So when is the western world going to wake up and realize that China is a cutthroat competitor that does not respect western law or traditions, cannot be trusted, and intends to dominate the world? This seems especially troubling for the tech world as IP is easily copied and the only thing that really protects it is the legal system, which China has shown over and over they don't care about.
Western businesses will never care. They don't care that the chinese destroy the planet. They don't care that the chinese manipulate the quality of the products they manufacture on their behalf. They don't care that the chinese sell counterfeits at huge markups in markets developed countries couldn't care less about.
The only thing they care about is money. They'll never stop doing business with China until it stops making them money.
You make the implicit assumption that it is possible to maintain an advantage in the market after destroying ongoing business relationships/expectations (as ARM China appears to have done). I think you may be overestimating the importance of 'apparent market power', and underestimating the value of consistency and adaptability.
Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term. In contrast, more chaotic, free market economies tend to look messy in the short term, but achieve amazing, spontaneous order over time.
> Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term.
That sounds like a prayer to me.
What evidence is there that China can't win? How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Consider that the dominance of democracy is a relatively short term thing on the historical timescale. For the vast majority of human history, civilizations have been ruled by authoritarian dictators. The rise of China could just be reversion to the mean.
I don't want totalitarianism to win. But if we just complacently assume that it won't, doesn't that make the worst case scenario much more likely?
> How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Authoritarianism always comes with a top-down execution structure, which optimises for cost-to-execute but not cost-to-transform.
When the need-to-transform exceeds a certain value, it would either have to re-adjust its internal structure or it will crumble (as the cost skyrockets) [1].
Interestingly, the same applies to compiler design, as well as any software systems when viewed at the right abstraction.
And from a functional programming perspective, it is also the principle that underlines the famous Alan Perlis' epigram "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing" (which outlines the importance of compiler optimization such as in tail-end recursion.)
[1] We're already seeing this in China's aging population crisis (thanks to the one-child policy introduced in 1980 [3]), and I doubt Xi's banning of private tuitions [2] would help (if we take his policy at face value).
[3]: fun fact - this policy had affected many people including myself in a deep personal level. By law I am not supposed to exist (I'm a Gen Z born in China illegally as a second child (after my parents bribed the hospital, and afterwards we still had to pay huge fines)).
Your point about cost-to-adjust resonated with me. What I’ve found is that designing for software successfully existing over time implies giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve—as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation, which in longer term leads to a situation in which whenever lead developer has not enough time (or is replaced) the software stops living. Something about infinite games in Carse’s and building worlds in Ian Cheng’s terminology.
To your footnote, I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare… I wonder how much of it is true.
> giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve - as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation...
Intriguing! Sounds like we'll end up with something hugely team-players-dependent. Also removing lead dev dependency is an interesting take. (I had at most worked with 2 devs in a project so this is definitely something to keep in mind when the team scales up.)
> I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare
Maybe not that many. But definitely not a phenomenon unfamiliar to the city dwellers (esp when there had been a huge rural-to-urban migration from 2005~2018)
At one point they did (unofficially, I think) relax access to education and healthcare. Ultimately every actor in the societal chains of command would try to milk out from the perpetrators as much as possible (in the form of bribes/fines), until eventually very little can be milked and then things became cheaper (or close-to-free).
We've been down this road with the Soviet Union during portions of the cold war, when folks in the West thought that high Soviet GDP catch-up growth would translate into sustained non-catch-up growth and meant non-authoritarian governments were doomed. It didn't work out that way.
Democracy isn't assured, we could easily vote it away in the West. But there is definitely a pattern whereby enormous cutting-edge economic growth seems to require relatively free societies. To make a long term bet on an authoritarian approach in a world where those societies exist, that seems like a very risky thing to do.
All those centuries of authoritarian rule also coincided with technological and economic stagnation. That might not be causal, but I think it is. The industrial revolution came after a number of liberalizing political movements in northwestern Europe.
And China has its own problems, including hugely problematic demographics and an export-fueled economy that is still highly dependent on trade with the West.
Your reasoning is based on narratives which I personally always discount.
Economists expect China to overtake the US economy in size by the 2030s. This can obviously either accelerate or decelerate and there will be hindsight reasoning in any case. Nevertheless, I don't see any of your narrative based arguments substantive.
