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Is anyone surprised? The investor class argued that shutting down factories in the American Midwest (where almost none of the investors live, of course) and mo

Is anyone surprised? The investor class argued that shutting down factories in the American Midwest (where almost none of the investors live, of course) and moving production to China would bring political liberalization to the nation. That's why the US didn't slam the door shut on China after Tienanmen Square with Bush 41, and why Bush 43 was supportive of China joining the WTO. Of course, they didn't liberalize, and now China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US (and other Western nations) for global economic and political supremacy. Really, it was all BS from the start; investors just didn't want to pay working-class Americans anymore and couldn't have cared less about the political implications of the market forces they were unleashing. It's arguably treason.

kirubakaran 3y ago
> It's arguably treason. If I can give some feedback, this last line undermines the rest of your points. Not everything selfish is treason.
- engineer_22 3y ago
  No, it's cogent to the argument. Undermining US economic and industrial capacity could be argued treasonous.
  - wbl 3y ago
    We literally have a clause in the Constitution defining what treason is, and that's not it.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Aid and comfort to the enemy, or making war against the US government. I'd say the terms under which many investments in PRC were made fall under the first standard.
      - lettergram 3y ago
        Companies in china are not defined as an enemy. I say this agreeing that these investors really hallowed out America. My father was in one of those factories and I remember him specifically training his Chinese replacement (who they flew over for 6 months). It devastated my family. That said, I don’t think treason is the correct term.
        marnett 3y ago
        What if the company is nationalized?
        lenerdenator 3y ago
        There is no such thing as a "company" in China as we understand it in the United States. There are CCP-controlled/tolerated commercial ventures that participate in the market economy. If you're investing in China, you can be sure there's a Party boss who's getting to wet his beak and dictate terms on which the deal will be accepted. Investments in China are not handled for the benefit of private interests; they are handled for the benefit of a strategic goal of the state.
      - voxic11 3y ago
        That's not what the Constitution says, it says treason is "adhering to [the] enemies [of the United States], giving them aid and comfort." So there are actually two separate conditions that both need to be satisfied, aiding the enemies of the United States and adhering to them. By saying you think aiding the enemies of the United States alone is sufficient you are disagreeing with the Supreme Court. If simply aiding the enemies of the United States is sufficient for a treason conviction then would everyone who goes on strike at a factory that makes something important to the US military (steel lets say) be committing treason? The Supreme Court and myself say its only treason if the strike was done out of adherence to a foreign power and not if done for other reasons (like better working conditions). I think the Supreme Court's interpretation is much more practical and less prone to abuse then yours. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iii/clauses/39 https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
  - bilbo0s 3y ago
    Treason is a Constitutional thing.
  - voxic11 3y ago
    Its only treason if you undermine the US economic and industrial capacity with the intent of betraying the United States for the enemy. If you do it for other reasons such as profit then there is no treason. For example there are teachers striking in my town right now, they may be undermining a essential US government function and you could argue that this aids our enemies but because that isn't their intent it is not treason. > "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." > the Court explained that a person could be convicted of treason only if he or she adhered to an enemy and gave that enemy “aid and comfort.” As the Court explained: “A citizen intellectually or emotionally may favor the enemy and harbor sympathies or convictions disloyal to this country’s policy or interest, but, so long as he commits no act of aid and comfort to the enemy, there is no treason. On the other hand, a citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy—making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength—but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.” https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iii/clauses/39 https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
    - engineer_22 3y ago
      Well here we are... Arguing. Ergo it's arguable.
- klipklop 3y ago
  How is supporting the military of your adversary not treason? Especially if a war does break out and those weapons are used against the US. Remember China is not the ally of the US. You don’t ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs to a country you are friends with. China actively works to disrupt the US. They only go as far as they currently think they can get away with.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    It’s not treason because words have meanings. It ain’t good, but it sure ain’t treason.
    - staplers 3y ago
      Similarly, was it treason to supply Afghan militias with weapons during the 80s? They were used later against US forces but wasn't something the US necessarily expected.
    - Supermancho 3y ago
      > It’s not treason because words have meanings There's an argument for it, which is sufficient to leave alone unless you want to argue the merits (not quibble about a specific definition).
  - some_random 3y ago
    I largely agree with you, but fwiw treason has a specific and pretty limited definition encoded in the Constitution. My understanding is that since the US and China aren't at war it can't be treason under that definition.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> Remember China is not the ally of the US. The raft of trade deals, tourism, cultural exchange, investment and massive trade relationship would say otherwise.
