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.
Can you be specific about how this is done?
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..
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.
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.
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.
* 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
* Increasing bankruptcies. 8.5M in 2023, up from 5M in 2020. https://www.asiafinancial.com/record-number-of-chinese-black...
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
That wasn't a loss. Russia was never in the western camp.
The "loss" is the loss of the hope that they would become so. I'm not sure how realistic that hope ever was.
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.
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.
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.
That's offensive bullshit which I will note but not going to waste my time on.
But please note that Russians are aware of such language of hate going on around them, and that justifies fighting people who disseminate that.
If you cry a wolf, don't act surprised when it materializes.
Also your threats prove my point. Nothing has changed, who would want to integrate aggressive and violent people. But somehow "west" is at fault.
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.
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? :))
So no other people have the right to self-determination anywhere in the world?
"Be russian or be ready to be dead" this is your opinion?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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, I've fixed it for you. But even then, it's not the only game in town. "Democrats" (Yeltsin's band of US loving nomenclature and friends) practically killed or dispersed just as many people as Stalin & company did.
There's a very significant number of monuments devoted to tragedies of Soviet period, in Russia. I'm not even sure Germany would match that. I believe their general approach was to pretend that nothing happened between 1933 and 1945. In short, stop trying to confront other people on their history and first confront yourself on your own history. Which would be?..
It was your own mismanagement that reached such level by 1990 that the economy was unable to provide even food to the population, forcing people from all social classes to subsistence farming for survival.
The constant passive-aggressive snark towards the Americans is distasteful and ungrateful given how much they helped you then with food aid.
> There's a very significant number of monuments devoted to tragedies of Soviet period, in Russia.
Mostly from 1990s and early 2000s, before Putin began rehabilitation of Stalin and incorporation of Soviet legacy into modern Russia. The monuments are now vanishing at an accelerating pace and incidents like these have become common: https://sakhaday.ru/news/v-yakutske-snesli-pamyatnik-polskim...
> In short, stop trying to confront other people on their history and first confront yourself on your own history.
That's what Europe has done - confronted own history and learned from it, Germans in particular. They do not pretend that nothing happened between 1933 and 1945, far from it. Disagreements are now solved calmly in EU cooperation formats, which have brought unprecedented peace to Europe.
The peace is being violated by Russians, who keep trying to bring back history by sending tanks with hammer-and-sickle flags into foreign countries, to shoot at peaceful people living there.
When will you confront your history and present actions, learn from them, and become a normal country where people are not living in filth and despair?
I'm glad that you have implicitly agreed that Soviet regime wasn't "our own".
> Americans... helped you then with food aid
As you've noted, I grew my potatoes myself and subsisted on them. Why would I be grateful to Americans then? shrug
> living in filth and despair
I wonder when you've last set foot in any Russian city or town, since they're actually quite nice these days. Of course, as they say, a swine will always find filth.
Of course it was. You've made it your own by flying its flags, by marching under its banners, by celebrating its dictators, and by continuing its traditions in how you treat domestic population and neighbours alike. Germany, in comparison, has made a clear break with its past and you see nothing like that there.
> As you've noted, I grew my potatoes myself and subsisted on them. Why would I be grateful to Americans then? shrug
The billions from American food aid program stabilized prices and prevented the situation from deteriorating into widespread hunger. Of particular importance was the grain required to feed livestock. I vividly remember newspaper photos of grain ships when they first arrived. The aid program lasted until 2000, and it wasn't the first time for Americans to give food aid to prevent starvation in Russia.
> I wonder when you've last set foot in any Russian city or town, since they're actually quite nice these days.
2019, but since I mentioned Narva earlier, this Varlamov's video is better than any personal anecdote ands sums up very well what I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSwO7lS5QY In 2014, the EU provided Narva and its Russian counterpart Ivangorod on the other bank of the river 5M EUR to reconstruct the riverbanks in an initiative to improve neighbourly relations. Estonian side built a modern and very popular public space with lighted walkways, open air gyms and playgrounds along the riverbank. On the Russian side, the money got stolen and fishermen continue to sit on piles of rocks between weeds.
And may I remind that Narva in 2024 is a run-down and declining provincial town, that is, nothing spectacular and no "model city" in any way.
All in all, I see no objective reasons why Russians couldn't share the same standard of living as Norwegians, if they hanged their Kremlin rat, dropped the idiotic and violent belief in Russian exceptionalism and xenophobia, and focused on improving life at home one step at a time instead of trying to drag everyone around them down the drain. This too is a Soviet legacy that Russians have adopted and willingly embrace. After losing the war, Germans gave up on their stupid world domination plans. When will Russians do the same?
That's just a great source, totally makes up for the the real thing. Have a nice day.
That experience in particular was like stepping into a time machine and arriving in 1980s Soviet Union. People in the west would never notice most details, like the way superiors yell, boss around and humiliate their subordinates in most mundane situations.
Another random detail was the way people treat their homes. Where I live, every apartment building has a legally established cooperative that manages jointly-owned parts of the building (parking lots, green areas, walkways, roof, exterior walls of the building and public spaces like hallways inside). Often this is delegated to professional management companies, but it's pretty common for someone from the building to take the management responsibility. Over time, from jointly collected maintenance fee, buildings have been renovated. New roofs, new insulation, solar panels, regular cleaning, etc.
In Russia, the concept of "home" seems to end at the front door. Even if people have made a modern yevroremont in their apartments, the hallways and exteriors are dirty, ugly, unmaintained and falling apart. When entering a typical commie block, the interior looks like it hasn't been renovated since it was built sometime during the Brezhnev era. Paint peeling, phone and internet cables dangling, electrical wiring unchanged since the 1970s. Nobody gives a shit about public areas. And it goes both ways. One of the first things Russian tourists in Europe notice and mention, especially in smaller places: how well maintained everything is.
While this may seem insignificant, I believe it is a key reason why Russia is still such a shithole. A cooperative means that people pool together their resources, democratically vote how to manage the building, choose people to act in their name and keep them accountable. It's the place where every homeowner learns how the entire country runs. How public finances are managed. How laws enable and restrict things that you can and cannot do. How to apply for things like renovation grants and coordinate them with government institutions. How to choose the right people for the job. How to analyze past performance and plan for the future. Capable people will quickly move on to local elections, becoming members of local government or council. The most capable will rise to become cabinet ministers and presidents. The most basic level of jointly taking care of the parking lot in front of the house or repairing stormwater drains is where the entire free society starts from.
I haven't seen that in Russia. Instead, I see people living in filth, with paint peeling and lights broken in hallways and cars parking on grass turning everything into a mud field, while shaking a fist at the Americans and "Gayrope" in jealousy and bitterness and unwillingness to admit your failures and in naive hope that by murdering enough people in foreign countries, you somehow gain the respect of the world and return to a past glory that never actually existed. And this is very convenient for the Kremlin rat and his cronies, because this way you will stay complacent, politically and societally inactive ("I am not interested in politics yada yada") and will never become a risk to their palaces and megayachts and NYC penthouses.
Sometimes I can't believe that people this stupid exist. If only the world knew how you actually lived outside of MKAD.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
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.
Well, 10% tariffs, which isn't exactly prohibitive.
Why would you want to pay for cars that help to grow your enemy to cause your countries to fall?
Most of the things we're using in the western world have parts manufactured in China. Less and less in the US or western europe.
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?
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.