It was interesting to read about younger Chinese people, and their dissatisfaction with life in China. At the risk of being too US/West-centric, I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place. I fundamentally do not believe that their system of government is good for people, and for the world at large. (To be clear, I'm fine with US/Western dominance declining over time, but I would like to see something I feel is equivalent or better taking its place, or, preferably, sharing its place.)
So in a way it's good to read about two things in concert: 1) Xi tightening things up and cracking down harder and harder on free expression, and 2) younger Chinese people -- despite the propaganda I hear they're exposed to -- becoming disillusioned and frustrated by it. Overall it sucks: I certainly don't wish more and more censorship etc. being foisted upon a billion of my fellow humans. But I also don't want to see a totalitarian regime being the main dominant world power.
Of course, dissatisfied young people -- and probably not even that many when compared to the whole of young Chinese people in China -- don't guarantee any kind of meaningful change over time. I'm sure there are plenty of young people in China who will happily step into the party's shoes once the current leadership's time has past.
That’s a common western view and wishful thinking but life is about power, not happiness. They can be all dissatisfied they want but a few crackdowns always put them in line, and in the end this is what matters.
I know it reads harsh but there’s little to no morality in this, they are “unhappy” because the expectations of having a good job, money, a big house and general prosperity forever is not materializing. In the past when China was really growing at 10% a year, there were also no freedom and horrible things were happening to many people, yet people where “very happy”, again no morality just a matter of power/money.
“Meaningful change” will happen if they align with who has the power at that time and there is no indication “young people” will relinquish their power when they finally have it.
Current old powerful people were also young at some point.
> They can be all dissatisfied they want but a few crackdowns always put them in line, and in the end this is what matters.
Until it doesn't. World history is the history of power being consolidated and then (often forcibly) distributed, either to new consolidators or democracies of various types.
For many years I've been worrying that this becomes harder and harder as surveillance technology improves. I'm also concerned that free media makes it much easier for foreign powers to disrupt things. An issue that doesn't destabilize authoritarian countries. These two potential trends or forces have me very worried about the long-term future of mankind with authoritarian becoming a one-way road.
And the Q is are they as unhappy as youths in the west? And at what point of unhappiness does that translate to systemic change? Is that point different in PRC system. PRC youth are behind west in adjusting to expectations in post academic inflation world. You have the % grinding away in good jobs being sad about cost of living just like in the west. Then you have % living at home on parents dime, with no onerous student loans, who doesn't want to work a well paying blue collar job (lot's of manufacturing opportunities out there that a poor Americans would work) because they wasted their life getting degrees. They're not working 2-3 part time jobs to get into 5-6 figure debts. They're currently on a different point of the disenfranchisement spectrum.
The light at end of tunnel is PRC kids will have more livable options as PRC develops interior provinces and bring them up to tier2 status. Many adequate, lower cost, decent QoL cities in PRC that rivals tier1 western economic hubs in convenience and lifestyle, versus most of west where it seems we'll be trapped in a handful of increasingly unaffordable areas. But it will take a mass change in culture, kids and parents accept their mediocrity - inevitable with normal distribution - and all those years cramming in involuted academic gamble won't pay off in top 1% job in air conditioned office of a tier1 city.
> The light at end of tunnel is PRC kids will have more livable options
That's very unlikely as China continues in its Great Depression https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2024/01/22/chinas-.... And with all economic engines declining (export, internal consumer, real estate), and no big systemic change happening, it will continue this path for a very long time. Remember that Japan's downturn lasted 30 years, and Japanese citizens were making $2000/month on average, not $300/month.
No the average unskilled Chinese elderly left behind by modernzation are stuck in poor informal economy. Average skilled labour in skilled jobs pays significantly better.
TIL 5% growth great depression. What china did was remove 3% of excess real estate malinvestment. Housing is down as expected, but that's a good correction. Other sectors broadly are still growing. Consumption is fine about world average factor in gov social transfers. Everyone's export is down, PRC relative down less after capturing 1T more in value over covid (greatest on record). And export @20% of GDP isn't even a big driver. Export dependant is when you're at 40-50%+. PRC continuing this path of 4-5% grown is... great? Big change happening is PRC ramping up skilled talent and skilled jobs in high value sectors to take on profitable western incumbants. It takes time, but EV/renewables just the start. Indicators everywhere PRC broadly moving up value chain.
If you're going to do JP 2000/month per capita, then PRC is ~2000 per month right now. Right about where JP/SKR was when TFR crapped out. Bottom quartiles are poorer. THat's basic statistic inevitablility. But guess what? Lots of japanese and korean grandparent farmers were poor back then to. Many still are. It's kind of a phenomenon if you follow east asian reporting. But their kids who were in manufacturing were comfortable, and their grandkids in high skilled sectors were "rich".
