> Chinese leadership typically reasons in terms of decades (or more)
No offense, but who keeps perpetuating this myth. Is this Zeihan bullshit?
In my previous life I've worked with people who worked at or near those levels and Chinese policymakers aren't any different from those in other countries (though the older generation does seem to have a bit of a penchant of skimming the top more than younger ones).
If there was a long term multigenerational plan, then LGFVs would have been cracked down a decade ago, they wouldn't have bungled the entire Semiconductor Manufacturing subsidy (only 1 company remains out of 6-7 that were given tens of billions of dollars, most of which was skimmed by corruption), and they wouldn't have instigated a trade war with South Korea and Japan leading both nations to move their investments to Vietnam and India respectively.
Obviously the intraparty bickering is just as in any other country, but imho it's fairly true that, not having to trouble themselves too much with popular opinion, Chinese leaders tend to push for long-term projects with more abandon than the average Western politician. Deng's pivoting, their moves in Africa, the "new Silk Road" / Belt and Road initiative, the artificial islands in the Straits - the horizon of these projects goes beyond the next (fixed) election, in a way that we don't really see anymore in the West.
That doesn't mean these projects are "better", that there is no (massive) corruption, that it's a preferable governance model (fuck no), etc etc.
Touché. I'm just grumbling about all the bullshit pop geopolitics I'm seeing on HN. It's all essentially orientalizing the Chinese experience by treating g Chinese policymakers as either omniscient calculating malicious geniuses or bumbling authoritarians strangling the golden goose. The reality is just much more prosaic and it pisses me off as someone who worked directly on this stuff in the early/mid 2010s.
I understand the sentiment, but you have too high expectations for here. Everything but programming is going to be pop-sci, pop-geopol, pop-econ, etc. in general. But it's odd you have such a distaste for Zeihan, because it sounds like you were doing similar work, as he was a Stratfor analyst. Zeihan is pop-geopol palatable, assuredly, and he keeps getting certain details wrong that invokes Gell-Mann amnesia. But he's better than 95% of the mostly silly international relations talking heads, and for that I'm grateful.
Most people in the policy world who want to have a tangible impact have to work with credible organizations that have a direct impact on policymaking (Govt Agencies, Defense, Lobbying firms, the hill, top tier NGOs and Think Tanks).
Stratfor isn't one of those. It's founder George Friedman has had a notoriously horrible track record in the IR space
For example, in the 90s he predicted Japan would start a war with the US and did a massive press junket about this from 1991-1996. Turns out, the opposite happened, yet his "analysis" had a massive negative impact on US-Japan relations and impacted foreign discourse in the 1992, 1994, and 1996 elections.
The big issue is no person with credible domain experience wants to work at Stratfor. If you have years of policymaking experience, there are multiple other better paying career options than a firm located in Austin TX - about as far from politics as they can be.
They shut down their DC office in 2001 after they lost all credibility, and pivoted to a bit of consulting (think McKinsey type work) before pivoting to thought leadership and media junkets.
They're about as credible as IDC or Gartner are about technology.
> better than 95% of the mostly silly international relations talking heads
Who and where are you getting your sources? If you're watching/reading Cable News or a subset of niche blogs, you are completely out of the loop of where the actual conversations and discussions are happening.
I can give you some actual credible sources that people in the field use. Most people in the space don't really participate on CNN or the like.
And if you are going to pull the "Russia Invasion of Ukraine in 2022" example, multiple of the top think tanks and NGOs publicly broadcasted that threat half a year before it actually happened, but they weren't invited to CNN or Fox to discuss.
> you have too high expectations for here. Everything but programming is going to be pop-sci, pop-geopol, pop-econ, etc. in general
I wouldn't care if I wasn't seeing conversations veering to that on a near daily basis here on HN. I want to nerd out about Golang and the business of tech (that's why I'm on here), but seeing entire echo chambers of people talking out of their ass about stuff needed to be rectified and I decided to start jumping into those conversations, but it's basically yelling into a vacuum. Hopefully YC cuts HN now that most of the old guard has retired. Bookface is nowhere as bad as HN.
