The World Is Splitting in Two
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Individual freedom seems like generally the right path, it attracts the best talent, fosters creativity and invention. Growing the economic pie has proven to increase overall well-being faster than careful central-planning and attempts to distribute resources equally.
However the pandemic also showed the risks of individual freedom. It's not hard to imagine a disease that spreads quickly and but is 100x to 1000x more deadly. Would the west have been able to stop it without the willingness to put in place the strict quarantines and authoritarian measures that China used? I'd like to think so but it is unclear.
That's one way to frame it, if you want to use the word "freedom" a lot. Another way is "cooperation vs anarchy". Our ability to pull ourselves out of the mud and position ourselves as the Rising Hope of Earth, is predicated entirely on our ability to cooperate. The philosophy of "individual freedom" is the quasi-religious conviction that we can simply sit back and let everyone do as they will, pushing and shoving and vying for money and status and power and all the rest of it, and without having to make any difficult choices, somehow it will all Just Work Out. It would be so convenient, wouldn't it? To have the moral and the pragmatic highground? But alas it's incompatible with having any opinions about what the future should look like. We need to be able to collectively decide on goals, and then collectively pursue those goals, and unfortunately that means Rules. And as surely as Newton's Laws, no matter how reasonable the rule, always there will be someone to publicly decry it, and someone else to even attack the very concept of having rules.
This could very well be The Great Filter. Like yeast in a carboy of wine we will consume all available resources or poison ourselves with our own excrement, unless find a way to act as more than a collection of cells.
So far it seems that democracy might be most successful just because it spreads around power so much that it takes many generations to successfully re-concentrate it.
At least unlike the sick Thatcher "There Is No Alternative" world, it's clear that there are elements of light & good & caring. There's undercurrents of caring & nothing really emerging but there's a lot of tendrils out searching, there's vision & reason for hope. Open source is doing great things, runs the world- but yes is mostly industrialized at this point. Still, there's such great hope embodied by Fediverse/p2p/sovereign aspirations.
I do fret that we're kind of entering a dangerous territory where computers themselves might become unaffordable, where the only computers that make sense to run are hyperscaler computers. Connectivity seems pretty good- plenty of folks with 100Mbps or more both ways that they can use- but it feels like there's so much intense cost optimization happening in the industry & so so little trickling down. The enterprise market is still filled with fat margins and support contracts, or vast margin multi-$1k chassis+motherboard barebones systems. We see price volatility like crazy: ram in 2017, hard drives in 2021, gpus in ~2018 & again now-ish. It feels like the cloud folk have enough volume to just build chips & slap them onto very low component/simpler motherboards, and there's no mainstream marketization of this obvious/logical/superior path.
- Investors/banks can refuse to finance a bad corp
- Legislatures can regulate it into oblivion
- Justice departments can break it up
- Employees can refuse to work there
- Consumers/Advertisers can refuse to purchase/use its products
Overthrowing a government in contrast typically has a single method: a bloody revolution.
When they had a vaccine, it proved of mediocre effectiveness. So they could not rely on it as the main strategy. And they still can't, obviously.
The (still called) Communist Party is very aware of its citizens' opinion. When pollution became a constant muttering, they acted vigorously, so that no "green movement" arise.
The Party has a huge power - but it is expected to deliver, otherwise social unrest ensue. Not being able to control a pandemy is unacceptable, since the dominance is justified by the common good.
The control of the Party on the Chinese population is ambivalent: very real and quite fragile altogether. The Party knows that very clearly.
The bar for revolution is quite high, during Mao and Stalin, people were starving to death and there was massive unrest but still the parties generally kept power. The CCP clearly doesn't want anything close to that, but this demonstrates that no social unrest is a nice-to-have rather than a requirement for an authoritarian government.
Russia is another example. Given the sanctions, economic turmoil, protests about the war it's pretty clear that this special military operation has been a huge net negative for most of the population. In an authoritarian government however there's little need to consider the populace as long as you're above the 'good enough not to revolt' bar. Most focus should be put on the politics of maintaining power.
Yeah, for the people in power (ie, the US/anglosphere at large)
> Unlike the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet blocs were clearly delineated, the two segments of the coming world will likely remain somewhat connected.
