7 ms·

The World, Built by China

89 points by cromulent 8y ago

baybal2 8y ago
Exceptional piece of research. I'm still dazzled why the realisation of what China's "grand plan" was, came so late into mainstream political culture in the West. Few month ago, I wrote a piece saying that China was long preparing (at least since 1991,) an economic war chest in case the country will be hit by sanctions like North Korea was, or even worse. A big portion of all national level economic programs since 1991 were there to aid and act upon that strategy. And they weren't even trying to conceal the original strategy paper, and if one can get access to state archives, they will find a lot of evidence that Chinese state did fully commit to it as early as 1992. The motto of the program is "the primacy of expansionism." They correctly identified that US domination in 20th century came from how they moulded the world after WW2. Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that: 1. "The world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan. 2. This is the last opportunity to act before US takes action So, all those impressive t-bill, cash, gold, and FX reserves that the West gave China in the last 30 years, will now be used by China to buy its own Pax Sinica
- oblio 8y ago
  > Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that "the world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan. That's an awfully Western centric view of things. The West didn't "waste itself" on things, they just plain didn't care about various regions, for various reasons. They babysat Germany and Japan after WW2 but Iraq and Afghanistan were comparatively thrown to the wolves. China mostly went where the West wouldn't go. I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is). And I'm neither American, nor Western, nor Chinese, so I'd consider myself a reasonably unbiased obverser.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    >I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is). Indeed, as a strategy it is as straightforward and rational as it can be. When it is a detestable communist party that continuously follows upon plain, and rational strategies, and Western civil states can not despite their best efforts, you begin to question the rationale for living in the West. This in big part was the reason for my move to China. And the constantly growing expat community in China is the proof that I am not alone having that idea.
- adventured 8y ago
  > Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," The West hasn't wasted itself on such any more than China is presently wasting itself on wars on X. Your premise falls apart when you look at what China is doing. China currently has equivalent wars going on against: drugs, porn, jokes, speech & expression broadly, homosexuality, neighboring territories, Islam, all forms of protest, worker rights, political activism, privacy, social rebellion, journalism and news. You know the Chinese war-on-all-things has gone wrong when the Communist Party is disappearing Marxist students who are activists for worker rights.[1] Or consider just one recent example [2] of their long war on porn. Offering $86,000 rewards for citizens to rat on their fellow citizens regarding porn: “I'm not going to work today,” wrote one potential porn-buster on Weibo. “I'll look everywhere for materials so I can report anyone who I find disagreeable. There’s money to be made in reporting, so what am I doing working myself to death?” "In August, the 27-year-old founder of video app Hot TV was served with a 7-year prison sentence for hosting 1,579 illegal videos on the platform, 28 of which were defined as pornographic – that’s one year in prison for every four indecent videos." "On Friday People's Daily, known as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a glowing report on (mostly retired) members of a community in the Chinese city of Chengdu that spend 90 per cent of their day snooping around their neighbours' backyards and propagating the “Clean up the Pornographic, Strike the Illegal” campaign." [1] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-communist-partys-latest-unlikely-target-young-marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun... [2] https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/china-offering-it-citizens-us86000-snitch-porn/article/2174646 https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/china-offering-it-ci...
  - baybal2 8y ago
    I don't challenge that the party is indeed messed up, and is shooting itself in the leg 2 times out of 3 when it comes to internal policy, but even with that in mind, they are still definitely doing better at strategic scale resource allocation in apples to apples comparison.
    - adventured 8y ago
