IBM and Chinese Communist Chairmen Miss and Embrace in New York, But New York's Governor and Mayor Snub the Chinese President

NEW YORK - "Birds of a feather flock together," goes an old saw.  They do.  Even in the maze of Manhattan skyscrapers where only the stupid birds fly.

Lou Gerstner, IBM's chairman, who once slept in Mao Zedong's bed in Shanghai, warmly embraced Jiang Zemin, Mao's protégé, outside the IBM Tower on Madison Avenue in New York.  Jiang's visit to IBM was his first stop after breakfasting with George Bush and opening the trading at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 31. 

Gerstner warmly greeted the Chinese communist with Tiananmen Square blood on his hands as an old friend.  "Lao pengyou, ni hao" ("Old friend, how are you?"), Gerstner said in heavily-accented Chinese, to the satisfied chuckles all around.  A REUTER's photo in WASHINGTON POST (Nov. 1) showed Jiang and Gerstner laughing heartily underneath a big IBM logo.  (Big Blue's next ad?).

What a contrast such a "red carpet" treatment by IBM's boss was to that by the angry demonstrators in front of the New York Stock Exchange, who were kept away from the Chinese president by a police cordon. 

Perhaps more than any other incident during Jiang's week-long U.S. visit, the two contrasting New York City scenes - minutes apart - symbolized a huge gulch which has developed between America's Main Street and Wall Street.

The IBM scene also offered a touch of irony.  Here was one of the most imperial rulers of corporate America, a person whom we dubbed "Louis XIX of Armonk" in an August 1996 report, playing the role of a doorman to a communist dictator whom the New York governor and mayor had refused to meet. 

Kafka would have loved it.  Shakespeare might have also relished symbolism - an omnipotent American corporate chairman bowing to the Golden Calf of the New World Order, the Almighty Dollar, epitomized by the chubby frame of one Jiang Zemin. 

Jiang underscored this NWO weakness (greed) by throwing a swordfish dinner party at New York's Waldorf Astoria.  Hundreds of America's all-powerful CEOs were tripping over each other in an effort to get an invitation to it, like a bunch of boys trying to get a ticket to a World Series game.  Many were turned away.  Ultimately, some 200 top executives of "blue chip" companies - like Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Fedex, Ford, Philip Morris, among others - got in (whew!).

Chairman Mao once warned that, "revolution is not a dinner party."  Yet, there was Jiang, Mao's protégé, having all these "capitalists" jostle for the privilege of eating at his heels in the "the financial capital of the world."   It was the ultimate victory of communism.

The Waldorf scene on Halloween 1997 was also proof that communism has come a full circle in the last 80 years - from Russia, to China, to Vietnam, to North Korea... and now to its original home - New York City - from where Trotsky sailed to join Lenin and Stalin for the launch of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

The kow-towing of the New World Order's "elite" to a foreign dictator actually isn't a new phenomenon.  Tom Watson, Sr., for example, a former IBM chairman, like his successor on Halloween 1997, was also in awe of autocratic power.   Watson praised Benito Mussolini and received medals from both Hitler's Germany and from the Fascist Italy in the 1930s (which Watson later said he regretted accepting as he rushed to support America's WW II effort...). 

Just as the German and Italian markets had attracted American businessmen like IBM's Watson in the 1930s, the enormous size of the Chinese market can explain the deference to the Chinese leader by the U.S. capitalists today, ideological differences notwithstanding.

"Most large companies - such as IBM, which has eight joint ventures in China, AT&T and Lucent Technologies - feel they have to invest in the country or risk losing out when the vast China market finally begins to pay off sometime in the next century," the NEW YORK TIMES reported on Nov. 1.  But the same story also said that, "all but a few American companies are losing money in China as a result of government restrictions, bureaucracy and corruption."

So if so many American corporate fans of China are losing money in this vast, promising, restrictive, bureaucratic, corrupt market... why are they there in the first place, one might wonder?  After all, isn't making money the ultimate objective of any company?

Yes, but in a global, not regional sense.  "There aren't many companies that have the reach and the breadth to help a country like China develop from the ground up," IBM's Gerstner said in his 'mission statement'-speech to Wall Street analysts in March 1994.

"Gerstner continued to speak as if IBM were some sort of a United Nations' public utility," this writer commented in a March 25, 1994 report, filed from Barcelona, Spain.  "Since when is IBM in the business of 'nation building', anyway?   Why would IBM not invest first in American 'nation building' by broadening the IBM customer base well beyond the traditional 'Fortune 500'-type companies?"

