This is especially egregious, because the few folks that have enough ethics to not do that, get driven into bankruptcy, by the ones that do.
The general consumer market basically wants cheap. If they can get stuff that does what they want, for less, then they go that way. They aren't particular, as to the source.
The market for High Quality is actually pretty small. People that make good stuff, don't get rich. People that make lots of cheap crap, get very rich.
The only way to reverse this, would be to invoke protectionism (or have a war, which will do that, anyway). That isn't very popular, with this crowd.
Because we know that protectionism with people like those you explained at the top
> If you can get an extra lambo in your garage, by firing all your factory employees, and move your manufacturing to China, well...what do you think will happen?
does not guarantee better products/outcomes. Those who would use basically slave labor offshore for profits, will also do other nasty things for profits at home as well. Not a fan of dichotomy like these.
I want cheap Chinese electric cars here in the US.
Not sure I support that broad a statement.
Here in NY, we have had many instances of dangerous building fires, caused by cheap Chinese scooters, which are a favorite transportation mode for folks without means.
A number of these fires caused many families to lose their homes and meager possessions, because one tenant was charging crap batteries.
I kinda hate this "Chinese = crap" narrative, it's naive, it misses the forest for the trees.
Just because they are the biggest manufacturer in the world they also produce lots of crap, it's just statistically more probable that you gonna find lots of crap that's Chinese, but generalizing this over entire industries and all kind of products is just...naive.
It kinda reminds me of that documentary where a Chinese billionaire buys a plant in Ohio to make car glass and American workers looked like crap compared to their Chinese counterparts when it came to the craft, even though they did produce glass before already before the Chinese ownership.
It's the kind of narrative that people pushed on Russian army after their failures in Ukraine claiming huge incompetence and their incoming demise. Or when people were sure their economy was gonna collapse because this and that.
Just saying stuff doesn't make it true.
The longer we keep with those biases the more naive and vulnerable we'll keep being.
There's a huge amout of corruption, and almost no regulation.
It's a matter of demand, not capabilities.
He has told me that he does need to hire a lot of folks to ride herd on production; more than in other places, though (he has had many places that run his production).
If he does that, he finds they do an excellent job.
Nonsense. It has been shown for much longer and many more times that people have a capacity to act on the long-term. It might involve various social thought mechanisms like religion, moralism, and politics that prevent so-called progress, but evolution often favors societies who act on the long-term. This is a especially true in moments of sudden catastrophe. A classic example is Catholicism in the face of the plague.
It’s not that popular with the masses either.
Sure, it can be very popular with the people whose specific industries are protected, and there’s many who like it in the abstract - but if you’re the party in power when everything gets more expensive as a consequence of protectionist policies a lot of people are going to be very unhappy with you.
There may be very specific cases where very carefully tailored uses of it are good for certain long-term interests or risk mitigation, but mostly it is waste — and extremely subject to corruption from those invested in inefficient industries.
That's the "spherical cow on a frictionless plane in a vacuum" of economics.
Protectionism is probably a good idea when the competitor is temporarily subsidizing various industries to build a permanent comparative advantage that can then be abused, either by being an effective monopoly, or by shaping your enemies to be logistically unprepared for war.
I do totally agree with dragonwriter that it is vulnerable to corruption
I wonder what would happen to a Chinese CEO who pulled a stunt like that? I hear they send the next of kin the bill.
One mistake the US did was switching from defined benefit pensions to individual retirement savings. When the stock market is something you hear about in the news, most people don't really care about it. But when you see it in your retirement account balance, it becomes relevant. If outsourcing to China is good for the stock market, you vote politicians who make it easier.
Depending on how the pension system is setup, it could become an indefinite pyramid scheme. You end with countries like Canada (and many in places like Europe) constantly importing immigrant labor just to prop up the older generations' retirement. It kicks the ball down the road.
IDK if the book of journalist Robin Alexander "Die Getriebenen" (the driven ones, meaning top German politicians driven by events) was ever translated to English, but that guy had daily access to the Chancellory and describes the situation to a T.
Merkel built her career on media appeasement and an illusion that Germany is in such good hands that nothing untoward can happen to it. It sort-of worked until 2015, when the outside world could not be kept at bay anymore.
The reason why governments promote immigration is because they want to increase the workforce (and in the case of Portugal, replace all the emigrants from Portugal). As the population is aging, if you want to keep cheap labor you need new arms to work, no matter who pays for the pensions.
But the supply of workers needed to provide the basic goods your aging population needs (including healthcare) shrinks and if you don't accept immigrants you end up with labor shortage (Or you raise the salaries for these jobs, but then the rest of your economy disappears because there's no one working there anymore).
Yes, but that's the biggest EU countries and they take a lot of migrants. Wikipedia says 18% of Germany population are first-generation immigrants. In comparison, in US it's only 14%. For the whole EU the number is around 11%.
