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Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

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Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#191

Post by hacknat »

loughnane wrote: post #146
prepend wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The West has a huge military and space program. So does China I don’t think this is true. China’s military is quite weak compared to the US (dollar amount, global reach, navy, nuclear) and it’s not able to project power globally. Even as far as the Middle East would be a problem as they don’t have bases or carrier groups. This is actually kind of an advantage as they can funnel money into more productive purposes,…

By some measures China's navy is larger than the US's [0]: >In a report published this month, the Pentagon acknowledged a grim milestone: China’s navy, having churned out warships like sausages, has become the world’s largest. I'm not aware of many signs that this trend will decrease. [0] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/09/26/china-now...

China is, at best, a Pacific power, but really they're just regional. China cannot project sea lane power past Japan at this point. The dirty secret of China's economy is that they're incredibly dependent on the American military for stable trade relations.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#192

Post by hacknat »

prepend wrote: post #122
echelon wrote: post #2

So is China going to surpass America to become the world's #1 economy? Or are the predictions that China's growth will decline true? Some analysts think China's population is too old and that youth will peter out, whereas others think that all the CCP has to do is ask its millennials to have more babies. Some analysts think that democratic nations will band together and give China the cold shoulder. China could just…

> The West has a huge military and space program. So does China I don’t think this is true. China’s military is quite weak compared to the US (dollar amount, global reach, navy, nuclear) and it’s not able to project power globally. Even as far as the Middle East would be a problem as they don’t have bases or carrier groups. This is actually kind of an advantage as they can funnel money into more productive purposes,…

It's not just untrue is laughably untrue. I'm not a big fan of US military power, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be realistic about it. The US military really is the last global superpower. Pretty much all of the global sea lanes rely on the US navy for stability.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#193

Post by coliveira »

enaaem wrote: post #163
coliveira wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just shows that China will NOT close. It is not a weakness for a country that wants to do commerce with the rest of the world.

There is a weakness. Despite being the second largest economy of the world, only 4.3% of international trade happens in in the Yuan [1]. People do not want give their oil and wheat in exchange for Yuans! Countries do not see the Yuan as a valuable reserve currency, which reflects their trust in the Chinese system. Since the majority if international trade happens in US Dollars, China needs to trade with the US to get…

For now. The yuan is still a new currency in the world trade. The Chinese are just starting to push it as a global currency. This will take some time, but I imagine that 20 years from now the yuan will be a second, if not the first international currency.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#194

Post by zepto »

landryraccoon wrote: post #154
zepto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if the recent success of democracy is random, and not systematic.

I'd like to believe that Democracy has systematic benefits, but we don't have enough data points to say that for sure. You can easily argue that the rise of Democracy in the 20th century is simply because the United States won world war 2 and the cold war, and all other countries adopted Democracy just to emulate the US. If Germany had discovered the atomic bomb before the US (which arguably could have happened if hi…

What? The US wasn’t the only country with democracy before World War 2.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#195

Post by bleepblorp »

Robotbeat wrote: post #78
whimsicalism wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it'd be horsehockey if I were claiming that the Chinese or white people or Americans or whoever is intrinsically more intelligent or "culturally" hard-working or whatever. That's bullshit. I can understand the gut reaction to any mention of IQ since it is a common trope among racists on the internet. But my claim is not that: it is about the pretty clear concentration of inherited wealth in the US, compared t…

If your argument is that we are approaching an aristocratic, low-churn society with a bunch of favored failsons at the top, then that would make more sense than trying to frame it in terms of Intrinsic intelligence. But I don’t think your comparison is accurate. The Chinese Party leadership and bureaucratic apparatus is plenty nepotistic while America’s more private-market-oriented economy is now dominated by (1st or…

American reliance on high-skill immigrants to build value-generating businesses is reflective of long-term weaknesses, both due to increasing hostility to immigration, and due to domestic high-skill talent being pulled into zero-sum economic sectors that extract economic rents but create no value. Unless the US is prepared to address these weaknesses, they will gradually erode US standing vs. China.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#196

Post by yongjik »

justicezyx wrote: post #178
yongjik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the other way: the strength of the West is that it's largely leaderless, and its "regional" leaders regularly gets switched out, so even a bad leader cannot leave much long-lasting harm. China is at the mercy of bad decisions made by its single unopposed leader - in a quest to command fear, it's needlessly antagonizing pretty much all its neighbors, which seems to me like a result of flawed leadership.

