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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

Interesting Move. If you base your assumptions on Peter Zeihan and his Book the Absent Superpower, this would basically be China trying to get as much manufacturing out of the US as possible to force it to be a customer of Chinese goods indefinitely and secure access to the US consumers. In this case it obviously has also strategic value, as China can also securely supply his military with "clean" chips.

I can only recommend watching one of his talks on YT for a different pov regarding world politics: https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU

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>If you base your assumptions on Peter Zeihan and his Book the Absent Superpower, this would basically be China trying to get as much manufacturing out of the US as possible to force it to be a customer of Chinese goods indefinitely and secure access to the US consumers.

Why wouldn't they want to do that? Isn't that what any self-respecting country, much less a superpower, would want to work towards to?

If your domestic consumption base is large enough, you can ignore the issues that arise from being dependent on trade.

Germany for example is so export-driven that if our exports drop for just 2% our economy will have major problems. There's nothing scarier than a trade-war for Germany.

>If your domestic consumption base is large enough, you can ignore the issues that arise from being dependent on trade.

Some of those issues -- don't you still depend on trade for stuff you don't have? And I don't mean Armanis or exotic foreign fruit, but stuff like raw materials for your industries and such?

That's where Geostrategy comes into play. Trade is an option, but not the only one. China is not really "trading" with Africa, are they?

The continental US has pretty much anything needed, they'd probably need to eat a bit more environmental damage if they wanted to actually extract their rare earths for example.

>China is not really "trading" with Africa, are they?

Well, aren't they? Not goods for goods, but they pay with money and infrastructure for resources like minerals and so on.

At least they are not having them as colonies, plundering, invading with their armies, or directly installing their own lackeys in power, yet -- as most Western powers have done in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries...

Does it really matter whether the boot crushing your throat was made down the street or across the sea?

That's not the difference that I wrote of, though.

What I wrote amounts to that what China does in Africa not a "boot crushing their throat".

And that's a nice change after a long period where foreign boots were crushing their throats regularly there in Africa.

Except the deal doesn't always work out well:

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/sunday-finance/no-more-flight...

Yes, it can matter quite alot. There's a reason British colonies faired better post independence than those of other powers. The British typically left behind a better developed local administrative apparatus, legal system, and business network. Japan's colonization of Taiwan followed a similar strategy, and it's a significant reason why Taiwan is today a very modern nation, industrially and politically.

Imperial relationships that too heavily emphasize resource extraction--minerals, labor, etc--leave behind a tinderbox.

China is in some ways the worst of the bunch in this regard because they completely abstain from any local development. Even when China "invests" in a country, they literally ship in their own workers and project managers.[1] The locals don't learn (and have no incentive to learn) how to do mundane stuff like project management and budgeting, and expectations that all government is corrupt are left entirely undiminished. Worse, the initiatives allow corruption on heretofore unheard scale.[2]

I don't mean to equivocate the modern reality with colonialism. Colonial powers inflicted many unforgivable injuries upon local populations. In terms of national autonomy there's simply no comparison between 21st century Chinese imperialism and colonialism. But the aftermath of colonialism has taught us much about the dos and don'ts of national development.

[1] Because Chinese development initiatives in Africa and South Asia are not only about securing resources for China, but also function as employment programs for the Chinese labor underclass.

[2] Look at the 1MDB scandal. $1 billion was originally smuggled out of the country through Saudi Arabian channels. But the paper trail was too obvious. To cover his tracks it appears that Prime Minister Najib took a loan from the Chinese Development Bank, nominally to help pay for a Chinese Belt & Road Initiative-sponsored project. The loan was used to pay 1MDB debts, and the project costs (with a corrupt payment structure) born by the government using the regular budget. In effect the money was laundered after the fact because they did such a poor job of it the first time. It would be much more difficult to hide corruption this way using European, American, and Japanese banks and development programs; and if they did and the public caught wind, there'd be serious repercussions. Indeed, one reason 1MDB was discovered and the country able to hold the PM to account is because of the strong, British-derived technocracy and legal system, and the paper trails that passed through Western banks. The Chinese simply don't care, at any level. Their Belt & Road Initiative is in some ways like dropping fentanyl onto entire countries of heroin addicts.