If your system can’t win because it’s inherently better, then maybe your system shouldn’t win?
Have a little faith. Our system shouldn’t win just because we are using it. After all, our core beliefs are that it is a better system, not just through our pure force of will.
The OP is right, much of China is is still undeveloped and their policies short-sighted and naive. In fact the whole government is so sensitive to face-saving that it screams insecure teenager. Getting worried they might be winning and that we must start to take alternative measures just legitimizes their tactics.
The GDP of the Soviet Union never exceeded that of the United States at any point.
If the GDP of China exceeds the United States in the near future (which seems quite possible), how does that fact reconcile with your analysis?
I find the government of China to be morally reprehensible. However there are plenty of cases in history in the real world where that which is morally reprehensible prevails, at least in the short term.
The "short term" on a historical timescale can easily be longer than your lifetime or mine.
If China collapses in two hundred years due to it's moral failings, that will be no more comfort to us than the United States collapsing might be to the indigenous tribes that used to live in North America before Europeans arrived.
I mean, they seem to win by simply throwing bodies on the pyre, working their own citizens to suicide in order to provide cheap labor to the rest of the world until they get valuable IP and steal it.
Capitalism thrives on cheap labor and cannot stop itself from being lead like a lamb to slaughter as long as China keeps pumping out all of those man hours of labor for the taking.
There's no evidence here. We're talking about predicting the future in a system that's too complex to make predictions with any certainty.
But for those of us following the politics and economics of China closely, it's pretty clear that they're screwed.
People said Japan would dominate the world. Then the demographic shift hit them and the economy has been stagnating ever since. China's demographic shift is much bigger and faster, they're further behind (per capita), and they're way less prepared. China has the same problem of not accepting enough immigrants, and they just made it worse by cracking down on after-school tutoring.
The vast majority of history is very different from the world we live in today. People can move between countries relatively easily, and all countries compete for the top talent. A huge share of workers these days are knowledge workers. You can't generalise based on history when the fundamentals are so vastly different. China has very little to offer there, and they're increasingly becoming hostile to foreigners.
They have an enormous housing bubble. Well, if you can call it a bubble when it's propped up so it never bursts. But much of their GDP is pure waste as they're building apartments nobody lives in, and that deteriorates within years. Why? Because they can't build a trustworthy stock market where people can invest, so people invest in housing. They just demonstrated once again that you should never but money in the Chinese stock market, so the problem isn't getting better.
Chinas infrastructure is weak. Many cities are built without proper drainage. Dams are breaking. The US may have a huge infrastructure debt, but at least it was solid to begin with.
China has an insane amount of public servants per worker. The whole economy is deeply inefficient, and has only been propped up by a crazy 996 work ethic, one that Xi is now trying to crack down on.
Which illustrates the fundamental instability: they can't continue to grow through capitalism anymore. The insane income inequality is becoming a big problem, and the wealthy was accumulating too much power, threatening the power of the party. So Xi is reverting to more traditional socialist policies, to remove some of the power of wealthy individuals and satisfy the public. But that will fundamentally weaken the economy. It'll push them in the direction of economies like North Korea and Venezuela.
China is being squeeze from both ends: low value manufacturing is moving to other countries as labor costs in China increases. But China has trouble establishing high value exports and services. How many trusted brands are there from China? Quite a few sure, but not compared to its population size.
If the GDP of China exceeds that of the United States and keeps a higher level for more than a few years, what would that mean for your thesis? Are you predicting that cannot happen, and therefore your thesis is falsified if it does?
Almost every country has a dark side with slavery. Slavery however was not what made empires.
What makes empires different is that they extracted the riches from lamds abroad, thru violence (stealing) which often meant war, murder, and pillaging. Usually this was followed by slavery. Slavery itself was often transactional consequence between to original human traffiker and the idiot buyer.
The US was a global power before it went on military adventurism. It can be argued whether the US could have become a world power without slavery, but that line of question can be leveled to any other country with significant power today.
The US became a global power and incredibly rich , in spite of its government only deciding to stick its nose abroad starting around the 1960s.
The US may have done pretty dark things abroad in the last 50-60 years. But thats when it really starts. And by that time, we had already a monopoly on world power.