> generally Europe is very anti-immigrant.
From what I know about "how to legally immigrate to US" vs "how to legally immigrate to Europe", the latter is much easier. The public sentiment might be there, but the laws say the other way.
Remember that EU has a free flow of work force, so I expect lots of those 18% will come from Netherlands or France.
In Sweden at least, immigration was always biggest from neighboring countries (e.g. Finland/Norway)
But if you take the broader, official definition then you get something like 30% apparently:
https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-situ...
What's the point for the native citizen of Netherlands or France in moving to Germany? The quality of life and salaries are similar, but the culture context is just so different between these countries. Completely different languages, different customs, etc. The numbers surely confirm that - the France is in the bottom of the list, and Netherlands are not even included. [1]
Anyway, out of ~14 million foreigners in Germany only 5 million are from other EU states, and most of them (~3 million) are from Eastern European countries (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary).
> In Sweden at least, immigration was always biggest from neighboring countries (e.g. Finland/Norway)
There are less cultural differences between Sweden, Finland and Norway. At least they have more or less similar languages (ok, Finnish is different, but Sweden is also an official language in Finland).
1. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
Ukraine (oustide EU sofar) is number two on the list afger Turkey and also Russia is pretty far up.
Then, why is it misleading to compare Polish and Romanian immigrants to Germany with Mexican immigrants to US?
1. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
I don't know what your experience is, but immigrating legally to the EU is not easy unless you're from a rich country like the US.
If you are thinking like my Portuguese friend complaining about how "hard" it was because it took six months to immigrate to the US, you have no idea how hard it is for other people to come to the US legally.
I'm not talking about filing paperwork taking a long time.
I agree it's harder if you're not from a developed country, but it's hard for a lot of people across the board.
Legally immigrating to the US (getting a residence permit) is either a matter of luck (lotteries), extraordinary skills, very long waiting lists, or a combination of these.
On the contrary, immigrating to the EU is "just" finding a job on the local market and applying for some paperwork. And the EU does not discriminate you on the basis of the country where you've been born.
Anyhow, revisiting the thread I can see that the post I answered to could be meant differently. I thank you for that and would like to advance my apologies to the OP in that case.
...was a response to this quote from original OP:
> generally Europe is very anti-immigrant
and there is "might be there" not "is there" in my post. I just don't really know the public sentiment in Europe enough to argue with original OP, so referred to the laws instead, to show that Europe is not anti-immigrant.
> Combined with a description that seemed to lament the apparent lack of stricter controls led me to question why it would be important where you are born if you obey the law.
It's not! To the contrary, my description was meant to show how harsh US immigration system is compared to the EU's.
> would like to advance my apologies to the OP in that case.
Please, nevermind. Your question was okayish in the context of the thread, plus I'm not the kind of person that can be offended by an Internet discussion.
Are they counting EU citizens living in Germany?
The alternative is having the worldview that money is something that shows up on your bank account on the first days of the month.
I think that is how normal people (is the term "unsophisticated investors" or does that mean something importantly different?) view sock market investments — sure, it says your investment may go down as well as up, but how many normal people doing investments act like that's true?
Even one step up from that, my dad's advice to me was: "Invest in Lloyds bank, if they go under we have bigger problems". We had bigger problems.
(To riff off what some ancient dead Greek philosopher said, the only reason I can meaningfully regard myself as better informed than most, is that I am aware of how little I know).
Similar thing happened e.g. after fall of USSR -- elderly people simply became poorer with way less buying power they expected.
You are describing an implosion - something getting smaller.
Two problems with this:
First, it will get small enough that you won't have a retirement and will work till you die.
Second, reducing pensions tends to be quite unpopular, and when chasing profits for the current quarter, CFO's don't care about the unsustainability of pensions decades down the road. By the time they have to deal with it, it's too late.
Oregon still has a defined benefits pension for its workers, and the problem is here and now. Small towns cannot afford to hire more firefighters, police, etc as their population grows because more and more of the money they have is going into paying out the defined pensions. They keep getting around this problem by taking out more loans to sustain those pensions. Despite the problem being now, they cannot politically reduce benefits for new hires.
For the longest time Chinese made Toyotas were of much lower quality than Japanese ones, simply due to precision robots being used in Japan for work that was being done manually in Chinese factories. Now that China made is also hitting a demographic cliff, one thinks that maybe again automation will take hold…or maybe Africa and India will develop next.
I moved to Singapore a while ago. Not for those reasons, but being on good terms with almost anyone certainly is a nice bonus.
Though my question was rather, what policies would a country want to adopt?
> Manufacturing technology is has improved in leaps and bounds. It's much easier that it used to be. And I can do all this from a self sufficient homestead deep in the forest.
