China isn't dumb, they saw what the US did to the USSR and anyone who else who was even the smallest possible threat to the US. And they knew how big of an actual potential threat they would become as they industrialized and hollowed out US manufacturing. And I think it is the right move on their part, surpass the US economically, let the US continuously drain its resources across the globe, and when the US is under pressure and decides China has too much control it will be too late and they can just starve the US out economically. The worst thing that can happen at this point to China is the US actually does build back a broad local manufacturing sector and reduces imports, but that still leaves China with a far larger domestic market. Every other potential outcome has China sitting in an even better position.
> as they industrialized and hollowed out US manufacturing
Just to be clear about cause and effect - during the long period of globalization, the U.S. chose to off-shore manufacturing, trading high availability/low cost for domestic production. Off course, China has been an active participant in that process; but the U.S. could have chosen otherwise. Much of the rhetoric from the current administration's leader in the U.S. implies that the U.S. has been victimized unwittingly by the process, which of course is entirely unfounded.
it would be super easy to blame the industrialists who wanted to outsource at any cost (and still do, just not to china) but that wouldn't work because thats where the (campaign) money comes from
What did they do to the USSR? They collapsed all on their own. If China were on its way up, people will flock there to find opportunities (just as they did briefly following the financial crisis) but the exact opposite is happening. China had its shot but they timed it poorly.
Besides the repeated sanctions and embargos, propaganda, proxy wars, and military dick waving contests?
I don't know how you can believe China is on anything except an upward trend right now. Many countries won't even let people buy Chinese cars because they are so far ahead of everyone else in cost and manufacturing efficiency and I don't know any industry where China can't match foreign companies in and compete against.
They are in a prime position right now in my opinion. All of their industries have major players in cutting edge technology, yet they still have more population to modernize and sell to domestically, and they supply half the world's manufacturing needs and do work in basically every sector. They have tons of foreign investments into infrastructure and mineral extraction to keep feeding themselves raw materials, they have all the processing equipment to convert raw materials into base materials, they have all the manufacturing to turn those base materials into pretty much any goods they want or need. They have highly educated people and education programs and schools, a robust government, a domestic population still fairly far away from dropping off a cliff like every western nation, they have a strong enough military to be secure against basically any nation outside of global nuclear war, and a populous that broadly supports their government. Outside of multiple chartoonish sized blunders I don't see any path for the near future that doesn't result in Chinese economic growth and increased global positioning and power.
Are we suppose to bury our heads in the sand and deny the reality right in front of us because it is inconvenient? Maybe if people faced reality we wouldn't have sold off so many western assets and industries in the first place and put us in a bad position compared to them. It wasn't their job to stop us from being stupid and gutting our own industries in favor of their exports and giving them everything they needed to quickly industrialize and modernize.
You make a good point. While there is ample documentation that no one in history has ever disagreed with, ever, of proxy wars and embargoes and sanctions and covert action over decades, what if “nuh uh”
“Nuh uh” paired with an invitation to an imaginary place is cool as hell
The answer to that is kind of, globally, the thing that defined the second half of the 20th century. Like I can’t think of a subject that has been covered in more detail than “what the US did to the USSR”. There are roughly infinity books about it.
You mean all those things the US did to stop the spread of communism which we now know definitely to be a giant dead-end. People make it sound like USSR and communism was so great and it only failed because of the US. This is like saying Intel failed because of Nvidia. No, Intel failed because they sucked all on their own.
Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic production capacity as a nation.
Sure, they did it to themselves, but we made the situation lose/lose by exploiting our position as an economic powerhouse.
With the very sad state of US manufacturing, where just trying to buy US made bolts and nuts can be impossible, it is entirely possible that China could use the same play against us.
We don’t have the critical skilled manpower to recover overnight, it’s at least a 5-8 decade process just to get enough qualified die makers to build the tools we need to build the tools and products we want. Die making is a skill that takes decades to master, and a master can only teach so many apprentices in a lifetime.
This leaves us in a very vulnerable position. We need to buy the tools from China at scale in order to build the tools that we need to rebuild our capabilities. We cannot build them ourselves at scale. If we had a BRICS embargo against selling certain tools to the USA, like we used to have with China before Reagan, we would be well and truly up a creek without the proverbial paddle.
Right now it’s almost impossible to manufacture in the USA at any significant scale, and cheap and easy to do in China. We can assemble, but manufacturing not so much.
The people with the skills needed to rebuild this capacity now number in the low thousands or even high hundreds , and the average age of those that are left in the field is 64. Deregulation and outsourcing, kicked off in earnest during the Reagan years, cut us off at the knees.
Pointing out that China is much better positioned than we are to lead the world in economic and industrial production isn’t unpatriotic. The first step to a solution is to recognise the problem.
There’s an interesting video that is on this tangent:
If your position is that nothing the US did, despite how well-documented and agreed upon it is, had any influence on the fall of the USSR, then I can see how it would be easy to get confused.