They seem to be looking to analyze the present day through the lease of the Cold War, yet it is clear that what’s happening isn’t primarily ideological:
> As the global divergence continues, however, countries will gravitate toward one side or the other, and (as during the Cold War) not necessarily on clear ideological grounds. Communist Vietnam, fearful of rising Chinese power, is open to American overtures, while democratic Pakistan, a Cold War ally of Washington’s that is now heavily linked to China through Belt and Road investments, has effectively become a client state of Beijing.
Overall, I find the thesis here lacking. Are there tensions? Absolutely. But the fact that sovereign nations feel they shouldn’t be at the mercy of the global dollar hardly harkens to Soviet era lines on a map.
A couple of pieces of evidence:
De-coupling is evidently a US driven initiative, starting with the Trumpian 'China Bad' rhetoric starting from 2016, placing over 200+ Chinese firms from the prohibited list, setting up AUUKUS military alliance, Quad military alliance etc.
China has massively benefited from status quo, no motivation at all to change it. Clear from Xi Jingping's speech at Davos where he cast China as a supporter of globalisation. It is precisely because China has closed the gap with the US via globalisation that the US is now keen to de-couple China from the system the US set up
This piece - typical of the Atlantic (lemme guess Applebaum was the author?) - is recasting the 'world splitting into two' as the responsibility of China malfeasance, rather than US fears of loss of absolute hegemony
Propaganda
Example: EVs. US has lagged behind so much in this while China has got tons of EV companies that are about to launch in the US. Sure the US could ban them, the next day China will ban US auto companies and seize their factories. How will the big three survive losing the Chinese market? Isn't that the only major growth market? They will be forced to open up to the Chinese makers. Have you seen their cars? They seem very competitive. Only people who won't consider them are the towns being supported by auto jobs and the "rural" MURICA folks. Everyone else will eat them up.
Repeat this for many other industries. I don't see how we can turn around from where we are at this point.
The course for a de-coupled future is probably set; the challenge for humanity is: are we able to co-exist without interdependence?
It also repeatedly antagonizes liberal democratic values that citizens of the current hegemony hold dear as it pursues dissidents abroad (Operation Foxhunt) and organizes economic retaliation against foreign companies and celebrities and countries (like Lithuania) that just speak out against China's government policy. China openly threatens the independence and freedom of a liberal democracy called Taiwan. Such openly expansionist ambitions, threats to free speech, and support of neighboring imperial ambitions (ie. Russia) undermines the very foundation of global free trade, liberal democratic values cannot be completely separated from global trade.
The status quo isn't just "globalization". Europe and North America and South Asia has global trade tensions but they never rise to the level of China's antagonism. The mere existence of global trade does not make China a genuinely cooperative player.
The west does a lot of what you describe, just on a smaller scale.
If you dare to go against Israel, which the US has deemed untouchable, you are met with economic sanctions, targeting from multiple intelligence services, online threats from supporters and laws placed specifically to stop your activities (anti-BDS laws). This is even if you deal with nothing but non-violent protest.
There is no such thing as hard liberal democratic values, just a sliding scale of values that go up and down depending on the time frame and circumstances. Different eras of Europe/US/western nations have provided different levels of "liberal values" to different groups of people.
With all this continued imperfection, what right does the West have to criticize China?
The West continually makes mistakes and is held accountable by its liberal democracy. Even anti-BDS laws which are IMO as deserving of criticism and as anti-liberal as anything else, they are moderated by democratic institutions and democratic laws. Anti-BDS laws are controversial even in the US where it happens on the provincial level. It also receives parliamentary condemnation and oppositional lobbying across the West in the US and powerful US-allied countries like France and Germany. Practically all US anti-BDS bills at the Federal level were either symbolic or failed to pass. Israel is hardly untouchable, it's controversial to the point of partisanship in the US.
And you'll have to elaborate on "targeting" by intelligence agencies. That's a pretty broad term. I'll tell you what China means when they "target" nonviolent foreign resident dissidents in Operation Foxhunt. They contact them to tell them that they have three choices: they can commit suicide, or they can return to China to be apprehended, or they can live knowing that any family they have in China will suffer violent consequences.