> China is at the mercy of bad decisions made by its single unopposed leader How bad a decision can Xi (just use it as an example) make? The Chinese system is bad. But it cannot make the same mistake as what US is making right now. Even during SARS, that worse version of the Chinese system did not make things as bad as what US is currently making. > the strength of the West is that it's largely leaderless, and its "r…

> Xi asked his leadership group to study Block-chain and Quantum tech

The internet was originally a DoD project, after all. Every industrial country tries to take a slice in the next big technology, but of course the predictions are hit-and-miss.

I mean, blockchain, really?

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#197

Post by tim333 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #140
jl6 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy and human rights - sure. Prosperity and peace? I think China actually has a good track record there. Actions you might perceive as un-peaceful (building islands, modernizing military) could also be interpreted as defensive. The world could achieve great peace and prosperity under a “Pax Sinica”, at the cost of individual liberty. That IMHO is the bigger threat: that authoritarianism will sneak in under the…

How is it defensive to build island military bases in places where there were barely any islands, in the international waters, in the most lucrative trade routes in the world? How is it defensive to encroach Kashmir and provoke a conflict with India? Dispute borders with Vietnam and Bhutan?

They are defending the nine dash line which has been sacred Chinese territory since someone sketched it.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#198

Post by hacknat »

echelon wrote: post #2

So is China going to surpass America to become the world's #1 economy? Or are the predictions that China's growth will decline true? Some analysts think China's population is too old and that youth will peter out, whereas others think that all the CCP has to do is ask its millennials to have more babies. Some analysts think that democratic nations will band together and give China the cold shoulder. China could just…

Honestly, I don't think the 20-30 year outlook for China is all that great. Japan's bailout of its corporate sector was contingent on its corporate sector removing their supply chains from China.

A lot of natural incentives, globally, are not going China's way right now. A lot of corporations are going to repatriate or localize their supply chains, because, at long last, supply chains, and not labour, are the cost-center of most corporations. Over the next decade we're actually going to become a less globalized world from a manufacturing perspective.

Finally, while the manufacturing sector has always had more friendly relationships with China, the technology sector (particularly software) has a much more ambivalent relationship with China; and now tech makes up a huge percentage of corporate power. Given that Western domestic politics is becoming more economically nationalist and that the corporate sector of most Western countries is gaining less benefit from the labour arbitrage that China offers them, I think we'll see a significant draw down in economic power from China over the next 10-30 years. There will be sectors that stay in China, like high-tech hardware, but even they will become more regionalized as well. You'll start to see some iPhones (or whatever) get made in Western countries as hedges against the need to rapidly draw down manufacturing in China.

The Washington Consensus in the 90s thought that normalizing trade relations with China would turn them into a Democracy. No one who is serious thinks that any more, and given China's current bad bout with human rights violations there is a convenient cover for the West to take.

My two cents.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#199

Post by chaostheory »

landryraccoon wrote: post #138
chaostheory wrote: post #7

Under XJ, China is declining. One of the big reasons for China's meteoric rise was that stupid laws weren't being enforced properly or at all, and free speech was on the rise which in turn led to more creativity and economic freedom. Under that old reality, I was worried that China would inevitably surpass the West, but Zhou Enlai & Deng Xiaoping's golden egg laying goose is dead now in exchange for more centralized…

> China is declining. It sounds to me like you're making a moral argument, not an empirical one. Are you saying that China deserves to decline, because they are authoritarian, or that they actually are declining, and the numbers show this? If China's economy is really declining, I'm curious what the evidence of that is. What are the numbers? Are they experiencing a shrinking economy, declining productivity, technolog…

I'm not making a moral argument, just a long term hypothesis based on history.

No, the data doesn't currently support my case. I posit what we're seeing now is similar to what happened when John Sculley took over Apple after Jobs' ouster. What we're seeing are the fruits from Zhou Enlai & Deng Xiaoping's faction.

I think it's really hard to have innovation without freedom of speech without relying on stealing technology.

Re: Dreams of a Red Emperor: The Relentless Rise of Xi Jinping

#200

Post by justicezyx »

yongjik wrote: post #196
justicezyx wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is at the mercy of bad decisions made by its single unopposed leader How bad a decision can Xi (just use it as an example) make? The Chinese system is bad. But it cannot make the same mistake as what US is making right now. Even during SARS, that worse version of the Chinese system did not make things as bad as what US is currently making. > the strength of the West is that it's largely leaderless, and its "r…

> Xi asked his leadership group to study Block-chain and Quantum tech The internet was originally a DoD project, after all. Every industrial country tries to take a slice in the next big technology, but of course the predictions are hit-and-miss. I mean, blockchain, really?

I mean, packet switching, really? [1]

...

Blockchain is a gimmick for startup, but it's quite useful as an infrastructure, just like what Internet was.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching

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