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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Beijing has an extremely long time horizon. They will endure the Trump administration and wait for a successor government to be more pliant to their needs.

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The USA has an extremely long time horizon. They endured the Qing dynasty, the PRC, the troubled times under Mao, and now bide their time patiently, waiting for a successor government more pliant to their needs.

I’m not fond of this whole “Eastern mysticism”/100-year-horizon crap; that sort of thinking is just soft-soled racism—along the same lines as the Noble Savage trope.

I hadn't thought of it that way and its an interesting point but in terms of racism I think its only something people think about the Chinese government. I don't think anyone attributes the same characteristic to American born Chinese.

It's the exact same thing that was said about Japan during its boom phase in fact. It was universally proclaimed that Japan was different because they had a very long time horizon and the West was short-term obsessed. It obviously plays into the eastern mysticism you reference. It's why Masayoshi Son has any credibility when he talks about having a 300 year plan for the Internet.

Back in reality, you can find countless examples of China behaving with rather absurd short-term obsession and making foolish mistakes due to that short-term thinking. They're doing it right now with Hong Kong. Or for example, in the way they've been willing to become the most leveraged nation in world history at record speed merely in order to buy a few more minutes of faster short-term 'growth' before they have to accept slower real growth in the system. That's long-term destruction in exchange for a short-term prop-up, something that is counter to the fantasy projection about China's long-term magical behavior. It also happens to be exactly what Japan did, exchanging long-term damage (resulting in long-term stagnation as the extreme debt robbed their economy of all of its dynamism) for a short-term propping up of the economy.

The idea that China will ascend without having to change seems silly to me too. Either the great firewall will come down or the country will stagnate. Economics and sociology doesn't change simply because the government says it does. China is either due for a massive correction or another civil war. People will only take being oppressed for so long and generally they stop taking crap from their government when things are getting better not worse. How things shake out in Hong Kong are going to echo through China.

Sure, their horizons are long-er term. Xi will be president for life, no term limits.

They do have a long time horizon, and on that horizon is a point at which China no long substantially relies on exports to the U.S. and can reject U.S. demands without fear of significant disruption to its domestic economy. Indeed, everything China has been doing has been designed, in part, to hasten that day.

Total exports as a share of China's GDP have been dropping since the mid 2000s. They're now below 20%. Americans, and especially American pundits, however, seem to be living in the 1990s and early oughts, when exports peaked near 40% of GDP.

China still has huge poverty problems, but what's changed is that both China and the world have grown up and fully industrialized. The entire world is China's market now, not just the richest, Western nations. The world is a much bigger, wealthier place today than 20 years ago, and the trend will only continue.

Kyle Bass would disagree.

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