      > they are still definitely doing better at strategic scale resource allocation in apples to apples comparison There's zero evidence to support your claim. The boom that the last 30-40 years of global trade and their joining the WTO produced (ie filling in the extreme slack in their economy), just as well may have papered over immense inefficiencies and wasted uses of resources during the boom phase. The next 10-15 years will be a far better judge of how good the Chinese bureaucracy is at managing intricately via command & control economics. When you have hyper fast growth and vast slack to fill in, you can afford a lot of mistakes - which mostly go unnoticed. So far it's not looking good, in just the span of one decade they've become the world's most indebted nation as a means to continue faking their expansion. They've found they can no longer grow their economy acceptably without rapid debt expansion. The bureacracy keeps rolling from one looming asset disaster to the next trying to keep it all propped up, while households load up on debt at record pace. Sounds a lot like some of the more foolish financial mistakes made in the West over the last few decades. When you have to lock-down nearly all capital from leaving your nation, you know something very bad is happening in terms of resource allocation. Don't confuse temporarily having a bonanza of resources to spend, with being brilliant at how you spend it, they're two different things. As the slack has filled in, their having to turn to extreme debt to continue on the path they set indicates they've made structurally incorrect choices. That rapid debt acquisition means the clock is running out on their former approach. They can't come close to accomplishing what they want to with the resources they actually have to spend, so they've switched to borrowing very aggressively from future output (a future with a rapidly declining worker base to pay for it all), which is an indication of incompetence at resource utilization. The Belt and Road is a flailing, expensive mess so far. It's more likely to end up as the world's most expensive boondoggle. Their biggest industries - such as steel, iron, aluminum, cement, etc - are mostly examples of incompetence at resource allocation. They've been over-producing to a great degree in their state-controlled industrial segments for a long time. There's nothing efficient or prudent about it, it's a very expensive way to run industries (instead of shifting those resources to where they're needed for sustainable growth, versus subsidizing unneeded production). I'll take Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Denmark and Canada against China any day of the week in terms of effecient resource allocation for the betterment of society. Not to mention those nations all have tremendous protections when it comes to human rights. The standard of living and quality of life is astronomical at the median in those nations compared to China. China still has half a billion people living on $5 per day or less. They have around 250 million people living on $3 per day or less. The bottom half billion people in China are among the poorest people on earth, and have among the fewest human rights. Human rights are a required top-line consideration for social well-being.
pasta 8y ago
Have they ever not been? I think through history China always have been a superpower (with some short exceptions). Edit: this might have been the longest time China was not a superpower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
- i_dont_know_ 8y ago
  Really good point. The industrial revolution pushed "the west" pretty far in terms of power/economics but there were thousands of years of human history prior to it. In that longer view of history, China has always been a major player, and the last 150-ish years have been a fluke that's being corrected. But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    > But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well. That's one way to look at it. The other would be to yield to the continuum a bit, to see that growth (technological, military, economic) usually doesn't happen overnight. Even if Iran were on the cusp of again being a world power, it wouldn't happen overnight.
    - konschubert 8y ago
      I think due to climate change it's pretty unlikely that Iran will become a superpower.
      - mercer 8y ago
        Interesting. Could anyone chime in on how various countries/superpowers will be affected by climate change? Or point me to an article that hypothesizes about this?
yazr 8y ago
Well - how did China finance all these investments ?! (start rant) The simple answer is "China consumed less, and invested more". The US can tax fuel and SUV, and invest in green energy. The EU can tax London's banks and offshore, it can slash its agriculture subsidies, and invest in tech and innovation. The Western world simply prefers bigger cars and exotic vacations. (end rant. Goes online to order Sushi for lunch)
- yuy910616 8y ago
  I think it's a little more than that. Let's not forget that democracy is a system design to move slow. Whereas China can move fast because it has a strong government that can disregard popular opinion to an extent. With this you create a government that is hyper-rich and very investment heavy. The incredible amount Chinese government spend on building infrastructure would simply not be passed in any democracy
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Democracies don't move especially slowly, they can reorient themselves at politically breakneck speed, if the people agree on something. While they move like turtles on contested minor issues a democracy on, eg, wartime footing is capable of terrifying speed and precision. Lots of centralised systems have crumbled before the baffling hydra of democracy. The real issue in America is voters appear to have temporarily lost interest in infrastructure spending in favor of other uses of public money. One other development that is quite startling in historic terms is a lot of modern western democracies is their relation with energy. I wouldn't be surprised if Germany was one of the first industrial superpowers of all time to turn its nose up at using a cheap energy source to further its economic successes.