Yes, but that's essentially just a hobby or at most craft production. So that is neither competitive as mass production in peace time, nor of much use for mass production in wartime.
(It definitely sounds like a great hobby, though!)
And the user you're replying to is advocating for that way of life because they are predicting a severe downfall in the quality of life for those who stay in the global system.
I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to be right.
Over what time horizon? The market consensus is definitely not giving this a big probability any time soon.
If we had proper prediction markets for arbitrary events, I would just directly talk about what those prices are. In the real world, we have to look at the prices of existing financial instruments and see which of these can be used as proxies for the events we are interested in.
For some events that fairly easy: if Russian government bonds trade at high prices in 2021, it's unlikely that Russia's dictator will start a senseless war of aggression soon. (In reality, the price of Russia's bonds went down in the runup to the war.)
For other events you have to be more clever: if you want to get a sense of the market estimate for the probability that an asteroid impact (or similar) will erase all life on earth, you can't just look at the price of a straightforward bet that pays out one dollar, if the asteroid hits: most of us would be dead, and the dollar would likely be worthless.
However you can create a bet that has the right structure: Alice gives Bob 100 dollar now, and in five years, Bob gives Alice 500 dollars (but obviously only if the asteroid hasn't killed Alice and Bob). The market price of such a contract can tell you something about the market consensus estimate of a collapse.
My argument wouldn't be that the market consensus is particularly good at prediction, just that it's better than any other prediction mechanism we have; because it can and will incorporate those other prediction mechanisms, and people have a financial incentive to do so.
Btw, why do you think markets would be particularly bad at forecasting ecological collapse? Is there any ecology you are particularly worried about?
It won't account for a volcano erupting and burying a society in the ashes as happened in Pompeii, or the global equivalent.
Yes, the market consensus can only reflect the information that available to (at least some) market participants.
Of course, the market mechanisms also give people incentives to acquire that information. Because any informational advantage gets rewarded with money.
> It won't account for a volcano erupting and burying a society in the ashes as happened in Pompeii, or the global equivalent.
It can account for the best estimates we have for the probability of that happening.
Again, I'm not suggesting that market estimates are perfect, nor even necessarily any good. I'm just saying that market estimates tend to be at least as good as any other estimates we have. Ie market estimates tend to be the best ones available.
That's good, and enough justification for your lifestyle. No need to come up with stories of imminent global collapse (unless that kind of roleplay enhances your enjoyment of your lifestyle, I guess?)
While I am treating it as a hobby I do have a garage full of CNCs, 3D printers, laser cutters, a pretty complete machine shop and the ability to do some foundry work. I am not expecting a complete collapse of society, mainly the collapse of the middle class as gradually the things they need get more expensive and they earn less. Being able to make stuff myself is already saving me money - you’d be surprised that for many of the bespoke things I need it is far cheaper to make it myself than send it out to a job shop. The idea is to be able to make replacement parts to contribute to the success of my local community so that it’s in their interest to shield me from whatever is going on beyond my gates.
So if you see any trends that only show up after Bretton Woods was _formally_ abandoned, then those trends can't have been kicked off by the unmooring.
What trends are you worried about anyway?
You want to subsidize a failing company?
The deeper problem is that, while the war isn't happening, the war products are not critical. It doesn't matter whether they work or are delivered. Even the medium scale wars the US did maintain over the past couple of decades to keep the machine going showed that various areas were just fleecing them for inadequate products or regular grift (like the vanishing Afghan government). Much of the Pacific fleet's maintenance budget was being stolen by one guy named "Fat Leonard". This sort of thing doesn't go away until the war is actually critical rather than something you can escape by turning off the news.
Fat Leaonard fleeced the Navy, but did provide services.
I.e. greed will be the downfall.
Or are you saying people wouldn’t do something short sighted if it made them super rich in the meantime?
It's not clear that we predicted that shift, so it's a good reason to maintain some manufacturing capability in pretty much all areas, comparative advantage be damned.
Near as I can tell, at the moment we’re mostly confused and tired.
So corporations and consumers outsourced because quantity at price beat quality and strategic concerns.
The reality is that a monopoly is incredibly hard to sustain without government. And even in the cases where something close to it can be created, they can seldomly really push up the price as much as they think.
Historically its governments creating the monopolies most of the time.
It kinda did. Large stagnant industries tend to collapse into monopolies. However, this was masked either by new more nimble companies pushing out the incumbents by utilizing newer technologies, or by industries fading away entirely.
Defining monopoly is pretty hard in the first place. Only Will Smith can play Will Smith. Or is he in a market against all black actors? Or all actors? Or is it he also competing against the NBA/NFL?
If a single company exist to provide some service in a small town, is that company a monopoly.
If a company dominates a market for a decade+, is that a monopoly? There is a question of time.
