8 ms·

A New Cold War Has Begun (2019)

81 points by ALee 6y ago

troughway 6y ago
Begun? You have to be tonedeaf or willfully ignoring the amount of IP that Chinese corporate spies have outright stolen from North America over the last few decades. Let’s be honest - we have strong cyber security considerations because of very few, but very known bad actors. China is near the top of that list and has been for awhile. Nevermind all the other security considerations.
- jstanley 6y ago
  Or, in other words, we've always been at war with Eastasia?
trumpoline 6y ago
Funny to see how these two corrupt 3rd world countries are at “war” with each other, while the rest of the world couldnt care less.
riffraff 6y ago
>Because, in a very different way than the old Soviet system, the Chinese system—the more authoritarian it gets—is over time more prone to crack up than America’s. I don't understand: what does the author think the difference is? I may have read the article without enough attention but I didn't get it. If anything, I got the idea it's less likely to crack.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The intuition is that freer political systems are both more challenging and less rewarding to subvert, because no individual person or group has overwhelming power.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    I get the difference with the US, but isn't this the same that was true for the Soviets?
- rudolph9 6y ago
  Provided the article wasn’t exactly clear and I have no way of knowing exactly what the author meant; I think things like civil unrest can be thought of as a “crack”, the US 1st amendment almost encourages small cracks and they quickly get filled in and we move forward with things slightly adjusted (for better or worse). Although in many regards the process is still flawed, the ability for the us to peacefully transfer power at all levels of government every is really quite remarkable! Where as China being authoritarian any civil unrest has a much higher likelihood of overthrowing the government in a violent and expensive way. Transitions of power happen infrequently and are very dangerous particularly at the highest level given how synchronized authoritarian governments tend to require. Everything in life has trade offs. And while the Chinese have accomplished things the US hasn’t; imperfections in government are inevitable and the US is arguably more resilient to these imperfections over extended periods of time given the US ability to effectively and efficiently accommodate changes to address these imperfections.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    But how is china's situation different from the Soviet experience?
    - asjw 6y ago
      In many ways. For example being part of WTO and being a capitalistic state which mass produce goods and services for the whole World
    - akimball 6y ago
      The first, most obvious, difference is the relative competence of economic planning.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  I don't think China is going anywhere for at least a generation. If you dig into the collapse of most countries/empires/super powers, they collapse from either: - External pressures - foreign influence through military/conquering, investment, or mass immigration. With the exception of Taiwan, China has been effective in reducing or at least controlling all of those. And even that may be cracking where you see groups like WHO refusing to even say the word "Taiwan." With the US and Russia tied up with other things, military is less likely an issue to. - Internal pressures - social strife due to mass deprivation (starvation, poverty in general) or mass immigration/tribalism. Once again, China has been effective here. They've raised the standard of living and disappeared most of the major dissenters. They've even reduced tribalism by isolating and disappearing huge minorities. Good? Absolutely not. Effective? Unfortunately. Even the "One Child" policy seems to have led to less strife than predicted. While there are some places that have 140 men for every 100 women, those are the official numbers. It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist. Based on the investment strategy (both nationally and corporately), China has gone all in on Africa for years. If I had to place a bet, they may effectively run/own Africa in a decade or two. If not in person, on paper.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    China has a pretty large mass immigration problem. Over 30% of the nation's workforce are migrant workers who are by law second-class citizens in the urban areas they migrate to, and this number is expected to significantly rise. It's my understanding that some smaller cities are making it easier to register your hukou there, but it remains a serious issue in all of the biggest and richest cities.
  - walterbell 6y ago
    > It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist. How do they work/travel/pay without ID?
    - asjw 6y ago
shasheene 6y ago
Due to decades of Deng Xiaoping's One Child Policy, China is a slow motion demographic car crash that's impossible to stop. China will "get old before it gets rich", and the days of 6% growth aren't coming back. I recommend anyone interested in geopolitics and the world over the next 30 years to watch this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0 It's the best overview of the future wealth and strength of brutal Chinese dictatorship that I've come across.
- tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Well that video is kind of dated ... we have the Trump administration who in 4 years totally managed to end the standing of the US on the world stage.
  - loyukfai 6y ago
    There is a chance that the Americans can change that in a few months though. If so, Trump may become just a footnote in history, and hopefully a valuable lesson, at least for a few generations. Meanwhile, we people in Hong Kong and China can choose between "strongly support", "reluctantly support", "disapprovingly support", etc... Xi to continue as the head of PRC. Get out and vote. Ask the people around you to do so. Explain to them why it's important to vote. Discuss with them how it may affect them. Learn to discuss serious topics without a confrontational attitude. Cheers.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      I see no evidence that Biden would be tough on China. He seems more likely to want to appease and try to profit from it than anything else.
