> Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles
Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.
I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.
We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
Plus, China's growth to this day is built on the back of foreign, primarily American, consumption. If they ever beat us too badly, they go down with us.
They'd need to find alternate consumer markets to alleviate this, and what are their options? Domestic is out, China hasn't managed to create a domestic consumer market with their current demographics, which are only getting worse as their baby bust deepens.
Europe? Similar demographic issues, simply not enough consumption to replace the US and greater economic protectionism.
The 3rd world? Maybe, but first you have to develop it, and even if you could manage that they have nationalist impulses of their own. You think India is going to willingly offshore their industry to China on the scale of the US?
The American system for all its many flaws is extremely dynamic. Trump and his policies are mostly bad adaptations, but they are attempts at adaptation, and the attempts aren't going to stop. The US has changed radically in the last 10 years; there's no reason it can't change just as radically in the next 10.
Because that would lead to mass unemployment and deindustrialization, as China lacks the wealth among the lower classes and the demographics to consume everything that it produces.
Yes, in China's case through mass exports. What you're suggesting is North Korean Juche. Turning China into a larger North Korea will not increase its prosperity.
But you have made no argument for why that must continue, only presented that is the status quo.
China is huge and I am simply wondering, why does it need to export? Except for oil, it has pretty much any resource needed to sustain a high technology economy.
Please, there are no similarities between North Korea and China.
The Chinese model is 100% not exportable. It is in essence a benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning. It’s exactly like having a good monarch and if you look at history, good monarchs, were not all that frequent.
Agree with this however I wonder how functional it would be in a war - benevolent Xi, like all those good monarchs of the past, still has to quash rivals and every so often purges his top brass to put loyalists in, which we can see how effective that is in Russia right now (no comment on current US administrative choices in this regard, but at least historically, our generals were career military)
A benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning... at the moment. If you look at the last 30 years, it looks like it works. But if you look at the last 70...
This comment might hold water in 2006 or 2016 but it rings hollow in 2026. Who elected/congressionally-approved Jared Kushner to run US foreign policy?
I'm sorry to hear you feel it rings hollow. As you know, the secretary of state is Marco Rubio, who is appointed and confirmed by the senate (bipartisian-ish, I might add).
I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.
It is a fact that Kushner (plus Witkoff) has been playing the role of primary diplomat of the USA in critical matters of peace and war. In many cases, Rubio is not even present at these key foreign meetings.
The belief that autocracies will inevitably fall (or perhaps that "the arc of history bends towards justice") is hopelessly naive. Technology is a force multiplier with the power to entrench autocracy, forever.
Still you will not be able to give any existing example that lasted longer than 100 years. There are examples like Sayfawa dynasty which is counter-example to your claim about technology being multiplier
there is competition in technology field, and autocracies are not most competitive entities compared to say public corporations. Its still not clear who will win (common folks unlikely though)
Fall how? Please be specific. The people will rise up to take down their evil leaders? With what weapons will the people be armed? With what weapons will their evil leaders oppose them?
The problem always was that the central planners never knew enough to plan the economy right. Well, with enough technology, enough reporting into the central database, they theoretically could know enough.
And that might actually work, if that were the only problem. But it's not. The deeper problem is that people work better when they get to share in the proceeds. People didn't work very well in the "worker's paradise". They worked half-heartedly, doing the least they could to get by, and production (and quality) reflected it. (This isn't exclusive to communism, though. Large corporations can have similar issues.)
I find your framing somewhat historically inaccurate. China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people.
Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture that originated in Europe and spread to the former European colonies (including to Venezuela and Argentina) and post-WWII to the allies.
Although China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy those remained foreign concepts and did not permeate Chinese culture.
So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.
Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.
Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.
Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.
> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture
cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.
> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy
Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)
> China, a fairly insular culture
Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".
The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.
You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.
America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.
People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.
Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.
The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.
"Please consult your history?" You could replace "China" with "The USSR" in this post and be almost indistinguishable from arguments straight out of the 1950s.
You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.
As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.