One can answers these question different ways. And even if they are monopoly, sometimes that is not a actually a problem.
There are certainty some cases where some monopoly exist and are harmful. Mostly those are created by governments. However one can certainty have harmful situation in a relatively free market as well.
But I think the argument that there was ever a case to be made that the Marxist idea of all companies merging in a single mega cooperation has never even been remotely true. And you have industries that are reasonably unregulated (in terms of market entry) and still have lots of competition.
So the facts are 100% for sure much more complex then Marx and those that claim 'Capitalism always leads to centralization' believe. Or at least if it does it operates at timescales that makes it unclear that we should act on their recommendations.
Often Standard Oil is the best example people can come up with and they are not even remotely close to taking over much outside of their specialty.
Of course the whole discussion gets even more complex once multiple government (and cultures, and geographies, and climates and so on) are involved and we aren't taking about a single unified market.
Well, and why would we expect them to take that into account?
Btw, there are good and (mostly) bad ways to do these interventions. Tariffs are especially bad.
A lot of the discussion of these measures also treats all foreigners the same. Eg in practice a chip being produced in eg Canada is virtually as good for national security as one produced in the US. But acts like the 'CHIPS and Science Act' don't see it that way.
The US industrialized itself with tariffs and deindustrialized itself by removing them.
Is it a benefit if that efficiency turns your industrialized economy into a financialized economy that can't manufacture enough bullets to fight a war that you start?
In classical capitalism, there aren't two or three monopolistic players that dominate each industry, there are thousands of companies competing with each other. And that competition brings costs down, so no outsourcing is needed.
Capitalism = private ownership of means of production
Socialism = collective ownership of means of production
Capitalist monopolies are privately owned. A monopoly is no less privately owned than a minor company in a sector with healthy competition, and there is nothing remotely collective about a monopoly. A lack of competition does not in any way mean that "the people" own the organization. Not theoretically, and not actually.
Collectively owned socialist enterprises are not necessarily free of competition. In fact, heated competition over quotas had a lot to do with many of socialism's worst blunders.
Competition does not remotely guarantee that costs are low by international standards either.
They are orthogonal; it is possible to have socialist corporatism, but there is nothing inherently socialist about corporatism (or inherently corporatist about socialism.)
Imo markets tend to have 2 trajectories. Either the market leader builds a moat that precludes competition (often through semi-illegal means).
Or the companies engange in fierce competition and the big players will either outspend or outproduce or straight up buy their competitors which tends to result in either monopolies or oligopolies with barely any competition.
This is when the enshittification begins.
That is why states that created capitalism like Dutch and British always had a strong comportment of fiscal-military state where the government made sure that they could defend their country and their trade.
The problem is that if somebody much larger then you comes along, this gets increasingly difficult. Specially if they are part of the same world and market as you. As Britain learned with the rise of Germany and far more so the US.
The US basically invited China, because they were concerned about the Soviets. This was smart in a struggle with the soviets. But unfortunately China was the much larger strategic danger all along.
The good thing is, that if China continues on along the same lines, the US will continue to do pretty well in a China dominated world. Just as Britain do in a US one. And as the Dutch did in a British one.
The question is, if China will behave the same or not in the long term given that they are not democratic and not even slightly germanic.
We didn't. The US manufactures more than ever. It seems like we gave up the advantage because we let China take over the cheap junk market (before them Japan and Taiwan had that - both have moved up quality though); and we use far less people. A typically factory in 1950 with 2000 workers would now have around 200 to produce the same amount.
We don’t have the ability to do the same kind of industrial mobilization we did in ww2.
There are other aspects.
* Industry/mining/some types of manufacturing are often dirty business and cause pollution, not something you love to be around. Energy consumption is also high.
* They usually come with many hard jobs that people don't exactly love to do if they have alternatives.
This can be countered with automation, but that comes with high cost and limitations that we are only now approaching solutions for (eg flexible humanoid robots with AI-driven controls).
* The big industrialization craze of the 90ies/early 2000s came about as western markets started to saturate and approach low growth rates. The hope was that lifting new countries out of poverty would create economic opportunities.
Among these are: 1. political leaders exploiting the lucrative US market for foreign relation wins. 2. differential labor costs 3. differential regulatory burdens (health and safety, environmental, etc.)
Manufacturers have had all of these pressures applied and they've responded accordingly. Seeking lower labor costs and lower regulatory burdens is not merely simple-minded "greed." When competitors leverage these affordances they gain an advantage in cost, so others must consider following.
People like to complain that it's the labour market, that nobody wanted the jobs.. but that's a lie told to stop the masses from organizing and putting some heads on pikes.
I don’t even think it’s very clear that recent US efforts to onshore manufacturing, both broadly and within green energy specifically, are even helping it. The US is paying close to a million in extra costs for every job it’s on-shoring, although there is the benefit of improving the US negotiating position and military readiness beyond bolstering employment.
