Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are.
Starts up again, US going to the other side of the Pacific and being aggressive. 2014 Victoria Nuland's Euromaidan happens, and problems in the Ukraine in 2014. Then more problems in 2022.
Calms down again, then the US starts arming Israel's Gaza genocide in 2023 more heavily. US soldiers killed off the coast of Yemen, which is doing a humanitarian intervention to help the Gazans.
The US world imperial stretching keeps having eruptions in tge colonized client states. Meanwhile the Standing Committe of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China keeps growing their country more and more.
An interesting interpretation of events. Let's continue.
"Then the air crew donates their airframe & technology to the Chinese Communist Party. And when they return they come up with a lie that they had been buzzed several times by the J8 pilot until the crash. Also they faked distress calls recording it. All to prove that the United States is a paper tiger intent on disrupting the Chinese people's rightful claim to all East Asian territory."
I do know real people that hold views like this, but they also apply similar lens to other large countries with global footprint. So at least a consistent approach.
Firing rockets indiscriminately at ships is not even in the same planet as humanitarian intervention.
this was a reference to Gabe Newell and Valve
1) maintain the autocracy
2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion
3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats
... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...
improving the country for the people
Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.
Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop delivering and the "Mandate of Heaven" expires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
China's demographic decline will take decades and unless the CCP really fucks things up (eg. invading Taiwan and failing miserably at it), it's going to be a Japan/Korea-style slow-motion stagnation, not a dramatic implosion.
Yeah I hope he's better than that
Americans don't like to acknowledge this.
But even that's a little different. Application of new farming practices is not an intentional genocide. The culling of the buffalo was an intentional genocide.
Meanwhile, China has been getting better and better, looking at US as an example, and correctly avoiding providing the "freedoms" given to us in US in avoiding the same fate.
The real change is that the US economy isn't obviously superior to the next however many economies combined. Consequently the US is losing the ability to impose its opinions on others as fundamental truths. It looks like everyone in the West will have to re-learn negotiation and it'll probably be a rocky process.
Sort of. I’d move the needle to the 1970s, when Soviet power was on an obvious downside. Realpolitik would dictate, at that time, for Europe and Asia to balance America. But we were a good ally. So balancing wasn’t seen to be necessary.
Wasn't seen as possible, an important distinction. The Australian experience so far is the US demands we ... basically commit war crimes every so often. Or whatever the term is for invading countries without justification. It is a lot like being good friends with a shark; it is important to keep them pointed at other things and the shark isn't ever going to go out of its way for you unless it is hungry and the friendship is ending.
The world was probably better for us when the US was unconstrained by reality; but the reality is the US have been behaving very irresponsibly for decades. Trump is on the upper end of the presidential scale in recent history, the world can't cope with another Bush or Biden. Obama might have been able to get better diplomatic results.
Look at BYD sales and Ne Zha 2.
Their gaming industry and entertainment industries are starting to pull ahead of the US.
We’re seeing the effects of ~70 years of hyper-consumerist behavior. It worked for a while, but now the costs have accumulated. There’s shit everywhere, and everything either breaks or is poison. Or both.
They’ve also massively overinvested in sectors like real estate
But maybe if Drumpf screws up the US enough, they will be able to weather these problems
Or perhaps AI will get so good it won’t matter
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2024/03/11/how-innovative-is-c...
[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0237_5th_Ple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan
[3] https://ccci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Policy%20Brief...
[4] https://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.
And they did it while remaining authoritarian. Incredible.
maybe chinese nationals / or ccp members can correct or add some things.
this also means you want your record pristine. And it is also why officials cover up problems rather than report it up.
But their current success to out-maneuver the US in terms of trade, as well as capacity, is testament to perhaps the success of such a system. I do recall there was a massive purge on corruption over the past decade(s), which is probably helped a lot. This did not happen in soviet russia.
He also actively promotes corruption of his underlings, but the important point is - within hard limits of their position. Get greedy and overstep that and either modern gulag or window for you. Good luck saying to the rest of population 'don't steal!'.