Because American labor costs more.  It's as simple as that.

The "captains of the American industry" tell us that China is a huge opportunity for U.S. businesses and, therefore, for the American people.  Indeed, in 1997 to-date, our exports to China have totaled $8 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

But what the "NWO captains" don't tell us as loudly, if at all, is that our imports from China were $39 billion during the same time frame.  And that the Commerce Dept. predicts that the U.S. trade deficit with China may reach $44 billion this year, a record high.  As of August, the latest month available, our trade deficit with China was even larger than that with Japan, our favorite "trade deficit bogey."

What does all this mean?

First, it means that the communist China is above all a huge source of cheap labor for multinational companies.  So one cannot blame the likes of Gerstner for seeking to lower their labor costs.  After all, that's what their shareholders expect them to do.  Witness the enormous "downsizing of corporate America" which took place in the last 15 years. 

Second, it also means that America's loss is China's gain.

Third, it means that our politicians who lobby for better relations with China actually represent the interests of multinational companies, not those of the U.S. electorate who sent them to public offices.

Fourth, it means that history is repeating itself... 

Back in the 1930s, when IBM's Watson praised Mussolini and accepted medals from Hitler, he was by no means the only U.S. business leader to feel that way.  Just as the American business elite of 1997 applauded Jiang in New York, the elite of the 1930s cheered Mussolini as a "benevolent despot... who made trains run on time" (Robert Sobel, "IBM Colossus in Transition," page 84).

And then - boom!  World War II breaks out. And suddenly our Italian friends are the bogeys.

Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, our multinational companies raced to sell to, and build all sorts of high tech weapons for Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

And then - boom!  The Gulf War breaks out. And suddenly our Iraqi friends are the bogeys.

Now, Gerstner and his globalist ilk have invested $158 billion in the 1990s building up China.

Students of history may conclude that the only thing uncertain is not if, but when, the China "boom" will occur.  And suddenly, our Chinese friends will have also become the bogeys.

Afterward, our "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex," to borrow the term from the late President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961, will have probably found another patsy to become its "friend."  Before destroying him, too.

Maybe not.  For, it assumes that we would remain as the world's "only superpower" after the war with China.  Unlike some western leaders, the Chinese are careful students of history.  After all, they've had more of it than the rest of us.  By a few thousand years... 

So, for the time being, they are quite content to milk the foolhardy western multinationals, like IBM and others, for all they are worth.  At the same time, however, China is preparing for war with the U.S.

The Chinese communist party officials are convinced that, "a limited Sino-US war will break out sooner or later," Yossef Bodansky wrote in the May-June 1997 issue of Defense & Foreign Affairs Policy.  Bodansky also noted that, in early May of this year, a senior former Chinese official told Hong Kong's CHENG MING newspaper that China's "global strategy" consisted of three parts

(1) Assuming the United States is its No. 1 enemy;

(2) Allying China with Russia to oppose the United States;

(3) Being prepared to wage war if the Sino-US contradiction sharpens over Taiwan.

So the preceding NWO scenarios (first build, then destroy) will not surprise to the Chinese, as they seemed to have Mussolini, Hitler, Hussein...

After all, Jiang, an engineer, as he proudly asserted at the IBM tower in Manhattan, surely knows the tongue-in-cheek difference between mechanical and civil engineers Mechanical engineers build the weapons, civil engineers build the targets.  -)

Which would suggest that the NWO elite are now in the process of building the future targets in China.  Just as they did in Iraq.  Or in Europe before WW II.

"Oh, but didn't the Chinese government promise not to sell its missiles to Iran and Pakistan anymore?" the free trade peace doves may chirp in.

True.  But didn't Hitler and Stalin also sign a friendship pact in the 1930s?

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P.S. "(IBM's) Gerstner is probably the most respected Western business executive of all industries (present) in China," Rick Thoman, a former IBM chief financial officer, told this writer in December 1994. 

One cannot help but recall Watson's foolhardiness in the 1930s.  And wonder if, one of these days, Gerstner may wish he had never hugged his "old friend" outside the IBM tower on Madison Avenue?

But then again, Thoman, now with Xerox, also boasted about Gerstner's cultivating his China relationship for a long time, even well before this communist country had the western-style hotels for the foreign visitors.  In the late 1970s, for example, "Lou was put up in the Mao Zedong suite (in Shanghai), while I had the Chou Enlai suite," Thoman said.