> 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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)
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.
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..
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: an' while we rape their virgin
cheerleader daughters, they'll still be whimperin' about contracts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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
> 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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
They will all fail. The difference is how brutal the end will be.
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
What if communism/socialism works with the assistance of technology?
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?
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)
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.
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..
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
I have found Chinese quality control to be quite good in my daily life here.
Or was that your point?
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.
How would raising the taxes force people to think 25 years ahead?
Taxing profits incentivizes reinvestment over reaping.
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.
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"
> ...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?