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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming from in US elite circles.

I get that china is a direct economic threat. That’s obvious.

I also get that china is a philosophical threat on a level different to the Soviet Union (that was freedom produces more wealth than totalitarianism - which the US won.).

The problem with China is that the argument is much harder to win - china is doing well economically (kinda) - and has not given up its totalitarian control. Their argument was the Soviet Union tried central command economics whereas we are something something power of markets and chinese culture.

What gets me is that this is not something to win on the battlefield - this is something where we (being liberal democracies) need to double down on liberal democracy- both the production of wealth and the use of that wealth to raise the living standards of all its citizens - in other words if we think freedom is better we make it so fucking obvious we live in utopia it’s painful.

Yea that’s wealth taxes, yes it’s more spending on infrastructure and education and sharing the wealth, and teaching ourselves to aspire to better.

Not (just) having bigger guns.

View on HN

As someone who spent 5 years in China pre-pandemic, China is a threat to many nations due to their growth. The Chinese govt. is specifically targeting key markets (EVs, solar, battery tech, steel, semiconductors) and China makes much more of those items that can be used internally in China. So China ends up driving any non-Chinese battery or solar panel manufacturer out of business.

If Chinese EVs were to be sold widely in the US, they would be less than half the cost of any Western-made EV and would take over the EV market. A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants- no govt. (outside of China's own) should want that.

Then there's the whole Fentanyl epidemic in the US and elsewhere. That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US. There are many to blame here but the US has been pushing China to ban the sale of these chemicals outside of China for a long time without agreement. China realizes this is important to the US and it's being used as a key trade issue.

"doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China. China doesn't respond to liberal democracy. They only respond to force or trade embargos, or tariffs. That's what was learned as Xi decided to become dictator for life.

To nitpick a single point:

> A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants

I agree, but why do cars need to send data to servers again? I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either. What's wrong with the alternative where we allow real competition that benefits everyone, and then ban any features (eg sending data to servers) that the government gets nervous about? I don't see how this is any different from the myriad of other requirements on cars (eg mandated safety belts etc etc etc).

I recognize that state-subsidised competition still isn't fair, so I support import tariffs that match those subsidies, but any further and you're just hurting competition and the consumer, right?

Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want. There's a climate crisis going on and these things are a big part of the solution. With climate goggles on, to put import tariffs on the tech that's gonna save the world sound batshit insane. We should want those tariffs to be as low as possible.

Grok IS why Tesla does it.

You're right that this isn't about data collection/privacy, though it would be a bit scary to have our nation's cars remotely shut off at the whims of a foreign government.

Instead, we want/need to be protectionist of our manufacturing industries so that if we were to go to war, we keep our ability to make more missiles, planes, tanks, etc.

I think going to war might be one of those things where if you plan for it, you substantially increase the chance that you'll do it.

> I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either.

User data is valuable[1], and storage is now so cheap, for a modest sum, one can keep data forever without deleting[2], so keeping car telemetry/videos has virtually no downsides.

1. For self-driving training, or selling to market researchers, or intelligence services. I'm not claiming this is what's being currently being done with the data, but how "value" can be extracted from it

2. Shout out to r/DataHoarder

> I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either.

> Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want.

It's plain to me how this can come into conflict with National Interest - no country wants cheap solar and EV at the cost of its own manufacturers going bankrupt (and losing the jobs that go with them going down the supply chain).

User data is valuable[1], storage is cheap, so keeping it has no downsides.

I want cheap solar and EV even if it means domestic manufacturers that can’t compete go out of business.

I understand that. Your national government (or politicians) will likely disagree.

I dont see how that is true at all. The textile industry has completely left the western world and no one is complaining(other than the luddites I guess). Solar manufacturing isnt very different from textiles. Protectionism just leads to expensive goods, 95% of people gain under free trade.

So what's your mental model for the protectionism by the US against Chinese EVs and batteries despite the push for renewables by the same administration?

> The textile industry has completely left the western world and no one is complaining(other than the luddites I guess).

This was a very gradual process (over centuries), and they weren't really happy about it either. It wasn't just the Luddites who were upset when Samuel Slater (a.k.a. "Slater the traitor") left England and helped set up a competing textile industry in North America.

For self-preservation purposes, no politician will willingly sacrifice jobs at existing regional or national champions[1], regardless of how noble the goal is: politicians get voted out of office for far less. The best we can hope for, is a slow steady decline of harmful industries (see coal).

1. The US will treat Boeing with kid gloves rather than gift the market to Airbus, even though Boeing has a terrible safety culture and not exactly competing on merit. The same goes for VW in Germany, Arianespace in France, Samsung in Korea, Huawei in China, etc.

If the government just gave away money, and paid your salary, your employees salary, your rent, your purchase costs on manufacturing equipment costs, I'd find it hard to compete with you too, given than I'm not a billionaire and would need to raise capital from investors.

> That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US.

i say china is not at all responsible for the drug, except as a contract manufacturer. If china doesn't do it, somebody else would've. China just does it cheaply.

The drug problems come from the cartels, and from the fact that US's war on drugs makes drugs expensive, and thus profitable. There's no possibility of humans relinquishing drug use - think about the prohibition and the problems that it caused.

I say, just allow drugs to be manufactured, and sold (under license and regulation) in the US. It's gonna be like alcohol. This will take away the profits from the cartels, and they will stop buying from china. It will increase tax revenue, as drug consumption can be taxed (like tobacco today is).

It will also remove the stigma, and reduce drug enforcement costs in police. The only thing society has to give up is the moral high horse of drug use.

Are you sure drugs can be regulated the way alcohol can? They are both more addictive and behavior changing than alcohol. I don't have a solution as I also dislike the current "war" on drugs. But I suspect regulating safe fentanyl use will be way, way harder than regulating safe scotch use.

> safe fentanyl use

it doesn't have to be safe, just legal. If people choose it, and fuck themselves up, they're free to do so. They're doing it today already, but with the added benefit of being illegal and force resources into a drug war against the cartels.

When I was living in the USA I felt this way, but after moving to Japan, a country that is very strict on drugs and has eliminated it from the public consciousness, I feel my opinions changing. I trust myself to be able to use/not use drugs responsibly but given how irresponsible most people are, it’s undeniable the positive effects on society of NOT letting people totally destroy their brains and lives, and it is utterly daunting to think of what it would take to get the USA back on its feet re drugs.

>with all of the American user data going back to servers in China

How about a future where user data goes to no servers of no country at all? Am I asking too much?

> "doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China.

