When Evan Osnos started studying Mandarin, twenty-five years ago, China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s:
It is now twenty-four times the size it was then, ranking second only to America’s, and the share of Chinese people in extreme poverty has shrunk to less than one per cent. Growth has slowed sharply, but the country still has legions of citizens vying to enter the middle class. It is estimated that a billion Chinese people have yet to board an airplane.
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To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth. Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights, free speech, and privacy.
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For nearly a century, the U.S. has been the dominant military power in the Pacific, as it has in much of the world. Xi sees this as an unacceptable intrusion. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia,” he has said. To achieve that, China has strengthened its military to the point that Pentagon analysts believe it could defeat U.S. forces in a confrontation along its borders.
The most anticipated moment of the day was the début of a state-of-the-art missile called the Dongfeng-41, which can travel at twenty-five times the speed of sound toward targets more than nine thousand miles away, farther than anything comparable in the American arsenal. Watching the missile roll by, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic state newspaper, tweeted, “No need to fear it. Just respect it and respect China.” Hu, a seasoned provocateur, added a sly jab at the travails of democracy: above a picture of the missile, he wrote that China was just fine forgoing the “good stuff” of electoral democracy on display in “Haiti, Libya, Iraq and Ukraine.”
Didn’t they used to talk this way about the Soviet Union?
“Lookit that funny man… He thinks that the statistics coming out of a Communist regime in a nation long noted for corruption and lies are actually trustworthy…”
Not quoting anyone, but… Sheesh, the credulity most of these guys have about what they see. It’s like the chimeric “Japan, Inc.” crap back during the ’80s and early ’90s. Everyone looks at the “good indicator” stuff, and mistakes that for actual broad-swathe stuff that’s simply not there.
The lousy and untrustworthy information about Chinese anything with regards to the economy and the rest of their governance is indicative of a key problem: They lie, even to themselves. This has led to massive issues throughout the Chinese nation, the latest of which is the corona virus crisis. Accurate and timely information transmission is a hallmark of a truly advanced and flexible modern economy, and I’m not talking about “information” in the sense of the BS you get on the evening news. The information I’m talking about is the real signal coming from things like failed companies and government enterprises. The Chinese habitually lie to themselves and others about all that crap–The economy can’t function with long-term efficiency when the dead hand of the bureaucracy is constantly putting not just a thumb, but an entire fist, onto the balance scales. And, you’ve got that all over the Chinese economy and government.
The one abiding flaw of Communism and Socialism is that you have to teach your people to lie under both systems, and once they have? You’re going to be a long time coming back from that. The cultural effects of that BS are to create an inherent and unnatural set of reflexes, and to grind those things into the populace. The reflex to always lie about things under a totalitarian regime prevents those regimes from ever competing effectively against the chaotic free-range polities that aren’t totalitarian. Both Communism and Socialism are essentially institutionalized graft and corruption, so when they run up against systems that don’t have those problems, they may do well for a bit, but… Eventually, the contradictions and mistakes pile up, and the whole thing self-destructs.
China will never be a super-power until they get that crap right. The Communists will hold them back, simply because they can’t tolerate anyone contradicting them, and since they’re mostly a criminal enterprise with a nation-state, well… It won’t end well for them, and maybe not even for a lot of other people. This corona virus crap is just a symptom of the problems, and there’s really no way of telling where the hell it’s going to go. The Chinese are no doubt hiding a lot of information about the rate of transmission and lethality, so we can’t even tell, as of yet, what the real characteristics of the disease are. It may well be that this is a game-changing end-of-nations sort of thing, or it may be another flash-in-the-pan like SARS or the Ebola thing.
And, because you can’t trust a damn thing coming out of China, we’re not going to know until it spreads out and we have our own data to analyze.
Jeez Kirk, you’re usually the even-headed guy on these pages.
China cannot be compared to the Soviet Union or even Japan. In the case of the former, it is capitalist and linked to the global capitalist system as something more than a giant petrol station. There is no need to believe their statistics, just look around your basic environment and count all the things around ‘Made in China’, look at the amount of investment coming out there, the amount of imports they consume…When has that ever been true of the USSR or Russia?
Unlike Japan, and one of the reasons I’m not a full-on, we’ll all be speaking Mandarin homer, is ’cause of their relative comparative poverty and technological backwardness compared to the Japanese at the similar scare stage. Other than perhaps ‘Tech’, it is hard to think of a sector or core technology they have mastered to the level of the Japanese. If I’m wrong, I defer to wiser heads, just pointing out my observations.