I do not think they can do this forever.
Lenin
> Is it just because it would be impossible to have an industrial base in a world where Asia exists and can produce everything that could be built in the US for 1/5 the cost?
It's not impossible, had the US kept capital control and tariffs there would have been no way for Asia to catch-up at all. But the free trade ideology and greed led the US where it is now.
Because there's a basic heirarchy in capitalism where resource extraction is at the bottom, manufacturing in the middle, and finance at the top, and the higher on that heirarchy your comparative advantage is, the more value you capture out of the global economy.
The US won (or, more accurately, is winning, its not a static state) global capitalism is what happened.
undercutting and destroying the financial viability of unions and labor
The rich don't actually care about how much money they have, they care about how much money they have relative to other people. Hollowing out the middle class meant while milking profits from cheap overseas near-slave labor? My god, so many billionaire boners.
Why do you think nothing tangible has been done about illegal immigration in, what, 40, 50 years now? Something that massively increases the number of desperate workers to undermine labor supply and union-based manual labor and trades?
As it stands now, this problem will self-correct because manufacturing WILL onshore. It has to. China is dropping the hammer on economic reforms and ratcheting up totalitarian control, to say nothing of demographic bombs, the real estate / regional debt crisis, and the inevitable sanctions from a Taiwan invasion.
Don't worry about the shipbuilding. China doesn't have carriers. They don't have a navy that can leave shore more than a hundred miles or so.
The fact is the US Navy can blockade China's food imports and petroleum (as in, fertilizer so ... most domestic food) shipments in Malaysia at will and ... China starves a couple months later.
The policy that needs to be pursued isn't one of China as a dangerous peer state. That has already passed. The policy is to deal with China as a dangerous collapsing state. It's kind of the same effect (manufactured goods being shut off, reestablishing more domestic production and manufacturing), just with or without overt warfare.
IMO this is an opportunity for greenfield modern manufacturing construction: lots of automation, lots of modern EV-based low cost low carbon transportation and infrastructure, building up the domestic energy industry around alternative energy on a fundamentally cheap basis never seen before.
One way to do this is to intelligently allow the best and brightest in China to immigrate. They'll certainly want to get out...
As for the article, it was a lot easier to crank out airplanes when they were basically automobiles with different body shapes. These weren't turbojets, they were ICE engine-powered prop planes. Yes that handwaves a massive amount of engineering and retooling, but it wasn't like ICE engine designers suddenly needed to learn how chip manufacturing worked.
It can't, as long as China has atomic bombs and ICBMs to deliver them.
2) That is suicide for the CCP. They may be crazy authoritarian, but they aren't suicidal.
By the same justification, China won't invade Taiwan because we "have atomic bombs and the ICBMs to deliver them". But it's pretty inevitable they will.
Pirates can almost never fully cut off a shipping lane.
While it would be a particularly horrific way to deal with the problem, the local people in the area of the Bab-el Mandeb strait and their capacity to interfere with international shipping can, in fact, be stopped with ICBMs.
>The fact is the US Navy can blockade China's food imports and petroleum (as in, fertilizer so ... most domestic food) shipments in Malaysia at will and ... China starves a couple months later.
The fact is that China do not have ships because they don't intend to do large scale invasions thousands of miles from home.
US Navy can't blockade China because the have enough missiles to destroy 100 times more ships. And they have the capacity to fab more than 1000 missiles per day.
He’s one of these folks who are really engaging to listen to and he uses a fun argument style like Simon Sinek where he presents stuff in a way that leaves you to put 2+2 together and feel smart about yourself when you think “aha! 4!” Just before he says “4”.
That argument style seems to be like catnip for me so when I recognise it I have to force myself out of the “well that’s obviously true” mindset I’ve fallen into and go spot check a few of the facts he shares during his opinions. Maybe about 1/3rd of them don’t hold.
It leaves me thinking he’s probably meaningfully wrong but like I say I don’t have enough knowledge to say for sure, just using a simple heuristic of “is this person’s argument consistent?”. I haven’t decided one way or the other, I just rate his thesis “caution, may not be true”
He's been saying China would collapse for quite a while, but only recently have I seen a lot of other geopolitical types go from poo-pooing him to essentially agreeing with him.
He still has a very strongly petrodollar/petroleum dominates the economy/alt energy isn't important, but a lot of that is because the tech churn in batteries/solar panels is so rapid. He doesn't really appreciate what sodium ion will bring to the table for example, he still thinks batteries can't scale because of limited cobalt and nickel, which is a two year old take.
He is still a bit too dramatic on open seas piracy/reduction of the US Navy, but I've seen him reduce that take. Really the open seas and global trade are going to disrupt because between Russia in Ukraine and China doing the Taiwan invasion, there's going to be a LOT of global trade disruption.
