This is exactly the correct line to take on China and the article shows that Noah has his finger on the pulse of contemporary Chinese intellectual circles who, when allowed to write and speak, bemoan their current leadership and its embarrassing squandering of Chinese human capital.
I think taking the diaspora as the median Chinese (valid for any country) is not accurate. I am not saying this is the feeling of the median Chinese or that it would be if it were not for the propaganda and censorship, but it is hard to say.
I really get the impression that things have changed a lot more under Xi than most people in the US appreciate. It’s really sad things turned in this direction when China actually had a shot at becoming a great neoliberal success story.
I've met dozens of Chinese citizens like the expats in Chiang Mai. I think this is the common worldview among young, educated Chinese in major cities: a desire for China to be more open internally and externally--engaging with the world and allowing freer expression at home. They also have almost no interest with military provocations against Taiwan that could draw in the US and Japan.
Yet I once assumed that this must be the median opinion of young Chinese... but the people that a Westerner encounters in China or overseas are much different than the median Chinese person who lives in a Tier 3 or 4 city, doesn't have a VPN, and consumes only state media. Unfortunately, the median Chinese opinion is likely pretty close to the CCP worldview... which is the point I suppose.
It's a very similar dynamic to Russia. The young, educated passport-weilding Russians (once they grow tired of partying in Moscow) have already left. Yet the median Russian consumes only Russian media and is as nationalist as ever.
China and America are very similar in this way, as in many other ways. We both obsess over real estate, wear T-shirts and shorts and Crocs, go shopping at the mall, have big vague unrealistic dreams of wealth, eat crappy mass-produced food, work way too hard to support our sick and/or lazy family members, and sit around watching nationalistic TV and thinking "My country is great because it's BIG!"
They are a distant mirror of our own civilization...
They're also frighteningly similar, physically. Ever think about it? Virtually identical land masses. With similar dimensions: northern Manchuria to Hainan is more or less Quebec to Key West, and Shanghai to Xinjiang is similar to DC to San Francisco. Both countries' largest cities are east coast ports at the mouth of navigable river systems connecting with the interior. Both countries have warm, humid southeasts. Both countries have dryish, mountainous western zones. Both countries have northern Rust Belts. Both countries' capitals are in the northeastern quadrant. Both countries are seeing a lot of human movement to their respective Sunbelts. It's uncanny.
True. I wrote they're similar, not identical! Similarly, China doesn't have the equivalent of the Outer Banks and the US doesn't have the equivalent of Zhangjiajie. Lol.
Still, eerily similar (almost mirror images) to each other...and they just happen to be the two superpowers. There's something almost Philip K. Dick-esque about the whole thing.
The absence of a West Coast in China (i.e., two-ocean access) would seem to be far more significant -- suggesting that the Old World equivalent might be... Europe?
Philip K. Dick (perennial Californian that he was) could indeed have had lots of fun extrapolating on all this! Imagine a far-future hybrid of "The Man in the High Castle" and "A Canticle for Liebowitz"! ;-)
We certainly have a common humanity, but we arrive at opposite conclusions:
In China and Russia, the authoritarian system is aligned with the worldview of the median citizen… the victims of state indoctrination and a closed system.
In the USA, the democratic system is aligned with the worldview of the median citizen too, but this citizen has the benefit of free press and an open internet.
Those in China with US-style education and a VPN align with a more liberal worldview.
That's Western culture being adopted by the East. The difference is that the West has the ability to forge into the future, but the East will simply have to folllow.
Like Noah said, scale can often be a big advantage. Imagine if the world had a China that was 30 Taiwans! I know it doesn't work like that, but I'm in daydreaming mode here.
>Scale matters, though. 1.2 billion is just different compared to 40<
Scale indeed matters. If you multiple Taiwan's per capita GDP by 1.4 BILLION, well...the rest of us had better start learning Mandarin. But unfortunately for China, its ruling party prioritizes Xi Jinping thought and war-preparations over prosperity, so I can happily continue to study French.
We need new variety of content, after the western and Japanese & South Korean style.. China could have been the next exciting content generator, but seeing that China's youth bulge has already passed away behind censorship, I remain doubtful.
