Zoellick and "Responsible Stakeholder" (#164, Topic F)

Wall Street Journal 6/20/06 reports that Robert Zoellick, State Department's No. 2 diplomat and lead voice on China policy, will leave next month. Last summer, before an economic forum, he delivered a major speech on US-China relations in which he called on China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in international system. As befitting a senior finance person in US government (witness former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan), Zoellick, in his long speech covering some nine pages in handout, never bothered to define what is meant by a stakeholder, let alone a responsible stakeholder. He wanted to keep China in the dark, while encouraging her to keep guessing -- at her own peril. Sure enough, several academicians and government officials in China took the bait and offered their views, complete with several versions of Chinese translation of this phrase. These interpretations were duly reported, Chinese translations and all, in long WSJ articles. I felt that these interpretations are unnecessarily rosy as bordering on self-delusion. To understand what a stakeholder is, one must, of necessity, understand what a stake is. As an example of calculated ambiguity, which US officials have perfected to a high science, the word stake has several meanings; take your pick. The closest to what Zoellick has in mind might be the following: sum of money offered the winner of a contest or race; prize; purse (Dictionary: Macmillan). Inferring from this, any one with a horse in a race is a stakeholder -- in the world arena, every country is a stakeholder. A race can have only one winner, and the winner takes the purse -- in the world arena, the winner must necessarily be the strongest contestant, the sole superpower, and the superpower takes the purse. Thus, a responsible stakeholder is a country who allows the superpower to take the purse without complaint. Q.E.D.