Banning all the paths to growth got the US to where it is now. Everything China did to out-compete the US was illegal in the US - the working conditions wouldn't have passed muster, the environmental damage wouldn't have been acceptable, the investment in cheap energy was off the agenda and the focus on heavy industry was broadly against the policy position which focused on financialisation and growing service industries.

We can argue until the cows come home which policies were the important ones (it is clear that some of what China does is counterproductive) but a key factor was legislative restrictions in the West. That is the opposite of the liberal part of liberal democracy. A key part of liberalism is giving people freedom to better their own lives.

I can’t help but think this IP theft scare, while completely real, has a version in the Western US-led economics called ”big business” or ”VC money” or ”platform control”.

How many independent innovations get snatched (sherlocked?) by big business taking the idea and making their own version, when they see a small player that found a customer segment a large company never bothered investigating?

When large sums of money is what’s needed to execute any novel idea to full completion before your competitors can, that money becomes just a version of ”IP theft” or unfair competition. I think what they are getting is a taste of their own medicine.

EVs were a mature idea a decade+ ago, but big money oil companies hamstrung it and big money ICE manufacturers argued it was not worth their time or effort. The Chinese market and leaders knew the fundamentals were valid and cornered the entire manufacturing market before it could be cornered by western companies.

The narrative of 'data-privacy' being a threat is IMO a whole lot of simplist bait. The real thing at stake here is the vehicle manufacturing jobs that are being threatened, and the whole chain of high value jobs that come with it. People who lose their jobs lose faith in their governments. And countries losing a high value chain of goods/services isn't going to do well psychologically for them.

This [video](https://youtu.be/BQ23sgi_mgw?si=3HOm3WeWKO7VJMzr) called <Is China’s High-Tech ‘Overproduction’ Killing Jobs In The West?> from Channel NewsAsia covers it. Highly recommend you westerners to watch it; there's some really heavy handed defense/reasoning from the chinese side.

We need the EV and solar transition to happen, and if the Chinese government wants to subsidize that we should let them.

> all of the American user data going back to servers in China

There's a long running argument with the EU over all EU user's data going back to the US where there are no privacy laws or protection against surveillance (US constitution only protects US nationals!), so the US government would have more credibility on this if it recognized that.

What if we lived in a world where Chinese are allowed to sell their cheap EVs but the government was actually on the side of the common man instead of corporate elites, and actually scrutinized anti-consumer totalitarian data collection, because its wrong, and anti-humanity on principle, and not because it's not controlled by them.

Honestly, it's wild that the US hasn't invested heavily into green energy for the past couple of decades. They could've been in an extremely strong position of selling the tech which all countries need to transition their energy sectors. But instead they've ... fought it? And let China and other countries outside of their hegemony eat their lunch? Why?

The Resource Curse. (Fracking.)

The oil industry (eg. Koch) has spent a fortune in lobbying and their ideological allies that want to maintain the status quo have spent enormous amounts of money and effort in spreading FUD around shifting away from an oil based economy.

I really think it’s much less insidious than you are making it out to be. Fracking means America has access to cheap natural gas so no one has worried about energy security in the last two decades so few are pushing for green energy subsidies. This is just politicians doing what their constituents want. China on the other hand has extremely limited oil so green tech has been a top national security priority.

It is the money and lobbying that results in the imbalance in information and an imbalance in what "the constituents want."

Absolutely constituents want jobs and cheap energy. I bet they also don't want the wild salmon they eat to go extinct too. On balance they're hearing about the former and not the latter.

>They only respond to force

In the wise words of Chairman Mao:

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

At least he practiced what he preached there, but in democracies the pen controls the sword, not the other way around.

>but in democracies the pen controls the sword

Pens are fairly sharp

That's just implicitly admitting defeat. We can't compete so will make it about guns.

I mean I'm Chinese, and the number of Americans with rose tinted glasses on China because "america bad" is insane. The real thing China does far better than the US, is having an understanding of how the US works and how to target Americans and American corporations with the right incentives. Americans on average almost know nothing about what the real China is like, and have a general disinterest in other countries and global affairs, and overlook the much suffering and abuse there is on a societal scale. I don't disagree with OP that the US needs to double down on improving social standards as a whole, but policymakers need to think hard about potential abuse from the Chinese side, especially when the economy is just a wheel driven by the political cart. The incentives don't align that neatly in the US, and coordination is hard.

Still it is up to western companies to prove that they aren’t inferior to Chinese ones. Tariffs and trade barriers will buy time but if western companies physically cannot approach the scale or cost effectiveness of Chinese industry then there are serious structural problems in our liberal system.

There's a pent-up frustration about the imbalance... US businesses are not allowed to do business in China; meanwhile Chinese businesses run freely in the united states.. until that imbalance is fixed business executives are going to use any tool in their toolbox to raise the heat about china. This is the simple truth of the matter right now

Before this there was an explosion in anti-European sentiment as well.

Lots of American newspaper articles disparaging European engineering and scientific work, disparaging European work culture, etc. Even now, if somebody here comes up with something they will be referred to as 'scientists' while others in the US will be referred to by name and university; and this stuff is on Wikipedia too. People like Håkan Lans, who in reality is a Polhem prize and Thulin medal winner, are presented as if though they were patent trolls.

This became less prominent-- it's still going on, but still slightly less prominent, so maybe the US is capable of calming itself down.

Well it's primarily driven by what's going on in China, not what's going on the US. The prior three decades were driven by the line of thought that a prosperous economy tends towards democracy and that prosperity prevents war. Allied to this, the expectation was that this would be mutually beneficial with both parties pursuing it in good faith.

Since then, it's become clear it's not the case. China have found the loopholes, their lack of IP (intellectual property rights) enforcement and government corporate espionage have shown the relationship is asymmetric and to the detriment of the US.

Xi has also strengthened his hold on power dramatically, breaking with his predecessors gradual loosening of control. This leads to more risk of irrational ideological driven decisions such as war, maintaining prosperity is no longer necessarily the main driving factor.

Intelligence around Chinese military build up around Taiwan are concerning evidence of this. The Chinese economy's rapid growth is also slowing.

there was no loophole. the problem was that the USA did not enforce the reciprocity principles of WTO with regards to China. (mostly because business was booming. so short-term thinking got us here.)

> in other words if we think freedom is better we make it so fucking obvious we live in utopia it’s painful

That's not what these people care about. Someone like Schmidt or Musk would be perfectly happy in a CCP-like regime, as long as they can be at the top.

They were fine investing money in China when they thought the country was going to be a complete free market they could rule. That's also why they hate the EU so much, because sometimes the EU is bothering their corps a bit.