Although I am extremely optimistic about India, today Indian OTTs are generating new tv series and movies almost every week and they are really good unlike the same old story of romance and machoism of Bollywood. I also see lots of theatres and community spaces filled with young people in metro cities such as Bengalore, Mumbai and Delhi. Given that demographic dividend of India would last for another 3 decades, I feel that the best is yet to come from India given it would get much more prosperous in upcoming decades..
Part of the reason for this is just that India is far, far more culturally diverse than China has ever been. Authoritarian implementation is just so much harder there!
And again content will be similarly diverse.. just see movies from India -> Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, English all have different flavours
Yes, he is not a typical Indian politician who used to suppress their religious identity when in office but there is no discrimination in laws he has passed and beneficiaries of his policies.. you have to be in India to see the impact of both British and Muslim rule, there is not a single ancient living temple in North as compared to in South where there are 1000 years old living temples..
First of all it is 15% and second there is a rise of ultra nationalist and majoritarianism all across the world.. you have one president candidate in America calling mexicans all kind of names and then you have far right parties rising all across Europe.. This is just a phase due to social media..
BUT there is no discriminatory law or discrimination of the beneficiaries on the line of religion..
yupp, civil society is strong in India and as Alien mentioned due to vast cultural and geographical diversity it is impossible to rule by sword in India
Oh, you mean, what do I think is good about Biden? Industrial policy + alliances. I really care a lot about both of those things. He's done an amazing job on both.
One party's authoritarianism is rooted in an entire administrative caste, while the other is led by a mean-spirited, blathering egomaniac. The latter is characterized as appealing to resentments, while the former sponsors an Oppression Olympics that demands explicit obeisance to a hierarchy of resentments (and to an apparatus ostensibly designed to service them -- made possible by a slew of NGO bureaucrats and by viewers like you).
As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, if the GOP next wins the Presidency by popular vote, do they get to characterize their adversaries as a threat to "our" democracy?
Is it too late for Willie Nelson to run for President? That might be our only way out of this pickle. ;-)
In general a very good essay and I think indicative of the problems command economies get when they get to a certain scale.
One quibble. More than a quibble. The claim that in absolute living terms the gap between the US and China has grown since the 90s. The Chinese standard of living is about 10x higher (eyeballing this, buts it’s about right) while US standards have grown 50%. China went from a rural impoverished country to a global superpower in one generation. They are about the same level of wealth per capita as the US was in the 70s.
I know that was made to help illustrate your point that they are not catching up at current growth rates and will not without a major change. I think we all hoped that as China got richer, it would liberalize and free up its economy and its citizens, leading to more economic growth as China joined the circle of developed countries. I know that I did, at least. Xi Jinping has been a disaster for China. He can’t live forever though. I still hold out hope that his successor will return to the path of integration and opening to the rest of the world.
What is your quibble with the claim? What you wrote just seems to indicate you are confused as to what absolute and relative mean, and not any weakness of the claim itself.
If the economy grows 50% and your share grows 1%, it's disingenuous to claim that you should be satisfied with your shrinking share of societies wealth.
"A truly great nation has confidence in its people" By this criterion, Chinese never was a truly great nation. No Chinese rulers ever had full confidence in its people, a.k.a subjects. In fact, if we look at the whole history of China, the most prosperous and most inventive and intellectually creative periods were the times when the emperors were the weakest. The China Order by Wang Fei-Ling argues for this point.
Well, that's true. But yeah, premodern states were totally impoverished compared to modern ones. They were great only by the low standards of the pre-industrial age!
What Xi and the CCP are doing to the Chinese people is a tremendous loss for humanity. They keep pushing against a string and squeezing regular workers to subsidize it. Rather than fund social services and pensions, they direct money into military expansion. This expansion is not to provide for common goods like sea lane protection or international rule of law, but rather so Xi and the CCP can flout treaties and undermine a rules based order.
I can't help but wonder how much longer the "grand bargain" can last. Younger Chinese (college educated especially, foreign educated particularly) have no interest in it and I can't imagine older Chinese, many of who lack the social safety net they expected (namely, their kids having kids), are much more thrilled with the bargain's current status. The flip side to this of course is that should said bargain break down, there's no guarantee what comes next will be better for anyone (see the novel from 2015 "Ghost Fleet").