P.S This corona issue has been a major talking point among American nationalists, proving to me, once more, the effectiveness of your propaganda system. Pray tell, after centuries of experience with hurricanes, how much better has your country gotten at dealing with them? Hurricanes in recent memory, from Katrina to Maria, call for a little less self adulation about the superiorities of your response to so called ‘Black Swans’.
China will be increasingly powerful, but it will be more of a Sassanian vs Late-stage Rome thing, not 90s era USA level dominance.
China has a better chance of collapsing back into chaos than it has of ever achieving the goals it has in terms of becoming a superpower.
Why? Because they lie to everyone, especially themselves. Information flow is critical to success–Go back and look at the rise of the US as a power, and the rise of Germany–Both entities had quite excellent information flow, in terms of what was going on. You didn’t have the governments of either nation wasting billions of dollars supporting obsolete or unproductive activities like you see in China. The only reason that they haven’t collapsed already is the massive amount of human capital that they have, which has been mostly wasted on enterprises like building empty cities. None of that activity is actually of any real use, and it’s all down to the CCP wanting it and allowing it to happen in the name of maintaining what power they have, and acquiring more.
You can get away with a lot of waste in a system, but when you have entire cities being built to no purpose in the Chinese hinterlands, guess what? That’s a symptom of really piss-poor resource allocation and management, which is down to equally piss-poor information transmission.
People forget that money is actually information, in an economy. Resources get allocated, decisions get made based on the flow of money towards positive activity. This is one reason why the US is going to have major problems with its debt before long–Too many resources going towards activities that are “dead”, in terms of economic utility. The CCP has enabled and allowed a much worse set of problems that are going to have commensurately worse effects.
Here in the US, at least we’re going to let the signal through, and that signal will tell the system that government activity is inherently wasteful. Where that goes, who knows, but it’s gonna hit the CCP just as hard, and with a lot more effect.
I kinda doubt the US is going to last out the century, as it is today. I’m morally certain that China will not survive, because its leadership class is even deeper in denial about reality than the US one is. The evidence for that is all over China, in the form of uncompetitive state-operated industries, and empty “ghost cities” and other similar things. World’s biggest mall? In China, and ohbytheway, empty. You can do that for a little while, but the inherent waste tied up with those resources being misallocated and misused will eventually catch up with you.
The CCP had a relatively short window to use their human capital that they had. They blew it, and the result is going to be disaster for mainland China. The demographic window is closing, and unless this current corona virus disaster solves their demographic age imbalance issues by killing off literally millions of pensioners, guess what?
Hell, even then, I don’t see how the CCP survives. They’re going to lose the “mandate of heaven” if that happens, ‘cos nobody wants grammy and grampy dead, and the amount of experience/knowledge that losing those age cohorts represent is going to be massively destabilizing. The whole thing could very rapidly spiral out of control, and it wouldn’t take much to convince a lot of people that the CCP planned it.
Interesting times, I guess. Shorthand for “really fucked up times”, but then, they always have been. The Spanish Influenza Epidemic must have looked world-ending, when it went on. Lasting effects, though? Hard to see, really.
Kirk…”Information flow is critical to success–Go back and look at the rise of the US as a power, and the rise of Germany–Both entities had quite excellent information flow, in terms of what was going on.”
I don’t get the impression that Kaiser Wilhelm II was very open to hearing information that contradicted his view of things. Apparently, war games in which he participated had to be rigged so that his side always won.
David, that’s actually a perfect example to reinforce what I’m trying to get at–German economy didn’t have much in the way of fantasy, when it came to accepting and dealing with market signal. Company is unsuccessful, it went bankrupt and got bought up. Even critical armament factories were allowed to fail–Look at DWM, for an example.
In the wargames, Wilhelm blocked the signal. Guess what happened when they went to war under him?
China isn’t even getting the economic signals right; do you think they’ll do much better with the military ones? Overall, I doubt it–If the guys out in the finance ministries and banks aren’t willing to tell the harsh truths, and obfuscate the reality of the economic situation for favored industries, what do you suppose the military is going to do, when the time comes to report bad news, or even just news that’s contrary to the preferences of the CCP leadership?
This is why totalitarian regimes inevitably fail. As goes the economy, so goes everything else. The Germans didn’t screw around with their economic signals very much, not until WWII when the Nazi fantasies trumped everything else. Wilhelmine Germany had a few economic distortions going, but not all that many–Or, they would never overtaken the rest of Central Europe and the British Empire the way they did.
China is a 3rd world country with a modern veneer. Even my Chinese friend who was born, raised and works in one of the mega cities says China is a 3rd world country. It is a low trust society controlled by one tribe called the Communist party. Modernity, in my mind, is not the indicator of a successful society. Trust and virtuous people are the basic foundation if a 1st world nation. On that basis most of Western Civilization is slipping out of the 1st world category.