    - sgift 8y ago
      > eg, wartime footing is capable of terrifying speed and precision. Wartime footing usually disables many of the checks and balances used by democracies in favor of "we have to go faster now".
  - 8y ago
hugh4life 8y ago
"The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness." https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html
- coldtea 8y ago
  "Assertiveness is a skill regularly referred to in social and communication skills training. Being assertive means being able to stand up for your own or other people's rights in a calm and positive way, without being either aggressive, or passively accepting 'wrong'." Sounds about right.
- tanilama 8y ago
  More like Western inconfidence, or the anxiety of losing
glasslion 8y ago
NYTimes display the power output as a bubble chart on PC and bar chart on mobile. I was shocked how misleading the bubble chart could be, The biggest dam is 3x larger than the smallest, but the it looks like only 1.5x larger on the bubble chart.
- athenot 8y ago
  Bubble charts show the value in the area of the circle, not its diameter. The chart is accurate but we're accustomed to seeing inaccurate charts using diameters, usually to sensationalize an article.
  - danso 8y ago
    The difficulty for humans to interpret and compare circular areas is one of the reasons IIRC why Tufte and others are so adamant against pie charts.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Surprises me - pie charts are properly used only to display proportions, and in a pie chart the area is proportional to the angle is proportional to the length of the arc, so there should be much less scope for confusion? We should all have good intuitions for our share of the pie or pizza, no...? :-)
- FabHK 8y ago
  Yes, I find bubble charts super annoying - it's not clear whether you're looking at the volume of a 3D ball, the area of a 2D sphere, or just the height. Using the first two conventions often underplays the actual difference - our brain doesn't seem to be wired that way. A ball with twice the diameter is 8 times as voluminous, but on paper it seems just a tad bigger.
perseusprime11 8y ago
China is a country with more than a billion hard-working people. This should not be a surprise!
- danso 8y ago
  India’s population rivals China’s and yet AFAIK is not considered to be the kind of superpower that China and the U.S. are.
  - perseusprime11 8y ago
    Are they as hard working as Chinese?
    - danso 8y ago
      The premise of the article is not that 1+ billion people all decided to work really hard.
  - bobosha 8y ago
    India is at least a decade, perhaps two decades, behind China in its development cycle.
    - Markoff 8y ago
      you are very optimistic about status of India with 20 years behind China
  - beerlord 8y ago
    How does the average IQ compare in India vs China? China has been running a eugenics program for 30 years, starting with the One Child Policy to discourage rural peasants from having children, to encouraging urbanisation and university education to allow assortative mating for the highly intelligent. Now, they have relaxed the One Child Policy so those who can pay can have more children, further allowing the intellectual elite to expand. All of these things are thoroughly politically incorrect, but they seem to be working...
cromulent 8y ago
Someone changed the title, it's actually "The World, Built by China".
carlmr 8y ago
>Beijing is heavily focused on its neighbors, lending them money for extensive road-building projects. Pakistan is running out of money to repay the loans, part of a broader pattern of what critics call China’s “debt trap” diplomacy. If you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", you know that the US has been following this strategy for years now. China is just copying a very workable model that the US pioneered. You have your banks giving loans to pay your companies to build projects that another country can't pay for (and you know it). Should they for some reason pay for it you made your bank some money and a lot of money for your construction company. Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money.
- yuy910616 8y ago
  Nice. Love that book
- badpun 8y ago
  > Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money. Or, the country defaults (like Poland in the eighties), and negotiates a partial cancellation of the debt, in exchange for adopting some of the recommended economic policies (in case of Poland, these were the Chicago-school liberal policies).
  - carlmr 8y ago
    True, that's a third case, but rare, and still gives you some degree of influence for your money.
    - screye 8y ago
      Or you ask the country to surrender land over to the lending company. As seen with Srilanka handing over a port to China.
- 8y ago
NicoJuicy 8y ago