But this thread is about happiness and livable options. JP/SKR fucked up because they concentrated opportunties in a few regions. That's the trap (western) urbanists wanted for PRC 10 years ago, noting PRC tier 1 cities are remarkably not dense, and they should 2x/3x population, as if it was not affordable enough. Now PRC did opposite, expand developement in land, and lots of new cities/hubs are openning up. Tier 2/3+ cities will be a lot more livable in PPP terms if everything goes right. And give it a few years, 1-2 child policy 1-2:2:4 ratio means every Chinese kid is almost guaranteed to inherit housing whena grand parent croaks. The TLDR is PRC engine for growth is fine, it's not overheated anymore. And PRC urban/develpment/social patterns is trying to avoid the pitfalls of modern SKR/JP. Keyword being trying. Edit: I just realized we're engaging across multiple threads. I'm going to stop because I don't think it will be productive for either of us.
But sufficiently unhappy people, in sufficient numbers, have more power than cynics think. (Though less than optimists think. But enough to change things, at least sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.)
Agreed, that's why functional governments ( democratic or not ) always offer some kind of "candy" for the plebs. It's an optimization problem, what it the exact point where we lose control of the situation? then dial it back a few notches.
It's not because of morality of being "good", it's a practical mechanism for every power structure.
The "saving grace", is that these power structures tend to become so corrupt they can't assess that threshold anymore and then "people revolt", which by itself is far from any guarantee of success or any meaningful change. That's one of the reasons the "silent majority" is not too adept of "revolutions" and always wait to see which horse they should bet.
Agreed, the West has ben better at power for the last few hundred years. I'm responding to the laughable idea that this perspective is exclusive to the west. It clearly isn't, and besides, imperial China seems to be on the rise again, so in the next century they might even grab back the "stinkiest asshole in the room" award.
> I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place.
What gives me hope is that we’re not driving in North Korean or Russian cars, nor use their chips, or airplanes. The Soviet Union tried to be a leader in all these fields. I know China is not Russia, but in many things it is. How many Western companies, for example, have the government sit on their board? Top-down economic planning has never worked and I don’t see why it would be different now.
The CCP is using its authority to make its citizens the slaves of the world. They do this by manipulating the currency and internal environment to stop living standards and wages from rising to Western levels, while trying to avoid interference with economic activity that does not threaten the government. Key nationalized sectors under-perform (like their oil industry) while others work much like they do in America. That doesn't make them a centrally planned economy, any more than FED's currency planning makes the US economy centrally planned in nature. They have a "central plan," which is to drive all of their money towards reinvestment, but it's not a planned economy.
Going beyond a statement of facts, I assume the reinvestment is supposed to eventually lead to owning the world, but that isn't working out in Africa and all of the western infrastructure they finance has turned into yet another way for depressed Chinese living standards to transfer wealth to the countries the government is trying to get on top of. (It might feel intrusive to find out that a Chinese company owns a toll road you frequently use, but what actually happened is they froze their capital in a fixed asset, freeing an American firm to start a new project.)
It reminds me of how the US's own foibles, mainly of a neocolonialist/military interventionist type, have done nothing to benefit us but have weakened domestic security and the security of our interests abroad.
Being a hybrid planned/market economy, CCP still has much of a say in what businesses prosper & which do not. China has very little in the way of a consumer sector, quite the opposite of the US consumerism. This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
China's savings rate as a result of these pressures hovers around 50%, compared to the low 4% in US / 10% in UK / 20% in Germany & Northern EU countries.
Saving such a high % of income means more money is available in the banking system to be lent out to businesses for investment. So China has an export driven market in which they sell goods to the world, and then re-invest it to build more capacity to build more exports to..
> China has very little in the way of a consumer sector, quite the opposite of the US consumerism. This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
FWIW Chinese middle class tend to gobble up ridiculous amount of foreign overpriced luxury crap instead, starting from designer clothes and ending up with several thousands of dollars worth bottles of whisky (that I bet absolute majority of the buyers couldn't distinguish from random Johnnie Walker in blind testing). High saving rates must be cultural and not just a result of not having the ability to spend the money.
> High saving rates must be cultural and not just a result of not having the ability to spend the money.
You can see this too in the generation that lived through the Great Depression, and some carry-over into the next one.
OTOH those who grew up in boom times tend to take on unhealthy amounts of debt (esp credit card, for weddings and vacations, and fancy cars) and have to struggle to learn to live within their means.
China has had a lot of rough times to until relatively very recently, and much of the country hasn't shared in a lot of the economic growth.
The Chinese savings rate is a bit of a mirage, since there are a couple of things happening
* Chinese banks are swallowing many Chinese citizens' deposits in the bank, without recourse and explanation. There are protests of course, and of course those are squashed. There's even a story of a public listed company's assets in the bank being swallowed without recourse, and the company had to shut down
* The banking system aren't able to lend the deposits out, because the Chinese government has asked them to take over real estate companies and local government debts. Also, there is very little consumer spending, and the state enterprises don't like competitions, so very little investment is given to private enterprises these days
> This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
How does this line up American consumers spending a large percentage of their money on products built in... China? Surely the Chinese products available to Americans are also available to the Chinese? I have to imagine they are orders of magnitude cheaper in China too given the drastically lower cost of shipping and warehousing.
Shipping and warehousing only accounts for a tiny fraction of the cost of most consumer products. It's hardly an order of magnitude difference.