So if “what did the US do?” wasn’t a question and you actually meant to write “I as a matter of ideology do not accept any US involvement in history”, then okay, cool. Otherwise if you actually want the question answered there’s a ton of information available, likely even some from whatever ideological angle you would prefer, since, again, it was so incredibly well-documented.
Do you have any references to support your “The USSR fell because of bad luck” theory?
It is clear that you do not believe that it fell because of something inherent to communism, as by your own reasoning there was no external force on earth that could have taken it down — even decades of antagonism by the richest and most powerful country on earth and all of its allies. It isn’t possible to say that a system is the single most durable thing on earth but also so fragile that it it’ll obviously just collapse, those are mutually exclusive statements. You can be 4’11 or 7’2 but not both.
I personally haven’t read any books that say that the Cold War was unnecessary and if the US had simply sat back and done nothing, communism would never have posed a threat to anybody since it would just end on its own. I would absolutely love to read more about Whoopsie Theory though, it is a fascinating proposition even if “communism was so chill that the world would’ve been better if nobody fought it” sounds like something you’d read on tumblr.
As you yourself say, there was no Earthly force that could have tumbled the USSR from outside. It was decrepit in many ways, but it was also a vastly powerful militarized nation with a vast territory, plenty of resources still at its disposal and of course, its huge nuclear arsenal.
The USA emphatically did not degrade the USSR down and it's not to blame for its collapse either. The idea is absurd and mis-attributes blame, which really lies with the Soviet leadership's own choices in misplaced spending priorities, poorly thought out political strategy changes and finally, a refusal to put economic improvement before political liberalization that was haphazardly applied and escaped their control, with Gorbachev ultimately deciding to simply not pursue the kind of repression that would have put the lid back on. These were internal causes and effects. External factors, such as falling oil prices, had their effects too but those were secondary.
U.S. military spending certainly wasn't a any reason for blaming the USA. The idea is absurd, like you going bankrupt because you also wanted the ferrari your much richer neighbor bought, then saying he's at fault because you were too stupid to make more strategic financial choices. Nobody external made the people at Gosplan and in the Central Committee sign off on such poorly planned budgets.
The USSR didn't collapse because of bad luck, but it also certainly didn't fall apart as a fault of the Americans. It disintegrated through its leaders' own politically foolish choices.
A country that watched this and learned from it was China, and it's still here, under the same essential leadership, more powerful than ever before, despite being in a weaker economic position than the USSR in the mid-1980s. (granted, China shared none of the ethnic and regional nationalist difficulties that had plagued the territory of the Soviet Empire since long before there even was a Soviet Union.
I don't think having less manufacturing is such a bad thing.
In a world of technology, what matters is designing and expertise, not making things.
China has a rampant cheating problem in its universities, and there is a lot of corruption. This discourages Chinese people to pursue innovation.
The communist party is a big obstacles to innovation.
China is dependent on stealing techs.
Not to mention Chinese talents would rather work in the US.
So it boils down to having the fairest political and regime system, which china is not, although it could be one day, but I don't think Chinese culture can absorb democracy very well.
What discourages Chinese people from pursuing innovation are the lax IP laws.
In China, if you spend 10 years designing a new awesome thing, everyone else will copy it as soon as you publish it. There is basically no protection for IP. That's why China caught up to the West so quickly, but it's also why very little innovation happens in China.
Just feels like China has very little to do in this cold war right now. The US just funded a massive war against itself, that is absolutely going to suck up fantastic resources & deeply deeply weaken our nation.
You know, I recently saw someone speculating that China would be ready for war in 2027 (as is their stated goal), but that they would go after Siberia rather than Taiwan. Taiwan is very risky (have to cross the strait, and who knows what the US will do?), but Siberia is more straightforward.
Well, if China is in fact thinking that, then China would love to keep the war in Ukraine going, because it weakens Russia.
That is absolutely nuts and one of the worst takes I’ve heard - a major land invasion with the goal of permanent occupation against Russia, who has nukes ranging from tactical to theater to strategic. China wants Russia isolated and dependent on them so they can exploit the relationship, that’s it.
That is absolutely nuts - a major land invasion with the goal of permanent occupation against Russia, who has nukes ranging from tactical to theater to strategic. China wants Russia isolated and dependent on them so they can exploit the relationship, that’s it.
They don’t need tanks to take over Siberia just time. In 100 years Siberia will be a Chinese territory and can claim independence and join the mainland. My understanding is that the Chinese population there already is quite high and growing quickly.
It's not really a revelation that war machine #1 has spent decades preparing for a war with war machine #2. That's the entire point of their existence: waging wars and preparing for wars.
Could that be because the US think tanks and establishment mouthpieces published papers on how the US needed to destroy China to prevent it from becoming an economic competitor decades ago, and then started appointing people to the State Dept. to implement that plan?
The angst and anger and destruction of all of our shared cultures by radical extremist anti-wokers is 1000% worse. Such rage over letting other people exist.
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