      - loyukfai 6y ago
        Was responding to the OP that the "Trump administration who in 4 years totally managed to end the standing of the US on the world stage." Have heard that Biden would be soft on China/Xi because of his commercial interest, but I haven't done enough research to justify this viewpoint myself. It's kind of ironic for me, who identify both as a HKer and a Chinese, to hope that the world can get tougher on China, or Xi/PRC to be more exact. What they're doing is IMO damaging to the Chinese people in the long term, and let's not begin to discuss HK. OTOH, I also understand that every country, including the US, has her own dark side as well. But then, when you put everything on a balance... It's just overall a complicated, difficult and sad situation, as life often is. Cheers.
ipnon 6y ago
The low-tech economies of China and America are integrated, but what about the high-tech ones? Can American companies create sub-apps on WeChat like Chinese ones can? As far as I know, US-Soviet trade was not comparable in scale to US-China trade. Did a lack of trade prolong the Cold War of the 20th century?
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  Trade with the USSR was very difficult. There was no use for it outside the USSR and it was forbidden to leave the country. So you couldn't just buy things from other countries. When pepsi started selling in the USSR they traded pepsi for Stolichnaya vodka. Enentually they traded old military equipment. [0] [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  The Soviets hardly produced anything worth trading for.
sametmax 6y ago
Why does everything has to be a war with the US?
- 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
  It so happens that whenever a country amasses more wealth than the US, they are maligned and considered evil. It happened in the 80s with Japan, and it is now happening with China. Except this time, the United States is broke. The US will Balkanize before anything happens to China.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Did it happen in the 80s? There was certainly anti-Japanese sentiment, I've seen the people smashing up Toyotas, but as far as I can tell nobody seriously proposed that Japan was a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
    It's probably the concentration camps, organ harvesting, and various other human rights violations, rather than the accumulation of wealth. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducation-camps-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducati... https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-executed-for-their-organs-former-hospital-worker-says/ https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/757089868/fentanyl-as-a-dark-web-profit-center-from-chinese-labs-to-u-s-streets https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/7570898...
    - sametmax 6y ago
      There are many countries that do such things, but the US selectively chose who are the ennemy du jour, and most are not tagged as such. In fact, some of them are friends with the US. What's more, I recall the US in the last 2 decades: - went to a war by lying about WMD and against the entire world (at least the world represented by the UN) will, killing thousands - deployed mass surveillance of its own people, introduced bypasses to Habeas corpus and legalized torture using the Patriot Act - elected a man that is at the center of so many Clinton-size scandals in a row it became the new normal Now, I don't even begin to claim I have a superior country, mine has done many terrible things. But let's not pretend the US (or any other superpower's) behavior has anything to do with morality. It's either naive or dishonest. However, labelling everything with "war" is, indeed, a very American thing to do.
gohai 6y ago
Note: this article is from 2019. Perhaps the title could be updated to reflect this.
- rhodium 6y ago
  I was wondering why we're resurfacing such an outdated article aside from its headline-grabbing title. The US-China relationship has evolved a lot, and it doesn't cover major developments like the Hong Kong protests, national security bill, and coronavirus response.
mleonhard 6y ago
> With the waning of the liberal world order, a more normal historical era of geopolitical rivalry has commenced, and trade tensions are merely accompaniments to such rivalry. Background on "liberal world (economic) order": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_economic_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_economic...
scottlocklin 6y ago
>For several decades, China’s breakneck development was seen positively in the United States, and the relatively enlightened authoritarianism of Deng Xiaoping and his successors was easily tolerated It was seen positively because our ruling caste of self-regarding morons thought China was more likely to become a liberal democracy as they became more prosperous and integrated with the world economy. An obvious delusion, even at the time. By contrast, the Chinese looked at what happened to Russia and decided to stick with totalitarianism in their economic development.
- gumby 6y ago
  I think things are far from obvious, at the time, retrospectively, or even now. It’s still early times for the Chinese revolution and I think there’s still a good chance of China becoming more democratic in the next half a century. Xi is literally a child of the revolution and when that generation is gone, the middle classes will have no connection to the old guard.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    I think the best you can hope for from China is Singapore -a business oriented Mosleyan fascism. Considering the lack of British influence there: this seems ridiculously optimistic to me. China will be Chinese. Western "Democracy" doesn't appear to be some universal desire of peoples; it's as far as can be told from observation a particularist ideology of Anglo and Franco Europeans. Russia's flirtation with "Democracy" (basically, being a US satellite) ended up being chaotic gansterism accompanied by mass death, and they reverted to their historical mean of being run by a strong man and seem to be happier and better off for it.
    - gumby 6y ago
      Korea, Taiwan and Japan seem pretty happy with it. India, mostly, too. Then of course many smaller countries like Mauritius, Botswana...
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