Chinese consumers can buy pretty much the same products as Americans (with a few limited exceptions such as weapons and narcotics). But they tend to save more on a percentage basis. Some of this is cultural. But mostly it's a practical reaction to a lack of a social safety net. Even though China is nominally communist, as a practical matter most consumers have to pay out of pocket for healthcare and retirement hence they save for those things. They also save to purchase residential real estate since it is seen as the only safe store of value and owning a home is somewhat necessary for marriage (at least for men).
Isn't this a false dichotomy? The inverse -- high spending and low savings -- still leads to reinvestment. From business POV whether they get funds via loans or via revenue the money they have to invest in growth is the same.
In China you have a lot of SOA (State Owned Enterprises) and entire sectors loosely under the CCP thumb.
So 50% of income going back into banks which then direct capital as the CCP sees fit.. more export oriented growth.
This is very different than the US model.
In the US ~95% of income goes into spending which flows into private enterprises which make operational cost, capital cost, and saving decisions on their own.
The US model is more decentralized. We have to create incentives and schemes like IRA and Opportunity Zones to get private individuals and companies to deploy capital where the government prefers, and even then it only works on the margins.
I think there are different levels to "things working" though. A country can be using an economic and governing system that ultimately doesn't work, but still have enough weight to throw around for a while, enough to do plenty of damage to others. Russia is clearly showing that right now in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine prevails (far from certain), the country may never be the same. China may pull something similar (and be more successful at it) in Taiwan in the near future.
I do worry about Chinese products in the classes you mention. OP notes that China became the world's largest automobile exporter in 2023 (by units sold, not by revenue). China still can't rival Intel or AMD in chips, but they're gaining ground all the time, and have some decent (though not superb) competitors in the ARM market, with inroads into RISC-V, I believe. The Comac C919 airliner isn't exactly all over yet, and I don't know how safe, relable, and airworthy it is (not that Boeing has done well in that regard lately), but it exists, regardless of whether or not the allegations that they stole IP from US manufacturers is true.
> Even if Ukraine prevails (far from certain), the country may never be the same.
You can also say: Yes it has never before been as pro-West as it is today.
I agree completely with you that China has enough weight to do plenty of damage in the short term. In the long term, I paraphrase something Stephen Kotkin said: The West has gained more and more friends over time. After the second world war, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have become friends.
Maybe the relationships are not perfect, but they are pretty good if you ask me. Some healthy back and forth and discussing without major drama. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden will soon also. Maybe one day even Ukraine. And maybe India one day?
If anything UKR (and Gaza) war has shown, global south, the dominant reservoirs for future growth, which PRC is courting (and now constitute plurarity of trade) is decidely not pro west. What west is doing is consolidating the elite clique amoung a powerful but increasingly stagnant friends. Which is fine, but it's also matter of relative size of the group. The Chinese "family" i.e just PRC itself, is pumping out comparable human capita and industrial potential than all of the west, their family and her friends. Don't be surprised a well run family business + some acquaintances eventually outcompete tight friend groups that are still connected based on artificial affiliations.
Also most of global android users would be on Chinese phones if US sanctions didn't ban access to Huawei and reduce appetite for PRC firms to continue expansion into western markets. Sanctions / tech control are every bit as top-down economic planning. Once PRC indigenizes their own tech stack, there's a good chance rest of world will drive PRC cars, and fly on PRC planes, and use PRC chips. I think only long durable term competitive advantage of west, and really we're talking about anglo countries like US/CA/AU is being net food/mineral exporters due to resource abundance.
These positive relationships are not artficial. Japanese and Taiwanese people really genuinely like the USA in a way that runs deep in the culture. Im from texas, and live in japan. I was surprised to find this out.
The relationships aren't artificial in feeling but artificial in construction - took generations/decades of postwar political purging in US influenced countries to cultivate local compradors to develop good people to people relations over time. But alliances between countries are still political arrangement are ultimate subject to domestic geopolitical interests and whims. Peoples in democracies still have very little control of their foreign policy. The other consideration we don't speak is you can absolutely massacre a people and still have their kids love you with enough elite capture and control over culture. That's also the story of modern PRC, you can slap the shit out one generation and mold their grandkids into patriotism. Or the story with US/JP, except with atom bombs. Regardless alliances will last, until they're tested. Then they can break or get stronger. I would not be surprised if they break if tested violently enough. That's usually how these things go. Remember Canada was originally a British possession designed to contain America. Then US got kicked out of North America and Canada, a fundmentally anti American project, are very friendly with US, and even the most antiAmerican politician in Canada won't seriously consider moves that would undermine US interests.
I think you have convinced yourself of something and wouldnt see it any other way.
Youre talking about a world when it took months for a message to cross a country, with totally different dynamics. I dont think the US is going to tax japan, or attack them. What are you even saying.
Geopolitical relationships and people to people sentiments between countries are artificially constructed over time. Tying back to the original comment, Japan, Germany, South Korea didn't "naturally" become friendly over time, it was a carefully cultivated process. The process doesn't work on speed of infomration transmission, but speed of demographic transition. Anti-American forces in those countries didn't get "converted" they were sidelined and repressed so their influence does not transmit to next generation. I'm saying friends western system/hegemony has build are one good fight from flipping.
> Yes it has never before been as pro-West as it is today.
