Sailing the Trade Winds

"Empty Vessel

By Ian Kumekawa

Knopf, 336 pages, $29

Thanks to Donald Trump, the world has been getting a crash course in antiglobalism from a populist-right perspective. Perhaps the singular merit of Ian Kumekawa's "Empty Vessel" is to remind us that, before President Trump steamrolled the news cycle with tariffs, globalism was already a well-established whipping post on the populist left.

Mr. Kumekawa, a historian at Harvard, traces the history of a container ship, which he frames as a symbol of the acceleration (until recently) in world trade and of the economic changes, such as deindustrialization in the West, he claims it has fostered.

His plan is also his subtitle: "The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge." It's a fine symbol -- a ship built in Sweden for a Norwegian shipping magnate, to be registered in the Bahamas and employed, over four-plus decades, in the North Sea, the Falkland Islands, Germany, the U.S., the British Isles and Nigeria.

The ship was sold numerous times, reflagged in multiple tax havens, rechristened so often that the author sensibly refers to it as "the Vessel." Mr. Kumekawa posits that the ship's stateless quality characterizes global trade itself -- fair enough. It is an "empty vessel," he repeatedly writes, a "chameleon" assuming the quality of its serial tenants.

Containerized shipping, developed to supply U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, revolutionized trade by making loading and unloading about as easy as assembling a Lego set. The key was modularity -- using snugly fitting crates designed to stack atop one another, secured with simple, interlocking hardware.

Mr. Kumekawa is impressed -- who wouldn't be by such a marked improvement in efficiency? -- but he devotes most of "Empty Vessel" to indicting neoliberalism, a program of relaxations on global capital and trade, for alleged offenses including racism, "extractive imperialism" and fostering "continuities between the slave trade and the trade in Nigerian oil."

Sometime over the past 50 years somebody in America bought a washing machine they couldn't have afforded otherwise, and two billion people in the developing world left poverty behind, courtesy of freer trade, but that is not the story Mr. Kumekawa is interested in telling.

The Vessel, we are told, was built by a shipyard that had been nationalized by the Swedish government, which invested billions to save the national industry from lower-wage Asian competition. Most of the local industry failed anyway.

After its completion in 1979 the Vessel was refitted to hold not goods but people. Though hardly luxury, it featured a library and bars, a swimming pool and squash courts, along with rooms with private baths to house hundreds of temporary workers. Over the ensuing decades, when not idled by lawsuits or bankruptcies, it would provide living quarters for deep-sea salvaging, oil drilling and an onshore auto plant.

When the private sector proved an unreliable client, the Vessel was thrust into public service. In 1982 it was leased to the British defense ministry to house soldiers following Britain's successful military operation in the Falklands. (The author harbors a particular disdain for Margaret Thatcher.) It later served as a prison ship, to relieve overcrowding, in both New York and England's Isle of Portland.

Mr. Kumekawa's story is not so much about the ship itself; it's about the various industries and public entities it has served, offering "a window onto the profound and dynamic changes that have buffeted and shaped the world economy." As a narrative device, this formula worked in the 1964 movie "The Yellow Rolls-Royce," which told the story of three successive car owners (an English aristocrat, who discovers his wife and her lover in flagrante in the back of the Rolls, followed by a gangster and then a wealthy American widow). The movie was racier and the Rolls at least had an engine; the Vessel does not (it has to be towed across the seas).

Perhaps to supply some punch, Mr. Kumekawa strains for effect. When the Vessel arrives in the Isle of Portland for prison duty, he writes that it "represented a return to a violent carceral past." Actually, the boat became a tourist attraction, the floating cell praised by inmates and locals. Similarly, he refers to policing power as "state violence." And in his effort to paint the ship as a burden to workers and localities, he tells us that "the air-conditioning system often needed repair." Has that never happened on land?

His chapter on the Vessel's time in New York, at the end of Ed Koch's disputatious reign as mayor in the 1980s, ties globalism to rising rates of incarceration for what Mr. Kumekawa terms New York's "perceived crime problem." Belying "perceived," he states that crack cocaine led to "extreme violence" and that an estimated 60% of inmates were "addicted to drugs and/or alcohol." This is far afield from global trade, and Mr. Kumekawa seems out of his depth. He implies that the Federal Reserve's high interest rates in the early 1980s did not stifle inflation, which they certainly did, and did not cause as severe a contraction as expected. Yet, according to the Fed, the 1982 recession "was the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression."