81 points by ALee 6y ago

Begun? You have to be tonedeaf or willfully ignoring the amount of IP that Chinese corporate spies have outright stolen from North America over the last few decades. Let’s be honest - we have strong cyber security considerations because of very few, but very known bad actors. China is near the top of that list and has been for awhile. Nevermind all the other security considerations.

jstanley 6y ago
Or, in other words, we've always been at war with Eastasia?

trumpoline 6y ago

Funny to see how these two corrupt 3rd world countries are at “war” with each other, while the rest of the world couldnt care less.

riffraff 6y ago

>Because, in a very different way than the old Soviet system, the Chinese system—the more authoritarian it gets—is over time more prone to crack up than America’s. I don't understand: what does the author think the difference is? I may have read the article without enough attention but I didn't get it. If anything, I got the idea it's less likely to crack.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The intuition is that freer political systems are both more challenging and less rewarding to subvert, because no individual person or group has overwhelming power.
- riffraff 6y ago
  I get the difference with the US, but isn't this the same that was true for the Soviets?
rudolph9 6y ago
Provided the article wasn’t exactly clear and I have no way of knowing exactly what the author meant; I think things like civil unrest can be thought of as a “crack”, the US 1st amendment almost encourages small cracks and they quickly get filled in and we move forward with things slightly adjusted (for better or worse). Although in many regards the process is still flawed, the ability for the us to peacefully transfer power at all levels of government every is really quite remarkable! Where as China being authoritarian any civil unrest has a much higher likelihood of overthrowing the government in a violent and expensive way. Transitions of power happen infrequently and are very dangerous particularly at the highest level given how synchronized authoritarian governments tend to require. Everything in life has trade offs. And while the Chinese have accomplished things the US hasn’t; imperfections in government are inevitable and the US is arguably more resilient to these imperfections over extended periods of time given the US ability to effectively and efficiently accommodate changes to address these imperfections.
- riffraff 6y ago
  But how is china's situation different from the Soviet experience?
  - asjw 6y ago
    In many ways. For example being part of WTO and being a capitalistic state which mass produce goods and services for the whole World
  - akimball 6y ago
    The first, most obvious, difference is the relative competence of economic planning.
caseysoftware 6y ago
I don't think China is going anywhere for at least a generation. If you dig into the collapse of most countries/empires/super powers, they collapse from either: - External pressures - foreign influence through military/conquering, investment, or mass immigration. With the exception of Taiwan, China has been effective in reducing or at least controlling all of those. And even that may be cracking where you see groups like WHO refusing to even say the word "Taiwan." With the US and Russia tied up with other things, military is less likely an issue to. - Internal pressures - social strife due to mass deprivation (starvation, poverty in general) or mass immigration/tribalism. Once again, China has been effective here. They've raised the standard of living and disappeared most of the major dissenters. They've even reduced tribalism by isolating and disappearing huge minorities. Good? Absolutely not. Effective? Unfortunately. Even the "One Child" policy seems to have led to less strife than predicted. While there are some places that have 140 men for every 100 women, those are the official numbers. It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist. Based on the investment strategy (both nationally and corporately), China has gone all in on Africa for years. If I had to place a bet, they may effectively run/own Africa in a decade or two. If not in person, on paper.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  China has a pretty large mass immigration problem. Over 30% of the nation's workforce are migrant workers who are by law second-class citizens in the urban areas they migrate to, and this number is expected to significantly rise. It's my understanding that some smaller cities are making it easier to register your hukou there, but it remains a serious issue in all of the biggest and richest cities.
- walterbell 6y ago
  > It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist. How do they work/travel/pay without ID?
  - asjw 6y ago

shasheene 6y ago

Due to decades of Deng Xiaoping's One Child Policy, China is a slow motion demographic car crash that's impossible to stop. China will "get old before it gets rich", and the days of 6% growth aren't coming back. I recommend anyone interested in geopolitics and the world over the next 30 years to watch this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0 It's the best overview of the future wealth and strength of brutal Chinese dictatorship that I've come across.

tibbydudeza 6y ago
Well that video is kind of dated ... we have the Trump administration who in 4 years totally managed to end the standing of the US on the world stage.
- loyukfai 6y ago
  There is a chance that the Americans can change that in a few months though. If so, Trump may become just a footnote in history, and hopefully a valuable lesson, at least for a few generations. Meanwhile, we people in Hong Kong and China can choose between "strongly support", "reluctantly support", "disapprovingly support", etc... Xi to continue as the head of PRC. Get out and vote. Ask the people around you to do so. Explain to them why it's important to vote. Discuss with them how it may affect them. Learn to discuss serious topics without a confrontational attitude. Cheers.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I see no evidence that Biden would be tough on China. He seems more likely to want to appease and try to profit from it than anything else.
    - loyukfai 6y ago
      Was responding to the OP that the "Trump administration who in 4 years totally managed to end the standing of the US on the world stage." Have heard that Biden would be soft on China/Xi because of his commercial interest, but I haven't done enough research to justify this viewpoint myself. It's kind of ironic for me, who identify both as a HKer and a Chinese, to hope that the world can get tougher on China, or Xi/PRC to be more exact. What they're doing is IMO damaging to the Chinese people in the long term, and let's not begin to discuss HK. OTOH, I also understand that every country, including the US, has her own dark side as well. But then, when you put everything on a balance... It's just overall a complicated, difficult and sad situation, as life often is. Cheers.

