Global Politics China Discussion

[Asclepius]

So, Gordon Geko culture reached china, quelle surpise!?..



oh, I think I should mention by the by, my "heartfelt", concern and shock about the reticence toward, nuclear fuel. I should engage a serious discussion about nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels however, the catastrophes that may result from geopolitical warfare, may mitigate its benevolent and efficient embark - and that leads me to, HUMBLY and stoically, "think" about the consciousness lacking in the world, did I mention my fluency in french ( Aiming to start a thread that will eventually, start a post on trump and macron - just so I can talk about myself ( after all, I lived there and speak french - *note to self - this is an asset to gain societal admiration - moreover and also, aim to have people drop into a political debate (unrelated to the thread) about things related to me and my interests and short scope of focus ( because I have developed no sense of insight); but the former; me, my agenda (basically, me and my perception of Buddhism - which is also about me and my perceptions) I thought I'd drop that in for notoriety, incase anyone gets a whiff of what bullshit I claim to; and to make my points about me and me and myself, "appear" more credible and get everyone in on it. I'm a hero, to the world -yay! Go -me! Also, did I mention, my most proud accomplishment to date is to state, my entitlement, btw, did you know, are you even aware; I know more than you?


lol awsome

 

[✿Dai₷y✿]

The problem will be ignored because it benefits the people in power, until a point when it causes destabilizing conflict and the U.S. deals with it like they deal with everything else: by starting a war.

This is pretty smart on the yanks part, get all the other folk fighting by stirring the pot and reap in the money from said fight.

 

[Xorkoth]

I split off the discussion about China from Foreigner's "I can't stand stupid people" thread as it had utterly deviated, but is an interesting topic.

Shouldn't China be experiencing a growing middle class given where it is in terms of economic development? It's economy hasn't matured like USA and Western Europe. I think the communist party needs to keep growing the Chinese middle class and raising people out of poverty or they are going to have problems governing the country more than they already do.

China may have a way to go still, but their middle class is growing rapidly. It was only 3 decades ago that they didn't even have a middle class. There is still a lot of poverty and essentially slave labor in China, to be sure, but the situation is improving for a great many Chinese. Their economy IS maturing, as huge swaths of the population now have disposable income, so the country can stop relying so much on manufacturing and focus on building its consumer economy, and start producing services as well as goods. Their economy is slowing down but is also becoming more self-sufficient.

Honestly China will easily overtake the US in just a few years at this rate and once they do the US will realise how much they have come to rely on China. They can hardly move production back to the US. What will be interesting is seeing if they move production to Vietnam or India, and how much that'd actually affect China's economy as they keep growing their soft power.

Agreed. China is a force to be reckoned with. I will not be surprised if in 20 years, the Chinese yuan is the world's reserve currency instead of the US dollar. China basically owns us, but at the moment, we heavily support their economy, since we are the largest consumer economy in the world still (for now). So it is not in their best interest to bring us down. But this is why Trump makes me so nervous, it's a sticky situation and one that needs to be handled with sophistication by someone qualified to lead a country's foreign affairs, not by an oafish buffoon who has no clue what he's doing and just reacts to whatever soothes or hurts his ego.

I do wonder about when manufacturing moves out of China. Manufacturing moving outside of the US was a big part of what has led to the slow decline of our economy. However it happened due to civil rights for workers, minimum wage, regulations on working conditions, ie, better quality of life for workers. However that caused businesses to look overseas for manufacturing. It's a double edged sword. For manufacturing to move back to the US, cheap slave labor would be required and I could not ever support that (though some are suggesting abolishing minimum wage, which is what would allow this to happen again). Ironically, early in our industrial revolution, when we had the most money for infrastructure because we manufactured for the world, the same as China has enjoyed over the past decades, we accomplished great public infrastructure works, but quality of life for individual poor workers was FAR worse. I don't know whether it's possible to have it both ways. Who controls the manufacturing obtains tremendous economic growth, but will have awful conditions for the common people.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

Maybe you are right that India and Africa will be targeted by the multinationals.

I see your point about tariffs being a clunky solution for the reason.

Any ideas on what might be a more direct or effective approach? Because I worry about the consequences of accepting an inevitable ongoing decline in American industry. That Americans might end up inheriting the poverty of those counties whos cheap labor they leverage. Unless there is a change of direction and soon.

The smart thing to do is focus on non-manufacturing industries. The US currently has a monopoly on important areas such as computer software and online services as well as Wall Street being the biggest financial centre in the world. These are all very strong relevant industries, why bemoan the loss of manufacturing instead of adapting?