This is a perfect example of how authoritarian sympathizers twist and equivocate common criticisms so they can construct a false equivalence between imperfections by liberal democracies with the much more severe abuses by autocratic regimes like China and Russia. Not only does scale matter, it also matters that liberal democracies have the capacity to change. The US in particular receives criticisms from allies and non-allies alike, its disastrous second Iraq war has weighed heavily on American democratic politics and its citizens influence new behavior like withdrawing from Afghanistan. China has the right to engage in such criticism as well, it does not have the right to deflect its own criticisms and it does not have the right to dismiss its criticisms without demonstrating a capacity to change as a totalitarian illiberal democracy.
Each generation has to fight to move the needle in the right direction a bit further. The civil rights generation fought to allow people like me to be able to type this here today. The "greatest generation" before them fought to even have a country for the civil rights generation to build upon. Time will tell if BLM or some other forthcoming movement was the trigger that we can look back to and see that it advanced the country forward.
>The West continually makes mistakes and is held accountable by its liberal democracy. Even anti-BDS laws which are IMO as deserving of criticism and as anti-liberal as anything else, they are moderated by democratic institutions and democratic laws.Anti-BDS laws are controversial even in the US where it happens on the provincial level. It also receives parliamentary condemnation and oppositional lobbying across the West in the US and powerful US-allied countries like France and Germany. Practically all US anti-BDS bills at the Federal level were either symbolic or failed to pass.
This is not entirely true. The way these laws are structured is that some state level group funded by supporters of Israel (sometimes using money funned from Israel themselves) push to have these clearly unconstitutional laws passed and then they remain on the books until there is a court case where the law gets tested. In the case of Abby Martin vs the state of Georgia, Ms.Martin prevailed and got the law struck down...until the same people who advanced the law had it amended to make it so that the amount of money that is required to trigger the law is now in the 6 figures. Now this requires another challenge. 35 states have laws on the books and there have been attempt after attempt to get a law at the federal level(as you mentioned). This is where any credibility of proper governance goes out the window. All these challenges required volunteer donations and resources to be expended to defeat them and even then there are people at all level of governance that will gladly toss aside any credibility that the US has in order to advance their interests. You see this in the states amending the laws instead of realizing that they are clearly unconstitutional and correcting their mistake. You see this in multiple congress people attempting to try at the federal level every few years.
How is this a real Democracy? This is just an illusion of democracy and the reality is that whoever has unlimited funds (Israel and its supporters) will have their "free speech" heard while everyone else just needs to "try harder and better luck next time".
>Israel is hardly untouchable, it's controversial to the point of partisanship in the US.
While I wish I could share your optimism, this is not true at all. Take for example Ilhan Omar making a twitter comment about how Israel lobbies the US govt to pass pro-Israel agendas: A pretty obvious statement. It resulted in her almost being immediately stripped of her committee assignments(until AOC and her massive supporter base intervened). Contrast that with the Democratic party itself talking about how they want to treat Muslims as equals during election season but when push comes to shove, their election groups shut down the committee under their party wing that was made to advance Palestinian causes. Lets not forget about how Palestinian coverage is completely ignored or framed in a Pro-Israel spotlight in mainstream media. They only place to vent opposition that is left is the internet(ignoring the tactics Israel supporters use to get those people kicked off platforms).
Let me repeat from my previous comment: This liberal democracy is on a sliding scale depending on the people and the timeframe. It is because of that, the credibility has been severely damaged and that makes the West's criticism of China very much like the pot calling the kettle black. If there was an honest attempt at moving forward then you can make an argument that the values are being held but that is not what is happening.
>And you'll have to elaborate on "targeting" by intelligence agencies. That's a pretty broad term. I'll tell you what China means when they "target" nonviolent foreign resident dissidents in Operation Foxhunt. They contact them to tell them that they have three choices: they can commit suicide, or they can return to China to be apprehended, or they can live knowing that any family they have in China will suffer violent consequences.
I'm referring to programs that Isaeli Intelligence agencies have formed involving a network of policing online and offline to quickly identify and neutralize any opposition before they have a chance to go viral.
In the case of online policing, there are software applications that are developed by Israel's tech groups and associated organizations that allow people to be quickly alerted of any social media post or comment and to quickly go there and be a pro-israel defense. I don't keep track of the latest apps (I think act.IL is the newest?)
