Are we entering a space-race with China for supercomputers or something? Did I miss the memo?
There always has to be some fear-based narrative involving the boogeyman de jour - the Russians, the Chinese, Islamic extremists, cyberwar whatever. Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
God I detest the politics of today :(
and so was slavery for a long time.
Humanity needs to shed the tribalism from which it was forged. The current political paradigm requires that the politicians to divide and conquer, because most people aren't able to really see what's real and what's propaganda (which makes propaganda so effective). I don't have a solution to this problem unfortunately, but until this is solved, world climate change or inter-planetary colonization (or any other big endeavour) won't happen.
But western countries are slowly-slowly creeping towards something else, something bordering on Orwellian.
They hype the boogeyman de jour to the nth degree, using fear, uncertainty and doubt to control the populace and justify ever-more overarching anti-privacy, anti-encryption, and mass surveillance laws. It's at the point where it seems like most people now accept such sweeping controls, because of course it's all to keep them safe.
They start wars based on faked evidence and the flimsiest of reasoning. War crimes are covered up and whistleblowers treated as the villans - non-western lives mean nothing to these people, who will do everything they can to grab more power, and enrich their coffers and that of their cronies.
So, it's not just about the choice of political system, or "Them and Us" - it's also about the profiteering, corruption, cronyism and borderline megalomaniac that have somehow become normalised. Perhaps worst of all is the simply staggering hypocrisy.
However, the "red danger" of the Soviets was (IMHO) an existential risk to freedom--just as the Poles why they fought for free multi-party elections. The rising influence of China, a totalitarian state, is a cause for concern. Why would you think a dictatorship growing more powerful is a good thing?
> Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
As a society/civilization, I would think it would be possible to walk and chew gum at the same time: raise concerns about bad actors abroad and try to solve domestic problems.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism: > Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life
> Article 1. The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
* http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/con...
"was" being the operative word, although I think the reality was more nuanced than "those commies are gonna get us!".
> The rising influence of China, a totalitarian state, is a cause for concern. Why would you think a dictatorship growing more powerful is a good thing?
It's not totalitarian state or a dictatorship. I also didn't say the rising influence of China was a good thing - but I'm not saying it's a terrible thing either.
What I do find to be of concern, is western politics, corruption, FUD spreading and war-mongering.
Well, they call them themselves a dictatorship. See Article 1 of the CN Constitution:
> Article 1. The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
* http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/con...
:)
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?
American software companies dominate tech and internet in both mindshare and profits throughout the world, excluding China. Despite them "stealing" all this IP.
Sure, the US may not be able to compete in China, but the openness of the US meant that the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa America's were willing to buy their products.
When the US engages in nationalistic trade wars, it loses China's market which was never really available to it. But it also gives Europeans and Asians and Africans an excuse to exclude the US from their markets.
Any country wanting to do that, which I suspect a lot of them will now that Trump has decided he just wants to fight trade wars despite the US being the biggest winner of the current economic system, simply needs to point to the well known American spying to ignore American suppliers and software companies and developers.
The US may come out net better in the relationship with China but it's gonna lose a lot more. (it won't even here...China had been giving America TVs and computers and what not for pieces of paper. If you told an alien this deal they wouldnt believe the US is complaining. The US's problem is entirely that it hasn't been able to distribute this massive wealth surplus it has enjoyed throughout it's society, because it has prioritized the ability of the richest to hoard that wealth to the point they don't even have islands left to buy, instead of providing healthcare to the poorest).
Most likely the US will increase its advantage overall during this time, as China's Government puts itself into a straight-jacket along with its most talented people. As opposed to unleashing them in Deng-style with further liberalization.
China can never have a full answer in terms of exports vs the US software juggernaut. That's inherent to their system of extreme government controls and limitations. Why would anybody in the West ever use Baidu, Ctrip, or Chinese equivalents of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Slack, DocuSign, Fortinet, Github, GitLab, Splunk, Twilio, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, et al? There are dozens of booming enterprise companies in the US in that mold, China inherently can't compete with most of them globally. That also goes for the burgeoning software companies in the 'West' outside of the US, such as Atlassian and Shopify (both with $30b market caps). There is a reason why AWS is globally dominant, while China's cloud providers are lagging by five years or more (both in service offerings and sales size) - businesses in the West mostly won't go anywhere near China's cloud services and never will. It's another case of their companies being firewalled inside of China.
To the parent's point re allies, Trump is a mess, however he is gone after one or two terms. US allies generally understand this is a speed bump in a very long-term relationship. Xi's authoritarianism is practically guaranteed to increase by the year for a long time to come. It's going to get worse. Dictatorships become more aggressive and paranoid with time, rather than less.
In my view this is the most probable scenario but there are also some advantages they have. One I find particularly valuable is that most of its government is constituted of engineers (70% if I remember correctly) vs. in the US most are some sort of Lawyers (?).
It is really interesting how this will play out in the mid/long term. I am kind of bullish on the western countries though they are all (especially here in europe) shooting their own feet by killing their most valuable asset: their free markets.
What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.