 

[jose ribas da silva]

A chinese friend told me he can't complain about anything in China, it is not because it is a perfect place, but because he would get arrested..

 

[Foreigner]

The smart thing to do is focus on non-manufacturing industries. The US currently has a monopoly on important areas such as computer software and online services as well as Wall Street being the biggest financial centre in the world. These are all very strong relevant industries, why bemoan the loss of manufacturing instead of adapting?

Because those are not the driving force behind the GDP.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

Because those are not the driving force behind the GDP.

The financial and tech sectors are both huge contributors to your GDP what you on about? The US has many worldwide tech firms worth tens or hundreds of billions. Or in the case of Apple, literally over a trillion dollars. The CEO's of tech companies are some of the richest people in the world, with Jeff Bezos of Amazon being right at the top. Amazon's market cap is in turn over $800 billion.

Yeah clearly the booming US manufacturing industry is much bigger than Silicon Valley and Wall Street right?

 

[Foreigner]

The financial and tech sectors are both huge contributors to your GDP what you on about? The US has many worldwide tech firms worth tens or hundreds of billions. Or in the case of Apple, literally over a trillion dollars. The CEO's of tech companies are some of the richest people in the world, with Jeff Bezos of Amazon being right at the top. Amazon's market cap is in turn over $800 billion.

Yeah clearly the booming US manufacturing industry is much bigger than Silicon Valley and Wall Street right?

Wall Street has always been the top earner, ever since the 1950's. I think you're confusing the fastest growing industry with the most lucrative industry. Manufacturing still outdoes IT, even in this era where the manufacturing sector has largely been outsourced. You can see the stats here.

IT falls under "information". It's what is called a tertiary industry because it only does well when the primary and secondary industries of raw resources, financial and manufacturing are doing well. When they aren't doing well, IT doesn't thrive.

You can't simply say fuck manufacturing and divert to IT because manufacturing is much closer to the root of the economy than IT is. That would be trading a root for a branch.

The top IT companies in the U.S. like Amazon and Apple pay next to no taxes, so their revenue contributions to our economy are based almost entirely in supplying the labor force. One of the biggest critiques of the tech sector is that if they actually paid their fair share of taxes, our economy would be much better off. Instead, we have billionaires hording more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes.

The U.S. economy is currently on the brink of another financial crisis because expenditures far exceed revenues, and part of the reason for this is that the top companies are able to evade fair taxation. The burden has shifted to the middle class, which means reduced consumption of consumer goods, which means the over all economy is tanking.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

Wall Street has always been the top earner, ever since the 1950's. I think you're confusing the fastest growing industry with the most lucrative industry. Manufacturing still outdoes IT, even in this era where the manufacturing sector has largely been outsourced. You can see the stats here.

IT falls under "information". It's what is called a tertiary industry because it only does well when the primary and secondary industries of raw resources, financial and manufacturing are doing well. When they aren't doing well, IT doesn't thrive.

You can't simply say fuck manufacturing and divert to IT because manufacturing is much closer to the root of the economy than IT is. That would be trading a root for a branch.

The top IT companies in the U.S. like Amazon and Apple pay next to no taxes, so their revenue contributions to our economy are based almost entirely in supplying the labor force. One of the biggest critiques of the tech sector is that if they actually paid their fair share of taxes, our economy would be much better off. Instead, we have billionaires hording more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes.

The U.S. economy is currently on the brink of another financial crisis because expenditures far exceed revenues, and part of the reason for this is that the top companies are able to evade fair taxation. The burden has shifted to the middle class, which means reduced consumption of consumer goods, which means the over all economy is tanking.

Yes I was not saying Silicon Valley on its own is driving your economy, I used it as an example of a hugely lucrative and booming industry - and it seems you don't disagree.

Wall Street is of course a perfect example of an older, more "traditional" industry that according to your own chart there not only remains the absolute biggest contributor to your GDP by far but is double the size of manufacturing.

Ultimately, markets shift and you need to either adapt or die. In order for the US to beat China in the manufacturing sector you'd need to dramatically decrease wages and pretty much allow sweatshops to run in your country. This, for obvious reasons, is unsustainable in the long-term even if you did manage to actually get the required laws passed.

Technology is small compared to traditional industries right now but it is young and, as you noted, fast growing. And it's not about to go anywhere soon. You got huge companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook as well as the heart of innovation for new tech companies right on your doorstep. That's a strength and will pay off more and more in the future as technology continues to become more and more ubiquitous.