On the other hand Russia has never been more in China's camp than it is now, and I think that loss is far greater than the possible gain of Ukraine and the NATO expansion.
> After the second world war, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have become friends.
Yes, over that period, but that is no longer happening. Power is shifting to other countries - China, India, etc. and they are not "friends". Quotes because I think the idea of friendship in international relations is mistaken.
> and maybe India one day?
India has very different values and interests to the west, and while it is likely to ally with the west against China, I cannot see it in anything else. It is not backing the west over Ukraine, for example.
The Western camp has never invented any framework that would let Russia be in it.
What it could offer was: you sit here and sell us cheap oil and gas, while we court all your neighbours to stop associating with you and associate with us instead. But it did not have any meaningful participation format for Russia, only that it should be increasingly lonely. Not to mention stuff like visa waiver or student exchange programmes. In the end even at the best of relations the integration was actually tiny.
When confronted with this, the West will usually deflect and blame it all on Putin, which is also not constructive: This does not offer any plan to a regular Russian, especially seeing how close EU politicians were to Putin at that time and how they did not care if he stays for as many terms as he wanted to.
And yet all of Russias neighbours are now courting China, Kazakhstan especially. And also Russia is content with becoming a vassal gas station for China as long as it gets to play as a faux empire and slaughter both its citizens and its brother nation's citizens in an industrial meat grinder. 5D chess as the youngsters say these days
China is not so dangerous in this regard because it is not appealing.
It has great amount of economic power, but culturally it is very insular, plus the story of Chinese Uighurs, making people (in Central Asia especially) wary of fully embracing the Chinese Way.
Not so with Europe, which is culturally dominant, and many countries around Russia would love to fully embrace the EU, if EU is willing to take effort. But this is shitty deal for Russia since it was never invited to any such schemes and will lose cultural and economic influence. It's also not all rosy for target countries' population, but it's acceptable and Europe can make it look great.
For Russians it will always look that they cut family bonds for sugar daddy, though. That has sufficient stigma that would explain why Russian population still does not mind the war.
Russia has the Snow White's Evil Queen role assigned here, who is uninvited to the party but crashes it. And boy does Russia embraces this role, unfortunately. "5D checkers" is the term.
Tell me. Had russia treated its neighbors well, not genocided them for centuries on end, enslaved and taken liberties from them. Would they then maybe feel different about russia?
Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Baltics, all the Stans. Everyone has been been attacked by russia over the centuries. Centuries before putin was born.
The biggest problem of course is that russia is STILL doing that. Attacked Georgia, attacked Ukraine, is threatening to attack Baltics again.
There is no sign that russia can be trusted to treat it's neighbors well or be a responsible member of a world where human rights are being valued.
This is completely on russia itself, trying to play the victim is not going to work as everyone has tried to accomodate russia. Germans thought that wandel-durch-handel tried to make russia to understand that trade is more profitable than war, but this was proven to be hopelessly naive.
The West should not pretend they wanted Russia in their camp then. Not talking about faults. "Your fault is that I want to eat", as Krylov's wolf said to a lamb.
Russia just wasted at least 15 years on that bullshit that it could productively spend, as you have framed it, genociding and enslaving people. Now have stuff to catch up.
From Russian perspective, everybody is trespassing on our lands. We tried voluntary giving independence to these regions, which belonged to Russia by right, on assumption they respond with gratitude and uphold the rights of Russians and living there and Russian culture. Here they are now, telling tales about how they were genocided and enslaved. Now the prevailing idea is that we should take that independence back whether possible.
One teeny tiny examples, Russian Empire has secured the lands which are now contested Southern Ukraine, from Donetsk to Odessa. These were nomad-raided steppes with barely any population. Russian Empire secured them and let Ukrainians settle these new lands alongside other ethnicities (Greeks, Jews and of course Russians), and just two centuries later, Ukrainians refuse to acknowledge that and seek to forcibly assimilate all other ethnicities there. Now it is obvious that Ukrainian autonomy during the USSR was a costly mistake. They were gifted these lands for settlement and now they tell fairy tales about centuries of genocide. They were permitted to settle there among others and now they have driven everybody else away.
But the situation with Baltic states is in fact even worse. What happened to Baltic Jews? Baltic Germans? Baltic Russians? :))
Russians exterminated them. When Russians invaded in 1939-1940, they abolished Jewish cultural autonomy, closed all Jewish institutions (schools, associations, etc), rounded up Jews into cattle cars and sent them in entire families to die in Siberian wilderness, because they saw wealthy Jews as kulaks and oppressors of the working man. Russians targeted the entire professional class that was capable of running a country (public administrators, lawyers, engineers, doctors, merchants, etc), but because Jews were overrepresented in middle-upper classes, they got hit the hardest. They were about ten times more likely to get victimized by Russians than anyone else.
> Baltic Germans?
Resettled to newly-occupied Poland between late 1939 and early 1940 under agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union. They were allies at the time and had divided Europe in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Russians gave Germans free hands to do what they want with Poland and in return, Germany picked up Baltic Germans from the region (in an action called Umsiedlung) and left the rest for Russians to maul.
> Baltic Russians?