Fair enough. We can point at each other or come up with examples all day long. Like I could say the United States didn't want to grant civil rights to African Americans as an example of some "high-minded cultural endeavors", but rather they wanted to avoid something like another civil war? Plus it made it sort of "awkward" shall we say for Americans to tell the Soviets and the world about human rights while bludgeoning black people in the streets for having the audacity to ask for basic civil rights.
I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:
The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?
They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".
You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".
Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".
It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?
China does not treat us as a partner any more than we do them. They have spent decades exploiting good will and abusing any attempts at genuine partnership. I don't blame anyone for looking for alternatives to the US in the current climate, but I doubt they'll find a better partner in China. Perhaps more reliable in the short term, in the long run China will try to run the same extraction game on its new "partners" just as it has done in the US.
Don't get caught up in their "thousands of years of history". They had thousands of years of history before Kublai Khan, they had thousands of years of history before the first opium war. They still have issues with older citizens stealing toilet paper from public restrooms because they were so heavily traumatized by Mao's famine, and Mao himself would probably have had you re-educated for suggesting he had any historical ties to Imperial China. The current leadership are the successors of that government.
The Soviet Union's fall was hardly self-evident before the 1970s, for some decades their GDP growth was surpassing the US. Khrushchev's aggressive speeches are now seen as naive bluster, but there was some hard data to back them up when he made them. The US adapted, as we always have.
I'd say the US has a number of structural advantages over China that it is currently squandering, but that won't always be the case. Demographically we're going to be the last major consumer economy standing as the century winds on, we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion), our natural resources are plentiful, and neither the Euro nor the Yuan nor gold are capable of replacing the dollar.
Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards. They lack discipline, organization, intelligence, and numbers. All they have is a blatant disregard for any rules, including their own; the longer they're in charge the more enemies they make. Like the communists who attempted to take Berlin by force in 1919, they will wake up one day to find themselves having crossed a line with far less support than they imagine. I doubt they'll take it well, but they won't last.
I am not Chinese, but the CCP loves to insinuate that the middle kingdom is 5000 years of uninterrupted rule. As we both know, that is hilariously untrue.
> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?
Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.
> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.
The article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.
The mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.
*with the implied framing being that China has somehow done this and is responsible, letting those actually responsible, largely the same people who own corpo rags like the New Yorker, off the hook entirely.
No, it's clear that you haven't actually read the article. You appear to be laboring under a sort of delusion, which I advise you to do your best to remedy.
It's been funny watching the slippery slope fallacy fallacy at play w/the supply chain:
- We'll only move cheap plastic toys to asia
- We'll only move low-value clothing to asia
- We'll only move inexpensive electronics to asia
- We'll only move TVs to asia
- We'll only move computer assembly to asia
- We'll only move low-value semi-conductors to asia
- We'll only move CPU production to asia
Only thing really left is IP and frankly I expect asia to outperform the west in that soon enough (my understanding is that they already are in some areas, I am not an expert)
Countries don’t have infinite supplies of labor and capital. The more of an economy dedicated to making cheap plastic toys or stitching tshirts, the less economic resources available for inventing the next iPhone. The very reason China is becoming more competitive in higher value-added economic activities is because China itself has moved away from low value economic activities - like manufacturing cheap clothing - these activities that have largely moved to poorer neighboring countries over the last decade or so.
And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?
yeah, i'm familiar with the just so stories told to us by economists, but the reality is that by moving the entire supply chain to asia there are huge knock on effects on our own ability to innovate and produce wealth
the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences
same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury
What economic "just so" stories have I presented? You accept that economic capacity is not infinite, right? Then you need to tell me from which sector would you reallocate workers to doing the things you listed: producing cheap plastic toys, low-value clothing, inexpensive electronics, TVs, computer assembly, low-value semi-conductors and CPU production.
Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).
many of them genuinely believe that it is progress to be above mere national interests. Certainly many people believe it to be a more progressive point of view.
Not sure if it was a naive new world order belief, blinding greed, racism, plain stupidity or a mixture of all of that. But the end result was selling the American people down the river..
There was a belief in "the end of history": that any economy that developed would inevitably become a liberal free market democracy.