>The problem with China is that the argument is much harder to win - china is doing well economically (kinda) - and has not given up its totalitarian control.

China's GDP _per capita_ is still 4-8x lower than the US depending on how you measure it. Its overall GDP is just very big because its population is very big. Given the recent slowdown in the Chinese economy, it's looking like it'll take a very long time for per capita GDP (the living standards of Chinese people) to catch up to the US.

> per capita GDP (the living standards of Chinese people)

note that the parenthetical isn't entirely true. it's a very mathematical measure of living standards, and sure, one number is much bigger than the other, which does mean something, but how happy are you really doomscrolling various feeds about how the world is doomed? The wrong person's gonna get elected, you just know it. How happy can you really be knowing that to be the future? Or, hey, know anybody who's died from fentanyl recently?

There's a lot GDP doesn't capture. Hell, in terms of buying more things and driving the economy, you could look at it and say divorce is good for GDP since everybody is now buying twice as much stuff, not to mention all the lawyers bills. Not sure I'd argue that it's great for living standards though. so yes, let's compare GDP for what it measures, money number divided by people number, and see that our number is bigger, yay. But simplifying that to living standards is lazy shortcut thinking. If a FAANG engineer makes $400k/yr, but minimum wage is $15/hr or $30,000, their average pay is $215k, which sounds pretty great! The living standards for two someones making $215k are much nicer than for the one person making $30k.

How much do you trust your neighbors? How about those city/rural/suburb folk, especially the ones the extremists on the opposite side of the political spectrum? That contribute to a good living standard?

GDP isn't a good measure of living standards, it's a neat number to compare, and means something, but it doesn't define living standards.

Honestly, I'm less and less inclined to believe in these numbers.

If your average Chinese person lives in a comfortable, well-built apartment that costs 1/4th of what it would cost in the US, drives a car that's similarly built but cost $10k instead of $40k, and eats food thats the quarter of the price, could you convincingly state that he has the quarter of the actual wealth, even though the numbers would indicate that.

That’s what GDP PPP per capital measures. China ranks better in PPP than just straight GDP.

Honestly PPP is one of those measures that has remained a mystery to me all my life, and I suspect has more to do with the fanciful imaginations of economists rather than reality itself.

I live in a smallish east EU country whose PPP is supposedly double that of nominal GDP, yet whenever the prices I'm expected to pay for a Corolla, my shopping in Lidl or a Macbook are largely the same as what I would pay in Germany (as is expected from a customs union).

Even restaurant prices don't match the differences.

> my shopping in Lidl or a Macbook are largely the same as what I would pay in Germany

The difference probably the Germans don't go buy at cheap stores like lidl. The easy way to do PPP is to go by how much people pay and not how cheap you can get something for, which gets you a much less accurate picture of how much it actually costs to live there.

Haha, Germans not being cheap :)

That being aside, I mentioned Lidl cause they sell pretty much the same stuff in both countries. As for PPP, it's supposed to be based on a basket of goods, which is supposed to be as similar between two countries as possible.

Comparing lower quality products in country A to better ones in country B would tell you nothing.

Freedom is better because it removes hurdles to more rapid evolutions of efficiency, which leads to better utilization of energy, bringing better material life for every human.

Other than that, I'm genuinely curious about the origin of the "inevitable war that we have to win for humanity" sentiment. Where does this judgment come from? It's perplexing to hear such a deterministic and high-stakes view being expressed in elite circles. I wonder what specific factors or events have led to this conclusion, and whether it's based on concrete evidence or if it's more of a narrative that has gained traction. It would be interesting to understand the reasoning behind this perspective, especially given the complex and multifaceted nature of US-China relations. Are there particular think tanks, policy papers, or influential figures promoting this idea? I'd be very interested in tracing the development and spread of this sentiment, as it seems to have significant implications for international relations and policy-making.

> Other than that, I'm genuinely curious about the origin of the "inevitable war that we have to win for humanity" sentiment.

There is a line of evidence/thinking that says relations between democracies are a lot more stable. So if you make everyone a democracy there would be no wars and a lot more peace. And peace is what humanity (or each individual) aspires to be.

Unfortunately this may result in some degree of intervention or politicking that others may not like. Intervention, specifically, is forcing judgement onto others.

Regarding these elites, you could say it's a calling from whatever Christian god that tells them to spread whatever good they deem it to be. But it may just as well be hubris, or human nature - a superiority complex that comes from being at the top of the chain of 'merit' and status. Anyway, it's happened before. Even in the colonial times there were British who thought colonizing India was a 100% good thing for humanity.

> Freedom is better because it removes hurdles to more rapid evolutions of efficiency, which leads to better utilization of energy, bringing better material life for every human.

Anything taken to extremes is bad. The chinese that studied in America and decided to go back made such a decision when they saw things like school shootings and riots.

Without an enemy (or two) the entire post-1945 identity construct of the USA (and its allies) does not have a purpose. It’s pretty plain and simple.

There's some truth in that, but it's a much more apt description of post-Soviet Russia. They celebrate their WW2 win like a bona fide religious event every year.

You completely do not mention, that China is MILITARY THREAT.

1. China takes Taiwan

2. China dominates all chip manufacturing

3. China dominates the AI industry

4. China overthrows the US tech industry supremacy by dominating global markets

5. US economy collapses (It is not exaggerating to say the tech industry is the lifeblood of US economic growth, just look at the stock market)

The philosophical argument is actually irrelevant, since China isn't trying to export its ideology that much beyond some alliances of convenience. China never tried to win that argument either, it just blocked off the internet with its firewall, and focused on building its economy.

China is first and foremost a military threat, then an economic threat. Hence why winning AI is so pivotal (AI drones will dominate battlefields and jobs).

Sorry but that take is insane. Don't you think that people in China just want to live just like people in the US? China dominating the Tech industry vs the US makes no difference to a majority of the people in the world.

The US no longer being able to print money (without massive inflation) out of thin air would force it to be more fiscally responsible like many other countries have to be.

Are you insane? China can only achieve that by forcibly conquering Taiwan, with minimum hundreds of thousands of casualties.

China can't win a peaceful competition against the US in the long run, because China is undergoing total demographic collapse (Marriage/birth rates declining 10% yoy every year).

China's plan is to sprint for the last stretch, while its population can still work.

As for the US, it is really held together by the massive wealth from its tech and financial dominance. Given the enormous social fractures today (please don't forget that Trump was nearly assassinated 1 month ago), an structural economic collapse will mean civil war.

