The world economic and political order is shifting under our feet. As the United States of America, racked by injustice and inequality, teeters, a new rising superpower on the other side of the Pacific is prepared to pick up the torch and lead the world in the 21st century. While American businesses shuffle money around and close factories, this Asian Tiger, with its glittering skylines and high-speed trains, is building the future and innovating on a scale we can barely even begin to comprehend. It might already be too late for once-mighty America to retain its place atop the world economy, unless it makes absolutely dramatic changes.
Yes, it's 1991, “Ninja Rap” has taken the world by storm, and Japan is on the verge of taking over the world.
Okay, maybe it really is different with China. It is a bigger country than Japan by several orders of magnitude, and is it far more willing to throw its weight around on the international stage. But I feel like I've lived through this already.
David Frum argues that the Chinese century isn’t even close to a sure thing. God knows the United States has its serious problems, but so does China - and, unlike in the US, its people are not allowed to discuss them openly:
…In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.
The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. advantages are persistently underestimated. The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends.
Beckley is a voracious reader of specialist Chinese military journals and economic reports. And, he argues, many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
[…]
China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true. But as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.
On April 28, the Financial Times reported that the suspiciously delayed Chinese census would reveal a population decline from 2010 to 2020, the first since the state-caused famines of the 1960s. The FT report was hastily disavowed by Chinese authorities, but in a strangely ambiguous way. Whatever the census ultimately claims, and regardless of whether it is believed, the story points to two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.
As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises. How much was borrowed? Nobody knows, because everybody lies. What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.
There is a long history of Americans and Europeans looking at some rising dictatorship, seeing the facade they want to show the world, and believing that is where the future lies. If I was writing this Substack in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, you wouldn't be reading it because the internet hasn't been invented yet. But chances are you'd be looking at the rapidly industrialising USSR, or a Germany getting back on its feet thanks to that guy with the funny moustache, and wondering why the US or Britain seemingly can't get out of its own way.
That it was all built on sand wouldn't become obvious for quite some time.
Like I said, this time might indeed be different. No world order lasts forever, and even if everything else were equal, a country with three times the population seems well positioned to surpass the Americans at some point. But nothing is inevitable.
The Chinese Communist Party certainly make any allies doing this crap:
Let's jump from 1991 to 2002, when a man who just wants to have his say about the goings on in the world, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, is locked out of the mainstream media and feels like he is just screaming into the void. Fortunately, a revolutionary new form of media, the weblog - better known as the blog - has become popular, and even the loneliest weirdo can publish his commentary for all the world to read.
That man was me. Nineteen years later, the former President of the United States is finally catching up:
Donald Trump's revolutionary new social media platform is…a blog. He has invented the blog.
And, yes, everyone who has seen The Office made the same joke:
I guess that’s the beauty of the internet. Even when you’re kicked off every big platform, it’s relatively easy to just create your own.
But I wonder why he hasn’t just gone to Substack, charged for subscriptions, and watched the money roll in from the Trump cultists. I mean, progressives are already mad at Substack because reasons, so it’s not like Trump using that service would hurt their reputation that much more.
Maybe he’s just not a very good businessman? Just throwing that out there.
At some point we’ll stop calling Steph Curry “the greatest shooter of all time” by removing the qualifier, “shooter.”