I think this has left its mark. A lot of people do not seem to be able understand that this is not true. Even if they accept it intellectually its such a fundamental assumption that its still influential.
I think there was, and is, an element of racism. It still persists in that a lot of westerners cannot comprehend that they can be overtaken technologically or threatened by non-western societies. This includes people who think they are not racist, or are anti-racist.
there was an element of drinking their own kool aid. the economic religion of the late 90s and 00s was the theory of (static) comparative advantage vs export oriented industrialization.
China was only shooting itself in the foot, it was argued, by not opening its markets fully and following export oriented industrialization.
profit margins dictated economist opinions though. This is why EOI was treated as quaint while TOCA was treated as gospel truth even though one was nonsense.
So what if they're technologically superior? What we can't steal, we can buy.
When the time comes to geld the Yankees an' hitch them to the plough, we'll cut
off their balls with a knife they competed to sell us
i dont know why this is such a sensitive topic that it gets immeditely flagged and considered some sort of hate speech.
china gets massive advantage from western ideas that even benigh thing like 'lets not depend on china' is automatically considered hate speech and racism.
The percentage of China's GDP that is dependent on foreign demand (15.7%) is the second lowest among major economies. The only major economy that is lower is the US at 9.0%, which is an extremely outlier.[0]
By many OECD economic metrics[1] around trade dependence, the US and China consistently rank as the least trade dependent. This reflects the scale of the countries, diversity of the economies, and an intentional strategy of minimizing trade dependence for GDP growth.
This last point is central to geopolitical leverage. Even if you treat the EU27 as a single trade entity, which operates at similar scales, there is little evidence of a coherent strategy to become functionally self-sufficient. A lot of geopolitical relevance is downstream of this.
Long-winded, as anyone familiar with the New Yorker would expect. But still very good.
Whatever its other weaknesses, China has the enormous advantage that the people really in power are focused on raising China to global dominance. Vs. those really in power in America are, at best, worried about their personal status and wealth at the end of the next fiscal quarter.
What you said about "next fiscal quarter" is exactly right, and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles... which means on average we are thinking only 2 years ahead.
China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond.
I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too).
If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).
> I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job
Eliminate share buybacks. Raise the top tax bracket to 95% on earnings over $10m. Executive shares cannot be exercised until retirement if you really want to get aggressive.
The nuclear option would be stocks cannot be used as collateral for loans, it would shore up 90% of the nonsense overnight and have 0 negative impact on 99.99% of the general public.
It's already too easy for those in power to control popular opinion, and only getting easier, so you're not going to get mass protests or revolutions that upset the status quo.
> and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles
One of the two parties spends most of their intellectual capital on acquiring and maintaining power. The other party spends theirs on policies which they rarely have power to enact.
> ...only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead ...
Not saying I was paying close attention to America from 1850 to 1950, but a variety of cultural and social factors - especially less hyper-individualism, and people's futures being far more closely tied to the success of their families, neighborhoods, towns, etc. - lead to very priorities.
Yes, but I don't see that realization as noteworthy. Does history record a nation which never found its own advancement hobbled by the scheming of its petty local officials?
> ...has to juggle fewer balls...
When things aren't going so well, trying to stay in power adds more balls (to juggle) than being an autocracy takes away. And "things aren't going so well" usually indicates that less-competent autocrats are in power - meaning that they are less able to juggle any number of balls.
The Chinese desire to raise China to global dominance is exactly a concern w/ status and wealth. It's naive to think that America and China are any different in the degree to which leadership is driven by these concerns. One simply hopes that the facts-on-the-ground (i.e. geography) structures this pursuit in such a way to provide peace and prosperity to normal people.
America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.
China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.
Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.
Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.
China had an enermous corruption problem, what are you talking about? Xi has been on an anti-corruption campagin since 2012 and they are just getting rid of top leaders like just last month. And I am sure his "anti-corruption" campaign is totally not ignoring some aspects.
While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.
1995 was a different leader in a different time. Let us not forget at one point, America forced walked people on The Trail of Tears. American Amnesia is very potent and powerful, we easily forget about last week, year, century
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
It's best not to go back and forth with someone like that. They did not answer my only question in their pass-by commentary, so I feel no need to respond to the quotes they pulled from the article (not their points), on top of the better path of disengaging after rule breaking.