Mr. Kumekawa depicts international shipping as a step beyond the law, characterized by shell companies, shady dealings and rogues. It's interesting to read that ships like the Vessel exploit the lax rules and lower taxes of -- who knew? -- 5,000 free zones.

But his repeated sneering at the capitalist West and his arch rhetoric make for heavy reading. He says three times that the Vessel is an "artifact of global capitalism," in addition to many similar variations (e.g., an "exemplar of the globalized, financialized, and increasingly abstracted" modern world). Mr. Kumekawa has a dubious talent for expressing simple points with big words. He finds it profound that the Vessel is both "a concrete object" and "an abstracted artifact," but anyone with a mortgage is familiar with the idea that a physical house can be conceptualized.

Underlying "Empty Vessel" is a reflexive antipathy to globalism, a working assumption that things from other places are suspect. Mr. Kumekawa would cringe at being called a Trumper, but he and the president are similarly hostile to trade and professedly ignorant of its blessings.

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Mr. Lowenstein is the author of "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."” [1]

Most of the West deindustrialized and is getting doomed because of that. Some people have blessings from this. We hope that Mr. Lowenstein is one of those people.

1.  Sailing the Trade Winds. Lowenstein, Roger.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 May 2025: A15.

DeepSeek. Temu. TikTok. China Tech Is Starting to Pull Ahead

"China’s top leaders did not appear to fully grasp the power of artificial intelligence in July 2023, when one of us, Eric, and Henry Kissinger met them. Economic malaise hung in the air. But when the other of us, Selina, returned to China just 19 months later, the optimism was palpable.

Dinner conversations were dominated by DeepSeek and other A.I. chatbots. Electric cars whizzed by, while apps offered drone food delivery. Unitree humanoid robots danced and spun handkerchiefs onstage during the “Spring Festival Gala,” China’s most-watched TV program, making the company a household name overnight.

This is the country we’re dealing with. China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the A.I. frontier. And it has developed a real edge in how it disseminates, commercializes and manufactures tech.

History has shown us that those who adopt and diffuse a technology the fastest wins.

So it’s no surprise that China has chosen to forcefully retaliate against America’s recent tariffs. To win the race for the future of technology, and in turn the war for global leadership, we must discard the belief that America is always ahead.

For a long time, China was slower to the game. In 2007, the year Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s first iPhone, the internet revolution had barely begun across the Pacific: Only about 10 percent of China’s population was online, while the tech giant Alibaba was still seven years away from listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The A.I. race appeared to follow the old pattern. The debut of ChatGPT in San Francisco in November 2022 led to a slew of copycat chatbots in China, most of which were estimated to be years behind.

Yet, as with smartphones and electric vehicles, Silicon Valley failed to anticipate that China would find a way to swiftly develop a cheap yet state-of-the-art competitor. Today’s Chinese models are very close behind U.S. versions.

In fact, DeepSeek’s March update to its V3 large language model is, by some benchmarks, the best non-reasoning model.

The stakes of this contest are high. Leading American companies have largely been developing proprietary A.I. models and charging for access, in part because their models cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train.

Chinese A.I. firms have expanded their influence by freely distributing their models for the public to use, download and modify, which makes them more accessible to researchers and developers around the world.

Apps for the Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu and the social media platforms RedNote and TikTok are already among the most downloaded globally. Combine this with the continuing popularity of China’s free open-source A.I. models, and it’s not hard to imagine teenagers worldwide hooked on Chinese apps and A.I. companions, with autonomous Chinese-made agents organizing our lives, and businesses with services and products powered by Chinese models.

In the internet revolution, Western dominance of the market helped America’s digital economy swell to $2.6 trillion by 2022. That’s bigger than Canada’s entire G.D.P.

For the United States to reap the benefits of the coming A.I. revolution, which is expected to have a larger impact than advent of the internet, the world needs to choose America’s computing stack — algorithms, apps, hardware — not China’s.

In a dozen years, China has gone from a “copycat nation” to a juggernaut with world-class products that have at times leapfrogged those in the West. Xiaomi — once best known as a maker of iPhone knockoffs — delivered 135,000 electric cars last year, while Apple gave up on its effort to produce an E.V. after burning $10 billion over a decade. China is now racing to deploy robots at scale, outlining plans for mass production of humanoids; in 2023, the country installed more industrial robots than all other nations combined. Along the way, the country also cultivated an abundance of STEM talent, robust supply chains, incredible manufacturing heft and a domestic ecosystem so brutally competitive that the only way to survive is to never stop iterating.