In the case of offline tracking, there are sites like the canary mission that publicly document any opposition to Israel in order to dox those people and get their careers ruined. In order to be removed from the website, you must make a public pledge that you will no longer defame Israel and that you are sorry that you caused trouble for Israel.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act.IL [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_Mission [3]: https://canarymission.org/ex-canary <-- This will probably alert them of this post.
>This is a perfect example of how authoritarian sympathizers twist and equivocate common criticisms so they can construct a false equivalence between imperfections by liberal democracies with the much more severe abuses by autocratic regimes like China and Russia.
You speak from an enormous position of privilege. Ask anyone who has suffered at the hands of the US's actions about how they feel about this "false equivalence". I bet you this is partially what is also driving many countries to adopt the Belt and ROad initiative. You think these countries are that stupid that they will be easily conned by China? They know that they are going to owe China, its just for many of these poor countries that have historically at best been ignored by the west or worst, been abused by the West, going towards China has some possibility of improving their lot. That is the West's fault for missing a golden opportunity: again I believe this is because the west has been slowly abandoning its core principles over the years.
>The US in particular receives criticisms from allies and non-allies alike, its disastrous second Iraq war has weighed heavily on American democratic politics and its citizens influence new behavior like withdrawing from Afghanistan.
It honestly does not sound like you live in the US. Because I can tell you as someone who lives here: this is nonsense. The decision to withdraw was an easy political win to increase Biden's poll numbers after negotiations of his build back better bill were faltering and he failed to implement multiple other promises such as significantly reducing student loan debt, providing an expansion of health care and failing to do easy wins such as legalizing marijuana at the federal level. The people did ultimately support him but it was not something that was top of mind given that they were still suffering from the fallout of year two of COVID.
You described media bias and media campaigns. Liberal democracy isn't a guarantee against bias nor does it ban organized campaigns against what you consider to be morally good, it's a guarantee that people can freely inform themselves and openly debate opposite point of views both privately and in their government. It is not the intelligence services that sanctions anti-Israel voices, it is the overwhelmingly pro-Israel sentiment amongst citizens that has only grown under an objectively free media, any cancelling effect is enacted by citizens and democratic institutions because free citizens agree with them. That one side is more dominant and likely better equipped does not categorically delegitimize American democracy. You describe financial advantage. Liberal democracy is vulnerable to such exploitation, but as your own accounts indicate, it has not categorically surrendered to autocratic edict.
Why do you think the Afghanistan withdrawal was a "political win"? A political win means that withdrawing for Afghanistan is a popular move supported by the electorate. Why do you think it's popular? The second Iraq war has largely dampened any enthusiasm and support for any similar ME interventions.
How do you square your recognition of a sliding scale of abuse & corruption with hyperbolic categorical claims that US governance lacks "any credibility" and is merely "an illusion"? You condemn the West for not being good enough to your satisfaction more than openly expansionist totalitarian regimes that mock the very principles by which you judge the West.
What's your point exactly? Are you telling me that until the West improves to your satisfaction, no one in the West should call out China? It doesn't seem like even you believe that the West is as bad as China, yet for some reason you've divebombed into this thread with common domestic criticisms as if they are at all relevant to China's misbehavior.
> You think these countries are that stupid that they will be easily conned by China?
Yes. In fact, we know they have been conned. Pakistan, considered one of China's strategic allies, has been pressured by its immense Chinese debt to fork over exclusive port rights with predatory revenue shares. Sri-Lanka has done the same with its ports and land, Laos has done it with their entire national power grid, Tajikistan has done it with large tracts of strategic land as well as mining rights [1].
We also know that these are not benevolent aid loans because the loan rates are practically identical to private sector market-rate loans that extract higher rates the more dire the country's financial situation, which stands in contrast to typical infrastructure aid loans like those of Japan that have comparably very low rates for developing countries. Aside from rates, the terms are unusually onerous and asymmetric (even in the world of loans), banning unusual things like loan restructuring and explicitly spell out requirements for foreign policy alignment. These loan agreements also force the government to keep the terms or even the existence of the loan confidential, which prevents any democratic or public accountability for these national loans.
