个比较温和的国家，否则，在舆论的影响下中国早就变成了一个怪物。苏联曾经是我们的敌人，但中国可能有过之而无不及，因为它永远也不会允许我们去干预它的经济发展。

The above realities are the subject of Eamonn Fingleton's book In The Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate Under Chinese Hegemony. Fingleton is a Tokyo-based Irish journalist who has lived in East Asia for over 25 years, and he has a long and distinguished record of telling truths about the region's politics and economics that the establishment (on both sides of the Pacific!) would rather the public did not learn. This is one of those books that one wishes the President would read.

以上所述的就是埃蒙-芬格尔顿《在巨龙的咽喉之下》一书中的一些内容：美国的命运在笼罩在中国霸权主义的阴影之下。芬格尔顿是一名常驻于东京的爱尔兰新闻工作者，并且在东亚地区已经生活了25年之久，他在政治和金融界的新闻报导工作中享有很高的声誉。这是唯一一本我希望美国总统能抽出时间来看的书。

While it is hardly news that America is facing a Chinese challenge, the seriousness of this challenge is still poorly appreciated. For example--this was my big takeaway from the book--China is not just another despotism. It is the implementer of a systematic and sophisticated political philosophy, which Fingleton calls Confucianism, which will almost certainly constitute a serious threat to liberal democracy in the years ahead.

当然，我不愿意看到美国正面临着中国的挑战，但问题的严重性在于很多人还没有意识到这种挑战的存在。举个例子，从这本书我意识到，中国不仅仅是一个独裁国家，而且还是这种独裁政治体制富有经验的制订者和实施者。芬格尔顿所说的儒家思想，将来很有可能会对西方自由民主体制构成威胁。

Confucianism, as the reader may recall from a comparative religions class taken long ago, is the political philosophy derived from the ancient Chinese sage Confucius. It was the official ideology of the state in Imperial China for thousands of years.

说道儒家思想，也许读者们依稀还能记得很久以前学过的“比较宗教学”。这种儒家思想起源于中国古代的一位圣人孔夫子，这种意识形态已经存在于中国帝制长达几千年之久。

Now Confucius wasn't a bad man, but he did base his political philosophy on taking authoritarian government as a given and trying to civilize it. He did not, as Western political thinkers since the dawn of democracy in Ancient Greece have done, base his political ideology on trying to prevent despotism in the first place. As a result, he simply wasn't that interested in concepts like individual freedom or limited government.

我并不否认孔夫子是一位圣人，他把他的毕生学术所得献给了当时的统治阶级，试图以此来引导他们变的更加文明。但是他没有借鉴西方思想家有史以来在古希腊所获得的成功。他的政治意识形态只是为了维护当时统治阶级的封建独裁统治。看起来他对自由开放的民主思想丝毫不感兴趣。

The bottom line, after a few thousand years of history and some astonishing ideological twists and turns, is an approach to politics that is systematically opposite to liberal democracy.

经过几千年的历史积累和惊人的思想转变之后，他们已经学会了有系统的来反对自由民主体制。

It is the velvet glove on the iron fist, and increasingly a very sophisticated one. It has tamed capitalism and mastered modern media. It is not headed for collapse or metamorphosis any time soon. If anything, it is currently more successful at imposing its will on us than we are at the reverse.

他们外柔内刚，而且手段运用地越来越驾轻就熟。他们让资本主义制度变的毫无脾气可言，而且他们还控制了一些现在的主流媒体。当然，他们的目的不是为了推翻资本主义制度。就现在来看，他们比我们更成功更具有活力。这让我们怀疑我们目前的政治体制是不是已经落后了。

To be fair to poor old Confucius, the political system of contemporary China is not a direct extrapolation of any blueprint he drew up, and its flaws should not blind humanity to the genuinely civilizing aspects of his teachings (which are real). But, as Fingleton shows in considerable detail, a Confucian mentality underlies the politics of not only China, but also, in a soft-authoritarian version that has mastered the surface rituals of democracy, the politics of neighboring nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

从公平的角度来说，我真的为孔子感到惋惜。中国目前的政治体制已经不以孔子所规划的蓝图为基础了。而孔子的儒家思想的缺陷就在于不应该盲目地，教条主义地引导人类走向文明。但是正如芬格尔顿所提出的一些重点，以儒家思想为基础的政治体制不仅仅只存在于中国，一些表面上看起来很民主，但其实是变相地，相对温和的独裁政府也一直存在，诸如中国周边的日本，韩国和新加坡。

Make no mistake: East Asia is on a fundamentally different civilizational track than the U.S., and it isn't going to get off any time soon. And why should it, when East Asians are currently watching America decline?

保守中庸：东亚文明的发展轨迹和美国是截然不同的。但这并不意味这种文明就应该退出历史舞台。也许这就是东亚人只是在静静的看着美国衰退的原因吧。

If the U.S. had not chosen, by its unconditional embrace of economic globalization by means of (one way) free trade, to render itself vulnerable to China, the above might not matter very much. After all, for most of its long history, China has maintained a civilization upon principles very different from those of the West, and it didn't do us much harm.

由于无条件的接受全球经济自由和贸易一体化，美国别无选择，这导致了美国很容易遭受中国的侵害。上面说的看起来或许不是很重要，毕竟，由于有着悠久的历史，中国维持自己文明的方式与西方有很大不同，而且看起来对我们并没有什么威胁。

Unfortunately, the U.S. has, in fact, chosen the opposite course, with the result that our own government is increasingly slipping under the control of an ethically alien and geopolitically hostile power.