On a purchasing power parity basis, the Chinese GDP is about one-third larger than the US’s. Its manufacturing sector is very much larger than ours, more diversified, and much more modern, including more automation.
Deng’s reforms have been the most successful economic policy of the last 30 years anywhere. They have moved 400 million people out of poverty into international middle class life styles. There is hardly any opposition to the CCP. The demonstrations in Hong Kong were populated by young people who have no economic future in the oligarchical Hong Kong system.
As to those empty cities in the hinterland, China continues to urbanize its population to the tune of one San Francisco per month. Those cities are built on spec, and they rapidly fill up.
China might or might not achieve hegemonic parity with the US. Its Achilles Heel is lack of resources, whereas the US still have abundant resources of all kinds and much of the world’s best farm land.
But the US also has problems, especially with its military, and especially as it moves to a White minority and identitarian politics. We might not (certainly hope not) have Civil War II, but the increasing discord among Americans means an ineffective government, perhaps even a delusional one consumed with infighting.
China and Japan have at least one advantage that is way better for their economies than the western nations. China owns it’s own central bank and does not create all it’s money with debt. If a bank goes bankrupt they can just write off the debts at a national level and recapitalize it if necessary. They create the money they can just as easily extinguish it or the debt created with it. In the US and most of the world every single penny created is created with debt.
The way money is created in the US is the Treasury ask the central bank for money. The Treasury then gives the FED a bond saying they will pay the FED the principal plus so much interest. The FED in turn says we can create money and gives us…nothing. Nothing at all.
A moments thought will tell you if you can only create money with debt and only pay the debt with more debt made money eventually the debt will consume a larger and larger portion of the economy. It also tells you who runs things if a country is not sovereign in creating money.The banks are in control.
Now when I say this someone will immediately chime up that the FED returns most of the money from the debt. It’s sort of true but if they are doing that what are we paying them for? Why do we pay them at all for…nothing? And I don’t see any big movement to wipe out all debts owned to the central banks. If they keep running things it will never happen. Creating cash from nothing is very profitable. The FED and other central bankers also favor putting cash in the hands of those that further their multicultural world order. Why not they create cash for free. If only Amish could create cash for free they’d all ride around in gold plated buggys and own all the farm land in the country.
I believe that the debt crisis that we have all over the world, or where they have central banks run by the NWO, is specifically because the debt burden has gotten too high to maintain. That’s why interest rates are so low or negative. The smallest uptick in rates would be like pouring liquid oxygen onto a flame. It would melt the whole economy down. They can not be raised and keep the economy alive. The minute you see them doing so you know they are about to crash the present system and create a new one with, the same problem as it’s just too damn good to give up for them.(For the record it’s called the Special Drawing Rights(SDR) and that’s the system they want to foist on us and it will leave us with even less control over our economies. If our politicians don’t do what they are told under the SDR they will cut off their cash flow.)
The Japanese and Chinese are different. There’s always this huge freak out about Japan’s massive debt but they don’t care. They have been “quietly” just telling their “sovereign” central bank to retire the stuff every so often. Think of the massive comparative advantage of a country with free cash at the Federal level. It’s not nothing no matter how low rates are in the west. What’s the amount of money borrowed just to keep the lights on in the US? I think it’s half the budget. It’s high. With sovereign money we could just write this all of. Every time someone tries to exit the global homo central banking system they get Qaddafied.
The present system is set up to shear the sheep. The common man and move all assets into the bankers hands and for this hey give us, supposedly a sovereign nation, nothing. Not a damn thing.
Damon Vrabel has a set of videos that are good at explaining the banking system, Here’s the first of six. His videos are well worth viewing. They make things very clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT4VXF1XJYk
The bankers are not even any good at it. They are constantly going broke even with money made from thin air. How incompetent do you have to be to do that?
The recipe for this is to make bankers much like the old time savings ad loan. They get a fee for making loans and if all their loans go bad they lose a good portion of what the made. The government would be “the bank”. This is the way some State banks work and they have done well on average.
Another or concurrent way to inject money would be to have a citizens dividend. It would be just enough to live, barely. Those that wanted too could spend a portion on school or if older retirement or whatever. You could drink yourself to death. Whatever you want to do.
The central banking system is a huge scam.
We won’t know for another week to ten days, but I believe the speed and extent of coronavirus spread on the mainland threatens the regime.
Yes, the high-IQ Han managed to marry some aspects of capitalism with a Central Committee and Politburo government.
But confronted with a crisis where rapid and effective decentralized decisionmaking is required, informed by absolute truth – well, let’s say, these are not strong points of the Chinese system.