  - ramblenode 3y ago
    > How is supporting the military of your adversary not treason? For one, because treason refers to an enemy, not an adversary, and China is not legally an enemy of the US (at war). You can't just assert that China is an enemy in court without some legal basis. Note that not even the Rosenbergs were charged with treason for sharing US nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union. That's how high the bar for treason is.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  Tell that to the parts of the American populace who suffered most from the lack of lower-education jobs. Deaths of despair have risen in that population sector over the last four decades. Wages have become stagnant. The generation that was born after this shift to China will be the first American generation in centuries to have a lower standard of living than their parents. These companies tossed the heavy manufacturing capabilities of the United States to a geopolitical rival. To be clear: there is no China with superpower ambitions if the American shareholder class hadn't made it happen.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - beaeglebeached 3y ago
    Jobs moving to where they can be performed cheapest is simple economic force. Through black market or white market, communism or capitalism, that populaces goose was cooked as soon as other parts of the world could perform and deliver their jobs cheaper. The strategy at that point is better comparative advantage. Education, capital improvements, infrastructure. Protectionism doesn't generate value .
    - staplers 3y ago
      Another point to add, if there are less local manufacturing/physical labor jobs, market forces will incentivize innovation in other areas like infotech jobs, etc. Not saying it's overall beneficial but it likely pushes the working class towards other areas like infotech and more specialized trades which could lead to innovation in those spaces. Creates a trade dependency however.
      - lenerdenator 3y ago
        It does not likely do those things consistently on a national level. Information technology was great for a handful of states - well, cities, really; I can't help but notice the lack of a MacOS Bakersfield - but not across the geography of the United States. The capital concentrated in those areas to an absurd extent. During the low interest rate days, VCs in these areas were far more likely to invest in an absolutely terrible idea within a fifty-mile radius of their offices than they were to invest in a good idea 800 miles away. They also drastically overvalue businesses that can throw on a thin whitewash of "tech company" on an otherwise-conventional business model, even if the execution of that business model does poorly in actually producing value for the non-shareholder parts of the market economy.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  In our society money is power. With great power comes great responsibility. Put your own desires over those of the people in your own country to a large enough extent and it sure starts to feel like something treasonous.
dboreham 3y ago
> didn't want to pay working-class Americans Consumers also like buying cheap products.
- szundi 3y ago
  Exactly. Either government should kind of ban this, or the ones who do find less cost are going to be quite rich. Of course they don’t care too much about anything else. This is why we have governments.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  >Consumers also like buying cheap products. Consumers also like having jobs and money to buy products of any type ... presumably.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  Consumers like being able to afford things, preferably through increased wages. Since we no longer allocate economic growth towards wages, but instead towards equities, we see the need for cheaper products. If you look at the history of the DJIA, it wasn't really until the 1980s that it began to consistently take off (https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...). That money previously went to a wider variety of outlets into American society, like taxes paid to the government or wages paid to workers. When Milton Friedman argued that companies exist solely to return value to shareholders, shareholders fought successfully to see the value diverted away from those outlets and towards them. If your consumers are workers who no longer see rising wages, and you want them to buy your stuff, you have to find cheaper ways to sell things, so the argument was made that the PRC would politically liberalize if the world made its products there. The alternative was to not have all of the money go back to shareholders, and that was, of course, unacceptable.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Why are you only looking at the DJIA? Look at SNP500 or VTI and you'll see consistent positive growth.
klipklop 3y ago
All part of the managed decline of the US. These people are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing.
- szundi 3y ago
  I think they don’t. They see this something they can manage but will slip out of their hands. Just imagine what is going to happen then to them and their families. Of course they don’t care that much to weight the risks
  - ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
    > Just imagine what is going to happen then to them and their families They'd flee the country because they have the wealth to do so.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - klipklop 3y ago
    For the VC elite-types they don’t really live exclusively in the US. Most of them likely have NZ passports already. Look at how all the tech CEOs and rich guys left the US during Covid. The (former) US wealthy elite don’t have the same strong ties with the US as they did in the past. They see themselves as international citizens free to go where it benefits them most.
