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Hey there!
In recent months we have heard a ton about China, From Trump's trade war to Xi Jinping's
permanent presidency.
But I don't think we really talk about China seriously.
Today I am going to talk about three things that almost all supposedly serious coverage
of China gets wrong, and that you should look out for.
This channel's coverage of China can seem confusing.
In some videos I am very dismissive of the threat to US interests that China poses today.
But in other videos I talk about how China will probably be the world's most powerful
country by the end of this century.
It may look like there is a contradiction here, but there isn't.
It's a question of timing.
US commentary on the topic seems to be split.
Some folks are in a constant state of panic.
Every time China surpasses the US on some metric, people come out to declare that US
power is finished.
That's not how any of this works.
The US has been building a world system for almost 75 years now.
No matter how much Trump abuses it, this system isn't just going to evaporate.
The US economy surpassed Great Britain's around 1900, but Britain maintained and even
grew its influence for decades after that point.
It took two apocalyptic wars to finally end British world leadership in the 1940s and
1950s.
This is why people who want to preserve US power should be super anti war by the way....
The other side of US commentary goes way too far in the other direction.
We hear things about how China is getting old before it's getting rich, and how their
economic model is running out of steam, or they are running out of women or whatever.
This approach relies really heavily on the example of Japan.
Back in the 1980s it looked like Japan was taking over the world, but they've been
falling behind for almost 30 years now.
There are some similarities between the Japanese and Chinese models, but there's a basic
question of scale that gets ignored here.
China has over 10 times more people.
Their economy is almost three times the size of Japan's already, and even if the figures
are fudged, the Chinese economy is still growing at 5-7% a year.
I have talked about how there's almost certainly a large China crisis coming, but they're
going to come out the other end, probably post-Communist, in better shape not worse.
China is not going to flame out.
Their resources are vast.
The belt and road project they are currently running includes infrastructure projects in
60 countries at a projected cost of 4 to 10 trillion dollars.
FADE TO ROUGH MAP OF BELT AND ROAD.
China is literally re-building the world, and their businessmen are on the ground in
all of those countries profiting from all that economic growth.
China has a crisis coming but it is not going to just fade away.
The US race with China hasn't even really begun yet.
It's going to be a marathon, even though US leaders are currently treating it like a fiscal
sprint.
This one really gets to me.
China is located in Asia.
There are a handful of other countries in Asia that have been very successful over the
past half century.
Some of them have taken paths to growth that are similar to China in some small ways.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out those similarities and trying to draw lessons from
them.
But every Western outlet, from the Economist to the US Government goes way too far in this
direction.
They are addicted to making predictions or broad statements about how democracy is lagging
in China based on the experience of countries like Taiwan or South Korea or Singapore.
This is just fricking nuts.
Do we expect Russia's political economy to develop along lines similar to Greece or
Slovakia or Lichtenstein because they share a continent?
Of course Not!
We recognize that the sizes, geographical attributes, and histories of these countries
will lead to dramatically different growth paths.
China is not some generic "Asian Country".
China is unique.
It's got a billion and a half people, a history as a unit that goes back longer than anybody
else's, a ruling ideology that can only be described as schizophrenic, and includes
the lifestyles of urban New York City and rural sub-saharan Africa in the same country.
Acting surprised that it didn't go democratic the same way South Korea did is moronic.
But you can find this kind of thinking in almost every article written on the subject.
The building consensus this year seems to be that the US screwed up by letting China
into the WTO.
The idea is that we were promised more progress towards democracy and free markets than we
got, and China has either failed or cheated us somehow.
There is a growing sense in the West that China's communist party is going to rule
China forever.
There's a problem with this.
China's Communist party doesn't believe that.
They'd never admit it of course, but the changes to China's system that Xi Jinping
is pushing through have a very clear through line of panic.
They know their rule is more threatened today than it ever has been.
And it's the Chinese people that threaten it.
That's the issue that this whole Xi Jinping is the new Chairman Mao narrative tries to
hide.
As recently as the 1960s China was a terrifying authoritarian nightmare state.
During the Cultural Revolution gangs of Red guards rampaged through the country, attempting
to erase China's history, and brutalizing China's intellectual and administrative
class.
The world's largest and oldest country was at the mercy of the whims of one senile old
man, Chairman Mao.
China today is completely transformed.
It is home to the world's largest middle class.
They want, and largely get the same things that people want in developed countries everywhere.
ENVIRONMENT URBAN LIFESTYLE PATH TO WEALTH If you imagine that China's ruling party
isn't responsive to these desires you simply haven't been paying attention.
In fact, I suspect that China's lack of democracy has a lot to do with its Middle
Class's fear of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who have been shut out of its vibrant
consumer economy.
The authoritarian aspects of China's system protect the middle class from the poor.
China may never have a system that fits Western ideas of democracy, but it's already in
the process of releasing an extraordinary range of human potential.
And that's why WTO accession for China wasn't a mistake.
China's growth has contributed to world prosperity in an infinite number of ways, from the curbing
of US inflation to dozens of Afrcan highways and ports.
China isn't democratic yet, whatever that means, but it's an infinitely better place
than it was just a few decades ago, providing great benefits to its people and the world.
We need to start taking this opportunity seriously in the United States.
If we do that, China will remain an opportunity rather than a threat.
Interestingly, decisions we make in Syria, this year, can help set that path.
And that's what I'll talk about next time.
Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and if you learned something today, I would be
grateful if you considered chipping into my crowd funding thing.
You can learn more about that at the Patreon link here.
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