At this point I agree with his China take because it has four different fronts which are conspiring. Demographic collapse didn't cause Japan to completely fall apart, but demographic collapse + totalitarian incompetence absolutely can.
I also haven't seen as many rebuke videos of his China take, and the US and its megaconglomerates are definitely shortening their supply chain and re-shoring manufacturing already. The most public one is the fab act (which will also expose Taiwan to a higher risk of invasion).
Yeah sure, just like Russian economy was supposed to fall in a few months after sanctions.
China does not. It is that simple, basically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_gas_pipeline
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/putin-says-oil-pipel...
Ukraine alone can take that out. Cruise missiles, sabotage, special forces, mercenaries. You don't even need to explicitly destroy it, Russians and Chinese build poor infrastructure.
Sarah Paine, a prof at the Naval War college really opened my eyes to this and the Belt and Road. Marine shipping is basically free. Keeping rail lines and pipelines intact over thousands and thousands of miles in Asia through desert wastes, mountains, tundra, and a half dozen politically iffy -stans is not a recipe for efficient trade logistics.
And China and Russia hate each other. Strange bedfellows, but would China want to rely on Russia for oil if it invades Taiwan and Russia has their country's oil supply in a firm iron grip? Putin? Nope nope nope.
As another comment in this thread has already mentioned, they have sufficient local production to fuel their war machine, while restricting other uses.
> Ukraine alone can take that out.
It's actually quite interesting. Are you aware that there is a pipeline running from Russia through Ukraine that pumps Russian gas to the EU? Ukraine earns $800 million USD a year from this. Then, they buy back that gas. Life is a little more complicated than it seems.
> And China and Russia hate each other. Strange bedfellows, but would China want to rely on Russia for oil if it invades Taiwan and Russia has their country's oil supply in a firm iron grip? Putin? Nope nope nope.
It doesn't matter whether they hate or love each other, the only thing that matters is interests. Stalin was called a dictator and a ruthless killer by the West, but when he changed sides, he was suddenly 'Uncle Joe.'
China will only invade Taiwan if the US forces their hand. In the short term, it's against their interests to invade Taiwan, just as Taiwan prefers to maintain the status quo. They know that if they invade, the US can say, 'You see? We told you. Look what they are doing' which would result in sanctions from the US and EU and lead to internal problems. Why would they do it? It's neither logical nor rational, and it goes against their culture. There's a Chinese saying: 'The wise win before the fight while the ignorant fight to win'.
Now when I say that, I mean "in 5-10 years for some substantively detectible change" not "next month".
The United States/Americas is quite well positioned for resource independence since the Bakken Shale became so productive. They are globally dominant still militarily. The only weakness is the offshored manufacturing, and as I stated in a different comment, the world that supported China being the manufacturing center of the US is OVER. It died with Russia invading Ukraine, COVID disrupting supply lines, the autocratic power convergence of Xi. End of an era. 75 years of free seas trade "end of history" type thinking is over.
"US forces their hand" ummmmmmmmm what would the US do that would "force their hand"? That's a WEIRD comment. Of course the US is quietly and carefully going to draw down their manufacturing dependence over a decade. Of course China can trump up some Gulf of Tonkin incident or affront to provoke casus belli.
You are ascribing FAR too much intellectual stability to the Chinese government. The Chinese government is now an unopposed Kim-style autocrat. There is only what the dear leader wants, and the dear leader wants to be as Dear a Leader with capital letters as possible.
If invading Taiwan is what dear leader wants and it matches some false rallying war rhetoric that dear leader wants about "restoring China" as it demographically declines, then dear leader will do that. The CCP is actively crushing independent action by China's major corporations. They are installing "thought police" in every country, and the population is being subjected to higher and higher degrees of surveillance and control. This is not conducive to a functioning economy in the long run.
Oh, and as for your proverb: China has already lost the long run. They didn't establish themselves as a benevolent world power and construct their own political sphere. They do not have resource independence. Their demographics are collapsing. Their society is becoming closed, oppressive, authoritarian, and corrupt. And the world that powered their economic wunderkind of free open seas trade is ending.
BRICS by the way is NOT a sphere of influence. Russia and India hate China, South Africa is a western country by nature, and Brazil is an Americas country.
If you can explain how the long term economics of China will survive crushing authoritarianism, isolationism, and a sharp demographic decline, I'm all ears.
You have a lot of confidence in the US to implement smart long term thinking industrial policy. Despite the US having shown to be very bad at that for a long time.
For a country that can seem to figure out how to build a single high speed train line or figure out that having a subway makes a lot of sense.
While the other country builds high speed train lines all over the place and has many cities building more subways then all of the US combined.