- greatwave1 3y ago
  What "managed decline"? The U.S. is arguably as strong as its ever been, and China's economy has been crashing recently. The implications in this thread that US citizens are soon going to be running for their lives from foreign threats seem incredibly paranoid -- the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a ZeroHedge or InfoWars comment section, not on this forum.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
lurking15 3y ago
> The investor class argued that shutting down factories in the American Midwest (where almost none of the investors live, of course) and moving production to China would bring political liberalization to the nation. of course isn’t this a contention of most mainstream economists too?
alephnerd 3y ago
> why Bush 43 was supportive of China joining the WTO. First, It was Clinton, Bush 1, and Bush 2. Secondly, this was because of how (then much richer) Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Turkiye, and Eastern Europe democratized in the 1980s-90s. With those priors, it made sense to assume that economic integration and growth leads to calls for democracy. The jury's still out on this btw - China's median income in the 2020s is still 33-50% that of Thailand's, Mexico's, Poland's, Serbia's, and Turkiye's in the 2020s and these countries are still in the process of democratizing. > didn't slam the door shut on China after Tienanmen Square PRC was sanctioned by the US and the west in the 1990s in the aftermath of the massacre. This was why ascension happened so late. People forget that before the 2000s, most foreign investors to China were mostly from South East Asia and Taiwan. Western countries didn't enter until the mid-2000s.
- eunos 3y ago
  > China's median income in the 2020s is still 33-50% that of Thailand's, Mexico's, Poland's, and Turkiye's in the 2020s and these countries are still in the process of democratizing Uhh no https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/thailand/annual-household-income-per-capita https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/thailand/annual-househ... Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    CEIC's data is incorrect. LET ME REPEAT. CIEC has data transformation issues. The median household income in Thailand is around $7,000 [0] versus around $4,000 [1] in China - both are government provided statistics. > Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump In a way, but more so the economic stagnation and massive inequality towards the end of the Hu Jintao era as the Bo Xilai scandal proved. [0] - http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx [1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t20220118_1826649.html https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t202201...
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> Of course, they didn't liberalize, and now China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US (and other Western nations) for global economic and political supremacy. China's going to be way too busy with internal affairs to try and start a showdown. China is not anywhere near a global economic supremacy. Nominally, China is close to half the size of the US. The idea that China is so big it runs the whole world is laughable. It's not even close to being the biggest player - and even the US is not that important like it was after WW2.
- philipov 3y ago
  yet.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    Yes, yet. With time and second worst demographics in the world they will be way less relevant relatively soon.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  I hate to say it but that's a lot of cope. They are way more advanced now and in some ways have exceeded US capabilities technologically. Also, in case you haven't noticed, the US is struggling with some very spicy internal affairs right now too. The US's saving grace is that China's foreign policy is absolute shit and they've made themselves hated by every single one of their neighbors in a way the US could only dream of.
- some_random 3y ago
  Xi has made it pretty clear that he wants China to take Taiwan and it seems likely that he wants to do it personally before he retires. Currently, that would trigger a showdown without a doubt.
huijzer 3y ago
> Of course, they didn't liberalize History is always easy to predict in hindsight. Even after Tiananmen Square in 1989, things could have turned around. Imagine what would have happened if someone would have stood up to the regime and turned it into a democracy. We would now have been talking about how clever George H.W. Bush had been in lifting them out of poverty etc etc. Also, the Soviet Union was the biggest threat still on that point. It fell only in the early 1990s. So what was so bad about giving China some space as a counterweight to the Soviet Union? Their relations where pretty bad since the Sino-Soviet split on the 1960. Only in 1989 was there a first summit again between China and the Soviet Union. > China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US Probably better to talk about "The West" since many Western nations have imported goods and services from China and will potentially end up in a conflict.
tarsinge 3y ago
China doesn’t want a showdown, it’s not Russia/Iran/NK/Pakistan/…, why must Americans think that if they are not #1 it’s the end of civilization? China only really care about itself (and Taiwan, but that’s a very special and not a black or white situation). US extreme hubris (and increasing plain racism) regarding China is really making me nervous. Americans should instead be following the words of Kennedy regarding Pax Americana. I obviously don’t support China politics, but I fail to see how they are a risk for western democracies and why peaceful coexistence and trade could not continue (in contrast to Russia for example where I’m grateful of US support). I’m open to be shown otherwise.

kirubakaran 3y ago

> It's arguably treason. If I can give some feedback, this last line undermines the rest of your points. Not everything selfish is treason.

engineer_22 3y ago
No, it's cogent to the argument. Undermining US economic and industrial capacity could be argued treasonous.
- wbl 3y ago
  We literally have a clause in the Constitution defining what treason is, and that's not it.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Aid and comfort to the enemy, or making war against the US government. I'd say the terms under which many investments in PRC were made fall under the first standard.