China's dominion as the worlds super power is going to be quite different to the US, EU and UK. They have a very different culture towards intellectual property, product versioning and quality control.
Can you not be so obtuse? If you are implying that, as a generalization, to you, the West is superior, just say that.
Such broad categorization about that vast of a nation seems disparaging to me. Grouping an entire nation on a label, and marking it inferior to your own.
> Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles
Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.
I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.
We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
Plus, China's growth to this day is built on the back of foreign, primarily American, consumption. If they ever beat us too badly, they go down with us.
They'd need to find alternate consumer markets to alleviate this, and what are their options? Domestic is out, China hasn't managed to create a domestic consumer market with their current demographics, which are only getting worse as their baby bust deepens.
Europe? Similar demographic issues, simply not enough consumption to replace the US and greater economic protectionism.
The 3rd world? Maybe, but first you have to develop it, and even if you could manage that they have nationalist impulses of their own. You think India is going to willingly offshore their industry to China on the scale of the US?
The American system for all its many flaws is extremely dynamic. Trump and his policies are mostly bad adaptations, but they are attempts at adaptation, and the attempts aren't going to stop. The US has changed radically in the last 10 years; there's no reason it can't change just as radically in the next 10.
Why must the consumption be exported?
Why can't they build for themselves?
Because that would lead to mass unemployment and deindustrialization, as China lacks the wealth among the lower classes and the demographics to consume everything that it produces.
Wealth is made.
Yes, in China's case through mass exports. What you're suggesting is North Korean Juche. Turning China into a larger North Korea will not increase its prosperity.
Yes, currently.
But you have made no argument for why that must continue, only presented that is the status quo.
China is huge and I am simply wondering, why does it need to export? Except for oil, it has pretty much any resource needed to sustain a high technology economy.
Please, there are no similarities between North Korea and China.
The Chinese model is 100% not exportable. It is in essence a benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning. It’s exactly like having a good monarch and if you look at history, good monarchs, were not all that frequent.
Agree with this however I wonder how functional it would be in a war - benevolent Xi, like all those good monarchs of the past, still has to quash rivals and every so often purges his top brass to put loyalists in, which we can see how effective that is in Russia right now (no comment on current US administrative choices in this regard, but at least historically, our generals were career military)
The article explictly mentions trying to export it via belt and road, which is why I bring it up.
Can you qualify the benevolence maybe as a factor of the distance to Beijing?
The nobles and the courtiers were always favored more.
A benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning... at the moment. If you look at the last 30 years, it looks like it works. But if you look at the last 70...
This comment might hold water in 2006 or 2016 but it rings hollow in 2026. Who elected/congressionally-approved Jared Kushner to run US foreign policy?
I'm sorry to hear you feel it rings hollow. As you know, the secretary of state is Marco Rubio, who is appointed and confirmed by the senate (bipartisian-ish, I might add).
I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.
It is a fact that Kushner (plus Witkoff) has been playing the role of primary diplomat of the USA in critical matters of peace and war. In many cases, Rubio is not even present at these key foreign meetings.
The belief that autocracies will inevitably fall (or perhaps that "the arc of history bends towards justice") is hopelessly naive. Technology is a force multiplier with the power to entrench autocracy, forever.
Still you will not be able to give any existing example that lasted longer than 100 years. There are examples like Sayfawa dynasty which is counter-example to your claim about technology being multiplier
many autocracies in terms of social management systems lasted for many hundreds years.
Leaders of specific autocracies change, right (e.g. king got killed, but now we have new king), but governing structure persisted.
there is competition in technology field, and autocracies are not most competitive entities compared to say public corporations. Its still not clear who will win (common folks unlikely though)
They will all fail. The difference is how brutal the end will be.
Fall how? Please be specific. The people will rise up to take down their evil leaders? With what weapons will the people be armed? With what weapons will their evil leaders oppose them?
What if communism/socialism works with the assistance of technology?
Can you be more precise maybe?