This China-dominated future is already arriving — unless we get our act together.

We should learn from what China has done well. The United States needs to openly share more of its A.I. technologies and research, innovate even faster and double down on diffusing A.I. throughout the economy.

Despite recent cuts in research funding, the United States continues to have remarkable strengths in university and private-sector innovation. Meanwhile, China is still playing catch-up on semiconductors. Additionally, the country faces significant headwinds of its own including a real estate crisis, mounting debt and weak consumer spending. That said, we wouldn’t underestimate the Chinese government’s resolve in tolerating near-term economic pain in pursuit of technological supremacy.

The United States imposed export controls on cutting-edge chips in order to stifle China’s A.I. progress. The country’s recent breakthroughs, however, illustrate that such sanctions instead fueled efforts by Chinese entrepreneurs to keep training and commercializing A.I.

At lunch during Selina’s trip to China, when U.S. export controls were brought up, someone joked, “America should sanction our men’s soccer team too so they will do better.” So that they will do better. It’s a hard truth to swallow, but Chinese tech has become better despite constraints, as Chinese entrepreneurs have found creative ways to do more with less. So it should be no surprise that the online response in China to American tariffs has been nationalistic and surprisingly optimistic: The public is hunkering down for a battle and think time is on Beijing’s side.

We’re no longer in the era when China is far behind us. If China’s capacity to innovate endures, if its A.I. companies continue to embrace openness, and if China stays on track to take over 45 percent of all global manufacturing by 2030, then the next chapter of the A.I. race will be an all-out dogfight on every axis possible. 

America will need every advantage it has.

Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive and chairman of Google, is the chairman and chief executive of Relativity Space. Selina Xu leads China and A.I. research in the Office of Eric Schmidt.”  [1]

The authors don't see any light in this tunnel. They tell us, that what we are doing is wrong. What could be done, that is right?

1.  DeepSeek. Temu. TikTok. China Tech Is Starting to Pull Ahead.: Guest Essay. Schmidt, Eric; Xu, Selina.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. May 5, 2025.

 

‘Transparent Dodge:’ Elon Musk’s Attorney Says OpenAI’s Restructuring Plan ‘Changes Nothing

 

"OpenAI’s decision to partly walk back its plan to restructure as a for-profit business “changes nothing,” according to Elon Musk’s attorney, indicating that the billionaire may continue his legal battle against the AI startup.

Bloomberg reports that in a statement released late Monday, Marc Toberoff, Elon Musk’s lead counsel in pending litigation against OpenAI, criticized the company’s revised restructuring plan, calling it a “transparent dodge” that fails to address the fundamental issues at hand. Earlier that day, OpenAI announced that it would proceed with restructuring its for-profit division as a public benefit corporation while maintaining the overall business under the control of its nonprofit entity—a significant departure from its original plans that effectively preserves the current organizational structure.

The decision to keep the nonprofit in control of the company came after OpenAI faced considerable pressure from various stakeholders, including former employees, academics, and rivals like Musk, who co-founded the startup a decade ago before departing and subsequently launching his own AI venture. Musk had previously petitioned a judge to prevent OpenAI from transitioning to a for-profit business, and while the judge denied Musk’s request, parts of his lawsuit have been allowed to move forward. Additionally, Musk made an unsuccessful $97.4 billion offer to acquire the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, which the company dismissed as an attempt by Musk to use the legal system to hinder a competitor.

Toberoff argued that despite the revised restructuring plan, which appears to be designed to avoid legal scrutiny, OpenAI is still acting against its founding mission of developing AI for the benefit of all people. “The founding mission remains betrayed,” he stated, emphasizing that “charitable assets have been and still will be transferred for the benefit of private persons, including Altman, his investors and Microsoft.”

The ongoing legal dispute between Musk and OpenAI underscores the growing tension and competition within the rapidly evolving AI industry. As major tech companies and startups alike race to develop and deploy advanced AI systems, questions surrounding the governance, ownership, and societal impact of these technologies have come to the forefront.

While OpenAI’s decision to maintain its nonprofit status may alleviate some concerns about the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few individuals, Musk’s legal team appears determined to continue challenging the company’s actions.”