Xi is not flaunting his billion dollar mansions with golden toilets or megayachts while his kids grow up in Switzerland, is he.
China is starting to look quite well run by comparison.
Stuff like that can’t happen if you have protected national giants.
The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.
The question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face when they stop accurately picking winners. We are already seeing the property bubble collapse in a manner similar to Japan’s.
Japan didn't "blow up" due to picking wrong. The US and allies negotiated the value of the yen up (the plaza accords) when the trade imbalance started to rack up against the US. This popped japan's bubble, which ultimately caused their lost decade.
China, on the other hand, would be unlikely to sign any sort of similar treaty with the US. Their property bubble collapsed, but i dont think to the same extend as the japanese one. Not to mention that it was triggered by gov't, so it popped earlier than japan's one in the lifecycle - therefore, it must be the case that it's less bad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/rvid0x/why_did_japan... has some details in the comments.
To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.
And Capitalism does not work for USA or anywhere else either (except for very few people at the very top of the pyramid (scheme…)
You could see tons of US equipment during WWII reels on eastern front including heavy machinery, soviets tried desperately to remove such footage (just like photos of soviet soldiers wearing 3+ watches on each hand... err borrowed from friendly locals) but truth has this behavior of seeping back to light.
Capitalism works pretty well in any moral society actually, much better than any other system thats for sure.
Over a decade ago, I worked in a public hospital with a really tight budget. The Pneumology section was clean, orderly and provided service to patients as they came with no waiting time. The service in the building nearby could well fit in the definitions of crimes against humanity. Same hospital, same financing, same system, just a different boss.
The difference in effectiveness between these two strategies is the difference between the richest countries in the world and famines that killed like 100M people.
Basically, China is centralized politically and decentraliced economically. The soviet centralized everything... even meat prices, a recipe for disaster.
They plan the outcome, but let the governing to the different provinces and the implementation to the (mostly) private sector. These actors are forced to compete, among other things, via export discipline that cannot be faked.
And somehow, despite facing the same corruption and cronyism problems we do in the west, they seem to get better results.
What 'went wrong' was the economic war that Kennedy admn. started to starve the USSR of GDP by starting an arms and space race. The USSR did not bite the space race bait, but arms race was impossible to not participate. So it did. Then in the 1970s, the US started an economic warfare against the USSR with the help of its Gulf allies by manipulating oil prices. That wasn't enough either, so Reagan started another arms race. In the end all of that combined, crippled the USSR and it went bankrupt.
The US also went bankrupt, but it was able to delay it for ~15 more years by printing money and pumping it into the stock market and real estate thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. That came crashing down in 2008. The US did some more of the same and dragged it a decade and half more and here we are, where everything is finally crashing down.
China avoided most of that economic warfare by sitting on the sidelines and taking lessons. Sometime a decade ago, it passed the threshold of being too well-rounded and large to fail. To the point that it became a driving engine of the world economy, but backed with actual goods and services instead of the financial voodoo that the US built everything on.
> Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success
Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control. Otherwise, they derail every plan to maximize their profit by siphoning off state resources for little actual progress. Like how the last US administration's 'build back better' plan was derailed.
how come in your scenario, the state can do no wrong then?
In 1916 the communists dud not want to take over Russia. In 1917, Lenin said they should take the opportunity to take over Russia, and wait for Germany to become a left wing government, the real revolution. This did not happen, big business at the 1933 Geheimtreffen decided to back a right wing government in Germany, and the divided left was pushed aside by a united right when the Catholic Center party signed the Enabling Act.
Russia knew from 1917 it needed political winds in the west, but they blew the other way. Continental Europe invaded Russia in 1941.
Then in 1953, Khrushchev shifted capital spending to consumer spending, one of the main blows to the Sividt economy which was humming along from 1933 to 1953.
Karl Marx basically said communist revolutions can't succeed in backwards countries, only the biggest and most advanced countries.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025