Exterminated during WWII by Russians. For example, one third of the pre-war population of Narva was Russian. Russians systematically destroyed Narva in WWII using the same methods we now see in Ukraine. Not a single habitable building was left. After the war, they banned the few surviving former inhabitants of Narva from returning. Instead, they resettled the area with ethnic Russians. This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war. The entire human (people, traditions, culture) and physical (buildings) history of the place got wiped away and replaced with depressing commie blocks and chauvinistic Russian settlers who are bitter that no-one treats them as liberators.
This is particularly striking considering that as a Hanseatic trading city, Narva had vibrant multiethnic population and immaculately preserved baroque architecture. It was a remarkably beautiful place that Swedes had once considered moving their capital to from Stockholm. Now it's a run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much.
It's also notable how Baltic Russians came into existence. They were historic minority compromised of refugees who had fled religious persecution in the 17th century Russia. Some things never change.
Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin? :)
The stupidity of "Russians has occupied Baltics and killed all Russians" will vanish once you call the former the Soviet.
But mostly, it is baltic people themselves who got rid of Jews and helped get rid of Germans, and then after 1990 tried to get rid of Russians too.
> This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war
That's the story of many places past WWII. There was an unprecedented cultural discontinuity. For starters, St. Petersburg is resettled practically anew because almost all of its population either perished in the blockade or was evacuated and was not encouraged to return. Don't get me started on Polish and German resettlements. Why blame Russians for anything here? Russians are the same victims of the war as Baltic people and Jews and Poles and Germans themselves.
> run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much
Can you perhaps stop disliking your compatriots for who they are, and maybe they will stop treating you as a Nazi who you currently objectively are.
> Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin?
Whatever possible claims there were along the lines of "Hitler was ackchyually an Austrian", present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy instead of denouncing it like Germans, justify it and continue to pursue it further.
> present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy
Present-day Woke LGBT socialists from California has adopted that legacy. Russians have no predisposition towards socialism, utopian cults or dictature of minorities. Soviet regime is a branchild of European Social Democracy and it's pathetic how they are trying to frame the victims of this crime for it.
Just ask all these young people from Italy, Spain or Seattle why so many hammer-and-sickles.
I didn't know that "LGBT socialist from California" were the people giving ~70% approval ratings to mass murderers like Stalin in Russian domestic polls and erecting monuments to Lenin in occupied parts of Ukraine.
As Stalin himself has said, "never ask who is doing the voting, ask who is doing the counting".
Most Russian people do not care that much about Stalin since it's all too old and they care much more about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who are much more recent butchers of Russia.
Some people do, but then again, some Italians, French and US campuses also give a lot of shits about people like Trotsky. An absolute majority of humanity are politically clueless, and the worst of them are also opinionated.
Spaniards and Italians, not to mention teenagers in Seattle, have no personal connection with Russian crimes and their ignorance is understandable. They have never lived under Russian control and have no real concept of what it means in practical terms. Russians have not extinguished entire branches of their family trees.
But why should any Russian approve Stalin, spew the same toxic imperialistic view of the world in many different forms like supporting the genocidal war against Ukraine remains a mystery. Germans are not holding military parades under swastikas, erecting monuments to their Führer, telling Jews that Germans suffered the most, harassing and shutting down Holocaust researchers and threatening rest of Europe that if they don't do as told, "we'll repeat it".
In the end, by not taking responsibility for your past and present actions like Germans have done, you will simply live shorter and poorer lives than other peoples of Europe, making endless excuses for your own suffering and the suffering inflicted upon others, while leaders are robbing you blind and partying on megayachts. My hope is that this degenerate russki mir will never reach me.
There is zero chance of India joining NATO in our lifetimes. They have an entirely different set of priorities. At most we might see some limited defense cooperation agreements between India and other maritime powers to secure their sea lines of communication and contain Chinese expansionism.
Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.
Watch some Asianometry. The guy explains how Japan's semiconductor industry was built on high-level planning and industry/academia collaboration with long-term planning and workshare division rather than competition between companies, to develop the necessary technologies for semiconductor manufacture. Same thing happened in the US.
R&D heavy industries cannot be bootstrapped without deep government pockets and expert oversight, and a risk tolerance that cannot be justified on balance sheets.
Government planning and investment can certainly bootstrap and protect a nascent industry in its infancy, but once the industry becomes competitive it is to the Democracy's own advantage to remove the training wheels and back off.
This book review of How Asia Works[0] gives excellent examples of how South Korea applied this strategy to break out of from economic despair to become a leading economic power, and how other Asian countries failed to apply this formula when their governments were too heavy handed in their approach.
> Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.
That's what gave us Intel processors? SpaceX? Google? ChatGPT?
I strongly disagree with your reading of events. (Yes, there was government involvement in the origins of the semiconductor industry, and in the origins of US spaceflight. No, top down government planning is not the only thing that has consistently worked. Having the government seed things and let private businesses run with it has worked pretty well.)
Intel (Fairchild) has the following in their biography:
> By the end of the 1970s they had few new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military
Yes, the megabucks put in by the government for Apollo and Military Programs were important, they created static demand - but the government neither planned nor built the technologies needed. It largely happened organically.
I think that just came down to capital requirement thresholds. Some circumstances required the collective funding because the payoff window was so long.
