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ROC and PRC economies are so strictly intertwined that I won't ever be able to take seriously these analysis focused only on geographical maps and military budg

• twblalock 4y ago
  A lot of people thought Xi would not crack down on tech companies either, because it would hurt the economy, but he did anyway. The Chinese government's top priority is the supremacy of the party. They will invade Taiwan no matter what kind of economic damage it would do, if they believe it will strengthen Xi and the party in the long run.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    Xi's crackdown on tech companies doesn't appear to be some sort of huge disruption that would lead to an existential crisis. Meanwhile, the PRC launching a hugely expensive preemptive war, risking untold amounts of diplomatic condemnation, economic sanctions, and chaos to international supply chains could very well break the entire global economy. It'd be burning down your neighborhood to spite your face.
    • code_biologist 4y ago
      It'd be burning down your neighborhood to preserve CCP legitimacy and control of China, which seems to be a reasonable tradeoff from Xi's perspective.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        Not if it destroys all of the developmental progress they've made since Deng! Blowing up world trade is highly detrimental to a country's standard of living.
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • yks 4y ago
          Russia is yet again proving that destroying standards of living in a dictatorship does not threaten the rulers which is the only thing that matters. CCP survived Mao’s policies and so they will survive the changes in GDP per capita whichever way they go.
          • Apocryphon 4y ago
            They have far more to lose now. I suspect things are rather different once you attain a certain level of prosperity and preeminence, which causes one to reevaluate one's appetite for risk.
    • kneebonian 4y ago
      Exactly, like in 1914 when the Austro-Hungarian empire and the German Empire were the worlds 2nd and 3rd leading exporters of electrical appliances, and had this massive trade network where German goods were going all over Europe, financed by English capital. No country would be stupid enough to bring all that crashing down because some stupid nationalist dispute in the Balkans, that would be idiotic and stupid. Clearly people are to rational for that.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        It would be certainly be a stupid thing to do so after the precedence of the Great War is already firmly entrenched in everyone's imaginations, not to mention the advent of nuclear weapons, which makes outright open warfare between the great powers a historical memory thus far (which also explains why the U.S. is fighting a proxy war rather than an actual war in Ukraine).
        • SllX 4y ago
          Wars continue to happen for even dumber reasons; they just rarely involve the largest nations clashing anymore. If you’re betting on human rationality over time in the hands of people with a lot of centralized power, you’re making the losing bet. There’s a reason people were genuinely afraid of nuclear war (and still should continue to be): if it happens, it will involve very few people and there will be nothing any one of the billion’s of others can do about it. There is a solution: the dispersal of power tends to work well; but the risk you run up against is charismatic individuals acting as a locus for a majority’s power, so you also need anti-majoritarian institutions and a culture that values them. Hard to get all three.
        • kneebonian 4y ago
          You're right it would be a stupid idea for Russia to march on Germany, given the precedence of the Napoleonic Wars that killed so many. Not to mention the advent of chemical weapons and high powered artillery which makes outright open warfare between the great powers a historical memory thus far (which also explains why the Russians are fighting a proxy war rather than an actual war in Serbia)
    • mensetmanusman 4y ago
      This is the disadvantage of authoritarian systems. They are more capable of making stupid decisions because there are fewer voices.
  • FpUser 4y ago
    >"A lot of people thought Xi would not crack down on tech companies either, because it would hurt the economy, but he did anyway." From what I read the crackdown was temporary and is now coming to an end. I guess they've achieved whatever goals were pursued and it is back to business as usual. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/economy/china-economy-guo-shuqing-ant-group-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/economy/china-economy-guo-shu...
    • twblalock 4y ago
      The goal was to prevent the emergence of a power center that could challenge Xi and the party.
  • Imtiredofpassw 4y ago
    You can live a lot better if you stop believing that ww3 is coming because god-emperor of China is bad guy
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      You can also live a lot better if you just respond to what people write rather than projecting assumptions onto them.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    You have to be more specific here. Xi cracked down on SV-type of tech. Which isn't useful tech. It's ad and addiction tech that is a net negative to society. It makes a few people filthy rich but does nothing for the productive basis of your country.
• rqtwteye 4y ago
  Before WW1 people stated similar reasons why a war would not start. People also thought that Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine because the economic consequences would be devastating, especially for Russia. Seems dictators don't really care about their own countries. Now with Xi grabbing more and more power in China he may also lose grounding in reality.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    China is far wealthier and more integrated with the global economic system, though. Wouldn't they have far more to lose than Russia did?
    • 988747 4y ago
      They are also "too big to fall" - any economic sanctions against China would hurt the West equally (if not more) than them. China produces half of everything you buy.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        They also import a ton of food, ore, oil, and LNG, so who knows how that dependence plays out. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00784-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00784-6
      • arroz 4y ago
        I don’t know if it’s true that it would hurt more the west. It would hurt both.