The problem always was that the central planners never knew enough to plan the economy right. Well, with enough technology, enough reporting into the central database, they theoretically could know enough.
And that might actually work, if that were the only problem. But it's not. The deeper problem is that people work better when they get to share in the proceeds. People didn't work very well in the "worker's paradise". They worked half-heartedly, doing the least they could to get by, and production (and quality) reflected it. (This isn't exclusive to communism, though. Large corporations can have similar issues.)
I find your framing somewhat historically inaccurate. China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people. Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture that originated in Europe and spread to the former European colonies (including to Venezuela and Argentina) and post-WWII to the allies. Although China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy those remained foreign concepts and did not permeate Chinese culture.
So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.
Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.
Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.
> China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people
For a good review: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/05/chinas-authoritarian-m...
Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.
> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture
cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.
> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy
Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)
> China, a fairly insular culture
Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".
"A republic, if you can keep it".
The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.
You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.
America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.
People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.
Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.
The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.
"Please consult your history?" You could replace "China" with "The USSR" in this post and be almost indistinguishable from arguments straight out of the 1950s.
You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.
As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.
Fair enough. We can point at each other or come up with examples all day long. Like I could say the United States didn't want to grant civil rights to African Americans as an example of some "high-minded cultural endeavors", but rather they wanted to avoid something like another civil war? Plus it made it sort of "awkward" shall we say for Americans to tell the Soviets and the world about human rights while bludgeoning black people in the streets for having the audacity to ask for basic civil rights.
I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:
The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?
They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".
You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".
Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".
It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?
China does not treat us as a partner any more than we do them. They have spent decades exploiting good will and abusing any attempts at genuine partnership. I don't blame anyone for looking for alternatives to the US in the current climate, but I doubt they'll find a better partner in China. Perhaps more reliable in the short term, in the long run China will try to run the same extraction game on its new "partners" just as it has done in the US.
Don't get caught up in their "thousands of years of history". They had thousands of years of history before Kublai Khan, they had thousands of years of history before the first opium war. They still have issues with older citizens stealing toilet paper from public restrooms because they were so heavily traumatized by Mao's famine, and Mao himself would probably have had you re-educated for suggesting he had any historical ties to Imperial China. The current leadership are the successors of that government.
The Soviet Union's fall was hardly self-evident before the 1970s, for some decades their GDP growth was surpassing the US. Khrushchev's aggressive speeches are now seen as naive bluster, but there was some hard data to back them up when he made them. The US adapted, as we always have.
I'd say the US has a number of structural advantages over China that it is currently squandering, but that won't always be the case. Demographically we're going to be the last major consumer economy standing as the century winds on, we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion), our natural resources are plentiful, and neither the Euro nor the Yuan nor gold are capable of replacing the dollar.
Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards. They lack discipline, organization, intelligence, and numbers. All they have is a blatant disregard for any rules, including their own; the longer they're in charge the more enemies they make. Like the communists who attempted to take Berlin by force in 1919, they will wake up one day to find themselves having crossed a line with far less support than they imagine. I doubt they'll take it well, but they won't last.
I am not Chinese, but the CCP loves to insinuate that the middle kingdom is 5000 years of uninterrupted rule. As we both know, that is hilariously untrue.
> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?
Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.
> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.
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The article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.
The mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.
Surely you realize that this article is, in fact, about the ongoing decay of the West.
It's not. It's about what's going well in China, not what went wrong in the West.
*with the implied framing being that China has somehow done this and is responsible, letting those actually responsible, largely the same people who own corpo rags like the New Yorker, off the hook entirely.
I refuse to believe this is a coincidence.
No, it's clear that you haven't actually read the article. You appear to be laboring under a sort of delusion, which I advise you to do your best to remedy.
yea history always repeats in patterns and nothing new ever happens.
It is utterly fascinating the ends to which people will go to insist the opposite.
https://archive.ph/w8J5L
Maybe we shouldn't have moved the entire supply chain to asia.