But a lot of that is due to protectionism and sanctions/restrictions.
I used to have a Huawei phone, now I don't because it can't use the Google App Store.
Here in Europe, there was a lot of controversy over the electric car tariffs too - as China produce high quality, cheap electric cars that could help us with the Green transition, yet we slap sky-high tariffs on them to protect Volkswagen shareholders.
How is it that some europeans like yourself don't realize that China is actively supplying military goods and funding to Russia, to help Russia attack Europe??
Why would you want to pay for cars that help to grow your enemy to cause your countries to fall?
>Top-down economic planning has never worked and I don’t see why it would be different now.
Countries have national currencies and central banks. Countries have borders where imports / exports are taxed and inspected for safety, illegal smuggling, etc. The US made Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to maintain liquidity in the mortgage market. All these things are not perfect, but what's the alternative? Where do you draw the line?
China is already number one on the EVs industry, so if we continue going down that route of forced electrification of our cars there's a big chance many of us will be indeed driving Chinese cars going forward. Granted, neither North Korea nor Russia are big in that industry.
> I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place
Chairman Xi made sure that won't happen. Maybe they'll take over Taiwan with disastrous consequences for everyone, but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up. They might also exert their influence in Africa, the Midlle East and Central Asia, at the expense of Russia. I'd argue Chinese influence in Central Asia is somewhat better than Russian influence, which has only created frozen conflicts that Russia can reignite whenever it's convenient for them (see Nagorno-Karabah).
If Chinese trade with the US stays at current rates, there's less risk of war between China and the West.
As usual, Dan Wang's yearly letter is not only beautifully laid out but also an eye opener.
Russia has nothing to do with Nagorno-Karabakh (indeed, in many ways this ethnic conflict has caused the demise of the USSR, not the other way around). Nagorno-Karabakh is not in Central Asia. There are no frozen conflicts in Central Asia, though there are some feuds.
Any Muslim country indeed may have an islamist insurgency and/or a Cotton revolution staged by CIA. Not sure China is great against either one threat.
But the claims that there are any frozen conflicts there are unfounded (no strong claims of one country on the lands of another country in the region), and about Russian involvement also unfounded (it did help secular Tajik win the civil war in a coalition but that's mostly it).
"but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up."
I am not that sure anymore. The Russo-Ukrainian war shattered a lot of my illusions with regard to rationality of leaders. A country with a very bad demographics started a war by deploying clearly insufficient forces (200 000 soldiers are nothing when compared to the size of Ukraine; Germans deployed 12x as more soldiers in 1941 to conquer Ukrainian SSR) and the result is an enormous fuck-up and unendong slaughter of young population which, with current TFRs, will never be replaced.
If Putin can make such a bad judgment, Xi can as well. It is not as if Xi tolerates more dissent/negative feedback to his rule than his Russian counterpart.
The Minsk agreements were highly favourable to the Russians, since they were basically forced on the Ukrainians. That’s why Poroshenko was going around saying Ukraine would never abide by them.
Claiming the opposite is just muddying the waters. Up is down in wartime, I suppose.
Yes and no. Putin could rationally expect no direct western intervention or even the level of support we have given. We did nothing when the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing when they invaded Georgia. The threat to invade Ukraine was originally made at least as early as 2008 and we did nothing in the intervening years to deter it.
Taiwan is very different. Xi also knows it is of far created economic importance to the west (and the US in particular) than Ukraine is.
The miscalculation was primarilly political rather than military. They expected the Ukrainians to roll over rather than fight. Possibly they believed their own propaganda (and their experience from the 2014 invasion) and expected a lot of Ukrainian support. The invaders were not even prepared to fight and the planning was lead by the FSB, not the military. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9ym9TDs6Dg
"Yes and no. Putin could rationally expect no direct western intervention or even the level of support we have given. We did nothing when the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing when they invaded Georgia."
This still sounds like a huge gamble with very high stakes. Ukraine received a lot of Western weapons between 2014-2022, and it was those weapons like Javelin that helped stop the original Russian armored onslaught.
International politics does not reliably work on the principle "actor X hasn't done Y before, so actor X won't do Y now". There may be thresholds that, once reached, change the entire situation.
To look at a historical example, the Allies did nothing when Hitler re-occupied the Ruhr, they did nothing when he annexed Austria, they allowed him to take Sudetenland and later they did nothing when he annexed the rest of Bohemia and Moravia. But with Poland, the threshold was crossed once and for all.
>but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up.
Why? PRC is currently extracting the greatest high skill demographic divident in human history in the next 30 years, and even with shit tier TFR they're producing more bodies than any modern military needs, and will continue to under the most pessimestic demographic projections until end of century. They have decades to try and try again, because they can replicate US expeditionary military model with even less than fraction of their population and industrial output. Ultimately IMO PRC doesn't need to dominate, or take over west/really US tier of hyperdominance, which it can't. But that's also exactly why it's fine and even prudent for PRC to take over TW and bring pyrrhic disaster for everyone. In terms of cold interest calculus, the west, being at the top has more to lose, and historically, you displace regional hegemon with force. Meanwhile PRC got plenty of excess/surplus workforce past 2050s for reconstruction. The TLDR is PRC comprehensive power by herself is going to increase / close gap with west. And even if she doesn't want war, structure forces / trends won't dissuade her, and if anything incentivizes escalation.