In order to look at what's best for the future you don't look at what's been big in the past, you look at what is growing now. An industry experiencing rapid growth today while becoming key to our way of life more and more each year is a solid industry. The iPhone only came out in 2007, before that it was mostly BlackBerries, now look at where we are.

And I don't think your government would disagree with me here. Why do you think Trump directly went after the biggest smartphone company in China? Because he knows that America's strength is selling branded goods - even if those goods are made in China, American businesses still make big money by putting their names on them. If Chinese brand names grow around the world it will put a huge dent in companies like Apple who have made literally a trillion dollars selling branded hardware. Huawei smartphones sales were up 70% last year alone. Huge threat to Apple. And I know they're banned from selling their phones in the US, but in the rest of the world they sell like hotcakes. I see them everywhere in the UK. I used to have one myself, but I changed it for a Xiaomi (another Chinese brand yes) because you cannot unlock the bootloader with Huawei anymore and I like to use custom ROMs. Shame too because the Huawei was a very nice phone and only cost me £250 brand new. Meanwhile Apple has the cheek to ask £1,499 for the top end iPhone! I can get a brand new top end Xiaomi or OnePlus with flagship specs for £500! See why they feel threatened?

As for tax loopholes - how is this an issue exclusive to any one industry? Those loopholes are used by all large corporations. If you want to deal with those, the government needs to close them.

 

[atara]

Why is a discussion about geopolitics posted in P&S?

Like, you're all arguing the de facto economic and political dynamics of China and their relevance to East Asia, not the ideological underpinnings of the modern Chinese state. And this is an ironic microcosm of America's myopic attitude towards China and mirrors the deficit in the larger conversation which has led to astoundingly dumb articles like this:

China Isn’t the Soviet Union. Confusing the Two Is Dangerous.

An unusual confluence of events after World War II led to America’s bitter rivalry with the U.S.S.R. That pattern is not repeating.

www.theatlantic.com

"And while the Soviet Union’s anti-capitalist message of proletarian justice and equality resonated in much of the world, China has no universalist ideology to sell. Beijing today may disparage Western democracy and tout socialism with Chinese characteristics, but all the world can see that it has embraced a capitalist mentality and a nationalist ethos. The Chinese are not champions of equality and justice, as the Soviets pretended to be, and they have little ability to exploit the discontent in neighboring nations. Aggrieved Muslims in India will not look to Beijing for inspiration. "

This paragraph is wrong, horribly wrong, and what's wrong with it infects every American discussion about East Asian geopolitics. China is not a champion of equality and justice. However, that does not mean that China has no universalist ideology to sell! China simply is not selling an ideology based on equality and justice.

Justice, they do sell, but in a sense different from ours. China is "selling" the idea that a less democratic government with more control over the market can lead to more stability than a system based on freedom of exchange and responsible government. One of the advantages China thinks their system has over ours is that they have a more consistent foreign policy, which, they think, will make other nations choose to do business with them and not us. China, so the marketing goes, may not be perfect, but at least you know what you're getting.

Under Trump the Republican Party has worked hard to prove the Chinese correct. The TPP, which was by far the best strategy we ever had for displacing the center of economic gravity away from China in the Pacific, was undone by a variety of populist lies and half-truths that took advantage of Americans' simmering resentment over outsourcing. Our allies in East Asia have looked on horrified as Trump fell for Kim Jong-Un's fake disarmament scheme. And Hong Kong drew him as a superhero while he used them as a bargaining chip in a trade deal, only reversing course when it became a political scandal.

 

[Jabberwocky]

China is a country that created gulags for Muslims, a manufacturing sector that relies on prison labor, and still props up North Korea. When USA supported South Korea, the Koreans were able to create global corporations like Sumsung, LG, and Hyundai, and a functioning democratic republic with rule of law. What does North Korea have, dictatorship, the threat of nuclear holocaust, famines, and prison camps where THREE GENERATIONS of a family can be sent for displeasing the Dear Leader. I still don't see how China wins.

 

[Xorkoth]

Why is a discussion about geopolitics posted in P&S?

Well it was split off from a different thread in here, but good point, it really longs in CEPS.

P&S -> CEPS

 

[Meth novice 79]

It’s like a moot point.

‘China’ has been ‘taking over the world’ since I was a child, which was a long fucking time ago now lol.