When the children of Politburo members start turning up in Switzerland, or when members of the Central Military Commission leave the country, it will be past time to sell.
Here’s a link that has all six banking system videos in one video. 1:12 total time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_yh4-Zi92Q
Sam, there are bankers, and there are bankers. The former care about making money, and “participate” in the political process in order to do so, but they didn’t invent the system. The latter invented the system and don’t care about money at all.
Imagine if there were a world-spanning information system and all economic transactions could be directed through a central point.
Imagine if no man might buy or sell save that he have a revocable private key.
P.S. Dividends (and other “entitlements”) are for SOCIALISTS.
“Another or concurrent way to inject money would be to have a citizens dividend. It would be just enough to live, barely. Those that wanted too could spend a portion on school or if older retirement or whatever. You could drink yourself to death. Whatever you want to do.”
P.P.S. Wang, it’s a shame when a country is run like a racket, but this is the sort of thing that happens when not-Goldman-Sachs is engineering every facet of your economy. As you probably already know, in the mid-late 18th century Goldman and Sachs left Germany to come to America in search of religious liberty, and the organization they established has been good enough to spread their love for Traditional American UltraProtestantism all around the world in the years since.
*19th century
“…Sam, there are bankers, and there are bankers…”
I, of course, know the difference but even I get tired of talking about the Jews. As a general rule they are involved in so much corruption, rotten disgusting, decadent, evil that it’s hard to keep up. I was making the general case which was enough without descending into too much detail. The main point is that the present system IS NOT moral or even sustainable. It’s illogical to base a whole country, actually most of the worlds financial system, on a guaranteed doomed to failure system. It only serves the bankers at the top. That video by the way is very good and covers all the main points efficiently.
“…P.S. Dividends (and other “entitlements”) are for SOCIALISTS…”
HAHA give the bankers $16 Trillion, we know this for a fact, and actually more likely, documented from gov. statistics many years ago, over $30 Trillion and that’s capitalism. But throw the poor suffering peasants a bone and “SOCIALISM”, “COMMUNISM”, “FASCISM”, “EVIL”, “EVIL”, “KILL”, “KILL”.
Let’s throw some real numbers in here. Let’s say you take the #30 Trillion the bankers got and gave it to “the people” @ 300 million. That’s $100,000 A PIECE. So a family of four could have a house and two new cars and pay for college education. Or you could give each person $10,000 a year to pay for school or whatever over ten years. I’d rather have people drink and drug themselves to death with the $10,000 a year they get than give it to the bankers. The people that will drink and drug themselves will do it no matter what but the bankers will really fuck things up if you give them the money.
What we did was give it to the fucking bankers who run an immoral, known to certainly fail, evil banking system.
Choose one. People or Bankers. Forget the name calling. Choose one.
I choose people.
I also note that no is willing to say that the Chinese “don’t” have a comparative financial advantage by creating their money in their country and owing no one a damn thing, because…that would be difficult to do.
Sam,
With all respect, I beg to differ. That 30 trillion was absolutely necessary to ensure global economic stability. Just imagine if the Orange Man hadn’t directed the Federal Reserve to shovel 4 trillion into Wall Street since September 2019. The real economy would’ve crashed and the 401Ks of the Boomer race would’ve been reduced to nothing. Besides, it isn’t really a handout when bankers get free money, since they already own all the money, which they loaned to you in the purest spirit of Christian charity and goodwill.
This is why it isn’t merely illegal to give the poor suffering peasants a handout, it’s actually immoral.
“…That 30 trillion was absolutely necessary to ensure global economic stability…”
I agree but “to who”??? I have no doubt at all that if each family of four had been given the same pay back terms as the banks of roughly $400,000 it would have ended all financial housing crisis IMMEDIATELY.
Now you will say, inflation, inflation, blah, blah, blah but the same amount of money was pumped into the economy giving it to the bankers. All it did was concentrate power. In this case if it had been widely distributed and the failing bankers put out of business it would have instead distributed power. CAN’T HAVE THAT.
“…Besides, it isn’t really a handout when bankers get free money, since they already own all the money, which they loaned to you in the purest spirit of Christian charity and goodwill…”
Exactly. I suspect that the standard Jew position which I would change if you made me King.
Speaking of banks ripping people off and destabilizing countries. In today’s VoxDay:
“…The ultimate and mathematically certain outcome of the current financial system is that the owners of the banks own literally all the property and all of the people. This is not a question of right-wing vs left-wing, and it’s very important to remember that banks are not capitalism, corporations are not human beings, and usury is not freedom….”
Seems I’m not the only one that thinks the banking structure is stupid and destructive.