We can look at EVs as well. China dominates the supply chain and production.
Yes the US
> If you can explain how the long term economics of China will survive crushing authoritarianism, isolationism, and a sharp demographic decline, I'm all ears.
Authoritarianism increases and decreases over time. China has been well functioning for a while now. Claiming that Authoritarianism is gone ruin everything they do is questionable at best. Our actual insight into China government internals isn't mostly guesswork. Specially as there is lots of evidence that US democracy isn't actually producing fantastic long term thinking.
China isn't actually isolated right now. And they wont be unless they make pretty fundamental mistakes.
The West in totality is also suffering demographic decline. Specially Japan.
Its kind of Ironic that the fear of 'overpopulation' pushed by idiot leftists intellectuals in the West was the greatest strategic weapon ever invented against China.
> They didn't establish themselves as a benevolent world power and construct their own political sphere.
They are increasing their influence in lots of places. And lots of other places are willing to go with the flow. One can imagine a future where Russia, Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan and many South East Asian countries become influenced by China over time. The same goes for Africa.
And places like UAE/Saudi and co aren't actually US allies in any meaningful way and would happily turn to China if they thought it gave them an advantage.
China doesn't need to lead them as the US leads NATO, but if they are all opposed to the 'Western Order' its gone be tough.
> They do not have resource independence.
But they do actually have control over lots of resources and refinement currently that would be incredibly hard for the West to be without. It would take very long for the West to produce sufficient amounts of these things. So I think in practice a divided market would be catastrophic for both sides.
Practically speaking the West does not have resource independence. And even best case, it would take decades to have it.
If China really wanted they could mass produce nuclear reactors and produce carbon fuel as needed. Its only a matter of investment. They have the Uranium/Thorium to do it. And if you do it at scale its not that expensive. If China were actually preparing for a serious war they would do this.
This leads me to think that China and the US will continue to rattle their chains at each other for decades to come with neither actually doing anything to throw over the apple cart.
It's such an unrealistic comment. Have you seen the new Navy report in Congress? Have you seen the yearly Congress report about Chinese rocket capabilities from the last few months? Have you seen the results of the war games in the South China Sea, most of which were lost by the US?
"US Congressmen: 90% of US fighter jets in the Western Pacific will be destroyed within hours of a US-China conflicts by missiles. The military bases being mentioned are those in Japan, S Korea, Guam and Northern Marianas." [1]
> to say nothing of demographic bombs, the real estate / regional debt crisis, and the inevitable sanctions from a Taiwan invasion.
They are heavily investing in Sub-Saharan Africa because, based on IMF data, it will be the only region in the next few decades experiencing significant population growth. This region is their own 'China.' With increasing automation and a cheap workforce, demographics are not a significant problem. They just poured 53 billion USD into the real estate crisis. To receive sanctions for a Taiwan invasion, first, you need to invade it, and it's not in the short-term interests of either China or Taiwan.
> Don't worry about the shipbuilding. China doesn't have carriers. They don't have a navy that can leave shore more than a hundred miles or so.
Don't worry? If they destroy a US ship, it will take 5-10 years to rebuild it, whereas they will rebuild theirs in a year. This is also mentioned in reports.
Your entire comment is wishful thinking. China is not collapsing, and the data confirms that. [2][3]
1. https://x.com/Ignis_Rex/status/1791035870210085350
2. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/china-still-ris...
2) China's rattling on Taiwan is very similar to the demographic motivations of Russia's invasion of Ukraine: both are suffering huge demographic collapses soon, so this is the last generation that the country can use for an offensive war. Yes, it is utterly stupid to take a demographic problem of a shrinking younger generations and KILL THOSE PEOPLE IN A WAR to exacerbate the problem, but strongmen just concern themselves with keeping their positions, not how the nation as a whole thrives.
3) Sub Saharan Africa? Like, that is 5,000 to 6,000 miles away? And an area that will become increasingly utterly uninhabitable due to global warming. The Belt and Road is a complete failure, again, because the infrastructure was poor and the payoff isn't there. The countries are just going to walk away from China, and instead of paying them back or restructuring (China won't restructure), they'll join a Western bloc against the Chinese.
Belt and road, for the reasons described about the complete inability to defend multi-thousand-mile infrastructure lines like pipelines and rail, is an impossibility to work in Asia. Even if the political and security challenges are solved (which requires a nice intercooperation and low-war world, which we are NOT headed for right now), it isn't even remotely economically viable.
4) Ultimately war games are meant to be lost. Because that drives the exigent threats to American hegemony that drive the near-trillion-dollar defense and intelligence budgets politically. Yes you don't want to underestimate the enemy, but look at what is going on with the Russian army under decades of totalitarian corruption and incompetence. China is headed down that path, but doesn't want to stop at a neo-western society like Russia has, they want full on North Korean dear leader control.
