In your fictional view, you are giving America way too much credit.
The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable.
The other theory is that if China was denied entry into the WTO, then they would’ve just created their own international trading agreement. And in 2020, they did just that, and called it the RCEP.
Besides, without China, then your iPhone would’ve probably never been created. Apple would’ve never made enough money from the iPod, to justify further investment into the iPhone. China and the iPhone, really are symbiotic. Instead, we might all be living in a Blackberry world.
>The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable.
I dispute that anything is inevitable - China was an economic and scientific mess in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the Cultural Revolution and Communist anti-truth thought control ideology.
The US and our democratic allies had a fleeting opportunity in the 90s to collectively pressure China into making a grand bargain, where in return for permanent access to Western markets, they enact major democratic and human rights reforms - multiple political parties allowed, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, military serves the national constitution rather than a specific political party, etc.
This is what should have happened, but in Wall St. and corporate America's rush to cash in on cheap labor and a potentially large new market, we replaced that grand bargain with wishful thinking and a rose-tinted predictions of an authoritarian regime that just a few years earlier in 1989 violently crushed a nascent effort at Democracy.
This was likely the most costly strategic mistake in US history. We spent 50yrs fighting a cold war to push back authoritarianism, and won, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 90s due to short-term greed. Now we'll have to fight that cold war all over again this century, against a much more formidable adversary that has been able to learn how to meld state authoritarianism with effective economic development and Orwellian technological thought control.
The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable.
The other theory is that if China was denied entry into the WTO, then they would’ve just created their own international trading agreement. And in 2020, they did just that, and called it the RCEP.
Besides, without China, then your iPhone would’ve probably never been created. Apple would’ve never made enough money from the iPod, to justify further investment into the iPhone. China and the iPhone, really are symbiotic. Instead, we might all be living in a Blackberry world.