Re: Biden thread
A few things to consider:Originally Posted by Montmorency
1. COVID impacted supply chain management such that business culture began taking a more skeptical look at putting all their eggs in one basket so to speak. When a country such as China is willing to enforce entire lockdowns and terminate all production with relatively little heads up, it creates bottlenecks and disruptions for most manufactured goods many of which still linger such as today's less than normal supply of large appliances, bicycles, plastics, etc. Also long term management of the country (e.g. it's failure to adequately learn from SARS years ago) is still questionable with short term management still undesirable in ways you already mentioned.
2. To my understanding, East-Asian countries retain historical animus towards China (well towards each other in general) and are not as driven by economic ideologies as the West. Countries in the region will continue to promote their own independence as they can by minimizing their economic dependence on China and gravitating toward a more neutral player like the US or Europe as a matter of preference. I liked this passage from 'Factfulness' (page 131):
3. While China has been an economic hub for most of human history it, along with India, was economically self sufficient pre industrial revolution and did not make concerted efforts to further integrate itself into world or even Asian markets most of the time (again, to my understanding). Its foreign policy was sending navies out periodically to enforce tributes and invasions of its closest neighbors. Keep in mind the timeline and strategy of Western colonialism in Asia, how with the exception of Portuguese Macao, Europeans ignored China's ports favoring instead trading ports across modern day Indonesia during the 16th and 17th centuries which had extremely prosperous kingdoms controlling trade between China, India, and East Africa.The Vietnam War was the Syrian war of my generation.
Two days before Christmas in 1972, seven bombs killed 27 patients and members of staff at the Bach Mai hospital in Hanoi in Vietnam. I was studying medicine in Uppsala in Sweden. We had plenty of medical equipment and yellow blankets. Agneta and I coordinated a collection, which we packed in boxes and sent to Bach Mai.
Fifteen years later, I was in Vietnam to evaluate a Swedish aid project. One lunchtime, I was eating my rice next to one of my local colleagues, a doctor named Niem, and I asked him about his background. He told me he had been inside the Bach Mai hospital when the bombs fell. Afterward, he had coordinated the unpacking of boxes of supplies that had arrived from all over the world. I asked him if he remembered some yellow blankets and I got goose bumps as he describes the fabric's pattern to me. It felt like we had been friends forever.
At the weekend, I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War. "You mean the 'Resistance War Against America,'" he said. Of course, I should have realized he wouldn't call it the Vietnam War. Niem drove me to one of the city's central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. The protests against the Vietnam War had united a generation of activists in the West. It had moved me to send blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed.
Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further , and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, "Here is where we commemorate out war heroes. Isn't it beautiful?" This was the monument to Vietnam's wars with China.
The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The "Resistance War Against America" took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion. It was only by comparing them that I could understand the relative insignificance of "the Vietnam War" to the people who now live in Vietnam.
4. China may not even have the densest center of economic activity by mid-century. Their population curve is currently transitioning downwards while India still has another 25-30 years of projected growth before their demographic transition towards a shrinking population hits. India will have more people than China as soon as 2027 according to the UN. China's population is aging faster than any other country and they have no effective welfare state to prepare for this. They will have more people over the age of 65 as a % of their country than the US by mid-century. Chinese culture traditionally had multi-generational housing with children expected to take care of their parents and grandparents at home. If the US Social Security is considered a 'ponzi scheme' in a shrinking world, then China has a big one.
5. Data on belt-and-road investments is limited because China continues to withhold information from the world on its decision making processes, such is a big negative in itself. But the available data and analysis has led many to believe that lots of corruption and frankly bad investments are being made, essentially throwing away money that China would be better using to establish domestic welfare.
All of this is to say that China has proven more than capable at manipulation of current environments and making very planned advances towards certain policies and outcomes. But the same could be said to a certain extent of Putin's Russia. Their cyber-warfare is running circles around us, the Crimea is theirs. But the fundamentals of managing shit at home is just not there and Russia continues to decline overall. My hot take is that China has just as much chance of becoming another Russia, projecting a foreign diplomatic weight that outsizes their actual internal strength, as it does of making the 21st the 'Chinese Century'.
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