"we"
It's been funny watching the slippery slope fallacy fallacy at play w/the supply chain:
- We'll only move cheap plastic toys to asia
- We'll only move low-value clothing to asia
- We'll only move inexpensive electronics to asia
- We'll only move TVs to asia
- We'll only move computer assembly to asia
- We'll only move low-value semi-conductors to asia
- We'll only move CPU production to asia
Only thing really left is IP and frankly I expect asia to outperform the west in that soon enough (my understanding is that they already are in some areas, I am not an expert)
Countries don’t have infinite supplies of labor and capital. The more of an economy dedicated to making cheap plastic toys or stitching tshirts, the less economic resources available for inventing the next iPhone. The very reason China is becoming more competitive in higher value-added economic activities is because China itself has moved away from low value economic activities - like manufacturing cheap clothing - these activities that have largely moved to poorer neighboring countries over the last decade or so.
And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?
yeah, i'm familiar with the just so stories told to us by economists, but the reality is that by moving the entire supply chain to asia there are huge knock on effects on our own ability to innovate and produce wealth
the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences
same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury
What economic "just so" stories have I presented? You accept that economic capacity is not infinite, right? Then you need to tell me from which sector would you reallocate workers to doing the things you listed: producing cheap plastic toys, low-value clothing, inexpensive electronics, TVs, computer assembly, low-value semi-conductors and CPU production.
Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).
China cleverly identified America's Achilles heel: the greed and shortsightedness of its oligarchs.
Give them an extra 5% profit and theyll sell out the entire country and reduce its industrial base to ashes.
many of them genuinely believe that it is progress to be above mere national interests. Certainly many people believe it to be a more progressive point of view.
Not sure if it was a naive new world order belief, blinding greed, racism, plain stupidity or a mixture of all of that. But the end result was selling the American people down the river..
There was a belief in "the end of history": that any economy that developed would inevitably become a liberal free market democracy.
I think this has left its mark. A lot of people do not seem to be able understand that this is not true. Even if they accept it intellectually its such a fundamental assumption that its still influential.
I think there was, and is, an element of racism. It still persists in that a lot of westerners cannot comprehend that they can be overtaken technologically or threatened by non-western societies. This includes people who think they are not racist, or are anti-racist.
I think the “end of history” idea was sold to the public in the same way and for the same reasons they were sold trickle down economics.
Totally agree on the racism. I do hope the West doesn’t learn that lesson the hard way.
there was an element of drinking their own kool aid. the economic religion of the late 90s and 00s was the theory of (static) comparative advantage vs export oriented industrialization.
China was only shooting itself in the foot, it was argued, by not opening its markets fully and following export oriented industrialization.
profit margins dictated economist opinions though. This is why EOI was treated as quaint while TOCA was treated as gospel truth even though one was nonsense.
Luckily for the rest of the world, your elites have made that mistake.
perhaps themselves driven by global consumers culture that doesn't care how or where something was made as long as it's slightly cheaper.
i don't think they view it as a mistake
The Capitalists Will [outsource the manufacturing of] the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them -- original quote attributed to various famous communists
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/
lol I almost included that quote, but the reality is that china isn't communist in any meaningful way
i dont know why this is such a sensitive topic that it gets immeditely flagged and considered some sort of hate speech.
china gets massive advantage from western ideas that even benigh thing like 'lets not depend on china' is automatically considered hate speech and racism.
Export-oriented economy is never sustainable, especially when it's built upon low human rights.
The percentage of China's GDP that is dependent on foreign demand (15.7%) is the second lowest among major economies. The only major economy that is lower is the US at 9.0%, which is an extremely outlier.[0]
By many OECD economic metrics[1] around trade dependence, the US and China consistently rank as the least trade dependent. This reflects the scale of the countries, diversity of the economies, and an intentional strategy of minimizing trade dependence for GDP growth.
This last point is central to geopolitical leverage. Even if you treat the EU27 as a single trade entity, which operates at similar scales, there is little evidence of a coherent strategy to become functionally self-sufficient. A lot of geopolitical relevance is downstream of this.
[0] https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/2082502536624287890
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/inter-country-input-ou...
Why do you say that?
It's an axiom that the modern Western mind is built upon.
Long-winded, as anyone familiar with the New Yorker would expect. But still very good.