Are you really claiming that there aren't as smart Chinese engineers as in the US? China is very capable of innovating on its own just like Europe and the US. There are even many Chinese that go to US universities and leave after graduation back to China.

No such claim appears in his post. Stop trolling.

> Don't you think that people in China just want to live just like people in the US?

Honestly, I don't think so. And even if they did, they can't do anything about it. Complaining will only give them a bad social score which will make their lives difficult. I think this is geopolitically irrelevant.

> China dominating the Tech industry vs the US makes no difference to a majority of the people in the world.

Economy, technology, industrial capacity and military power absolutely go hand in hand.

If you can't get chips because the production is controlled by China. You can't build missiles, fighter jets, drones or really anything. Not even modern helmets.

If China gets Taiwan, the US are geopolitically toast. That's why the US will not tolerate it and will even go to war if necessary.

It doesn't work like that. Over 90% of the machines that Taiwan needs for chip making are made in Europe. If anyone has a hold on chip making it's ASML.

I wish you were right about this.

But then again, why does the US risk going to war with China over Taiwan?

You think it's because democracy, liberty and or human rights?

It is very obviously strong geopolitical interest.

Oh no, what a blatant hypocrisy.

The West wants liberty and democracy to prevail in the world and doesn't want to lose them, thus they care of their geopolitical interests. Who would have thought!

You missed the most important items...

1. The U.S. fails to protect Taiwan. 2. All allies lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and they create their own nuke programs. 3. Japan and S. Korea produce nukes nearly overnight. Lots of other countries follow. We now have a much worse nuclear arms race.

China needs only one reason to make the argument for taking control of Taiwan. That's national security. Taiwan is extremely important as a strategic island for defense of the mainland. For example, go look at a map of Taiwan airspace vs Chinese airspace. Honestly, I find it almost ridiculous that such a great power is boxed in so much by a tiny neighbor.

Personally, I think Taiwan needs to take one for the team and commit to reunification with China. That would cool things down significantly. Maybe the Chinese could even throw in some deals on borders to give the Philippines and other neighbors a break.

“ I think Taiwan needs to take one for the team and commit to reunification with China”

That approach was already tried against Hitler, allowing Germany to reunify with Austria (Austrians were even willing), and then taking Sudetenland.

If you reward aggression, you will only get more aggression.

> If you reward aggression, you will only get more aggression.

That is not true, punishing aggression creates more criminals, fixing their problems creates less criminals, there is plenty of evidence of this. USA rewarded Germanys aggression with the Marshal plan, rewarding aggression is great!

Another example, Norway didn't want to be a part of Sweden any longer, Sweden rewarded this "aggression" by giving Norway independence. Everyone lived happily ever after, the end.

Happy endings are possible.

If you say that isn't "aggression", that is what people say about other separatist movements, separatists are always labeled aggressive and combative, somehow people always argue that separatists are never happy and always wants more, but evidence suggests that letting them separate actually can work and make both sides happy. So I am pretty sure that sometimes when two countries wants to unify you should let them, meaning "rewarding aggression" is sometimes the right play.

For example, if England instead of waging a war against Irish separatists let them separate I think both would be happier, but instead of doing like Sweden they punished the aggression and just caused misery for everyone.

Now about China you are possibly right, I just think you can't say that you shouldn't reward aggression in general, because often that is exactly what you should do.

Likewise with Crimea and Russia. Letting Russia take Crimea without any real repercussions only emboldened them to try and take the rest of Ukraine.

>2. All allies lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and they create their own nuke programs. 3. Japan and S. Korea produce nukes nearly overnight. Lots of other countries follow. We now have a much worse nuclear arms race.

This is a much better solution, not worse, because empirically the only thing that stops countries being invaded is having nukes, so the more countries with nukes, the fewer invasions there'll be.

Another way to cool things down is to make taking Taiwan infeasible.

For example, if Taiwan built nuclear weapons, then the whole invasion idea is cooked and won't ever be worth it and you can't say 'Oh, America is over there' because it's all Taiwan and then nobody needs to care about this anymore.

Chinese merchant ships freely navigate the ocean. China is only "boxed in" by Taiwan in the event of a war, not during peace time, and the most likely cause for such a war is China trying to invade their neighbors, particularly Taiwan. If they don't do that, they have nothing to worry about. Nobody is going to come invade China, they're armed with enough nukes to ruin the planet and have a massive military, they have nothing to fear from external threats.

An independent Taiwan is a threat to their plans for military conquest, nothing more.

China has no reason to take over Taiwan militarily. They already have like 60% of trade with it, and that share is only going to grow in the future, simply because they are so close. It's the US who is worried to be cut off Taiwan.

Anyway, China dominating chip and AI will likely happen soon. They don't really need Taiwan for that.

TSMC is banned from exporting high-end chips to China. The Taiwanese want to be an US ally, and not end up destroyed like Hong-Kong, hence they'll comply with US sanctions.

China is still far behind the US in high-end chips. Sure they are catching up. But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.

The first mover can have overwhelming advantages. If the US gets to AI first, dominates the global AI market, China facing demographic collapse, economic decline, will lose the ability to compete for supremacy

> But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.

And the US can attract foreign engineers far better than China ever will. For many, many reasons, whether it is the language (English is far more common as a second language than Chinese, even though Chinese is among the top spoken as a first. And Chinese is ridiculously hard to learn, it's not just the writing system, the spoken language being a tonal language is not helpful either.), the capital - US corporations pay better, the higher quality of life/work environment etc.

This is what happens when people foreign to Chinese corporate culture have to deal with it (the first link is about Taiwan but they're not too dissimilar when it comes down to this):

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

> Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

No, I don't want to work for this kind of asshole.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/quit-facebook-tiktok-biggest-diff...

> Although US and Singapore teams aren't expected to do 996 — I work normal US working hours — the reality is that US employees still often attend late night meetings to collaborate with teams in Asia.

> The lack of process, mentorship, standardized performance review, and internal documentation means that it's harder to learn best practices and mature in your profession.

Oof.

The US can afford a population decline more than many other nations of the earth, and it is continously draining brain power from the rest of the world. Many of the more talented programmers I've known as a French living in France moved to the US for greener pasture. Americans should not have too many worries about the future: if it ever gets bad for them, it means the rest of the world will suffer even harder.

> China has no reason to take over Taiwan militarily.

That's your opinion, not theirs. The CCP has staked its legitimacy on their ability to "unify China" (take Taiwan by force) and they've been spending a great deal of money to develop the necessary military capability. This is true whether or not you think their desire seems rational.