      • rqtwteye 4y ago
        I think the pain in the West would be relatively short-term while they are rebuilding manufacturing capacity. Globalization has hurt a lot of workers in the West so it may actually positive for them. China on the other hand would have nobody to sell their stuff to.
• alliao 4y ago
  PRC have it's own set of institutional internal logic which undermines this analysis
  • Imtiredofpassw 4y ago
    Their institutional internal logic has been don't fuck with the international order for decades, which actually supports this analysis
• deleted 4y ago
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• michael1999 4y ago
  I heard similar arguments about Russia in Jan 2022. I have a clear memory of my confusion: any invasion ends with Putin at the end of a rope, but all the evidence was of a looming invasion. And here we are.
  • morpheos137 4y ago
    It turns out power is more important to those whole wield it than fungible tokens (money). With power arbitrary wealth can be built and rebuilt. For the average Russian during the 1990s life was worse after economic liberalisation. What can a vast country like Russia, China or the USA not produce domestically, keep people employed and keep profits at home? How much is wasted on advertising and market casinos? On the one hand globalisation expands the labor pool and access to capital. On the other the more labor there is the lower its unit value. So under autarky prices would rise but so would wages (labor would be more scarce). So for a big country it is not clear that people are worse off in the long run going alone. So called comparative advantages are more a function of structure of the economy than long term inherit capabilities. When people are scarcer their price goes up.
  • Imtiredofpassw 4y ago
    I'll just copy paste Yeah, except that Russia wants raw natural resources from the Ukraine territories it wants to annex. They can kill all Ukrainians and destroy all of their cities and still be able to extract what they want. Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
• kneebonian 4y ago
  People said the exact same thing before WW1. That "the economies are to interdependent", "no one would want a war it would make things worse for everyone.", "anyone that tried to start a war would be bankrupt in days" It turns out that economic interdependence didn't stop the Germans from marching on France when the Russians declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once it started it turns out the economics weren't powerful enough to stop a way in progress. Economic realities only are in play so long as no one feels they are fighting for their survival as the world geo-political maps continues to change, Russia facing a complete collapse, the coming Chinese demographic problems combined with their food supply issues, etc, many nations will see their only future being through conquest.
  • foepys 4y ago
    You don't even have to go so far back. In January 2022 few believed that Russia would invade Ukraine because Russia was heavily depending on exporting gas and oil to the EU. The sanctions in 2014 for the annexation of Crimea were deemed to scare Russia away from doing so. Then Russia invaded anyways and is apparently now in the process of doubling down by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits.
    • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
      Dictators dream of conquest, often against economic or strategic realities. If the law prohibits that, call it a special operation and not a declaration of war.
    • Imtiredofpassw 4y ago
      Yeah, except that Russia wants raw natural resources from the Ukraine territories it wants to annex. They can kill all Ukrainians and destroy all of their cities and still be able to extract what they want. Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
      • fomine3 4y ago
• jseliger 4y ago
  You could make a very similar argument for Germany pre WW-I, Germany pre-WWII, Russia invading Ukraine more recently and the effects in Europe, and on and on. Dictators do what I would call "irrational" things, though one could have a long, pointless, define-your-word fight about what "rational" means here. Over time, they become surrounded by yes-men and more and more insulated from the real world. Many of them also have very selective readings of history (e.g. Putin seems to think Ukraine should be part of Russia based on a slanted reading of history; he seems to have ignored the parts of history in which failed invasions lead to the dictator's head being separated from his body). The "economies are so strictly intertwined" argument which finds that war isn't going to happen, particularly when applied to dictators, doesn't stand up to casual scrutiny. One major virtue of democracies is that they never or almost never (again, fights about definitions here) go to war against each other.
• loudmax 4y ago
  Angela Merkel and the Germans thought the same thing about Putin. That is, Russia would never launch a war that would destroy its own economy. It makes sense, and I admit to thinking the same thing before February 2022. What we, living in democratic societies, fail to appreciate is that autocrats don't mind destroying their economies in order to pursue their personal ambition. Putin has no qualms about sacrificing tens (hundreds?) of thousands of ordinary Russian men to secure his status as a great historical figure. The Russian standard of living will decline as it descends into a totalitarian state, but Putin and those around him have no elections to face. Even if the disastrous Ukraine invasion had been successful it would not have improved the lives of ordinary Russians, but it would have secured Putin's legacy. The same goes for Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is no longer "Communist" in any Marxist sense, except in their rejection of democracy. As economic growth stalls, Xi is turning to xenophobic nationalism to bolster his legitimacy. The Chinese people will in no way benefit from an invasion of Taiwan. But Xi and the CCP aren't looking out for the benefit of the Chinese people, they are looking out for themselves.
  • kentrado 4y ago
    Communism doesn't reject democracy. It necessitates democracy at its core. Otherwise you can't make decisions within your local commune.