> PRC is currently extracting the greatest high skill demographic divident in human history in the next 30 years
China is not. There is a trend in China for companies to not hire people over the age of 35. Also, their unofficial youth unemployment rate is something like 45%. In addition, 1 billion people live in poverty in China https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-.... That means those people don't have the knowledge/connection/skillset to contribute. Lastly, Chinese population is expected to shrink to 600B even faster than 2050
At current PRC STEM / skilled labour production rate, they're on trend to generate 50-100M new skilled workers in the next 20 years. Those are growing bodies already born and accounted for. That's multiple times more than US is set to gain in people via all methods birth/immigration. In the next few years, PRC will have more skilled talent IN WORKFORCE than US in absolute numbers. It's exactly beause relative skill across workforce is still low, currently 20% vs developed countries for 60-80% that PRC has incredible skilled demographic divident to squeeze. It's how JP/SKR GDP doubled/tripled after TFR crash 20 years ago, by training up new generations into more skilled/productive work. Hence PRC similarly marching to advanced economy workforce composition is - objectively the greatest concentration in high skilled talent within one coordinated system in human history. Even at lower relative % of skilled workforce, due to PRC population denominator, that means PRC will have significantly more aggregate knowledge/skill/connection than any other competitor.
PRC broad unemployment rate is 5%, youth find jobs within a few years. Right now you have massive cohorts of new graduates post academic expansion who don't want to settle for jobs they think are beneath them, but eventually, like all humans, they will. It's going to take a few years because PRC kids have no crippling student debt, can mooch off parents living at home, and don't need to work 2 part time jobs to make ends meet. Even if 40% of youth unemployemnt was durable, implying 40% of PRC skilled workforce end up not working, which is an idiotic hopium position to draw analysis from, the remaining 60% is still MORE aggregate skill pool than again, any other competitor, at any time in past or projected future in next 30-50 years. Which if you care about geopolitical balance/stragetic competition, is the cohort and period worth considering.
There's no credible model where PRC population will dip to 600M in 2050.
On poverty: there's 600M, on 1000rmb disposable household income, 900m on 2000rmb. That again, that's precisely why they don't matter for growth. That 60% of population constitutes merely 10% of GDP. Most of GDP/productivity in advanced/modern economy driven by the minority of skilled workforce. In PRC case, the minority in developed tier1/2 regions. The same cohort responsible for 90% of the GDP is set to increase by order of magnitude within the next 20 years. They're the real growth drivers. That growth will trickle down so the bottom 60% can eventually charge 10rmb for a haircut instead of 5rmb and live on 2000/4000rmb instead of 1000/2000, but ultimately their contribution to development is/was always going to be marginal. You don't need everyone to be high skilled, and with PRC population, modernization timeframe, they couldn't. But going forward they can certainly have more absolute/aggregate skilled labour than US+partners, and still have a few 100 million stuck in informal economy doing shit all. And right now that's where impactful demographic trend is heading.
> generate 50-100M new skilled workers in the next 20 years
You're overestimating the impact since
1.) 80% of the top minds will study abroad and stay there, not in China, like they are now. More smart people are realizing if they live in a freedom-less dictatorship, being just a chive to be cut down, they are better to move. When they see their hero Jack Ma was imprisoned and stripped of power. When they hear their hero Ma Huateng of Tencent actively proclaiming one should not attract attention and to lower profile
2.) rote studying + cheating culture + mandatory Xi Jing Ping learning for 3 hours every day for these workers in college make them inferior workers than workers in the West. Chinese colleges are already not as good as Western colleges to start with.
3.) when these skilled workers graduate and can't find jobs, much like now when tsinghua graduates are forced to become didi drivers, they won't be able to learn the actual skills to contribute, since college learnings are just that, college learnings.
4.) US can get skilled immigrations from around the world, and can ramp up whenever they want. They also have skilled partners like Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea to work with
> settle for jobs they think are beneath them, but eventually, like all humans, they will
Yes, these new college grads now are driving for didi and delivering for meituan, which they will continue to do for 20 years. There is no magic bullet to turn an event like Great Depression around
> There's no credible model where PRC population will dip to 600M in 2050
There are many, but first you have to not buy China's word that it has 1.4B to start with. (why would you when they still proclaim 5% GDP growth in 2023) Many guesses are 1.2B, before all the unreported covid related deaths
1) Subtantially less (like single digit %) PRC tier1 talent are leaving now, and more skilled talent are flowing back from west to PRC due to better opportunities. Record number in last few years. What you're seeing is some old wealth, accumulated in PRC at time when you didn't need high skill talent, capital flighting. And a bunch of low skilled migrants trying to enter from south America to flip burgers. This isn't the 2000s where best of best PRC goes abroad, some do, but largely it's the extra mediocre/dumb who can't hack Chinese gaokao. This isn't diasphora from 90s where every Chinese group has friends who were like top10 from their province. The common story now is my kid too dumb/fragile to survive PRC tertiary, lets send them abroad. Which relates back to old wealth fleeing, a lot of rich peasants who guanxied their way into wealth and know their kids aren't smart enough to do well in PRC but maybe can coast in west where talent pool is shallow. Like this
2) Except they're climbing/leading science/innovation indexes in west controlled for quality. As if university in the west don't have retarded waste of time rereqs. No one is learning XJP app for 3 hours a day. They're studying their courses and farming primogems.