Where are you getting this idea of english colonies doing well after independence from? I can think of many english colonies that were left very dysfunctional post-empire, and not one where you could say they were left with a solid institutional foundation.

If British colonies had a marginal advantage over, say, French ones - it's probably because the British were generally more reluctant and less capable of getting militarily involved with their affairs after the end of the empire.

There's a loose consensus in the foreign policy community that, relatively speaking, British colonialism was better. And it's backed by various studies. For example,

  This could suggest that the British colonial system, which
  had what Lee calls "greater levels of indirect rule and the
  granting of local-level autonomy to chiefs," was more
  beneficial — or at least less damaging — than the more
  hands-on French model, which involved a "greater level of
  forced labor."

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/03/the-post-colonial-hango...

That, I can sort of see if I squint at it. Obviously, the less the colonizers were involved, the better for everybody.

This, however:

>The British typically left behind a better developed local administrative apparatus, legal system, and business network.

is massively overselling it, I think, and is somewhat contradictory to the point that article is making. If the british left it behind, was it local? Or was it simply that the british did not utterly destroy local organizations in some areas they colonized?

It varied. Often times the British established a parallel administrative regime. Because the parallel regime was more functional in terms of the modern world (i.e. more conducive to the demands of commerce) it usually became the predominate facet of a post independence syncretic governance regime. Other times it was setup this way from the start.

How is saying it was better overselling it? I never said it was extraordinary. I never said the countries were better off having been colonized. I simply made that point that 1) the British-style regimes were better relative to those of other colonial powers, and thus 2) what distinguished Britain's approach is instructive (independent of colonialism or imperialism) in terms of which policies are more conducive to political and economic development.

What distinguished British colonialism wasn't that they were simply hands off. In many ways they were much more involved.[1] My original point was that being completely hands off can potentially result in the worst of all possible outcomes in terms of economic development if you're just handing a blank check to whoever holds power at the moment in a country suffering from endemic corruption. You may get what you want, but not all approaches result in the same outcomes for the local population.

The British were at least as racist as the Dutch, French, or Germans; and they all believed the locals to be incapable of achieving and maintaining modern economic and political systems on their own. But for whatever reason the British nonetheless still developed the rule of law in their colonies, and built strong technocracies to a much greater extent than other powers, who were more prone to believe it was a useless and futile endeavor.

[1] The British were more devious. They operated by a more complex playbook, which included installing a local minority group into power on the theory that minority groups would be beholden to Britain while also being more culturally competent and more capable of dealing with prosaic issues. They made a science of it. Other powers were more haphazard or simplistic in their approach.

I still think saying that British left behind a better developed infrastructure is sort of like saying that a burglar left behind a well-stocked fridge. It might be technically true in some cases - but it's mostly just radically misleading.

The British practice of installing a minority as puppet ruler is the root problem of a large number of dysfunctional states, when it comes to sectarian and racial violence.

I also think what you call the 'rule of law' (although this isn't a problem specific to British colonies) was really the rule of decrees, over which the colonized people had no power. I've read that this led to a lot of state dysfunction in post-colonies - the state was set up to rule over a populace that it essentially considered subhuman, so even post-empire, there weren't established structures and traditions for relating and mediating between rulers and ruled (civil society, essentially).

At least they are not having them as colonies, plundering, invading...

I totally agree.

But, surely, one can do better than a mere comparison to perpetrators of invasion, enslavement, colonialism, racism and genocide.

Is there a stronger defense and explanation of China's role in Africa?

>Germany for example is so export-driven that if our exports drop for just 2% our economy will have major problems. There's nothing scarier than a trade-war for Germany.

China is already gunning for Machinery, which I remember represent close to 30% of Germany export. While I don't expect China will ever come close to German quality in the next 10 years, the middle half of market might be up for grab. So unless Germany have some more to export, this drop of 2% might come very very soon.