And by the way, it's not about computer chips. It never was. The computer chips thing is techy tunnel vision, tech people see the tech thing as the important thing, but China has wanted to take over Taiwan for far longer than Taiwanese chips have been at all relevant. It's not about chips; it's about national pride, prestige, and face.

What I am saying is China will effectively take over Taiwan's economy first (by being a good trading partner), and that's pretty much all they need to do. It's easier than invasion, of course we don't know the future, maybe China will do something irrational but why assume that? What would be foolish for Taiwanese to try to block China out economically at the behest of US. (That might actually trigger a military invasion from China, it's actually what Ukraine did before the Russian invasion in 2014.)

In response to anonylizard: "TSMC is banned from exporting high-end chips to China."

It's amusing that it's US, defender of trade freedom, who gives orders to Taiwan, with who to trade?

"The Taiwanese want to be an US ally, and not end up destroyed like Hong-Kong, hence they'll comply with US sanctions."

Why would they want that, if they have 60% or more of their trade with China, share culture, and are closer to them? I think it's also a misconception that Hong-Kong got destroyed, but I am not sure. Obviously it has not the same economic weight in the West as it used to, but that is true for all former colonies.

Look, I agree that it would be better if China was a liberal democracy (although I also believe that liberal democracy has only limited effect on limiting imperialism, as is obvious from the British and US example). But if the Taiwanese people will be forced to choose between economic depression (due to some more sanctions on trade with China) or losing democracy, I sure hope, for the sake of their future, they will choose the latter. And I am worried US will force them to make this decision, exactly for the reason of "national pride, prestige, and face".

> maybe China will do something irrational but why assume that

1. Because they say they will.

2. Their military spending backs up what they're saying. It's not just hot air from politicians, they really are committed to building the ability to take Taiwan by force.

So you're saying that "China will effectively take over Taiwan's economy", but it "would be foolish for Taiwanese to try to block China out economically".

If you're using the economy as a weapon it makes complete sense for Taiwan to block those ties.

> I think it's also a misconception that Hong-Kong got destroyed, but I am not sure.

It depends on who you ask.

Foreign entities who used to operate politically in Hong Kong got obliterated due to the national security law. (Yes, it used to be "legal" for foreign entities to do funny things with the intention of subverting Chinese interests in PRC soil. Imagine that!)

Hong-Kongers who refused to believe the PRC (and CCP) were ultimately in power after 1997 had their dreams and illusions "destroyed". Many migrated elsewhere.

(And then there's aftershocks due to COVID policies having to align with mainland China's, and financial/property markets being tied to China which is currently kind of struggling, but the causation with post-2019 politics is not very clear.)

Personally, I think the doomer narrative w.r.t. Hong Kong is overblown, unless you fall into the two categories above.

I think the CCPs legitimacy has much more to do with ensuring the continuous growth of living standards and wealth of the Chinese people.

Your opinion, not theirs. The CCP has repeatedly promised to "reunify" China. If they can't do that, then they fail the bar they've set for themselves. And they wouldn't be making, and repeatedly reiterating, this promise if it wasn't taken seriously by the Chinese people.

Xi's personal leadership lies on a promise of taking Taiwan in the forseeable future as part of the "restoration" of Chinese power. Anyone who disagrees honestly has no idea about Chinese political circles.

Sometimes leaders can still make not rational actions. Putin still didn't need to invade Ukraine. I think the same can happen with Taiwan. For me I also believe "they don't really need Taiwan" but I think a lot of Chinese people think about it not in economical reason but national/historical and military reason - many of them say that china is really afraid if US will start putting their own military bases in Taiwan so they supposed to don't care much about Taiwan as more wanna control the land.

Don't really want to defend Putin, but consider that Russia would at the very least lose the naval base in Crimea, if the Ukraine entered NATO. Also, in 2013, the EU put an ultimatum to Ukraine to choose between the free trade with EU or free trade with Russia.

Perhaps Putin's action isn't as irrational as it seems?

> Russia would at the very least lose the naval base in Crimea, if the Ukraine entered NATO

How so? Russia already controlled the whole of Crimea since 2014. Ukraine joining NATO would certainly NOT have changed the status of Crimea.

Russia losing free trade with Ukraine is pretty much nothing compared to the economic damage caused by the sanctions, and loss in gas sales to the EU.

Putin's action would have been rational if he had captured Kyiv in a couple of days or weeks, and managed to install a puppet government. IMO the whole thing was based on bad intel, lies, corruption and yes-men who told their superiors what they want to hear, rather than what was the truth about Ukraine's defense capabilities. After that Putin couldn't back off without losing his face, and obviously loss of human lives and economic damage mean nothing compared to that to him.

China will probably catch up in chip manufacturing and microchip design even without invading Taiwan though.

There's just too many of them, and there'll always be diminishing returns, so at some point what they do will be alright even if it is slightly behind.

If China takes over Taiwan they gain nothing technology wise. All the manufacturing would be destroyed and many engineers would flee or get killed.

Maybe the fact that China is threatening Taiwan, our ally, with war on a nearly daily basis?

in other words if we think freedom is better we make it so fucking obvious we live in utopia it’s painful.

China isn’t going to roll over because life is better in the US.

In the end it will come down to power and the ability to project it. You can do that a lot of different ways - politically, economically or militarily, but in the end whether life is better in the US won’t really matter.

The Chinese state won't, but if freedom is really so much better, the people will find ways to escape non-freedom - just like they already do from every country that's obviously worse than the USA and the USA seems powerless to stop - and the Chinese state will have no choice except to become free or suffer brain drain and collapse.

FYI, china has gotten much better at brainwashing over the past 10 years with the new age propaganda machine and increased censorship. Don't act like all this information is public.

>I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming from in US elite circles.

In my opinion, it's not about communist vs democracy, IP theft, ideology, Taiwan, etc. Elites hardly care. These are just the topics used by the government to get common people riled up.

The sentiment comes from increasing competition from China in the upper value chain where these elites get their wealth from. These elites want China to manufacture phones for them. They don't want China to design phones and sell it to consumers directly.

The same sentiment was found when Japan looked like it was going to take over the world economically.

It's a lot easier for the government to get its citizens to become anti-China if they use anti-communist, IP theft, human rights, etc. propaganda. Commoners resonate with these much easier. It's not going to work as well if the government tells you to hate China because they're increasingly more competitive at high value things such as design and services.

It’s easy to see why as well.

Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.

Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.

For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.

For what it's worth, we in the UK have pretty good labour laws and welfare systems, minimum standards, environmental protections etc. All of this has evolved over time as a way to ensure no race to the bottom happens and most people can lead a decent life.