Given your articles about the need for US to ramp up military spending to be able to thwart China, your comment that Xi may not start a war with the US (over Taiwan presumably) seemed surprising. I don’t mind, but I’m curious if I missed an article or something.
On another note, I would love to visit China and zoom around all over their bullet trains. Do you think you would be safe traveling there after what you’ve written? I’ve also posted critiques of Xi, saying he shouldn’t invade Taiwan, and Taiwan should invest heavily in drone manufacturing to defend itself. I’ve even reposted your critiques on X.
Worth visiting to try them before they are shut down! IIRC the high speed rail in China is a catastrophic failure with hardly any demand, because they tend to link cities that don't have much natural intercity traffic.
Actually from a quick double-check, it seems far worse than I knew:
"Profitability was disregarded as the network expanded, and now the total debt of the state-controlled China Railway, which runs HSR, stands at approximately ￥120 trillion JPY (around $842 billion USD). This is three times the amount of debt that caused the Chinese real estate giant Evergrande Group’s liquidity crisis.
[....]
The expansion of HSR accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis as a means of using up excess steel and cement, which could not be exported due to overproduction
[....]
For instance, the line connecting the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region’s capital Urumqi with Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, has the capacity to operate 160 round trips per day, yet it runs only four. “The ticket income is not even enough to cover the cost of the power needed to run the trains.”
[....]
the HSR’s total ticket revenues are not even enough to pay the interest on China Railway’s debt.
[....]
China Railway has raised its cargo fares in an attempt to recoup some of the losses caused by HSR. The increasing cost of railway shipping is leading more and more companies to opt for road transportation, which, in turn, worsens air pollution and raises the cost of logistics as a whole.
[....]
In August 2020, China Railway announced a plan that envisions expanding the HSR network to approximately 70,000 kilometers by 2035."
My favorite part of visiting China in 1998 was taking a two day train ride from Beijing to Chengdu, looking out the window.
It’s a shame Xi has become so oppressive he can’t take criticism (against starting a war with another country, for example -- which I leveled against my own country too, the US, when it invaded Iraq.)
I've been zooming round on those trains the last 4 months. It is really a pretty good way to travel. Even works well with a 6 month old along for the trip.
Visit China soon if you can. You will feel welcome. Most of the time. Expect the unexpected. It can feel like a parelell world sometimes. The good thing is that paying for stuff with international versions of mobile payment apps got a lot easier from last year. That, translation software, and kindness of strangers, can overcome most problems.
Think about this: if China wasn't hobbling itself by micromanaging its population, then the US would be utterly swamped by that tide of energy. I'm not sure if that future would be good or bad, but it certainly would be completely unpredictable.
I agree that they would be a less likely military enemy, but they have a deeply ingrained culture of ruthless cutthroat economic competition complete with theft of intellectual property and Unfair trade practices (dumping). That's a scary future.
Look how the US reacted to the Japanese economic miracle. A major net benefit for the world I'd agree, but you'd still have a hard time convincing most Americans of that.
There were some trade conflicts but overall the countries are close partners and have a mutually beneficial trade relationship. Would be great to have the same with China.
For Noah, the unleashing of the energies of China can only come if they abandon the totalitarian model, so that version of the future has no totalitarianism in it.
Considering how the PRC has treated its neighbors... this is a good thing in my view. Why would I want a country with a proven track record of bullying everyone around it to be "great"?
I don’t believe so. The foundations of the current South China Sea bullying go back decades - the artificial islands there were started under previous Chinese leadership. All a “freer” China would be is a more powerful and effective bully.
Good article.... it is just very sad to see the shift from Deng to Xi. Right now, China is very susceptible to economic shocks which in the worst case can lead to their own Great Depression. There will certainly be an impact in China, but very likely worldwide.
It sounds like you're reading the textbook definition of “Communism, Government, form of…”
Any system of government that requires extensive control of its citizens (ie., significant prohibition of liberty) is, by definition, one that does not have confidence in its people’s inherent goodness and capabilities.