What worries me the most: - Lending for infrastructure ( sometimes not even used/required ones) and they then build it themselves. It's just a method for having extra inflation. With none of the employment/knowledge advantages for the country involved ( loans through "the bank of china"). It is a death trap.
ramblerman 8y ago
China has every right to provide construction and loans to other countries. Pulling third world countries into the modern world through expensive infrastructure is not the worst thing even if it enriches the Chinese. In fact this kind of economic colonialism has one big benefit, being economic in nature it prefers peace. The US could learn a thing or two about this flavor of nation building
- OldManAndTheCpp 8y ago
  The US did acknowledge this: the Marshall Plan was clearly an effort by the US to dually resore the homeland of many Americans and to bind the broken or beaten powers closely to the US. The term “Greatest Generation” is a bit passé, but the USA immediately after WWII was legitimately great.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Yes. Being German, I'm as critical of the current US policy and government as anyone - but I am incredibly grateful to and mindful of the Marshall plan and what it did for Germany and Europe.
agumonkey 8y ago
Interesting how money is defining the new world
onetimemanytime 8y ago
The good news for us is that China is /will be checked by at least India. Japan, S Korea, Vietnam etc also be watching. Give India a couple of decades of good management and they'll be strong enough
- ReptileMan 8y ago
  India had probably 5 decades head start on China and they started with big pool of western educated statesmen with know how. Also India didn't suffer much in WWII compared to china while china had civil war and Japanese occupation. The development of China is amazing. I am not sure India will be able to catch up (or be allowed to) - China are probably not keen on having a new superpower next door, so they will do their best to thwart it.
  - oblio 8y ago
    India will probably not be alone. There's plenty of countries who are fearful of China's rise (the US, Japan, etc.).
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    China supports Pakistan, a local rival to India. But then USA supports a lot of countries that are scared of China's rise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So... USA can help India catch up at least when it comes to military and fill in any gaps with allies /US firepower should a war happen meanwhile. China cannot stop India, but India can stop India. If a war starts (not likely,) China will be virtually alone, maybe just NK joins them. At least Taiwan, Japan, South Korea have super-modern weapons and the rest of the countries can tie China's hands.
cnfteol 8y ago
people should actually consider the sinosphere than just china alone and include hk taiwan sg and the koreas already in it the biggest player not in the sinosphere yet is japan and china is already working on that japan weakness is apparent and honhai takeover of sharp and attempt at toshiba memory unit should be seen in this light my guess is once the gdp tables flip within a decade japan too will see the writing on the wall and it will not be a controversial choice for the japanese either
UnpopOpinion 8y ago
Too often this discussion falls into the oft-repeated tropes about how a evil west is “containing” China (he same claims historically were made by Germany, Russia and Japan in 1913, 1917 and 1933 respectively). Or the claims that the West just wants to keep China down, and it’s China’s duty to grow because racism of west/ greed of Japan / lebensr .. cough... (I mean, one China policy). While most of the comments here are focused on the economic elements of china’s rise - the political implications here are what are really scary to me. China is basically a totalitarian state with a capitalist escape valve. Moral and social decisions are made by a strong central state, and while corporations toe the party line, they are free to do what they want, and the government will pour money into them. The authors seem to think this is a new phenomena, but historically that’s not too far off from how many totalitarian states worked - most notably the NSDAP. The NSDAP led a resurgence in German manfuacturing by backing their corporations, and corporations embraced the kultur promoted by the party. People prospered, and were free to act in their economic self-interest as long as they toed the party line. The Chinese have developed something that the previous states never had - technology that supresses dissenting voices. The levers and restrictions that they can deploy at will are so much greater now then various fascist and communist governments enjoyed in the past. Let’s say that someone in the government decides that the South China Sea is worth killing over. Any voice of dissent in China will be shut down via the “Social Score” and it’s built in ability to marginalize people who act in a way inconsistent with the state. China will claim that this is preferable to the infighting that is rocking the western world. Historically Liberal Democracies have proven that untrue, but it feels like Liberalism itself is under threat.
Markoff 8y ago
superpower where there are zero children playgrounds even in capital and you can't let your child outside because of toxic air, okay... glad i moved away from such superpower paradise and my child suffered there only for one year

