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China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

nytimes.com

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Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#131

Post by gaius »

prodmerc wrote: post #113
gaius wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But I predict in 10 years we will all buy Huawei networking kit and everyone will have forgotten there ever was a company called Cisco (for example).

Huawei will shamelessly give away all your data to the Chinese government. At the very least it looks like Cisco doesn't willingly do that with the NSA. That should count for something. Else we'll have to learn to trade like the Chinese, and it's almost inconceivable - they'll fuck you the first chance they get, like some third world shithole, they have no principles in my experience.

It's clear that the Chinese are playing economics to win, while the West is playing like it's still just a game.

It's kinda weird when you think about it. A Western manager thinks that Chinese or Indians are content to do as they are told and lack the ability or ambition to compete, so just outsource the work. But the truth is they are just as smart as anyone, and have the same aspirations as everyone else and are ruthless about getting it just as the West was in the imperial colonial days.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#132

Post by pdonis »

marcell wrote: post #77

I'm struck by China's ability to attempt large, ambitious projects like this, compared to America's inability to do, well, anything really. The largest infrastructure project I'm aware of in the USA is California's High Speed Rail (~$60B+), was approved a decade ago and is barely making any progress. The federal government is in complete gridlock. The most ambitious legislation passed in the last decade, the ACA, cau…

China's ability to do this is just an example of Cheops' Law: You can do anything you want to if you have a sufficient supply of expendable labor.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#133

Post by Quinner »

throwaway053 wrote: post #89
holydude wrote: post #31

The scary part is china's protectionism. Small nations and businesses have so little possibilities to operate in china without getting robbed of IP or being outcompeted by state supported domestic ventures. I fear the future of China being stronger superpower than the USA.

pretty sure the world doesn't want an authoritarian dictatorship like China, who acts like a retarded bully with Taiwan and Dali Lama, who oppresses its own people in hong kong and xinjiang, who is belligerent with most of its neighbors like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, India.

The world isn't exactly thrilled with the US, who has acted like a retarded bully across the world.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#134

Post by awkwardtortoise »

BurningFrog wrote: post #67
holydude wrote: post #31

The scary part is china's protectionism. Small nations and businesses have so little possibilities to operate in china without getting robbed of IP or being outcompeted by state supported domestic ventures. I fear the future of China being stronger superpower than the USA.

Protectionism has never made a country strong.

Every "strong" country today became strong via theft, protectionism and mercantilism. And once a country became strong, they expanded/colonized/etc and then supported "free" trade.

There isn't a greater example of this than the US. We stole all kinds of tech from the british/europe and then protected our industries.

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

It's how our nascent industries developed in the US. Without protectionism, all our industries would have been dominated by european companies.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#135

Post by awkwardtortoise »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #91
BurningFrog wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protectionism has never made a country strong.

This is demonstrably false, and actually the opposite of most countries that have successfully developed. I was searching for "South Korea protectionism history" to find articles for a great example (as SK practiced heavily protectionist policies in the immediate post-war decades), and this came up: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/eu.glo... Protectionism can be very successful for countries with…

Hell the icon of "free trade and capitalism" developed under protectionism.

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

Every nation needs protectionism to help its industries. It's only when you have strong stable industries/companies that you become anti-protectionism because you want your native companies to have access to foreign markets.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#136

Post by awkwardtortoise »

Kholo wrote: post #11

I found this talk with Niall Ferguson and Samantha Power pretty fascinating about the US - China power balance changing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8yghOc-lMIM Just one mindblowing fact from the talk - China has poured more concrete in the last two years than the US in the last hundred.

China has 1.1 billion more people than the US. They have bet big on megalopolis ( the bejing centered, shanghai centered and the chonging centered ). Combined, these 3 megalopolis will have a population larger than the US. China has 110 cities with 1 million people. The US has 10. And china is at 55% urbanization while the US is 80%+ urban so china still has hundreds of millions of people to urbanize.