Ironically, China’s people are extremely capable; which is why their government isn’t actually “squandering” their potential, so much as acting *in fear of it*. Ask yourself where Jack Ma suddenly disappeared to, and your thesis will seem crystal clear.
Panasonic also scaled Li-ion up, and arguably did more to drive down the cost than anyone else.
Scaling up does involve innovation, in the sense that it usually requires driving down costs with reasonable error rates. And it requires abundant sources. But the requirements for Li-ion after commercialization were not novel for that technology.
This is exactly the correct line to take on China and the article shows that Noah has his finger on the pulse of contemporary Chinese intellectual circles who, when allowed to write and speak, bemoan their current leadership and its embarrassing squandering of Chinese human capital.
I think taking the diaspora as the median Chinese (valid for any country) is not accurate. I am not saying this is the feeling of the median Chinese or that it would be if it were not for the propaganda and censorship, but it is hard to say.
I really get the impression that things have changed a lot more under Xi than most people in the US appreciate. It’s really sad things turned in this direction when China actually had a shot at becoming a great neoliberal success story.
Yeah, I think there's a lot brewing beneath their surface, and it's starting to bubble up.
I've met dozens of Chinese citizens like the expats in Chiang Mai. I think this is the common worldview among young, educated Chinese in major cities: a desire for China to be more open internally and externally--engaging with the world and allowing freer expression at home. They also have almost no interest with military provocations against Taiwan that could draw in the US and Japan.
Yet I once assumed that this must be the median opinion of young Chinese... but the people that a Westerner encounters in China or overseas are much different than the median Chinese person who lives in a Tier 3 or 4 city, doesn't have a VPN, and consumes only state media. Unfortunately, the median Chinese opinion is likely pretty close to the CCP worldview... which is the point I suppose.
It's a very similar dynamic to Russia. The young, educated passport-weilding Russians (once they grow tired of partying in Moscow) have already left. Yet the median Russian consumes only Russian media and is as nationalist as ever.
China and America are very similar in this way, as in many other ways. We both obsess over real estate, wear T-shirts and shorts and Crocs, go shopping at the mall, have big vague unrealistic dreams of wealth, eat crappy mass-produced food, work way too hard to support our sick and/or lazy family members, and sit around watching nationalistic TV and thinking "My country is great because it's BIG!"
They are a distant mirror of our own civilization...
They're also frighteningly similar, physically. Ever think about it? Virtually identical land masses. With similar dimensions: northern Manchuria to Hainan is more or less Quebec to Key West, and Shanghai to Xinjiang is similar to DC to San Francisco. Both countries' largest cities are east coast ports at the mouth of navigable river systems connecting with the interior. Both countries have warm, humid southeasts. Both countries have dryish, mountainous western zones. Both countries have northern Rust Belts. Both countries' capitals are in the northeastern quadrant. Both countries are seeing a lot of human movement to their respective Sunbelts. It's uncanny.
True -- but China has no equivalent to the West Coast of the US.
True. I wrote they're similar, not identical! Similarly, China doesn't have the equivalent of the Outer Banks and the US doesn't have the equivalent of Zhangjiajie. Lol.
Still, eerily similar (almost mirror images) to each other...and they just happen to be the two superpowers. There's something almost Philip K. Dick-esque about the whole thing.
The absence of a West Coast in China (i.e., two-ocean access) would seem to be far more significant -- suggesting that the Old World equivalent might be... Europe?
Philip K. Dick (perennial Californian that he was) could indeed have had lots of fun extrapolating on all this! Imagine a far-future hybrid of "The Man in the High Castle" and "A Canticle for Liebowitz"! ;-)
We certainly have a common humanity, but we arrive at opposite conclusions:
In China and Russia, the authoritarian system is aligned with the worldview of the median citizen… the victims of state indoctrination and a closed system.
In the USA, the democratic system is aligned with the worldview of the median citizen too, but this citizen has the benefit of free press and an open internet.
Those in China with US-style education and a VPN align with a more liberal worldview.
Different inputs, different outputs.
That's Western culture being adopted by the East. The difference is that the West has the ability to forge into the future, but the East will simply have to folllow.