89 points by cromulent 8y ago

Exceptional piece of research. I'm still dazzled why the realisation of what China's "grand plan" was, came so late into mainstream political culture in the West. Few month ago, I wrote a piece saying that China was long preparing (at least since 1991,) an economic war chest in case the country will be hit by sanctions like North Korea was, or even worse. A big portion of all national level economic programs since 1991 were there to aid and act upon that strategy. And they weren't even trying to conceal the original strategy paper, and if one can get access to state archives, they will find a lot of evidence that Chinese state did fully commit to it as early as 1992. The motto of the program is "the primacy of expansionism." They correctly identified that US domination in 20th century came from how they moulded the world after WW2. Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that: 1. "The world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan. 2. This is the last opportunity to act before US takes action So, all those impressive t-bill, cash, gold, and FX reserves that the West gave China in the last 30 years, will now be used by China to buy its own Pax Sinica

oblio 8y ago
> Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that "the world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan. That's an awfully Western centric view of things. The West didn't "waste itself" on things, they just plain didn't care about various regions, for various reasons. They babysat Germany and Japan after WW2 but Iraq and Afghanistan were comparatively thrown to the wolves. China mostly went where the West wouldn't go. I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is). And I'm neither American, nor Western, nor Chinese, so I'd consider myself a reasonably unbiased obverser.
- baybal2 8y ago
  >I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is). Indeed, as a strategy it is as straightforward and rational as it can be. When it is a detestable communist party that continuously follows upon plain, and rational strategies, and Western civil states can not despite their best efforts, you begin to question the rationale for living in the West. This in big part was the reason for my move to China. And the constantly growing expat community in China is the proof that I am not alone having that idea.
adventured 8y ago
> Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," The West hasn't wasted itself on such any more than China is presently wasting itself on wars on X. Your premise falls apart when you look at what China is doing. China currently has equivalent wars going on against: drugs, porn, jokes, speech & expression broadly, homosexuality, neighboring territories, Islam, all forms of protest, worker rights, political activism, privacy, social rebellion, journalism and news. You know the Chinese war-on-all-things has gone wrong when the Communist Party is disappearing Marxist students who are activists for worker rights.[1] Or consider just one recent example [2] of their long war on porn. Offering $86,000 rewards for citizens to rat on their fellow citizens regarding porn: “I'm not going to work today,” wrote one potential porn-buster on Weibo. “I'll look everywhere for materials so I can report anyone who I find disagreeable. There’s money to be made in reporting, so what am I doing working myself to death?” "In August, the 27-year-old founder of video app Hot TV was served with a 7-year prison sentence for hosting 1,579 illegal videos on the platform, 28 of which were defined as pornographic – that’s one year in prison for every four indecent videos." "On Friday People's Daily, known as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a glowing report on (mostly retired) members of a community in the Chinese city of Chengdu that spend 90 per cent of their day snooping around their neighbours' backyards and propagating the “Clean up the Pornographic, Strike the Illegal” campaign." [1] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-communist-partys-latest-unlikely-target-young-marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun... [2] https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/china-offering-it-citizens-us86000-snitch-porn/article/2174646 https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/china-offering-it-ci...
- baybal2 8y ago
  I don't challenge that the party is indeed messed up, and is shooting itself in the leg 2 times out of 3 when it comes to internal policy, but even with that in mind, they are still definitely doing better at strategic scale resource allocation in apples to apples comparison.
  - adventured 8y ago
    > they are still definitely doing better at strategic scale resource allocation in apples to apples comparison There's zero evidence to support your claim. The boom that the last 30-40 years of global trade and their joining the WTO produced (ie filling in the extreme slack in their economy), just as well may have papered over immense inefficiencies and wasted uses of resources during the boom phase. The next 10-15 years will be a far better judge of how good the Chinese bureaucracy is at managing intricately via command & control economics. When you have hyper fast growth and vast slack to fill in, you can afford a lot of mistakes - which mostly go unnoticed. So far it's not looking good, in just the span of one decade they've become the world's most indebted nation as a means to continue faking their expansion. They've found they can no longer grow their economy acceptably without rapid debt expansion. The bureacracy keeps rolling from one looming asset disaster to the next trying to keep it all propped up, while households load up on debt at record pace. Sounds a lot like some of the more foolish financial mistakes made in the West over the last few decades. When you have to lock-down nearly all capital from leaving your nation, you know something very bad is happening in terms of resource allocation. Don't confuse temporarily having a bonanza of resources to spend, with being brilliant at how you spend it, they're two different things. As the slack has filled in, their having to turn to extreme debt to continue on the path they set indicates they've made structurally incorrect choices. That rapid debt acquisition means the clock is running out on their former approach. They can't come close to accomplishing what they want to with the resources they actually have to spend, so they've switched to borrowing very aggressively from future output (a future with a rapidly declining worker base to pay for it all), which is an indication of incompetence at resource utilization. The Belt and Road is a flailing, expensive mess so far. It's more likely to end up as the world's most expensive boondoggle. Their biggest industries - such as steel, iron, aluminum, cement, etc - are mostly examples of incompetence at resource allocation. They've been over-producing to a great degree in their state-controlled industrial segments for a long time. There's nothing efficient or prudent about it, it's a very expensive way to run industries (instead of shifting those resources to where they're needed for sustainable growth, versus subsidizing unneeded production). I'll take Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Denmark and Canada against China any day of the week in terms of effecient resource allocation for the betterment of society. Not to mention those nations all have tremendous protections when it comes to human rights. The standard of living and quality of life is astronomical at the median in those nations compared to China. China still has half a billion people living on $5 per day or less. They have around 250 million people living on $3 per day or less. The bottom half billion people in China are among the poorest people on earth, and have among the fewest human rights. Human rights are a required top-line consideration for social well-being.