Also, some economists say that data is the new "resource" of wealth ( the next oil ). If that is true, then china is the saudi arabia of data. Given their smartphone penetration and the size of the population and the continued urbanization.

Also, china is now building a hundred colleges every year. This is reminiscent of the US in the 1850-1900 when we went on a college building spree ( stanford, MIT, stevens, purdue, michigan state, cornell, UC, UT, endless list ) as a result of our economic growth. And it wasn't too long before we outstripped the british empire as the largest economy in the world and kept growing.

There are tons of reasons to expect that china will continue to grow and outstrip the US in the near future. But there are stark differences as well. China's growth isn't in a "asian-centric" world like the US growth was in a "western-centric" world. US overtaking britain wasn't as traumatic and/nor resisted event. The US has the most farmland, diverse territories stretching from the arctic to the caribbean to the western pacific. We had allies/etc that china lacks. We had the resources/oil/etc that china doesn't. So there are a lot of headwinds for china.

It should be interesting how things pan out. Considering our position in the western pacific ( a bazillion bases surrounding china ), I don't see how eventually, there won't be a war between china and the US. I don't see how china doesn't push us out of their 'backyard' sooner or later.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#137

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #82
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's the other way around. Negotiating international trade agreements with the purpose of limiting the flow of information by means of "IP" is the very definition of protectionism.

Mutual IP agreements are not protectionism just an equal playing field. Protecting domestic companies, but not foreign ones on the other hand is the definition of protectionism. PS: Abolishing IP would also be a level playing field, but again that's not what they are doing.

[deleted]

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#139

Post by awkwardtortoise »

nostromo wrote: post #13

The "China vs America" narrative is unnecessary. If China wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure to develop their region that's a great thing for America too. Counterintuitively, it could even be better for the US than China. Eventually the demand for low-margin, subsidized, Chinese steel will flatten, while the demand for high-margin American technology and cultural products will grow.

> The "China vs America" narrative is unnecessary.

It's central to the current world event. The major theme of the 21st century is going to be china's growth in power vs the US.

Power is a zero sum game after all. If china's power increases, it's going to come at the expense of the lone superpower.

> If China wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure to develop their region that's a great thing for America too.

A china-centered economic order isn't a "great thing for America".

> Eventually the demand for low-margin, subsidized, Chinese steel will flatten, while the demand for high-margin American technology and cultural products will grow.

What makes you think that china isn't going to take over the high-end steel market too?

Unless you think chinese are intellectually incapable of developing high-end steel...

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#140

Post by contingencies »

From about 2005-2008 I used to live and own a house on the Laos and Burma borders of far south-western China and still often travel in the area. Laos is simply poor, being a landlocked mountainous country with minimal infrastructure or education surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbors. In the last 16 years, Laos has begun to get some better roads (largely with foreign investment), mobile telecommunications, a larger tourist industry, some dams and a great deal more rubber plantations. Otherwise, it is still a sleepy, mountainous, jungled backwater.

China has committed to building infrastructure to connect Laos and Thailand to Chinese rail and road networks. Relatively tiny Vietnam apparently made an expensive and partly abortive attempt to sponsor a road from Dien Bien Phu to Udomxai in the north, perhaps in a bid to counter growing Chinese influence, but China ran rings around them and the strategic significance or benefit of such a road is now negligible.

From an economic rationalist perspective, I think China just wants more markets. If you were a massive manufacturer with 14(?) land borders and awesome infrastructure expertise, you'd be building infrastructure to connect new markets too. I don't think there's any kind of evil Beijing geostrategic scheme at play here ... there's very little to gain by controlling Laos (which economically China already does in the north of the country) ... it just makes sense.

Some images of the northern Laos road to Dien Bien Phu in 2012 (dunno if this new non-Picasa Google Photo link works) @ https://get.google.com/albumarchive/106883718971909092529/al... or https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOJtgKiJZdgruRyZhNTUk2b...

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