As someone once said, what would China look like if it were democratic and capitalist...
It would look like Taiwan, which is Chinese, democratic and capitalist.
Scale matters, though. 1.2 billion is just different compared to 40
Million
Like Noah said, scale can often be a big advantage. Imagine if the world had a China that was 30 Taiwans! I know it doesn't work like that, but I'm in daydreaming mode here.
>Scale matters, though. 1.2 billion is just different compared to 40<
Scale indeed matters. If you multiple Taiwan's per capita GDP by 1.4 BILLION, well...the rest of us had better start learning Mandarin. But unfortunately for China, its ruling party prioritizes Xi Jinping thought and war-preparations over prosperity, so I can happily continue to study French.
Also, Taiwan received tons of assistant from the US, same as South Korea and Japan. It is not a fair comparison.
We need new variety of content, after the western and Japanese & South Korean style.. China could have been the next exciting content generator, but seeing that China's youth bulge has already passed away behind censorship, I remain doubtful.
Although I am extremely optimistic about India, today Indian OTTs are generating new tv series and movies almost every week and they are really good unlike the same old story of romance and machoism of Bollywood. I also see lots of theatres and community spaces filled with young people in metro cities such as Bengalore, Mumbai and Delhi. Given that demographic dividend of India would last for another 3 decades, I feel that the best is yet to come from India given it would get much more prosperous in upcoming decades..
Part of the reason for this is just that India is far, far more culturally diverse than China has ever been. Authoritarian implementation is just so much harder there!
And again content will be similarly diverse.. just see movies from India -> Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, English all have different flavours
As long as the system can rein in the theocratic impulses of Modi
Yes, he is not a typical Indian politician who used to suppress their religious identity when in office but there is no discrimination in laws he has passed and beneficiaries of his policies.. you have to be in India to see the impact of both British and Muslim rule, there is not a single ancient living temple in North as compared to in South where there are 1000 years old living temples..
No discrimination… huh. I guess the 20% of Indians that are Muslim are terrified for no reason.
First of all it is 15% and second there is a rise of ultra nationalist and majoritarianism all across the world.. you have one president candidate in America calling mexicans all kind of names and then you have far right parties rising all across Europe.. This is just a phase due to social media..
BUT there is no discriminatory law or discrimination of the beneficiaries on the line of religion..
Although that didn't stop PM Indira Gandhi implementing Emergency in 70s
But she did end it too.
yupp, civil society is strong in India and as Alien mentioned due to vast cultural and geographical diversity it is impossible to rule by sword in India
Just a preview of what is to come: Fusing rock with hindi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a65A626Ed20&list=RDa65A626Ed20&start_radio=1&ab_channel=Bloodywood
This band is just on another level
Damn this is punk rock and it slaps
Is this code for a critique of some ot the intellectual currents within both the Left and Right in the US?
I hadn't intended it that way, but yes, authoritarianism sucks!
Then why are you a democrat? (Notice that I did not ask why you were not a republican.)
Well, sir...
https://twitter.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1750345859278225529?t=F0EdEDqDuqFlmGfROGGq3A&s=19
You answered the question, I pointed out, that I did not ask.
Oh, you mean, what do I think is good about Biden? Industrial policy + alliances. I really care a lot about both of those things. He's done an amazing job on both.
Both teams pretend that the other team is one that is authoritarian.
Do we have to pretend that both teams are pretending here, or can we admit that certain candidates have objectively justified those concerns.
One party has a problem with some misguided college kids and the other has a fascist as its leader and presidential candidate.
One party's authoritarianism is rooted in an entire administrative caste, while the other is led by a mean-spirited, blathering egomaniac. The latter is characterized as appealing to resentments, while the former sponsors an Oppression Olympics that demands explicit obeisance to a hierarchy of resentments (and to an apparatus ostensibly designed to service them -- made possible by a slew of NGO bureaucrats and by viewers like you).
As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, if the GOP next wins the Presidency by popular vote, do they get to characterize their adversaries as a threat to "our" democracy?