pasta 8y ago

Have they ever not been? I think through history China always have been a superpower (with some short exceptions). Edit: this might have been the longest time China was not a superpower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

i_dont_know_ 8y ago
Really good point. The industrial revolution pushed "the west" pretty far in terms of power/economics but there were thousands of years of human history prior to it. In that longer view of history, China has always been a major player, and the last 150-ish years have been a fluke that's being corrected. But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  > But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well. That's one way to look at it. The other would be to yield to the continuum a bit, to see that growth (technological, military, economic) usually doesn't happen overnight. Even if Iran were on the cusp of again being a world power, it wouldn't happen overnight.
  - konschubert 8y ago
    I think due to climate change it's pretty unlikely that Iran will become a superpower.
    - mercer 8y ago
      Interesting. Could anyone chime in on how various countries/superpowers will be affected by climate change? Or point me to an article that hypothesizes about this?

yazr 8y ago

Well - how did China finance all these investments ?! (start rant) The simple answer is "China consumed less, and invested more". The US can tax fuel and SUV, and invest in green energy. The EU can tax London's banks and offshore, it can slash its agriculture subsidies, and invest in tech and innovation. The Western world simply prefers bigger cars and exotic vacations. (end rant. Goes online to order Sushi for lunch)

yuy910616 8y ago
I think it's a little more than that. Let's not forget that democracy is a system design to move slow. Whereas China can move fast because it has a strong government that can disregard popular opinion to an extent. With this you create a government that is hyper-rich and very investment heavy. The incredible amount Chinese government spend on building infrastructure would simply not be passed in any democracy
- roenxi 8y ago
  Democracies don't move especially slowly, they can reorient themselves at politically breakneck speed, if the people agree on something. While they move like turtles on contested minor issues a democracy on, eg, wartime footing is capable of terrifying speed and precision. Lots of centralised systems have crumbled before the baffling hydra of democracy. The real issue in America is voters appear to have temporarily lost interest in infrastructure spending in favor of other uses of public money. One other development that is quite startling in historic terms is a lot of modern western democracies is their relation with energy. I wouldn't be surprised if Germany was one of the first industrial superpowers of all time to turn its nose up at using a cheap energy source to further its economic successes.
  - sgift 8y ago
    > eg, wartime footing is capable of terrifying speed and precision. Wartime footing usually disables many of the checks and balances used by democracies in favor of "we have to go faster now".
- 8y ago