I remember my aunt and uncle burying rifles and survival gear on their farm in prep for the ‘take over’ in the 80’s.
They were ready! Ready for what? I still don’t really know since guns and amo and tinned dinners weren’t going to help stop China buying all our fucking casinos and oil rigs lol

World power needs to change hands over time. To combat corruption.
They feed us propaganda and drama re Russia and China and the Mid East and whatever other boogie man they imagine so we will continue to support their war torn sagas.

Relax. It’s not a Hollywood movie.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

It’s like a moot point.

‘China’ has been ‘taking over the world’ since I was a child, which was a long fucking time ago now lol.

I remember my aunt and uncle burying rifles and survival gear on their farm in prep for the ‘take over’ in the 80’s.
They were ready! Ready for what? I still don’t really know since guns and amo and tinned dinners weren’t going to help stop China buying all our fucking casinos and oil rigs lol

World power needs to change hands over time. To combat corruption.
They feed us propaganda and drama re Russia and China and the Mid East and whatever other boogie man they imagine so we will continue to support their war torn sagas.

Relax. It’s not a Hollywood movie.

I agree with you about media scaremongering, but China's increasing wealth and power is certainly a justified topic of discussion now. They're pretty much on track to displace the US as the world superpower. This is why the US is so terrified of them and Trump has been able to exploit this fear.

Intellectually I find this to be a very interesting area of geopolitics and I think the media focus is on the wrong areas. While the news covers whatever Trump points his finger at this week, they are pretty much missing a lot of big things China is doing under the radar, for example as I mentioned earlier in this thread they have bought out or created enough huge, well funded film production companies that they effectively hold control over Hollywood right now. They've done this in a very intelligent way and I have to admit they deserve credit where it's due. They just leveraged their economic power knowing the Yanks would happily do business with them if they had a wealthy market to sell goods to - which they do.

Similarly with that whole Huawei thing the media really missed the big picture on it. There is no evidence of Chinese backdoors in Huawei devices. I even hooked up one of their phones to a packet sniffer and monitored all traffic going in and out. The background traffic was all the usual Google Android stuff. It wasn't beaming my personal data to China. To America through Google (and by extension the NSA, CIA, FBI) yes, but not Beijing. The scaremongering over Huawei is 100% political. And in my eyes it was a move of pure desperation when the American propaganda failed to stop other Western nations from using Huawei so they had to ban it from doing business with US companies in an attempt to harm its consumer business. Which it has in the short-term, but in the long-term I think it'll harm the US economy more as Huawei continues to grow without doing business with American tech companies who would have otherwise made big money from sales of chips, software licensing, having services on those devices, etc. Not to mention that they're putting Chinese tech companies in a position where they know they can't rely on America and will therefore create their own OS and ecosystem. Which is not as hard as you'd probably think, forking Android with a custom app store and no Google services is so easy there's multiple open source hobbyist projects that have done exactly that.

On a personal level it truly makes no difference to me at all whether the US or China is the biggest economy. I'm English, I don't feel any type of emotional connection to either nation. I know I'm meant to care more about the US according to the newspapers but I just don't. If Chinese produced films are good I will watch them, if American ones are good I will watch those too. If Chinese companies make better value products I'll buy them, if not I'll buy American ones. I think most people are like me where they're not making consumer spending decisions based on politics. Still, I find this to be an interesting and relevant topic in modern geopolitics though. Russia too, but that's another kettle of fish.

 

[Foreigner]

The scaremongering about China is basically to shift the attention away from all the real evil that the U.S. government is doing. That's what McCarthyism was about, the fear of the Red Tide, and all the subsequent propaganda about communism.

Americans are raised to see things as one way and one way only. China is an extremely complex polity with a lot going on. I would say that in many ways it is even more complex than the United States because it's simultaneously a developing nation.

But if you only listen to the U.S. media, you don't really get to know much of anything about China.

 

[novaveritas]

The smart thing to do is focus on non-manufacturing industries. The US currently has a monopoly on important areas such as computer software and online services as well as Wall Street being the biggest financial centre in the world. These are all very strong relevant industries, why bemoan the loss of manufacturing instead of adapting?

yeah deplorable blue collars, you just need to learn to code.

In case you hadn't noticed Wall Street does not generate real wealth, There is a direct correlation between so called GDP that the FIRE sector has created and the rise in overall debt therefore this is not real GDP, it is future production brought forward, future earnings spent today and stolen through the mechanism of financialization.

The prevalence non self liquidating debt is the sign that future wealth is being stolen wholesale.
If the lifetime return on an asset does not cover both the interest and principle of the debt then that debt is destructive.

If the cost of financial intermediation is greater than the value of the end product of that intermediation than to put it bluntly you are screwed.

