War, yuan way or another

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-040914.html



War, yuan way or another
By Francesco Sisci
Sep 4, '14

BEIJING - The recent friction between China and the United States over flights of surveillance planes along China's coasts and Beijing's allegations of foreign meddling in the issue of the Hong Kong's elections - a thinly veiled denunciation against the US - show apparent strain in China's trust of Washington. In some ways, then bilateral ties are at a new low, possibly similar to the time in April 2001 when a Chinese plane crashed into a US EP-3 surveillance plane and the EP-3 made an emergency landing on Hainan, an island in southeast China and the country's most important submarine base.

Yet before looking at the particular situation, we may want to take a broader approach to some of the issues of power and power management, starting from something dear to the hearts and minds of many, West and East: money.

Napoleon said that for war you need three things: money, money, and money. For this reason, he was clear that the battle against his main enemy, London, had to be fought on the money front, before even fielding an army. In 1806, he issued the Berlin Decrees, which brought into effect the Continental System. It was a policy aimed at eliminating the threat of the United Kingdom by closing French-controlled territory, ie de facto all of continental Europe, to its trade. Europe was the steam engine of the global economy, and if the UK was cut off from this engine, it was bound to dwindle and perish, reasoned the inventor of modern warfare and his followers.

However, it did not work like that.

[bemildred]

1. Quite an essay. Mr Sisci is in good form. nt