> Who and where are you getting your sources? If you're watching/reading Cable News or a subset of niche blogs, you are completely out of the loop of where the actual conversations and discussions are happening.
I’m not watching cable news, or getting it from from the rest of the niche media cranks. That’s what I’m talking about the 95%. That Zeihan threads the needle between not being the brightest most connected in DC, but giving geopol info better than most of the crap there is. Since I’m a layman, I personally have an info diet from Zeihan, Caspian Report, Dmitri Alperovitch, and the DC think tank Institute for the Study of War, a long with the occasional book like Prisoners of Geography and World Order.
> And if you are going to pull the "Russia Invasion of Ukraine in 2022" example,
Would never. My info diet, kudos to Dmitri Alperovitch, made me almost certain of this back in Dec 21, a few months before.
Of course Bookface wouldn’t be as bad, it’s further filtered.
You should give me some good sources to compare to then, since your answer of 200 think tank list by a university, whose report ended in 2019, includes ISW at #92 in the US and Alperovitch's DC think tank, Silverado, was started in 2021.
Stick with the top 10 globally, and then maybe the top 4-5 per region. Start reading books published by people affiliated to those think tanks, and recognize that OSINT is largely dead after 2022.
Though not involved in this particular discussion I would love to know your credible sources so I can better keep in the know.
I’ve only recently ventured back to focusing on current events after a 2 year nihilistic fallout with my perception of modern media and I’m desperately trying to get a foothold on some real solid reporting.
> recently ventured back to focusing on current events
Don't. It's completely useless. You are not in a position to make a change so it's completely useless. Grassroots activism almost never works without explicit backing from someone with some power.
That said, if you still want to waste your time and mental sanity, for international relations I'd use the list provided by this prof at UPenn who's entire professorship is about ranking think tanks [0].
I'd also recommend reading this guide on how to evaluate think tanks from Harvard Expos 10 [1]
I see your outlook isn’t much different from mine before I separated myself from the space. More philosophically than technically. Nevertheless I appreciate you providing those sources.
Keep doing what you can and not stressing over what you can’t.
> No offense, but who keeps perpetuating this myth. Is this Zeihan bullshit?
The origin is a mistranslation/misquote, albeit maybe one that played into the desire of the left to believe that communist dictatorship is a system in which wise long-termist technocrats get to make better decisions than presidents with an 8 year term limit, or CEOs focused on the next quarter.
--
In 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution. “Too early to say,” he replied. Given that the French Revolution of 1789 had occurred nearly 200 years before, Zhou Enlai was expressing the long view of history in a very witty and Oscar Wildean way. News of this quote flew quickly around the chattering classes in the west, and it was soon used as evidence that the Chinese (especially Chinese intellectuals and leaders) took the long view of things, that they were a patient civilization, and that, when they thought about the future, it was hundreds of years distant.
Alas, Buzzkillers, it seems as if this was a case of mistranslation or misunderstanding the question. Prominent American diplomat Chas Freeman was a translator during that trip, and he was there when Zhou Enlai made this statement. Along with Chinese records of the exchange seen by historians, Freeman has confirmed for us that Zhou Enlai did reply to a question about the French Revolution — the 1968 student uprising in Paris, that is, not the 1789 French Revolution.
No offense, but who keeps perpetuating this myth. Is this Zeihan bullshit?
In my previous life I've worked with people who worked at or near those levels and Chinese policymakers aren't any different from those in other countries (though the older generation does seem to have a bit of a penchant of skimming the top more than younger ones).
If there was a long term multigenerational plan, then LGFVs would have been cracked down a decade ago, they wouldn't have bungled the entire Semiconductor Manufacturing subsidy (only 1 company remains out of 6-7 that were given tens of billions of dollars, most of which was skimmed by corruption), and they wouldn't have instigated a trade war with South Korea and Japan leading both nations to move their investments to Vietnam and India respectively.