A New Cold War Has Begun (2019) | Hacker News Reader

A New Cold War Has Begun (2019)

foreignpolicy.com

81 pointsALee65 comments

Due to decades of Deng Xiaoping's One Child Policy, China is a slow motion demographic car crash that's impossible to stop. China will "get old before it gets rich", and the days of 6% growth aren't coming back.

I recommend anyone interested in geopolitics and the world over the next 30 years to watch this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0

It's the best overview of the future wealth and strength of brutal Chinese dictatorship that I've come across.

This [0] is a much more interesting and enlightening documentary about China and Xi Jinping. It's in French but english subtitles are available.

[0] https://youtu.be/7QDktp_i6eY

Chinese birthrates would have fallen anyways due to increasing education and prosperity.

The one child policy only accelerated the decline. When it was lifted, birthrates hardly budged.

Every developed country is a slow motion demographic car crash. China is in a bad position, I'll grant, because the CCP's legitimacy depends upon demographic dividend-scale growth rates when the dividend has already peaked. Democratic countries have pressure release valves built into their political systems that China lacks.

I think it's easy to say their "legitimacy" or "stability" depends on high growth rates, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. I would love to hear even one genuine expert on the subject make the case for a revolution in even the 30 years following a drop from insane growth back to earth.

China growth rate during recovery was actually depressed compared to several developing nations. So even the basic premise doesn’t fit the actual data.

Long term compare the People's Republic of China (China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) after the war based on per capita GDP and the mainland is still catching up. The CPP maintained power after completely wrecking the countries economy, so a period of stagnation seems unlikely to be a major issue. More recently you can see how the CPP is placing Hong Kong’s economy as a lower priority than increased control.

While dictatorships like China can fall surprisingly quickly, I doubt slower growth is that critical of an issue.

I think CCP legitimacy does depend upon a social contract of rising living standards, compared to the Mao era when political idealism had more purchase.

Moreover rising expectations beget rising expectations, and the genie is out of the bottle.

I don't foresee a revolution either, rather a perestroika movement that will be forced from below but embraced out of necessity from above. As the video said, all of the energy needed to address domestic unrest will drain from China's ability to project their national interest.

Hans Rosling explained very well why advancements in National wealth leads to smaller families (less children per family) and longer lives

It's linked to becoming richer countries, which China has become

https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w

>Because, in a very different way than the old Soviet system, the Chinese system—the more authoritarian it gets—is over time more prone to crack up than America’s.

I don't understand: what does the author think the difference is? I may have read the article without enough attention but I didn't get it.

If anything, I got the idea it's less likely to crack.

Provided the article wasn’t exactly clear and I have no way of knowing exactly what the author meant; I think things like civil unrest can be thought of as a “crack”, the US 1st amendment almost encourages small cracks and they quickly get filled in and we move forward with things slightly adjusted (for better or worse). Although in many regards the process is still flawed, the ability for the us to peacefully transfer power at all levels of government every is really quite remarkable!

Where as China being authoritarian any civil unrest has a much higher likelihood of overthrowing the government in a violent and expensive way. Transitions of power happen infrequently and are very dangerous particularly at the highest level given how synchronized authoritarian governments tend to require.

Everything in life has trade offs. And while the Chinese have accomplished things the US hasn’t; imperfections in government are inevitable and the US is arguably more resilient to these imperfections over extended periods of time given the US ability to effectively and efficiently accommodate changes to address these imperfections.

But how is china's situation different from the Soviet experience?

In many ways.

For example being part of WTO and being a capitalistic state which mass produce goods and services for the whole World

The first, most obvious, difference is the relative competence of economic planning.

I don't think China is going anywhere for at least a generation.

If you dig into the collapse of most countries/empires/super powers, they collapse from either:

- External pressures - foreign influence through military/conquering, investment, or mass immigration. With the exception of Taiwan, China has been effective in reducing or at least controlling all of those. And even that may be cracking where you see groups like WHO refusing to even say the word "Taiwan." With the US and Russia tied up with other things, military is less likely an issue to.

- Internal pressures - social strife due to mass deprivation (starvation, poverty in general) or mass immigration/tribalism. Once again, China has been effective here. They've raised the standard of living and disappeared most of the major dissenters. They've even reduced tribalism by isolating and disappearing huge minorities. Good? Absolutely not. Effective? Unfortunately.

