> And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.

I’m going to concur with others here. It’s not irrecoverable. And the future isn’t yet written.

China has had the fortune (even eclipsing the US) of being a giant market of burgeoning consumers and massive amount of labor. The US first won this economic opportunity partially through immigration and a well-timed WW2 victory. Now its chinas turn to wield consumerism.

That said, China also has the misfortune of a serious risk for population collapse due, in part, to the prior 1 child policy. They’re aging faster than the US and others nations, and that will dramatically shift their economic output, consumption, and of course strain government resources. They also don’t have a culture of immigration like the US to slow the change. It would take a major global shift to see large immigration into China. There are other major economic risks they face, like their real estate debt, but the population collapse does pose a significant threat to stunt or reverse their ascendance.

TLDR: China could be the next Japan, not the next US.

But of course China is still going to be able to look at the response of nearly every other modernized nation and see how they deal with population drop first. That still puts them at a major advantage over other nations even after they peak. China is in an absolute prime position going into the future, they just gotta hold onto competent leaders for a few generations, and from my (admittedly limited) view they are doing a better job than most.

I do not think the 21st century is necessarily already determined. China had suffered so much in the 20th century, including famine and revolution and yet they still rose.

What Trump did so far is a farce but it's recoverable.

History is too unpredictable to determine which nation is the winner of the 21st century. Anybody who claims to know the future have too much certainty about the course of history.

Western Capitalists didn’t and don’t give two shits about a liberal China. The investments were made and technologies transferred because the Chinese government required them in order for Western companies to access China’s enormous pool of stable and cheap labor. As for this being the Chinese century, I think it’s not an inevitability. Japan at one point also looked like it had a shot of becoming a dominant economic superpower.

They are still implicitly betting on it though, because if this doesn't materializes they have nurtured their own enemy.

I'm not sure much matters to them aside from quarter-over-quarter growth. Take climate change, for example. Bad for business in the long run but here we are.

Sadly I agree with you. But I think society can't work if this is accepted. I think you need some amount of intrinsic orientation, because if this is forced then it leads to even more evil.

My mother tongue (German) has a term (Herzensbildung) that I would like to use here, but I don't know a good english translation. The dictionary gives me "nobleness of heart", but I don't think this captures it, because it is about the education to lead to this, not a final state. Literally it means "education of heart". But this is not about morale, good and evil (that's Gewissensbildung). It's about being educated to want things and to care about them.

When looking at past times, it is often assumed that they were as focused on advantage as much as we are, but I don't think that's true, and I think loosing this is also part of the sickness of "the West".

A gigantic part of China's Rise is actually down to Apple.

Channel 4 news made an interview with a financial times journalist if you wanna hear a neat summary https://youtu.be/43PtL0XQeA8?si=bovF8wXeK9Ege4Mz

But it's not exclusive to this video, lots of coverage around, from way bigger channels too.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc

You forget some characteristics of China's political economy that make their quality of life improvements way bigger and are not accounted for in this story. For example, the unprecedented investment in clean energy is seamlessly (compared to the west at least) followed by improvements to the grid. The central planner knows the plan, so he can account for the infrastructure necessary, which is not true for capitalist countries. The USA is laughably behind other powers in terms of basics like mass transportation and energy partly because of this coordination issue. No need to get started with how ahead China is with internet infrastructure, too, right?

You know, the whole git 'master' branch stuff has many in the USA exhausted about arguing over words and their meaning.

A good shortcut is to just invent and use new words. USSR-PRC is probably better than arguing over CPC or CCP, which itself probably comes from the Russian CCCP as the Alaska Trump-Putin meeting made me notice.

As per Google: CCCP is the Cyrillic form of the Russian acronym СССР, which stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik).

Other things that may be beneficial to do: not anthropomorphizing countries and using the neuter "it", saying "X government" like USG instead of "Washington DC." Using stand-ins like Washington DC for US Government another word is called metonymy.

In this kind of analysis it is always something that is done to or for China. The latter never has any kind of agency. Neither the will nor mind of its own. If that were true China would have stayed a complete and utter shithole no matter the investment whether political, intellectual, financial or scientific.

@yubblegum nails it - well written. I might add a couple of things:

- China had a free look at what Japan did so well 70s-90s

- China had a free look at Russia and most definitely did not repeat their mistakes economically. Russia ought to be the most embarrassed of all how well done China has done.

- the above two points are compliments to china: they take statecraft far smarter abd seriously for them. Similarly, China isn't stupid enough to start a war (Ukraine) they couldn't mop up with a low level adversary. But Russia is because they're fragile that way.

- China under Nixon sided with the US and the west, who had solid currency to pay for goods. That helped a lot.

- we Americans made the same mistake germany did with Russian energy: economic ties are not a by way to western liberlization. You can't buy off Russia from invading.

- and as for us Americans: we didn't protect ourselves in job losses through nafta, or China. It wasn't woke liberal politicians who sent jobs overseas or to canada/Mexico or china. It was private corporate owners/boards. And yes, they are a special kind of stupid if they couldn't see the long game china played. China had a long game; US only saw $ signs. Good lord! China was never going to allow dominance in manufacturing or access to Chinese markets by outsiders. The British made sure of that. Period.

- the US is now at a point where job security is more important than cheap crap at 5 and below, while china has moved onto high end. The days of trading lower consumer prices for job losses is waning.

> China isn't stupid enough to start a war (Ukraine) they couldn't mop up with a low level adversary.

Didn't Russia (and a lot of other folks) think Ukraine was an adversary they could mop up? Or are you saying China wouldn't estimate wrong like Russia did?

I'm saying china makes better decisions; i don't think it would start a war with a snowballs chance of winning convincingly. Second, China is not motivated (apart from taiwan) to invade. Russia is because it's fragile, scared of nato, and generally more expansive. China just doesn't have those urges. If I was China I'd be sick and tired of babysitting Russia with handouts because its in over its head.

Russia as far as I know was told by its own Ukraine was 1 week doable - clearly wrong. I think but have no argument to underpin the claim China is smarter in that the decision makers are not told what they want to hear in foreign wars.

This doesn’t really make sense. Everyone thought Russia would mop up Ukraine in a week. Turns out it was wrong because Russian military was weaker than they thought, Ukraine response was strong, etc. but this is just a hindsight 20/20 thing. Any country could make such a mistake.

And you say fragile, scared, etc. Countries, especially large countries, don’t operate like that. They had security concerns, which they publicly warned about for months, and then they attacked.