These are sovereignty-ending concessions. It's a total non-sequitur to claim that historical oppression by the West means that their pivot to China is a rational decision. I can be sympathetic to their attitudes towards the West while pointing out that China is actively abusing them.
[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/international/551337-chinas-debt...
However... China's imperialism is a real threat. I don't think that the citizens of the western quite imperfect "democracies" have just knowledge of the Chinese grievances against us.
The West immensely abused China during the XIXth century. On all levels: economically first, but also culturally. The resentment of the Chinese people is both very vivid and grounded on very factual facts.
Putin has shown where resentment leads. We thought that he would not invade Ukraine for the benefits were low in comparison to risks, e.g. large sanctions. But he did nevertheless, for Ukraine is - in his view - a central issue in the identity of Russia.
When we sacked the "Old Summer Palace" during the opiums wars, it's as if the Louvre in Paris, the Palace in Versailles and the castle of Chambord had been voluntarily plundered and destroyed. The Opium Wars meant we put millions of Chinese into addiction in order to counterbalance our commercial balance.
Putin's claims on Ukraine have no historical grounds, whatever he and many Russians think. But Chinese resentment towards the West are quite understandable.
Furthermore, Japan devastated China between 1937 and 1945 - with a rare level of atrocity. The Cold War has now made Japan an ally of the US, and of the West more generally.
Most people in the West have no clue about that part of History. It's not taught at school, or in passing. Which makes it even worse for many Chinese: not even knowing what our countries did to them is the worse insult possible. We also don't push Japan to acknowledge their outrageous war crimes.
If we want peace with China in the coming 50 years, we should start acknowledging what we did and ask for forgiveness - e.g. demonstrating our respect. Being able to apologize with very official, large ceremonies is not a sign of weakness.
And since this must not be taken as such, we need to be military ready, to be economically ready (not depending on China industry as we do nowadays) and socially ready.
By socially, I mean to be capable as societies to endure tough times. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that we don't care enough about democracy to stop the flow of petrol and gas from Russia. The EU pays Russia 600 million euros * per day* for it. We are not ready to go through an economic recession in order to save Ukraine.
We are weak.
We provide a big amount of weapons - but that's not a huge one. No planes, no tanks. We even stop ex-army volunteers to join the Ukrainian army! We could perfectly give temporary vacations to volunteers from our armies, as long as they disperse and go there by their own means.
So we need to stand up against Putin much more clearly than we do, just keeping the few legal appearances to avoid OTAN's country to be implied as an official belligerent. We can do much more and we don't. We could decide to limit the temperature in our homes to 16ºC. But our politicians are no Churchills.
China is looking. China wants revenge and I find it quite understandable - even if I despise violence to solve issues. We should prove our strength, our will to keep up collectively with China and its vassals (Russia becoming one of them very soon). And ask the Chinese people for forgiveness for our past behaviors, by providing all the symbolic reparations they rightly deserve.
True adults know when to apologize and when a bully needs to be stopped.
Our Western politicians have not enough courage for any of these necessary acts.
Let's hope that the coming war with China will stay "cold". Or that a common enemy appears to force us to cooperate. Aliens would be fun but, well, improbable... :-) Climate dereliction has the potential to be bad enough to collectively get our priorities right.
For sure, nor our politicians neither the Chinese are doing what is necessary, so huge "natural" disasters are on their way. Like Greta Thunberg repeats: that's what Science predicts, not a point of view of mine.
I am familiar with China's history with the west, there are plenty of Youtube videos that cover this topic so I think more "online citizens" are informed than you might think.
The US should pressure Britain to apologize to China. These days the US says jump and Britain says "how high?" I'm guessing that there isn't enough political capital that is willing to be spent to make this happen.
You could argue that HK 97 was a first step even though it has caused a lot of trouble looking back.
The US has a history of uniting when under siege and it is amazing what they can accomplish. Whether this will be effective against China's long game remains to be seen.
Climate change could trigger the war. China has a lot to lose (arguable more than the US).
The US and the democracies in general ought to put a huge pressure on Japan. I don't feel that we belong in the same alliance if the Japanese people don't do their homework. It will be very difficult for them, but a necessity however. I'm not holding my breath.
The whole thing is indeed depressing.