Even the "One Child" policy seems to have led to less strife than predicted. While there are some places that have 140 men for every 100 women, those are the official numbers. It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist.

Based on the investment strategy (both nationally and corporately), China has gone all in on Africa for years. If I had to place a bet, they may effectively run/own Africa in a decade or two. If not in person, on paper.

China has a pretty large mass immigration problem. Over 30% of the nation's workforce are migrant workers who are by law second-class citizens in the urban areas they migrate to, and this number is expected to significantly rise. It's my understanding that some smaller cities are making it easier to register your hukou there, but it remains a serious issue in all of the biggest and richest cities.

> It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist.

How do they work/travel/pay without ID?

US and UK have no official national id system...

So I guess, in the same way people in US and UK do.

Also remember that illegal work is not uncommon in every western country as well

If you're paid cash, you pay in cash

If you live and work in a small rural village in continental China, where girls have been hidden and everybody knows it, who's coming to check if you have an id or not?

Fake ID.

The intuition is that freer political systems are both more challenging and less rewarding to subvert, because no individual person or group has overwhelming power.

I get the difference with the US, but isn't this the same that was true for the Soviets?

The low-tech economies of China and America are integrated, but what about the high-tech ones? Can American companies create sub-apps on WeChat like Chinese ones can?

As far as I know, US-Soviet trade was not comparable in scale to US-China trade. Did a lack of trade prolong the Cold War of the 20th century?

Trade with the USSR was very difficult. There was no use for it outside the USSR and it was forbidden to leave the country. So you couldn't just buy things from other countries.

When pepsi started selling in the USSR they traded pepsi for Stolichnaya vodka. Enentually they traded old military equipment. [0]

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...

The Soviets hardly produced anything worth trading for.

Why does everything has to be a war with the US?

It so happens that whenever a country amasses more wealth than the US, they are maligned and considered evil. It happened in the 80s with Japan, and it is now happening with China. Except this time, the United States is broke. The US will Balkanize before anything happens to China.

Did it happen in the 80s? There was certainly anti-Japanese sentiment, I've seen the people smashing up Toyotas, but as far as I can tell nobody seriously proposed that Japan was a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.

It's probably the concentration camps, organ harvesting, and various other human rights violations, rather than the accumulation of wealth.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducati...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/7570898...

There are many countries that do such things, but the US selectively chose who are the ennemy du jour, and most are not tagged as such. In fact, some of them are friends with the US.

What's more, I recall the US in the last 2 decades:

- went to a war by lying about WMD and against the entire world (at least the world represented by the UN) will, killing thousands

- deployed mass surveillance of its own people, introduced bypasses to Habeas corpus and legalized torture using the Patriot Act

- elected a man that is at the center of so many Clinton-size scandals in a row it became the new normal

Now, I don't even begin to claim I have a superior country, mine has done many terrible things.

But let's not pretend the US (or any other superpower's) behavior has anything to do with morality. It's either naive or dishonest.

However, labelling everything with "war" is, indeed, a very American thing to do.

Whataboutism, I simply stated ongoing actions by the CCP that probably influence people to view them as evil.

It's up for people to decide what they view as acceptable, the history of every country is for the most part transparent these days.

Laundry listing things other countries do (I disagree they come close to the atrocities committed by the CCP) is not a great defense.

I listed CURRENT atrocities being committed by the CCP right now, you picked from our entire history that we as Americans have already expressed outrage (WMD's, etc)

I even left out surveillance because all countries seem to be spying on their citizens, though the CCP goes a lot further with no accountability because it's a dictatorship.

No country is perfect, especially the United States. How many war crimes have been committed in the last 50 years? China is not the enemy. We could learn a lot of positive things from them.

China is in competition with a lot of countries, and in a race for power.

And it is a bloody dictature.

That's not the point. The point is: why does the US has to formulate systematically its antagonist positions as a War?

Given they have the biggest army in the world, this is the best way to have the most violent resolution of this antagonism.

That is due to the military industrial complex, which incentivizes the use of the American war machine.

I know, let's end that abominable feature of our culture. I call it... the war on war.

More seriously... "war" seems to be a byword for "unlimited and opaque budget" so it's attractive to all political stripes; it's also a byword for "we're actually taking this seriously" which is attractive to a large segment of the population.

Soon, a series of organizations fighting war will pop up creating the war-on-war industrial complex, necessitating the war on war on war.

It's war all the way down.