3) Yeah they're going to spend years bumming a round while job creation meet talent creation, which is expected artefact of PRC overcapacity. That'll sort itself out in a a few years. Supply/demand etc. The important point being, right now there are host of significant, strategic industries where there's lots of demand and having excess talent is net good, i.e. PRC is basically the only country on trend to not have talent shortage in semiconductors in 5 years. And guess what happens when there's extra demand, companies take and retrain less qualified applicants. It's better to have a pool of STEM taxi drivers who can skill work because you know they were filtered by tertiary system than the west who has excess demand for skill work, and taxi drivers who can't.
4) Now break down the numbers. US has access to global talent, but what US actually has access is 400M english speakers, 600m with some english proficency, from a few countries with skill development. And guess who they have overwhelmingly chose in the last 10-15 years. PRC talent, that they are now making harder to brain drain due to domestic policies. Meanwhile, PRC has 900m mandarin speakers, but realistically like US, the subsect of viable tertiary talent is much lower. But PRC talent bias skill/technical work, vs gender studies and has much bigger pool for high skill work. Meanwhile, they've been retaining significantly more talent due to more opportunities, and frankly produce so much that US/west can't even brain drain enough to make a dent, assuming US/PRC domestic politics allows prior levesl of brain drain. US has access to "more" talent, but realistically can only takein/incorporate so much. Meanwhile PRC has access to MORE talent, more than US can ever take, including top end.
Very few are skilled youths driving did/meituan. Some do, but youth umemployment stats concenrates low skill. Credentialled youth and taking their time job seeking, looking into teaching/government, and eventually will settled into bluecollar work that pays better than delivery work if they can stomach the shame. Broke, medicore skilled youth, the C students are desperate enough to do low end work. If you're an A level talent, you're already working sometime nice. No so different from advanced economies as they deal with academic inflation.
Conspiracy/FLG/and that one professor guess 1.2B. Which doesn't even matter since output of PRC exports and value chain can be measured by proxy. That 1.2B is consuming resources for previous 1.4B, and living 10% better. It's fine. And as if PRC having 200M less mouth to feed and fuel is actually a problem. Meanwhile commodity imports and energy increase trend is clear and can't be systematically fudged over timescale. Dang's not going to be happy if I interrogate every luny claim on PRC. Suffice to say, PRC skilled demographic boom, and ability to to coordinate them is so large, that they have large advantage even if you think they're fudged by double digit percentages.
I think the answer is, it doesn't. It requires coordinating bodies, industrial base, and resources. Not ability to vote or unfettered media. See PRC recently moving up value chains, topping science and innovation indexes in western publications, controlled for quality. That's PRC goign from fraction of high skilled talent in 2010, to near parity in in last few years after boosting tertiary education. If you buy into the innovation+freedom argument and also PRC is less free argument, then innovation is negatively correlated to free thought. Regardless, whatever system PRC has in place, it's been driving innovation in last few years with less talent than west, and soon more talent, with more experience. Absurdly more. Meanwhile everyone else is adopting PRC industrial policy, or rather re-adopting indy policy that PRC copied from Asian Tigers who copied from US. And ultimately even if you presume leading edge innovation requires the "right" culture, PRC is still good at replicating and commercializing. Hence whatever lead an innovation an "innovative" culture produces, PRC can still replicate and commercialize and at scale faster and cheaper and reduce market share / R&D of those companies on global market.
I'd wager the enormous media machinery does work to some extent in scaring people away, though I know people that have moved there and things are going extremely well for them.
I share many of your sentiments, but I have a theory that it won't be China or the West, but a blend of the two, which dominates the future (or, hopefully, rules without dominating). It's like our cultures are mating, and posterity will be the child of both. And like actual mating, the courtship is often rocky and marked by conflict. We'll sort it out.
This. While one could argue the current conflicts we're seeing are the Thucydides Trap, as the US' power wanes and China rises, this transition from quasi-unipolar hegemony to a multipolar and multicentric is clearly being mediated by conflict.
Personally I think it's the only realistic way we could have a system of checks-and-balances. You truly need a set of superpowers fending each other off, keeping each other in line for there to be some stability, offsetting their influences.
So in a way it's good to read about two things in concert: 1) Xi tightening things up and cracking down harder and harder on free expression, and 2) younger Chinese people -- despite the propaganda I hear they're exposed to -- becoming disillusioned and frustrated by it. Overall it sucks: I certainly don't wish more and more censorship etc. being foisted upon a billion of my fellow humans. But I also don't want to see a totalitarian regime being the main dominant world power.
Of course, dissatisfied young people -- and probably not even that many when compared to the whole of young Chinese people in China -- don't guarantee any kind of meaningful change over time. I'm sure there are plenty of young people in China who will happily step into the party's shoes once the current leadership's time has past.