Is it too late for Willie Nelson to run for President? That might be our only way out of this pickle. ;-)
Misguided college kid?
https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/1300x/center/top/images/cropped/bernie-sanders-soviet-singing-1548699453.jpg
I disagree with "pretend".
In general a very good essay and I think indicative of the problems command economies get when they get to a certain scale.
One quibble. More than a quibble. The claim that in absolute living terms the gap between the US and China has grown since the 90s. The Chinese standard of living is about 10x higher (eyeballing this, buts it’s about right) while US standards have grown 50%. China went from a rural impoverished country to a global superpower in one generation. They are about the same level of wealth per capita as the US was in the 70s.
I know that was made to help illustrate your point that they are not catching up at current growth rates and will not without a major change. I think we all hoped that as China got richer, it would liberalize and free up its economy and its citizens, leading to more economic growth as China joined the circle of developed countries. I know that I did, at least. Xi Jinping has been a disaster for China. He can’t live forever though. I still hold out hope that his successor will return to the path of integration and opening to the rest of the world.
What is your quibble with the claim? What you wrote just seems to indicate you are confused as to what absolute and relative mean, and not any weakness of the claim itself.
The claim is accurate but the graph is misleading, or at least presents data in way that is different than what matters to most people.
If the economy grows 50% and your share grows 1%, it's disingenuous to claim that you should be satisfied with your shrinking share of societies wealth.
The Nineties consensus was wrong that trade would make China liberalize, but it was right that failure to do so would be against their interest.
"A truly great nation has confidence in its people" By this criterion, Chinese never was a truly great nation. No Chinese rulers ever had full confidence in its people, a.k.a subjects. In fact, if we look at the whole history of China, the most prosperous and most inventive and intellectually creative periods were the times when the emperors were the weakest. The China Order by Wang Fei-Ling argues for this point.
Well, that's true. But yeah, premodern states were totally impoverished compared to modern ones. They were great only by the low standards of the pre-industrial age!
By this measure, no non-Democratic state was ever truly great.
Well, that's pretty true.
What Xi and the CCP are doing to the Chinese people is a tremendous loss for humanity. They keep pushing against a string and squeezing regular workers to subsidize it. Rather than fund social services and pensions, they direct money into military expansion. This expansion is not to provide for common goods like sea lane protection or international rule of law, but rather so Xi and the CCP can flout treaties and undermine a rules based order.
I can't help but wonder how much longer the "grand bargain" can last. Younger Chinese (college educated especially, foreign educated particularly) have no interest in it and I can't imagine older Chinese, many of who lack the social safety net they expected (namely, their kids having kids), are much more thrilled with the bargain's current status. The flip side to this of course is that should said bargain break down, there's no guarantee what comes next will be better for anyone (see the novel from 2015 "Ghost Fleet").
Yep.
If other authoritarian regimes are any indicator, quite long
Given your articles about the need for US to ramp up military spending to be able to thwart China, your comment that Xi may not start a war with the US (over Taiwan presumably) seemed surprising. I don’t mind, but I’m curious if I missed an article or something.
On another note, I would love to visit China and zoom around all over their bullet trains. Do you think you would be safe traveling there after what you’ve written? I’ve also posted critiques of Xi, saying he shouldn’t invade Taiwan, and Taiwan should invest heavily in drone manufacturing to defend itself. I’ve even reposted your critiques on X.
I think he might start a war and he might not, but if we maintain a strong deterrent, the chances of him starting a war are much lower.
And no, I don't think I'll be traveling to China while Xi is in office...
Worth visiting to try them before they are shut down! IIRC the high speed rail in China is a catastrophic failure with hardly any demand, because they tend to link cities that don't have much natural intercity traffic.
Actually from a quick double-check, it seems far worse than I knew:
"Profitability was disregarded as the network expanded, and now the total debt of the state-controlled China Railway, which runs HSR, stands at approximately ￥120 trillion JPY (around $842 billion USD). This is three times the amount of debt that caused the Chinese real estate giant Evergrande Group’s liquidity crisis.
[....]
The expansion of HSR accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis as a means of using up excess steel and cement, which could not be exported due to overproduction
[....]