If anything, the US has proven that it's technique for stealing to keep its advantage has been incredibly ineffective and downright inept (cuba, vietnam, arguably Afghanistan)
This is unlike china, that steals as a matter of national policy, and its stealing its way to the top
A couple of points. Not to turn this into a discussion about advantages of one system vs another, but here is why China has a leg up:
1. What the United States has is not Capitalism - it's a badly broken Capitalism. The power of healthy oversight and regulation has been decimated by shocking amounts of money which, now, thanks to the same corrupted system, is mostly "dark". We are not exactly in an oligarchy, but we are very close.
2. You can think of China as a team. They still, as a whole, unite around their national and strategic interests, as a nation. We, on the other hand, wonder about which country owns this or that particular Congressperson, and wearing a mask as a health measure for the greater good of the country is bloody murder.
I have an honest question: why could China catch up to the western countries in many verticals and even become the dominant player, while in history the western could stay lightyears ahead of developing countries, no matter how hard the developing countries tried, with or without government interference or industrial espionage? What's changed?
We have an example most readers here are familiar with: the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country. Germany, Switzerland, and Italy also ignored patents for a while and now they are power houses when it comes to pharmaceuticals and chemicals.
> the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country.
There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.
The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.
The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.
In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.
Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.
Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.
If the west wasn’t light years ahead of India, why was it so easy for the west to take control of India and rule it for hundreds of years? I am honestly interested in what you think the reason was.
Britain invaded during a period of political instability, civil war, and factionalism immediately following the collapse of the Mughal empire. It then carried out divide-and conquer tactics, fighting India peacemeal.
During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.
I'm not sure if we can attribute the gap solely to colonialism. Chinese rulers back in 1890s thought the products of industrialization were simply exotic crap. They despised STEM and didn't have a single school teaching STEM (there were a few such schools due to the Western Affairs Movement, but they were not created by the government). I don't think this level of barbarian culture was caused by colonialism.
In 1890s? In other words, soon after China lost the second Opium War. The British took Hong Kong and secured their right to poison the populace with opium. Are you sure colonialism was not at play?
You can't speculate as to China's outcome in the 21st century, based on what its rulers may have thought in the 19th century, on an alt-historical timeline that skipped the opium wars, and the century of occupation, civil war, war, and some more civil war.
I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.
In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.
You can't blame colonialism for China's pre-colonial-period problems, but you sure as hell have to give it the lion's share of credit for it's colonial problems.
Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.
Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'
they want to dominate the world? shall we compare war involvement or record of foreign influence?
this is literally a response to an American act of aggression to cut China off of access to chips. but we're the peaceful good guys?
This is what the US did in its infancy and after WWII since their country was not devastated by the war took in all the scientist they could take for their own benefits.
Naw, we shall label them as racist and xenophobic for even bringing it up, and we just can't have people labeled as racists running around spewing "facts," so out the ban hammer comes. And the world will cheer it on as they only read the headline of "Another racist banned from x" and scroll on thinking what good people they are.
They were distracted by their "clash of cultures" wars in the middle east. They failed to fully identify China as the main threat to democratic nations and allowed the transfer of capital and technology to go on unhindered. The lack of democracy and human rights wasnt a real issue to them because China wasnt considered to be a future threat. There was the naive belief that democracy would be the inevitable outcome of economic growth and a growing and more affluent middle class.
But people care primarily about their economic well being, and whatever system delivers it is what they'll be happy with. There are no huge movements calling for democratic reforms in well off non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states. And even in democracies like Hungary or Poland the slow slide to a more authorotarian government hasnt got the majority of people worked up, as long as their personal circumstances arent too badly affected. Democracy is only that thing which is demanded when they want to change their circumstances for the better, otherwise its forgotten or undermined when the good times are rolling.
Will China win? No I dont think they will, they dont have the ability to change course peacefully or quickly enough under an authorotrian system. They let momentum carry them in straight lines until they crash into a wall.
Our problem is that we're stuck with a rich and technologically advanced threat that we built. Trump for all his faults did the right thing by starting the economic war with them, Obama was quite happy to let the status quo of technology, capital and job transfers continue unabated.
But we havent learnt our lesson and we risk making the same mistakes with India. The western nation are looking for another low wage, low cost manufacturing base, and they're going all out on India. But we can see the authorotarian and less democratic direction the government there is taking everyday. Yet all our major tech companies and planning to build and invest in capacity over there. Until we end up with another rich and technologically nation that isnt a friend of democracy.