Now, some people may disagree with this on a philosophical level (libertarians for example), but it is what it is.

If you now just mass import anything and everything from a country with much lower "standards" (I use the term to encompass all of the above and whatever else), then it means your own working population get cheaper stuff, but suffer from the loss of jobs. Not only that, but it creeps into everything. Where once you were high value design, even that starts leaking out of society into a country willing to undercut you on "standards".

This is all very well known, so I don't really think it is much of a surprise that there is a push back. I'm just surprised that it hasn't happened more and sooner.

The People's Republic of China is a revisionist aspiring superpower in east Asia, one of the three great industrialized areas on Earth, structured as a Han Chinese ethno-nationalist state. To make matters worse it aims to seize hegemony over east Asia and to dominate the Western Pacific. This directly implicates the United States as currently most of the non-PRC states in that region are either treaty allies of the USA (Japan, Australia, South Korea) or significant economic powers that provide many crucially important goods to the US (Taiwan, Vietnam).

Furthermore, the PRC is embarking on a naval expansion only rivaled in history by the buildup of the German High Seas Fleet in the 1900s. This combines both a grand strategic objective (regional hegemony) with large-scale active efforts to acquire the tools to achieve that objective.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle; The US and other western powers have not faced any major war since 1945 because of atomic weaponry. However, the atomic posture and grand strategic situation between the USA and the PRC is far different from that along the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Both the US and China have nukes yes, but both only have strategic weapons, and those would likely only be used in a situation where the existence of the state was under threat. A war for dominance of the western pacific and east asian hegemony would not be an existential war for either power. This paradoxically makes a hot war far more likely than it was in West Germany, where tactical nuclear weapons were written into the battle plans from Day 1. Combine that with a Chinese state facing a "Now or Never" moment to attempt to achieve their grand strategic objectives as their demographic crisis approaches and the US rearms after 25 years of the unipolar moment, and the late 2020s and early 2030s are looking extremely dangerous. American elites are not stupid and understand this full well and this is why, in the past decade, anti-PRC sentiment has become universal across party lines.

Ideology plays a relatively small role in this (beyond of course the fact that the PRC ideology has made them a revisionist power).

Maybe it's an occurrence of Thucydides trap: the reigning power is afraid to lose its crown, and as a result becomes more and more aggressive towards the growing power.

It seems to me that many Americans are personally sensitive about these issues of power. It's also the case with Russia : I agree that Russia is doing terrible things, but people tend to see the Russian enemy everywhere. Cf the arson on train lines in France at the beginning of the Olympics: even here where people are normally rational, every single comment was focusing on Russia and ignoring other possibilities. But actually it was done by French far-left activists.

The thucydides trap is just some bs invented by US foreign policy circles about how war is inevitable. It's not.

> What gets me is that this is not something to win on the battlefield - this is something where we (being liberal democracies) need to double down on liberal democracy- both the production of wealth and the use of that wealth to raise the living standards of all its citizens - in other words if we think freedom is better we make it so fucking obvious we live in utopia it’s painful.

I could definitely get behind this. Sadly it doesn’t seem to be what people want, at least not here in Sweden. The dominant branch of political thought is more like something something power of government and Swedish culture.

Just watched a documentary of drone warfare in the Ukraine war. Many of the drones presented, that have been developed in the fires of war to meet evolving threats have no equivalents in the West, or their equivalents are orders of magnitude more expensive, and cannot be manufactured en masse.

Most of these drones on both sides, are either lightly modified Chinese designs, or have a very large percentage of Chinese-made components.

China has already managed to dominate a new mode of warfare and make a huge profit from it while supplying both sides of the deadliest modern war in Europe.

A major item is the prevention of the proliferation of nukes.

The U.S. has security agreements (or assumptions) with allies. If the U.S. appears weak, then allies freak out and nuke up. China and Taiwan are nearly at war. If the U.S. doesn't come through for Taiwan, then everyone gets nervous. Japan and S. Korea likely get nukes the fastest, since they are tech powerhouses. Then European countries may follow suit. Then, each enemy of every new entry to the nuke club also feels pressure to get nukes. Next, everyone gets in a race to build more nukes.

Additionally, you get the same issue as with Russia. If a big power takes a smaller power, then where do they stop? What is to stop them from taking everything. And this is already happening. China has been in low level clashes with the Philippines to take forcefully reshape borders. If they do this to Taiwan and the Philippines, then they likely will do this to every country in a border dispute with China. And Taiwan is strategically important. Japan faces a greater threat from a China controlled Taiwan. That's why China wants Taiwan. The island is important to China's national security.

In this world, you have a nightmare situation of more fingers on more triggers. More MAD targets for everyone. A greater possibility that someone actually pulls a trigger. And the thing is, China doesn't care about this. If every country on the planet being nuked up was the price to pay for domination, then so be it.

> And the thing is, China doesn't care about this. If every country on the planet being nuked up was the price to pay for domination, then so be it.

Citation needed.

You don't need a citation. You can see from their actions. And China isn't going to come out and say this anyway. But the leaders of the country know what the results would be, and still they continue with an aggressive posture vs Taiwan and the U.S.

yup, their actions of not being involved into every single war going on right in the world.Very scary

It's actually about one major thing. Will China invade Taiwan, a country and 20 million people that have lived free of the Communist Party for 70 years, and if so, what does that mean for the US and allies to do something about it or let it happen?

If the US tries to prevent it, that's a package of huge "war-like anti-Chinese (government) sentiment" ramifications that should've been grappled with a decade ago.

If the US doesn't prevent it, Pax Americana is officially over, and the world will know what the collapse of World Order really looks like and what that means for the diminishing prosperity that first worlders are accustomed to.

Pax Americana is a farce. There was always war going on and America was always involved, and for their own imperial interests.

This narrative that the US are the good guys and they are the police of the world is the propaganda of the empire. It's coolaid.

I don't think the Chinese or whatever other empire comes will be better.

But this Pax Americana is just lies. Go tell Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on about it.

US sure do seem like the good guys, if you happen to live next to even worse guys, such as Russia. The US might want your natural resources, but that's less bad than Russia's desire to annex your entire nation and genocide its population.

Well, I don't know. If we look at the body counts, I think being in the receiving end of getting democratized by the USA is actually worse.

But this is "whataboutism" and not addressing the point of my comment.

The actual point of my comment is: the narratives of good guys / bad guys are silly propaganda.

Geopolitics were never about morals, unluckily for us.

Edit: for the record, by no means I like the Russian regime "better" than the west. Yes, Putin bad.