For instance, the line connecting the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region’s capital Urumqi with Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, has the capacity to operate 160 round trips per day, yet it runs only four. “The ticket income is not even enough to cover the cost of the power needed to run the trains.”
[....]
the HSR’s total ticket revenues are not even enough to pay the interest on China Railway’s debt.
[....]
China Railway has raised its cargo fares in an attempt to recoup some of the losses caused by HSR. The increasing cost of railway shipping is leading more and more companies to opt for road transportation, which, in turn, worsens air pollution and raises the cost of logistics as a whole.
[....]
In August 2020, China Railway announced a plan that envisions expanding the HSR network to approximately 70,000 kilometers by 2035."
https://japan-forward.com/weak-demand-for-chinas-high-speed-trains-a-ticking-time-bomb/
Wow.
Wow. So crazy.
My favorite part of visiting China in 1998 was taking a two day train ride from Beijing to Chengdu, looking out the window.
It’s a shame Xi has become so oppressive he can’t take criticism (against starting a war with another country, for example -- which I leveled against my own country too, the US, when it invaded Iraq.)
I am concerned I would not be welcome.
I've been zooming round on those trains the last 4 months. It is really a pretty good way to travel. Even works well with a 6 month old along for the trip.
Visit China soon if you can. You will feel welcome. Most of the time. Expect the unexpected. It can feel like a parelell world sometimes. The good thing is that paying for stuff with international versions of mobile payment apps got a lot easier from last year. That, translation software, and kindness of strangers, can overcome most problems.
Think about this: if China wasn't hobbling itself by micromanaging its population, then the US would be utterly swamped by that tide of energy. I'm not sure if that future would be good or bad, but it certainly would be completely unpredictable.
A democratic and free China would be a much more formidable competitor but not a likely enemy. And a major net benefit for the world.
I agree that they would be a less likely military enemy, but they have a deeply ingrained culture of ruthless cutthroat economic competition complete with theft of intellectual property and Unfair trade practices (dumping). That's a scary future.
Look how the US reacted to the Japanese economic miracle. A major net benefit for the world I'd agree, but you'd still have a hard time convincing most Americans of that.
There were some trade conflicts but overall the countries are close partners and have a mutually beneficial trade relationship. Would be great to have the same with China.
Yep. That's why I always post the meme of Xi Jinping in a CIA hat. I can't imagine they like those memes very much.
I suspect China's totalitarian model would have far more of a (minority) following elsewhere if Zero Covid was still in force.
For Noah, the unleashing of the energies of China can only come if they abandon the totalitarian model, so that version of the future has no totalitarianism in it.
Considering how the PRC has treated its neighbors... this is a good thing in my view. Why would I want a country with a proven track record of bullying everyone around it to be "great"?
If they were a freer country, they'd probably do less bullying...
I don’t believe so. The foundations of the current South China Sea bullying go back decades - the artificial islands there were started under previous Chinese leadership. All a “freer” China would be is a more powerful and effective bully.
The tiger does not change its stripes.
Don't you mean "the dragon does not change its scales"?
Good article.... it is just very sad to see the shift from Deng to Xi. Right now, China is very susceptible to economic shocks which in the worst case can lead to their own Great Depression. There will certainly be an impact in China, but very likely worldwide.
It sounds like you're reading the textbook definition of “Communism, Government, form of…”
Any system of government that requires extensive control of its citizens (ie., significant prohibition of liberty) is, by definition, one that does not have confidence in its people’s inherent goodness and capabilities.
Ironically, China’s people are extremely capable; which is why their government isn’t actually “squandering” their potential, so much as acting *in fear of it*. Ask yourself where Jack Ma suddenly disappeared to, and your thesis will seem crystal clear.
China did not commercialize the lithium ion battery. That was Japan, in 1991. Japan also invented it.
Japan did invent it, but China has scaled it up to the point of cheapness and ubiquity. That is a big accomplishment!
Panasonic also scaled Li-ion up, and arguably did more to drive down the cost than anyone else.
Scaling up does involve innovation, in the sense that it usually requires driving down costs with reasonable error rates. And it requires abundant sources. But the requirements for Li-ion after commercialization were not novel for that technology.