不幸的是，美国作出了一个错误的选择，其结果就是我们的政府在一个我们永远也无法猜透的敌对强国控制下变得越来越弱不禁风。

To take just the most obvious example: because political bribery is, by way of political action committees, essentially legal in the U.S., Beijing can manipulate the U.S. Congress and the presidency almost at will. Why? Because it can manipulate the profits of the Fortune 500 companies that do business in China, and they do its bidding as lobbyists here. Because they are still headquartered in the U.S., they find welcome on Capitol Hill, but it is Beijing that is calling the shots.

举一些很明显的例子：通过对美国政治委员会的政治贿赂，北京可以操控美国国会甚至总统。为什么北京要这么做？因为他可以操纵世界财富500强的公司跟中国做生意，为中国的利益服务。这些公司的总部设在美国，他们接受美国国会的保护，但他们只听命于中国。

Americans sometimes puzzle over why their government doesn't "get" the Chinese threat. The answer is simple: because it has been bribed not to by China.

美国人有时候会感到很困惑，为什么他们的政府感受不到来自中国的威胁。答案很简单，因为他们已经被收买了。

The most important issue on which our government has been bribed is, of course, trade. China runs astronomical trade surpluses with the U.S. In fact, a majority of our trade deficit is now with China. This is no accident: it is the product of China's aggressive embrace of predatory mercantilism plus America's government being bribed not to take defensive measures.

最重要一条是，我们的政府一直在接受贿赂，当然，只是在贸易方面。事实上，中国天文数字般的贸易盈余都和美国有关，而美国多数的贸易赤字也都和中国有关。这绝不是偶然的，

这是中国重商主义的掠夺，侵略和美国政府被贿赂后的不作为所造成的。

To find an historical parallel, one would probably have to go back to something like the suicide of the old Polish state in the 18th century, carved up by its adversaries after its domestic politics was paralyzed by foreign bribery.

相类似的情况，可能要追溯到18世纪的波兰，当时的政府由于接受了来自国外的政治贿赂而导致整个波兰被敌对势力瓜分。

America's defense against Chinese mercantilism is further sabotaged by the fact that, despite our using similar policies earlier in our own history, mainstream American economists are largely blind to the fact that mercantilism even works. Trapped in the same "free" market thinking that led to the 2008 financial crisis, they don't believe that China's policies can possibly be a winning move for that country.An economy that has gone from peasant agriculture to superpower in 30 years doesn't seem to persuade them.

美国对中国重商主义的防御措施进一步被现实所破坏，我们无视历届政府早先用过的类似政策，大部分美国主流经济学者无视重商主义的危害。由于陷入了所谓的自由贸易市场的错误思想导致了2008年巨大的金融危机。美国人不相信中国的政策法规会为中国带来巨大的进步。30年来，中国已经从一个农业国家逐渐向一个全方位的超级大国转变，这难道还不具有说服力吗？

Why are China's economic policies so effective? The aggressive pursuit of exports is a game other nations, like Germany and Japan, also play well. But these are both medium-sized high-wage nations that are already developed, not gigantic low-wage nations still on the early stage of their development path. (China is an economic superpower because it has so many workers, but their per capita output still only qualifies China as a middle-income nation globally, behind nations like Jamaica.)

为什么中国出台的政策法规会如此有效？具有侵略性的商品出口就像一场游戏，像德国和日本也很善于玩这场游戏。在规模上来看，德国和日本都只能属于中型国家，而且是属于那种高薪水收入的发达国家，而不是那种还处于初级发展阶段的大规模低薪水收入的国家。（中国是一个经济大国，但是他的人均收入在全球范围内还只能处于中等的水平，甚至还排在牙买加的后面。）

China is unique because it combines standard-issue (if exceptionally cynical) mercantilism with other policies, like forced savings and systematic technology acquisition, made possible by its despotic ex-Marxist political system. For example, it has, by deliberate state fiat, a savings rate close to 50%, while America's is close to zero. This gives China a tidal wave of investment capital to put into everything from factories to freeways. (It is also enabling China to accumulate ownership of American government securities and private-sector assets.)

中国是独一无二的，因为他把重商主义和其他一些政策相结合，例如强迫储蓄和有系统有计划的获取技术资源，这些都出自于他的马克思主义政治体系。举个例子，通过中国政府深思熟虑后所颁布的法令，当美国的储蓄率几乎接近于0的时候，中国的储蓄率已经接近50%了。从工厂到高速公路，中国掀起了资本投资的巨大浪潮。（这也使中国有机会掌握了一部分美国国债和一些私人资产的所有权。）

Japan never took over the world, so some people dismiss the Chinese threat as yet another big wolf-cry. But China has ten times Japan's population, nuclear weapons, and a hard-authoritarian rather than soft-authoritarian political system. This time, it's different.

日本永远也不会有能力来接管这个世界，所以有些人认为中国的威胁只是另一个狼来了的故事。但是中国有十倍于日本的人口，拥有核武器。这次，真的不同于以往。

Beijing is already extending its political tentacles everywhere from the Middle East to Latin America. Now that Uncle Sam worships democracy (at least in principle) and doesn't cut dictators the slack he did during the Cold War so long as they were anti-communist, China is the new best friend of despots everywhere. China's voracious demand for natural resource imports alone guarantees that this rivalry will not remain trivial forever.

中国已经把他的政治触角延伸到了中东和拉丁美洲。由于山姆大叔对民主体制的崇拜和反共冷战期间对独裁统治的疏忽，导致中国成为了所有独裁统治政权的好朋友。

If worst does come to worst, don't say you weren't warned. This is a readable and very important book.

如果发生最坏的情况时，不要说我没有警告过你们，这是一本非常有价值和重要的书。