It's not. US tried to stay out of both World Wars, and was very cooperative with Stalin at the end of WWII. It was dragged into Vietnam by the French. North Korea attacked first. The wars in the Middle East after 9/11, you're right though.

Also “war on drugs” “war on poverty”...absurdism.

The US stayed legally out of the war in Europe due yes to a strong isolationist movement but also a strong pro-german movement. Without committing troops, Roosevelt tacitly involved the US in the European war (enough deniability that congress would not interfere) and specifically mounted a petroleum embargo in Japan leading to the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor (not at all blaming the victim — USA — for Japan’s decision). I don’t think you can say though that the us tried to stay out.

“Very cooperative with Stalin at the end of WWII” is hardly borne out by the historical record. The US invaded the USSR during its revolution, and long before Yalta both countries were jockeying for post-war position once it became clear that victory over Germany was inevitable.

The French asked for help yes but it was no treaty matter (not a NATO issue): the US willingly intervened in both Korea and Viet Nam because of communists being on the other side.

I strongly agree. Whether you think China is butterflies and kittens (I do not) or unspeakably evil (I also do not) it seems like a so-called “war footing” is going to distort priorities and thus be less likely to achieve its goals than simply pushing back wherever the national interest (whatever that might be) Might require it.

Even with its current turmoil, the US is a far more resilient society and is more likely to prosper (and that is what prevailing or “victory” should mean) than China in its current configuration.

One possible explanation is that the author is a shill for Israel. He served in Israel's military. He has some publications with Israelis, such as "The Glory of the Holy Land."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Kaplan#Early_life_an...

Israel benefits heavily from US militarization and US belligerence toward non-allies.

Israel invests a lot of money on lobbying US politicians and on PR to influence the US public. I'm not sure how much they spend. Israel receives $3B in military aid from US every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs...

Note: this article is from 2019. Perhaps the title could be updated to reflect this.

I was wondering why we're resurfacing such an outdated article aside from its headline-grabbing title. The US-China relationship has evolved a lot, and it doesn't cover major developments like the Hong Kong protests, national security bill, and coronavirus response.

> With the waning of the liberal world order, a more normal historical era of geopolitical rivalry has commenced, and trade tensions are merely accompaniments to such rivalry.

Background on "liberal world (economic) order":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_economic...

>For several decades, China’s breakneck development was seen positively in the United States, and the relatively enlightened authoritarianism of Deng Xiaoping and his successors was easily tolerated

It was seen positively because our ruling caste of self-regarding morons thought China was more likely to become a liberal democracy as they became more prosperous and integrated with the world economy. An obvious delusion, even at the time. By contrast, the Chinese looked at what happened to Russia and decided to stick with totalitarianism in their economic development.

I think things are far from obvious, at the time, retrospectively, or even now. It’s still early times for the Chinese revolution and I think there’s still a good chance of China becoming more democratic in the next half a century. Xi is literally a child of the revolution and when that generation is gone, the middle classes will have no connection to the old guard.

I think the best you can hope for from China is Singapore -a business oriented Mosleyan fascism. Considering the lack of British influence there: this seems ridiculously optimistic to me. China will be Chinese.

Western "Democracy" doesn't appear to be some universal desire of peoples; it's as far as can be told from observation a particularist ideology of Anglo and Franco Europeans. Russia's flirtation with "Democracy" (basically, being a US satellite) ended up being chaotic gansterism accompanied by mass death, and they reverted to their historical mean of being run by a strong man and seem to be happier and better off for it.

Korea, Taiwan and Japan seem pretty happy with it. India, mostly, too. Then of course many smaller countries like Mauritius, Botswana...

South Korea with its long history of democracy dating from the early 90s... Had a little help from giant US embassies and military bases in the middle of it for the last 70 years. Imagine if it weren't a US "ally" what it would look like. The idea that things are the way they are today because of some inevitable movement of history rather than submission to pressures from the world hegemon; pretty sure that idea won't survive historical scrutiny.

I suppose I could be wrong though! Our state department informs me that I am wrong!

America literally wrote Japan's constitution after WWII and had a heavy role in guiding the development of Japan.

Begun? You have to be tonedeaf or willfully ignoring the amount of IP that Chinese corporate spies have outright stolen from North America over the last few decades.

Let’s be honest - we have strong cyber security considerations because of very few, but very known bad actors. China is near the top of that list and has been for awhile.

Nevermind all the other security considerations.

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