hugh4life 8y ago

"The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness." https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/forum.html

coldtea 8y ago
"Assertiveness is a skill regularly referred to in social and communication skills training. Being assertive means being able to stand up for your own or other people's rights in a calm and positive way, without being either aggressive, or passively accepting 'wrong'." Sounds about right.
tanilama 8y ago
More like Western inconfidence, or the anxiety of losing

glasslion 8y ago

NYTimes display the power output as a bubble chart on PC and bar chart on mobile. I was shocked how misleading the bubble chart could be, The biggest dam is 3x larger than the smallest, but the it looks like only 1.5x larger on the bubble chart.

athenot 8y ago
Bubble charts show the value in the area of the circle, not its diameter. The chart is accurate but we're accustomed to seeing inaccurate charts using diameters, usually to sensationalize an article.
- danso 8y ago
  The difficulty for humans to interpret and compare circular areas is one of the reasons IIRC why Tufte and others are so adamant against pie charts.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Surprises me - pie charts are properly used only to display proportions, and in a pie chart the area is proportional to the angle is proportional to the length of the arc, so there should be much less scope for confusion? We should all have good intuitions for our share of the pie or pizza, no...? :-)
FabHK 8y ago
Yes, I find bubble charts super annoying - it's not clear whether you're looking at the volume of a 3D ball, the area of a 2D sphere, or just the height. Using the first two conventions often underplays the actual difference - our brain doesn't seem to be wired that way. A ball with twice the diameter is 8 times as voluminous, but on paper it seems just a tad bigger.

perseusprime11 8y ago

China is a country with more than a billion hard-working people. This should not be a surprise!

danso 8y ago
India’s population rivals China’s and yet AFAIK is not considered to be the kind of superpower that China and the U.S. are.
- perseusprime11 8y ago
  Are they as hard working as Chinese?
  - danso 8y ago
    The premise of the article is not that 1+ billion people all decided to work really hard.
- bobosha 8y ago
  India is at least a decade, perhaps two decades, behind China in its development cycle.
  - Markoff 8y ago
    you are very optimistic about status of India with 20 years behind China
- beerlord 8y ago
  How does the average IQ compare in India vs China? China has been running a eugenics program for 30 years, starting with the One Child Policy to discourage rural peasants from having children, to encouraging urbanisation and university education to allow assortative mating for the highly intelligent. Now, they have relaxed the One Child Policy so those who can pay can have more children, further allowing the intellectual elite to expand. All of these things are thoroughly politically incorrect, but they seem to be working...

cromulent 8y ago

Someone changed the title, it's actually "The World, Built by China".

carlmr 8y ago

>Beijing is heavily focused on its neighbors, lending them money for extensive road-building projects. Pakistan is running out of money to repay the loans, part of a broader pattern of what critics call China’s “debt trap” diplomacy. If you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", you know that the US has been following this strategy for years now. China is just copying a very workable model that the US pioneered. You have your banks giving loans to pay your companies to build projects that another country can't pay for (and you know it). Should they for some reason pay for it you made your bank some money and a lot of money for your construction company. Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money.

yuy910616 8y ago
Nice. Love that book
badpun 8y ago
> Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money. Or, the country defaults (like Poland in the eighties), and negotiates a partial cancellation of the debt, in exchange for adopting some of the recommended economic policies (in case of Poland, these were the Chicago-school liberal policies).
- carlmr 8y ago
  True, that's a third case, but rare, and still gives you some degree of influence for your money.
  - screye 8y ago
    Or you ask the country to surrender land over to the lending company. As seen with Srilanka handing over a port to China.
8y ago

NicoJuicy 8y ago

What worries me the most: - Lending for infrastructure ( sometimes not even used/required ones) and they then build it themselves. It's just a method for having extra inflation. With none of the employment/knowledge advantages for the country involved ( loans through "the bank of china"). It is a death trap.

