What I Learned About the US and China

         I have never formally written a blog before, nonetheless, a political blog. It was an exciting experience yet difficult due to the fact there is proper "blog etiquette".  This semester my group focused on the relations both political and economical between the United States and China. I originally found my interest in the topic due the amount of dependency the United States has on China because we increasingly import their products to sell to Americans. However, our first blog post we discussed the history of China and US relations. This history included the main interactions of the two most powerful country's in the world, the fast economic growth of both country's and the competitive nature lead to political tension. In our second post we decided to go into more detail and specifically focus on one topic; the ballistic missiles and the issue of national security between the two countries. The group focused on the analysis of why  China would believe that they needed missiles. We explicitly discussed the impact on national security and what it would mean for the United States that China increased their weaponry. Our third blog was one of the most interesting ones as we discussed cyber espionage, a topic that almost everyone has a peaked interest for. We discussed the impact of the internet and information and the increase of security risk due to the easy- accessible information on the internet. Finally, we decided to discuss the environment which was a little different from our other topics but it still had a strong impact on both the political and economical spheres of China- US relations. However, this post was not about tension but it was about environmental agreements between the US and China which display progress in this multi-year relationship.
            Our blog group never went in senselessly! We always had a thorough plan to some extent about what we should put on our blog. We usually met a few days before the blog is due. One day to go over what we want to do on the blog and another day to actually write the post. There were many attempts to write it all on the first try, however, that did not always work with our crazy schedules. Though it was hard for all of us to meet sometimes we were able to research and look up many different sites that had detailed information on China-US relations. With the research that we used we divided the blog into two different parts. Three people would do the first part which was the summary and three people would do the analysis part. In order to ensure fairness, we switched up the people that did analysis and summary as sometimes the summary was easier than the analysis. Working as a group on this project opened my eyes to how each student saw the world and the different writing styles of the group members. Some were passionate and some were humorous at times. It was a great combination between the two and I couldn't have imagined our group any other way.
        Though I had a little knowledge about China-US relations I have gained a lot of information from this topic. As a politics minor and in general a person that is passionate about politics I found it interesting to learn about the different interactions between the two countries. I also was able to apply what I learned in psychology and use it to understand the different political spheres. This project has been a wonderful lesson. I have learned the value of group work and I have also learned so much from each of the students.