Okay, I watched the vid. The guy is an über-pessimist. Also, he seems very confident that the position the US has is unassailable, I think he's showing a bias to the place where he's from.

I personally see Russia, China, India, and the EU forcing the US to disengage militarily around the world and I see the US-led unipolar world transforming into a multipolar world with more just global governance.

Is this an optimistic view? Maybe. But there is a chance that because nations have got used to trading rather than warring that nations might actively protect trade routes rather than go to war over resources. If Steven Pinker's last two books are to be believed large-scale great power hot conflicts are a thing of the past.

What I think Trump and Brexit show is that Europe got complacent about the military umbrella the US provides so I think the EU along with India and China and Russia are going to have to start policing the highways and seaways of world trade. That's a scenario pessimist Zeihan fails to imagine – that peace rumbles on and China and India rise to provide counterweights to the US, Russia, and the EU. Where the UK fits into all of this is anybody's guess – they may support the EU from a distance but they may fall even more into the sphere of US power.

Anyway, on the strength of the vid, whatever Zeihan is selling I'm not buying. I think the world is far more complex than great plains, river basins, and demographics.

>Peter Zeihan

Man, he cooks his digits and "facts" haard. What is his point? He pulls out his "revelations" just to advance himself as think tank academician/strategy consultant

Ironically, you've given us no facts by which to judge your position.

Double ironic, since it was in response to a statement attributed to that analyst, that is itself self-evident and obvious.

Might be the case, I stumbled upon him just two weeks ago but didn't find much critic of his work. I'd love to hear any.

FWIW, I watched one of his videos also just 2 weeks ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feU7HT0x_qU

He describes that the US is now in a position to isolate itself and will do so. While I largely would assume that's a valid prediction, I believe he forgot to mention one fact:

The USD will (in the scenario he described) lose a lot of value (why should foreigners hold US debt or currency in his scenario?) to a degree that will lead to major calamities in the US. Those in turn affect the politicians in a way, that usually leads to scapegoating others (the Chinese, the Europeans, the Russians, ...) and possibly even to a distraction war (you know, show strength, punish the others who really deserve it, we all must stand together now, ...).

That whole thing will be a major counterforce to the isolationism he predicts.

The history of his Wikipedia page is interesting – most of the content comes from two accounts flagged as sock puppets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Zeihan&acti...

Oh the river guy. Every analysis he does relies heavily on the length of inland water ways of a country.

Oh yeah. I asked him why Nigeria is a shithole when it has more rivers than Switzerland and CH is not a shithole; he blocked me.

I believe is the latter point that's more important for China. First point is simply true for all nations that are trying to sell something.

Dumb question, who comes up with these smart policies/strategies?

In China, the US or where?

In the US the parties have Think Tanks and hordes of analysts covering these topics.

From what I heard from people at the WEF in China there's committees that are created to work on those topics, staffed meritocratically.

> In the US the parties have Think Tanks and hordes of analysts covering these topics.

You wouldn't say so. Most 'think tanks' seem to do what they can to give the party they work for the ammo they need to get the laws passed they desire, it rarely - if every - seems to be based in a genuine desire to move matters forward.

I seem to be getting the same impression through all the news and 'research' that have come up over the years. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

Move matters forward in the sense of implementing the party’s preferred ideology.

Though it’s a far cry from the highest good of all conceded.

Well you only get the strategies that lead you to the scenarios you ordered. If your party winning the next election is on the list, the strategy will be influenced by that. Not sure if there's anyone that would pay a think tank for a strategy that achieves world peace by way of destroying the party that ordered it.

So, similar to the networks of think-tanks in the US funded by the powerful to push forward their agendas. Similar oligarchic structure, different labels on the system of record.

This fits their "Made in China 2025" [1] strategy.

Side note: Chinese leadership seems a bit worried about reaching their self-proclaimed goals. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/business/china-trade-cens...

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