5) The fact of the matter is that China imports its oil through the Malaysian Staits/Straits of Malacca. Go look at the map. No matter how much shipbuilding China has, no matter how many cruise missiles, they won't get oil through there if the West decides to impose sanctions.
6) Finally, there's India. India of course hates China as well, and India is modernizing its military under Modi and it alone would jump at the chance to choke China in the Indian Ocean.
China is not collapsing overnight. It is not economic armageddon, these things are always slow slides. I mean, in theory it could because mass starvation at the hands of the communist party is in China's 20th century history, and it is actively occurring in North Korea.
The point is that the old world political economic order, and by order I mean stability and structure, not the illuminati evil control council "order", is over. Russia invading Ukraine, COVID disrupting supply chains, and China becoming aggressive and authoritarian ended that. That era, a solid 75 years between bipolar Cold War stability and unipolar post-Cold War is OVER.
Every five years that go by in China will decrease their military effectiveness by a substantial degree, because of authoritarian degradation in chain of command and corruption, because of demographic reductions and disruption.
2. I don't buy this argument, they only keep their positions because of the economy growth currently in China.
3. The claim that BRI is a failure and that Sub-Saharan Africa will become uninhabitable and thus, unimportant, overlooks the long-term investments and geopolitical influence China is garnering through these initiatives. The BRI has indeed faced challenges, but it has also led to significant infrastructure developments in participating countries. These nations may face debt issues, yet many continue to engage with the initiative because of the substantial economic benefits and the lack of alternative funding sources for infrastructure.
4. You haven't addressed the Congressional reports, which show that a US vs. China military conflict, including a blockade, does not have an obvious winner.
5. The vulnerability of China's oil imports through the Strait of Malacca is a well recognized strategic concern, often referred to as the "Malacca Dilemma". China has been actively working to mitigate this risk through various strategies, including the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), building pipelines through Myanmar, and increasing domestic energy production and diversification of energy sources. While a blockade of the Straits of Malacca would be significant, it is not an insurmountable obstacle given these mitigating measures.
6. While India might oppose certain Chinese actions, an outright confrontation is not a foregone conclusion given the potential economic and political costs. They do not want to escalate, which you can see based on agreement to use only sticks in border clashes.
> The point is that the old world political economic order, and by order I mean stability and structure, not the illuminati evil control council "order", is over. Russia invading Ukraine, COVID disrupting supply chains, and China becoming aggressive and authoritarian ended that. That era, a solid 75 years between bipolar Cold War stability and unipolar post-Cold War is OVER.
Fully agree.
> Every five years that go by in China will decrease their military effectiveness by a substantial degree, because of authoritarian degradation in chain of command and corruption, because of demographic reductions and disruption.
I'm not as optimistic as you are.
I don't remember the actual numbers, but Japan is heavily increasing its defense budget. This is significant because historically, unlike China/India, if Japan invests in its military, it produces a good military. Japan + India with funded modern militaries is a very legitimate counter to China. In particular India is a sleeping tiger that should be far more influential and productive.
India we won't give our top weapons. Japan we very likely will.
Energy diversity helps in many respects, China can mitigate domestic needs with EVs, solar, and wind, and I guess coal if they want to burn money.
But war and food need petroleum. Pipelines and rail are extremely vulnerable, a single raid can shut them down for weeks or months, they have fixed, limited capacity. If we were talking a 50 million population country, sure. But it's a goddamn billion+ frikking people, and not enough productive land to feed them.
India is a billion plus people, so if it wants to militarize, corruption and internecine ethnic relations be damned, they'll probably have one capabable of worrying China.
Everyone is arming up. NATO nations are reconstructing their military industrial complex in anticipation of Russia beating Ukraine.
I guess fundamentally I see China as a nation that is critically dependent on open maritime trade, and that world is basically over, partially of their own creation. The "Dear Leader" phenomenon is particularly troubling, particularly because Xi sets the stage in 10-15 years for a bloody succession and equally or more autocratic leader that assumes the strings of control.
Most "Dear Leader" countries start from a point of stagnation and then limp along under the repression. China is different, it went through a massive economic expansion due to free trade and relative free will, but now it will sharply regress. If it wasn't so dangerous, it would be fascinating to see what happens.
The Naval War College prof points out that historically continental powers overextend, and then collapse when their central government fails. China has done this something like 5 or 10 times in its long history. Both Russia and China seem to be in the overextension phase. She contrasts to maritime powers like the UK and US that don't need buffer states, and thrive with world trade, while the buffer state syndrome of continental empires inevitably leads to an autocratic paranoid country or corruption/decay.
Anyway, what do I know.
They have 3 carriers and are rapidly building more. They have naval bases as far as Africa.
A lot more misinformation in your comment but it would take too long to correct it all.