ipnon 6y ago

The low-tech economies of China and America are integrated, but what about the high-tech ones? Can American companies create sub-apps on WeChat like Chinese ones can? As far as I know, US-Soviet trade was not comparable in scale to US-China trade. Did a lack of trade prolong the Cold War of the 20th century?

oldsklgdfth 6y ago
Trade with the USSR was very difficult. There was no use for it outside the USSR and it was forbidden to leave the country. So you couldn't just buy things from other countries. When pepsi started selling in the USSR they traded pepsi for Stolichnaya vodka. Enentually they traded old military equipment. [0] [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
BurningFrog 6y ago
The Soviets hardly produced anything worth trading for.

sametmax 6y ago

Why does everything has to be a war with the US?

0x8BADF00D 6y ago
It so happens that whenever a country amasses more wealth than the US, they are maligned and considered evil. It happened in the 80s with Japan, and it is now happening with China. Except this time, the United States is broke. The US will Balkanize before anything happens to China.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Did it happen in the 80s? There was certainly anti-Japanese sentiment, I've seen the people smashing up Toyotas, but as far as I can tell nobody seriously proposed that Japan was a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
  It's probably the concentration camps, organ harvesting, and various other human rights violations, rather than the accumulation of wealth. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducation-camps-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducati... https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-executed-for-their-organs-former-hospital-worker-says/ https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/757089868/fentanyl-as-a-dark-web-profit-center-from-chinese-labs-to-u-s-streets https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/7570898...
  - sametmax 6y ago
    There are many countries that do such things, but the US selectively chose who are the ennemy du jour, and most are not tagged as such. In fact, some of them are friends with the US. What's more, I recall the US in the last 2 decades: - went to a war by lying about WMD and against the entire world (at least the world represented by the UN) will, killing thousands - deployed mass surveillance of its own people, introduced bypasses to Habeas corpus and legalized torture using the Patriot Act - elected a man that is at the center of so many Clinton-size scandals in a row it became the new normal Now, I don't even begin to claim I have a superior country, mine has done many terrible things. But let's not pretend the US (or any other superpower's) behavior has anything to do with morality. It's either naive or dishonest. However, labelling everything with "war" is, indeed, a very American thing to do.

gohai 6y ago

Note: this article is from 2019. Perhaps the title could be updated to reflect this.

rhodium 6y ago
I was wondering why we're resurfacing such an outdated article aside from its headline-grabbing title. The US-China relationship has evolved a lot, and it doesn't cover major developments like the Hong Kong protests, national security bill, and coronavirus response.

mleonhard 6y ago

> With the waning of the liberal world order, a more normal historical era of geopolitical rivalry has commenced, and trade tensions are merely accompaniments to such rivalry. Background on "liberal world (economic) order": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_economic_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_economic...

scottlocklin 6y ago

>For several decades, China’s breakneck development was seen positively in the United States, and the relatively enlightened authoritarianism of Deng Xiaoping and his successors was easily tolerated It was seen positively because our ruling caste of self-regarding morons thought China was more likely to become a liberal democracy as they became more prosperous and integrated with the world economy. An obvious delusion, even at the time. By contrast, the Chinese looked at what happened to Russia and decided to stick with totalitarianism in their economic development.

gumby 6y ago
I think things are far from obvious, at the time, retrospectively, or even now. It’s still early times for the Chinese revolution and I think there’s still a good chance of China becoming more democratic in the next half a century. Xi is literally a child of the revolution and when that generation is gone, the middle classes will have no connection to the old guard.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  I think the best you can hope for from China is Singapore -a business oriented Mosleyan fascism. Considering the lack of British influence there: this seems ridiculously optimistic to me. China will be Chinese. Western "Democracy" doesn't appear to be some universal desire of peoples; it's as far as can be told from observation a particularist ideology of Anglo and Franco Europeans. Russia's flirtation with "Democracy" (basically, being a US satellite) ended up being chaotic gansterism accompanied by mass death, and they reverted to their historical mean of being run by a strong man and seem to be happier and better off for it.
  - gumby 6y ago
    Korea, Taiwan and Japan seem pretty happy with it. India, mostly, too. Then of course many smaller countries like Mauritius, Botswana...
    - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]