Whatever its other weaknesses, China has the enormous advantage that the people really in power are focused on raising China to global dominance. Vs. those really in power in America are, at best, worried about their personal status and wealth at the end of the next fiscal quarter.
What you said about "next fiscal quarter" is exactly right, and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles... which means on average we are thinking only 2 years ahead.
China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond.
I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too).
If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).
> I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job
Eliminate share buybacks. Raise the top tax bracket to 95% on earnings over $10m. Executive shares cannot be exercised until retirement if you really want to get aggressive.
The nuclear option would be stocks cannot be used as collateral for loans, it would shore up 90% of the nonsense overnight and have 0 negative impact on 99.99% of the general public.
I think having wealth tax would make rich push money to innovations and production more aggressively.
Why would the elites ever agree to that?
It's already too easy for those in power to control popular opinion, and only getting easier, so you're not going to get mass protests or revolutions that upset the status quo.
How would raising the taxes force people to think 25 years ahead?
If I can reinvest my profits to grow my business or pay most of it out in taxes I’m probably reinvesting it if there’s a long term gain to be had.
Unlike trickle down economics, it’s not just a failed theory. It’s something we’ve seen in action and it works as expected.
Taxing profits incentivizes reinvestment over reaping.
This was the role of those "unelected bureaucrats" in the US that some folks decry.
It is far shorter than a fiscal quarter - the next market open is all that matters.
with the president trying to sell early access to his market moving "truths"
> and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles
One of the two parties spends most of their intellectual capital on acquiring and maintaining power. The other party spends theirs on policies which they rarely have power to enact.
> ...only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead ...
Not saying I was paying close attention to America from 1850 to 1950, but a variety of cultural and social factors - especially less hyper-individualism, and people's futures being far more closely tied to the success of their families, neighborhoods, towns, etc. - lead to very priorities.
The Chinese leadership realized one doesn't exclude the other.
Also, a leadership that is so enormously autocratic simply has to juggle fewer balls at the same time.
> ...one doesn't exclude...
Yes, but I don't see that realization as noteworthy. Does history record a nation which never found its own advancement hobbled by the scheming of its petty local officials?
> ...has to juggle fewer balls...
When things aren't going so well, trying to stay in power adds more balls (to juggle) than being an autocracy takes away. And "things aren't going so well" usually indicates that less-competent autocrats are in power - meaning that they are less able to juggle any number of balls.
The Chinese desire to raise China to global dominance is exactly a concern w/ status and wealth. It's naive to think that America and China are any different in the degree to which leadership is driven by these concerns. One simply hopes that the facts-on-the-ground (i.e. geography) structures this pursuit in such a way to provide peace and prosperity to normal people.
America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.
China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.
Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.
Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.
China had an enermous corruption problem, what are you talking about? Xi has been on an anti-corruption campagin since 2012 and they are just getting rid of top leaders like just last month. And I am sure his "anti-corruption" campaign is totally not ignoring some aspects.
While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.
1995 was a different leader in a different time. Let us not forget at one point, America forced walked people on The Trail of Tears. American Amnesia is very potent and powerful, we easily forget about last week, year, century
When did we go from bad guy to good guy?
Yes, let us not forget The Trail of Tears which happened two hundred years ago.
> China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.
> This is one of the safest places in the world, if you’re not a dissident
> In March, authorities abruptly barred the two founders of an A.I. startup called Manus from leaving the country.
Did you even read the article?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
True, that's the site standards.
I notice that you didn't answer any of his actual points, though...
It's best not to go back and forth with someone like that. They did not answer my only question in their pass-by commentary, so I feel no need to respond to the quotes they pulled from the article (not their points), on top of the better path of disengaging after rule breaking.
China's dominion as the worlds super power is going to be quite different to the US, EU and UK. They have a very different culture towards intellectual property, product versioning and quality control.
Can you not be so obtuse? If you are implying that, as a generalization, to you, the West is superior, just say that.
Such broad categorization about that vast of a nation seems disparaging to me. Grouping an entire nation on a label, and marking it inferior to your own.
I have found Chinese quality control to be quite good in my daily life here.
Or was that your point?