> I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming from in US elite circles.

I think they're predicting large military spending and are seeking the power, influence, and money that can come from being an early leader.

If I wake up to find that I’m going to die from ww3 over some nonsense involving Taiwan, I’ll make sure to die happy, knowing that the fifty cent army will be dying right around the same time that I do.

>I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming

Maybe from China's war like anti the rest of the world actions?

We'll settle for having more guns per capita

The US cannot exist without enemies.

USA has always been anti China because we perceive them as opposed to our (American) way of life. Whether it exists in reality or not, we view them as a communist dictatorship with no freedom and poor quality of life whereas we're the capitalist land of freedom. So China exists and grows by opposing American ideals and this scares Americans.

the root of all authority is violence

america wants to maintain the authority to dictate who gets what and for how much and to make sure they get first dibs on everything

We didn't win the ideological battle against communism through liberal democratic means. That's a common misconception. The war against communism was fought and won with violence. Sometimes this violence was meted out directly by the US (in the case of Vietnam (about 0.5 million civilian casualties), North Korea (1 million), Cambodia (150k)), and in a lot of cases by local militias armed and trained by the US (Indonesia 0.5M dead, the Chile coup leading to Pinochet being in power). The forceful intervention of the US in foreign countries whenever they tried to be even slightly leftist is well documented. Heck, we even armed and trained Bin Laden in the fight against communism!

Maybe within the US itself it was fought with liberal democratic means (although, McCarthyism is a thing), most of the world by population had to be convinced violently.

That isn't to say that all communists were all nice and peaceful like the ones in Chile and Indonesia; Pol Pot and Stalin need no introduction. But to say we won the war with words and ideas dismisses the suffering and pain of millions as non-existent. And no matter where you stand on the debate, that's a bit disrespectful.

Manufacturing Consent defines anti-communism as the US's national religion and a pillar of political power...

> The forceful intervention of the US in foreign countries whenever they tried to be even slightly leftist is well documented.

This is nonsense, there are plenty of very leftist countries that USA didn't attack, so that provably wasn't the reason.

Communism is first and foremost anti democratic and authoritarian in these countries, that is the main issue. If you take Sweden that was very close to going towards worker owned economy in the 80's USA didn't do anything to them, same with rest of Europe. Sweden since then became much more right wing and moved away from those ideas, but at the time it looked very likely.

The point the parent comment made still stands, why did the US fund so many coups/regime changes up until the modern day? Your answer as to why seems to be “communism is antidemocratic and authoritarian”.

If that’s the case, why were so many Western backed regimes also antidemocratic and authoritarian?

I don't know, I am not an expert, but I can say for sure it wasn't just "they did something left wing".

My main point the attacks happened for some other reason, it could be more noble but could also be more ulterior like economic control etc. They aren't a raging lunatic that attacks anyone who tries to do left wing things, at worst they are a cold calculating evil villain that manipulates the world to their own benefit.

American interventionism in the Cold War largely got started under Eisenhower. His administration’s policy could be best described as a reaction against Soviet moves (or perceived Soviet moves) in the countries affected. And so by engaging in regime change, the rationale was that this prevented that state from aligning with the Soviets. This seems to have worked in many cases but not in others, but I won’t get into the historical details here.

The point is that lot of people seem to forget that the USSR wasn’t sitting at home, either, and was deliberately funding political actions around the world as a part of the Cold War. Whether that “justifies” US interventionism is a different question, but people seem to talk about it as if the US was acting in a vacuum.

> people seem to talk about it as if the US was acting in a vacuum

The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, yet the same “interventionism” continues? This is isn’t ancient history, we fought two whole imperial wars since the with the same exact thought process without the USSR even existing anymore.

I don’t deny that there was some kind of context to American imperialism and I have no interest in whitewashing what the Soviets were doing. But to say that these “interventions” were a purely defensive/reactionary measure against communism is silly, the US has a vested interest in protecting its hegemony control. It’s that simple.

I don’t think I’d categorize Iraq and Afghanistan as “imperial wars” and as remotely similar things as the regime change operations during the Cold War. Very different context and reasoning.

But sure, powerful states want to protect their hegemony. Part of that includes not letting your allies turn into hostile enemy states. I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

The opinion you’ve expressed here is just the typical cynical approach that seems to lack any understanding of real world politics, or the basic fact that people in the Western “free” world might actually have a legitimate interest in promoting freedom and defending their values.

I recommend reading biographies of presidents during that era, especially Eisenhower. You’ll learn about the difficult (and often wrong) choices those in power had to make. To treat their actions as simply some kind of imperial bloodlust is not even remotely historically accurate.

Again, I am in no way arguing that these various interventions were “good” or “justified” or what have you, just that the framing of them as purely militaristic imperial conquests is flat out wrong and uninformed.

I’m firm on my claim that they were imperial wars, but we can lay that to the side.

> I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

This is precisely my problem. If the US/West wants to maintain a moral high ground by claiming that their “freedom” and values are simply the best and everyone needs them, then why is there an incessant need to subjugate? There is no moral high ground with continuously destabilizing countries and making half the world’s life a living hell.

I’m happy to talk about the actual realities of geopolitics. Of course the US wants to maintain control, but that desire is a not a “moral” one.

Saying that the US has put “half of the world’s life a living hell” is really hyperbolic and not at all conducive to a real discussion, because again, that’s not how history actually happened.

To give you an example: the Korean War officially started when communist-backed North Korea invaded the Western-backed South. Had the South not been backed by the US, they would have lost - and indeed almost did lose.

Are you therefore suggesting that if the entire Korean Peninsula were under the control of the North today, they’d be better off? Because the reality is that South Korea today is more free and economically successful because the US intervened there.

Or what about Germany? If the US let the Soviets take the entire country, do you think Germany today would be the economic leader of Europe?

Of course, there are situations in which that defense turned out in the opposite way - Vietnam for example.

As to your last comment, again, this is just the typical cynical line that assumes everyone in the government is an evil imperialist that only pretends to care about their values.

You are ignoring the very basic fact that many of these interventions were done in order to prevent the very anti-free USSR from defeating the West. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that communism would be defeated, or atomic war avoided. And so the people in power in the West needed to make very difficult decisions about navigating this game theory situation.

Name one.

I did.

Edit: Sweden started transitioning towards worker based ownership in the 80's, that is extremely leftist. Why did USA do nothing to stop them? Didn't even sanction them.

> Wage Earner funds,[1] is a socialist version of sovereign wealth funds whereby the Swedish government taxed a proportion of company profits and put into special funds charged to buy shares in listed Swedish companies, with the goal of gradually transferring ownership in medium to large companies from private to collective employee ownership.