ramblerman 8y ago

China has every right to provide construction and loans to other countries. Pulling third world countries into the modern world through expensive infrastructure is not the worst thing even if it enriches the Chinese. In fact this kind of economic colonialism has one big benefit, being economic in nature it prefers peace. The US could learn a thing or two about this flavor of nation building

OldManAndTheCpp 8y ago
The US did acknowledge this: the Marshall Plan was clearly an effort by the US to dually resore the homeland of many Americans and to bind the broken or beaten powers closely to the US. The term “Greatest Generation” is a bit passé, but the USA immediately after WWII was legitimately great.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Yes. Being German, I'm as critical of the current US policy and government as anyone - but I am incredibly grateful to and mindful of the Marshall plan and what it did for Germany and Europe.

agumonkey 8y ago

Interesting how money is defining the new world

onetimemanytime 8y ago

The good news for us is that China is /will be checked by at least India. Japan, S Korea, Vietnam etc also be watching. Give India a couple of decades of good management and they'll be strong enough

ReptileMan 8y ago
India had probably 5 decades head start on China and they started with big pool of western educated statesmen with know how. Also India didn't suffer much in WWII compared to china while china had civil war and Japanese occupation. The development of China is amazing. I am not sure India will be able to catch up (or be allowed to) - China are probably not keen on having a new superpower next door, so they will do their best to thwart it.
- oblio 8y ago
  India will probably not be alone. There's plenty of countries who are fearful of China's rise (the US, Japan, etc.).
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  China supports Pakistan, a local rival to India. But then USA supports a lot of countries that are scared of China's rise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So... USA can help India catch up at least when it comes to military and fill in any gaps with allies /US firepower should a war happen meanwhile. China cannot stop India, but India can stop India. If a war starts (not likely,) China will be virtually alone, maybe just NK joins them. At least Taiwan, Japan, South Korea have super-modern weapons and the rest of the countries can tie China's hands.

cnfteol 8y ago

people should actually consider the sinosphere than just china alone and include hk taiwan sg and the koreas already in it the biggest player not in the sinosphere yet is japan and china is already working on that japan weakness is apparent and honhai takeover of sharp and attempt at toshiba memory unit should be seen in this light my guess is once the gdp tables flip within a decade japan too will see the writing on the wall and it will not be a controversial choice for the japanese either

UnpopOpinion 8y ago

Too often this discussion falls into the oft-repeated tropes about how a evil west is “containing” China (he same claims historically were made by Germany, Russia and Japan in 1913, 1917 and 1933 respectively). Or the claims that the West just wants to keep China down, and it’s China’s duty to grow because racism of west/ greed of Japan / lebensr .. cough... (I mean, one China policy). While most of the comments here are focused on the economic elements of china’s rise - the political implications here are what are really scary to me. China is basically a totalitarian state with a capitalist escape valve. Moral and social decisions are made by a strong central state, and while corporations toe the party line, they are free to do what they want, and the government will pour money into them. The authors seem to think this is a new phenomena, but historically that’s not too far off from how many totalitarian states worked - most notably the NSDAP. The NSDAP led a resurgence in German manfuacturing by backing their corporations, and corporations embraced the kultur promoted by the party. People prospered, and were free to act in their economic self-interest as long as they toed the party line. The Chinese have developed something that the previous states never had - technology that supresses dissenting voices. The levers and restrictions that they can deploy at will are so much greater now then various fascist and communist governments enjoyed in the past. Let’s say that someone in the government decides that the South China Sea is worth killing over. Any voice of dissent in China will be shut down via the “Social Score” and it’s built in ability to marginalize people who act in a way inconsistent with the state. China will claim that this is preferable to the infighting that is rocking the western world. Historically Liberal Democracies have proven that untrue, but it feels like Liberalism itself is under threat.

Markoff 8y ago

superpower where there are zero children playgrounds even in capital and you can't let your child outside because of toxic air, okay... glad i moved away from such superpower paradise and my child suffered there only for one year