Wall Street makes nothing other than ever more creative and devious ways to steal everyone's future prosperity and slice off the vig for themselves. I'm not going to go into whether GDP is a meaningful metric for anything right now, it isn't but that is for another bed time story.

Eventually everyone is in a service industry, everyone is giving each other expensive hair cuts or extracting rent, smugly remarking on how rich and clever they are, and then bang it all disappears because none of it was real anyway.

Back on topic, if you visit China rather than rely on western media you get a different perspective, In China everything is controlled but on the ground everything and anything is possible, In the West everything is supposed to be free and protected by constitutions and rights but everything is controlled and so much is impossible, rights or no rights.

On a very simple level Chinas 1.2 billion people have much more than 4 times the brainpower of the USA, there is no way that the USA can maintain its dominance and monopoly of Tech or Finance, software is actually a low value added service which currently is overpriced and finance is too

I have no fear of China. I fear that the USA is going the wrong way.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

yeah deplorable blue collars, you just need to learn to code.

In case you hadn't noticed Wall Street does not generate real wealth, There is a direct correlation between so called GDP that the FIRE sector has created and the rise in overall debt therefore this is not real GDP, it is future production brought forward, future earnings spent today and stolen through the mechanism of financialization.

The prevalence non self liquidating debt is the sign that future wealth is being stolen wholesale.
If the lifetime return on an asset does not cover both the interest and principle of the debt then that debt is destructive.

If the cost of financial intermediation is greater than the value of the end product of that intermediation than to put it bluntly you are screwed.

Wall Street makes nothing other than ever more creative and devious ways to steal everyone's future prosperity and slice off the vig for themselves. I'm not going to go into whether GDP is a meaningful metric for anything right now, it isn't but that is for another bed time story.

Eventually everyone is in a service industry, everyone is giving each other expensive hair cuts or extracting rent, smugly remarking on how rich and clever they are, and then bang it all disappears because none of it was real anyway.

Back on topic, if you visit China rather than rely on western media you get a different perspective, In China everything is controlled but on the ground everything and anything is possible, In the West everything is supposed to be free and protected by constitutions and rights but everything is controlled and so much is impossible, rights or no rights.

On a very simple level Chinas 1.2 billion people have much more than 4 times the brainpower of the USA, there is no way that the USA can maintain its dominance and monopoly of Tech or Finance, software is actually a low value added service which currently is overpriced and finance is too

I have no fear of China. I fear that the USA is going the wrong way.

Are you implying there is no blue collar work outside of manufacturing? This isn't really the case is it? You still have construction, plumbing, electricians, and so on. Many blue collar working class jobs remain and the people in those lines of work can actually make a pretty decent income too. You don't need manufacturing to have blue collar workers.

You're saying a whole lot of different things at once with regards to Wall Street and GDP but if I read correctly you basically just don't like financial derivatives? You're not wrong that sector could do with more regulation, but how are you defining "real wealth"? For example if I short a stock I am not actually buying anything, I am taking out a contract which is effectively betting money on the price going down - shorting is itself derivative trading. But if that stock does decrease in value and I sell my short position, I can make a tidy profit. Likewise I can possibly make good money on the commodities markets using futures contracts if I predict the market correctly, another form of derivative. Some clever people who predicted the housing crash of 2008 made good money from credit default swaps (the book and movie The Big Short is an interesting look at this).

Regarding China, what you say about things not being controlled much on the ground used to be true, but I seriously don't think it will be for much longer with the social credit system coming in next year. That policy will allow the state to monitor and control everyone in the nation. It's like they have a policeman in everyone's pocket. This won't necessarily affect their trade with the West, but what will is China's upcoming ban on VPN's and their ability to insert government officials into foreign private businesses with Chinese offices, a power previously limited only to Chinese companies.

 

[Xorkoth]

Also, tech is a valid industry, and differs greatly from Wall Street. People in tech industries produce all sorts of things of value to society.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

Also, tech is a valid industry, and differs greatly from Wall Street. People in tech industries produce all sorts of things of value to society.

Wall Street invests a lot of money into those tech companies too, there's a reason they go public.

I completely understand why people have a dim view of Wall Street especially after 2008 but to act like financial services doesn't make any contribution to the economy is simply wrong.

 

[atara]

The scaremongering about China is basically to shift the attention away from all the real evil that the U.S. government is doing. That's what McCarthyism was about, the fear of the Red Tide, and all the subsequent propaganda about communism

Yeah, fuck the Uyghur, amirite?