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

So there, clear proof USA didn't mindlessly commit hostilities against any country doing anything leftist. So you were just wrong here.

It is kind of funny how delusional western people are on these subjects. This is similar to reading books on economic success by western people, they go through 50 hoops to explain why africa is doing bad but don’t mention the slaughter, exploitation etc. Those countries suffered and how it made first world countries even richer. It just seems like the stronger crush the weak and write the history always, the most obvious and undeniable example is israel situation

> they go through 50 hoops to explain why africa is doing bad

Africa were doing bad before white people intervened, answering why isn't trivial at all. They did trade over Sahara, technological advancement and knowledge was there but Africa didn't manage to take advantage of it unlike the Arabs, Asians and Europeans.

Almost all of the American military actions you mentioned were in response to Soviet or communist actions. In no way were they just the American government being violent for the sake of it.

Maybe you think that America and allies should have just stepped aside and let communist armies capture the various states, but geopolitics in real life is a little more complex than that.

Indonesia's communist party was a social democrat one. They never armed themselves.

Allende was democratically elected, no armed struggle from his end.

I'm not claiming that what America did was right or wrong. Sometimes violence is the right answer, maybe here too. But to pretend that we won the ideological battle through conversation and ideas is just factually false.

I didn’t claim that the West won through conversation and ideas, I pretty much said the opposite.

Ah sorry, I always make the assumption I'm talking to parent comments.

Parent comment is claiming the cold war was won through liberal democratic means. I claim that the tools employed by the US were violent incursions. I'm not claiming the US was violent for violence's sake. They were calculated actions with the intent of smothering any left leaning movement in the third world. Specifically the Indonesian case is egregious because their communist party was about as left wing as Bernie Sanders, and still a US-backed genocide was carried out against (suspected) leftists in Indonesia. Similar with the case in Chile. This was a democratically elected center left president, and the US-backed coup installed a violent dictatorship for the next 15 years.

No problem; and yes I think the best way to look at the Cold War is via the game theory approach of two powers battling each other. Each of them had ideologies that were integral to their actions, but not exclusively so, and they acted in ways contrary to those ideologies if it was deemed necessary in a realpolitik sense - which usually meant because the country in question was going to be influenced by the other player.

if you look up Indonesia and Allende on wikipedia, it doesn't say "the US did this", and given wikipedia's politics, it would if they could make a case for it.

It is not clear that the wars you cited, especially Vietnam, were necessary to fight and defeat communism, anymore than the Iraq was needed to reduce WMDs. This might be the reason for the wars given by the government, even a sincerely held position, but that is not to say that it is correct. Having a better economic system relative to communism, diplomacy with China to part ways from USSR - these seem more important.

That great violence unleashed in various wars wasn't actually necessary for realizing the goals of the countries involved is a very important history lesson which can prevent future violence.

(Similarly, one of the motivations for World Wars - who gets control of the colonies, seems futile in hindsight as the system of colonies was anyway dismantled.)

> It is not clear that the wars you cited, especially Vietnam, were necessary to fight and defeat communism

But that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming that they were a big part of America's toolkit in the cold war. To say that we won the battle through liberal democratic means is absolutely false. We toppled democratically elected left leaning governments time and again. Democracy was neither our means nor our end.

US did X is different from saying US defeated communism by doing X. I am not disputing the former and indeed there were terrible actions including bombing of civilians, and the removal of elected governments.

But that is not to say that X was the cause of victory. For too many cases, it actually lead to a backlash with regimes which were not friendly to US interests coming to power(Iran, Vietnam,..). Also, the USSR did similar acts (Hungary, Afghanistan) but could not win.

That the US prevailed owes a lot to its economic dynamism relative to USSR. (As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn't necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric.)

> As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn't necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric

That isn't true, taxes has remained constant since ww2. The tax distribution might have changed, but the total amount collected hasn't changed much. Can see the curve looks about the same as always. The marginal tax rate barely matters for total taxes collected since there are so few rich people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

This is an interesting point. But the spikes in revenue when tax policy changes indicates sensitivity. Further, that there are other countries with wildly different tax revenues as of GDP implies that there is lot of scope for change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...

But in the US itself, if it is true that high tax regimes(for both income and corporate tax) did not prevent dynamism in the economy (because of what Hauser observed or otherwise), that would be an interesting to note. One analysis I read, in Jacobin - a pro-socialist magazine, was that the critical difference was that in the US, companies were allowed to fail, whereas in the USSR failures continued due to political reasons and absorbed a lot of resources.

Lol no, the US won the battle by not collapsing in on itself. The Soviet model was on its own timer from the start.

China has a decent amount of structural issues, the US just has to hold on until they explode without exploding itself.

You realize communism exists outside the Soviet union right? Closing your ears and eyes and loudly going "lalalala" doesn't make the violence and death the US inflicted on most of the third world (yes, 3rd, i.e., not the Soviet union) go away. Millions dead, and you're making light of it. You should be ashamed of yourself.

> I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming from in US elite circles.

About half of America's political elites owe fealty to Trump - so a tough, America First, anti-foreigner, every-other-nation-is-a-rival stance is currently in fashion.

I really don't see western elites caring about freedom, lol.

> freedom produces more wealth than totalitarianism - which the US won

> The problem with China is that the argument is much harder to win

> What gets me is that this is not something to win on the battlefield

Authoritarian state capitalism already won this fight. Everybody is realizing that the marriage between liberal democracy and bourgeois capitalism is coming to an end.

For Western societies, the only remaining ways to assert dominance are 1) war & violence, 2) becoming more authoritarian themselves, or 3) a radically new way Western societies organize production and the distribution of wealth.

> Everybody is realizing that the marriage between liberal democracy and bourgeois capitalism is coming to an end.

I’m not. What do you recommend me to read, in order to come to that realization?

I’m trying to understand where this perspective is coming from?

From most measures China has peaked. Its state capitalism has gotten it a housing bubble and investment in industries with not enough customers. Combine that with its falling birth rate and high youth unemployment it would seem that the failures, not successes, are on display.

How is it clear that authoritarian state capitalism has won the fight? China is still less productive per Capita than the west. Most of it's advantage comes from it's population size, and demographics are bringing that to a halt.

I disagree. People don't want to live under authoritarian regimes. I'm willing to bet that for many working professionals have moved to the West to escape authoritarianism at home, and were willing to accept lower living standards (smaller home etc.) in exchange for greater freedom and peace of mind.

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