    - lettergram 3y ago
      Companies in china are not defined as an enemy. I say this agreeing that these investors really hallowed out America. My father was in one of those factories and I remember him specifically training his Chinese replacement (who they flew over for 6 months). It devastated my family. That said, I don’t think treason is the correct term.
      - marnett 3y ago
        What if the company is nationalized?
      - lenerdenator 3y ago
        There is no such thing as a "company" in China as we understand it in the United States. There are CCP-controlled/tolerated commercial ventures that participate in the market economy. If you're investing in China, you can be sure there's a Party boss who's getting to wet his beak and dictate terms on which the deal will be accepted. Investments in China are not handled for the benefit of private interests; they are handled for the benefit of a strategic goal of the state.
    - voxic11 3y ago
      That's not what the Constitution says, it says treason is "adhering to [the] enemies [of the United States], giving them aid and comfort." So there are actually two separate conditions that both need to be satisfied, aiding the enemies of the United States and adhering to them. By saying you think aiding the enemies of the United States alone is sufficient you are disagreeing with the Supreme Court. If simply aiding the enemies of the United States is sufficient for a treason conviction then would everyone who goes on strike at a factory that makes something important to the US military (steel lets say) be committing treason? The Supreme Court and myself say its only treason if the strike was done out of adherence to a foreign power and not if done for other reasons (like better working conditions). I think the Supreme Court's interpretation is much more practical and less prone to abuse then yours. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iii/clauses/39 https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  Treason is a Constitutional thing.
- voxic11 3y ago
  Its only treason if you undermine the US economic and industrial capacity with the intent of betraying the United States for the enemy. If you do it for other reasons such as profit then there is no treason. For example there are teachers striking in my town right now, they may be undermining a essential US government function and you could argue that this aids our enemies but because that isn't their intent it is not treason. > "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." > the Court explained that a person could be convicted of treason only if he or she adhered to an enemy and gave that enemy “aid and comfort.” As the Court explained: “A citizen intellectually or emotionally may favor the enemy and harbor sympathies or convictions disloyal to this country’s policy or interest, but, so long as he commits no act of aid and comfort to the enemy, there is no treason. On the other hand, a citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy—making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength—but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.” https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iii/clauses/39 https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
  - engineer_22 3y ago
    Well here we are... Arguing. Ergo it's arguable.
klipklop 3y ago
How is supporting the military of your adversary not treason? Especially if a war does break out and those weapons are used against the US. Remember China is not the ally of the US. You don’t ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs to a country you are friends with. China actively works to disrupt the US. They only go as far as they currently think they can get away with.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  It’s not treason because words have meanings. It ain’t good, but it sure ain’t treason.
  - staplers 3y ago
    Similarly, was it treason to supply Afghan militias with weapons during the 80s? They were used later against US forces but wasn't something the US necessarily expected.
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    > It’s not treason because words have meanings There's an argument for it, which is sufficient to leave alone unless you want to argue the merits (not quibble about a specific definition).
- some_random 3y ago
  I largely agree with you, but fwiw treason has a specific and pretty limited definition encoded in the Constitution. My understanding is that since the US and China aren't at war it can't be treason under that definition.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> Remember China is not the ally of the US. The raft of trade deals, tourism, cultural exchange, investment and massive trade relationship would say otherwise.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  > How is supporting the military of your adversary not treason? For one, because treason refers to an enemy, not an adversary, and China is not legally an enemy of the US (at war). You can't just assert that China is an enemy in court without some legal basis. Note that not even the Rosenbergs were charged with treason for sharing US nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union. That's how high the bar for treason is.
lenerdenator 3y ago
Tell that to the parts of the American populace who suffered most from the lack of lower-education jobs. Deaths of despair have risen in that population sector over the last four decades. Wages have become stagnant. The generation that was born after this shift to China will be the first American generation in centuries to have a lower standard of living than their parents. These companies tossed the heavy manufacturing capabilities of the United States to a geopolitical rival. To be clear: there is no China with superpower ambitions if the American shareholder class hadn't made it happen.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- beaeglebeached 3y ago
  Jobs moving to where they can be performed cheapest is simple economic force. Through black market or white market, communism or capitalism, that populaces goose was cooked as soon as other parts of the world could perform and deliver their jobs cheaper. The strategy at that point is better comparative advantage. Education, capital improvements, infrastructure. Protectionism doesn't generate value .
  - staplers 3y ago
    Another point to add, if there are less local manufacturing/physical labor jobs, market forces will incentivize innovation in other areas like infotech jobs, etc. Not saying it's overall beneficial but it likely pushes the working class towards other areas like infotech and more specialized trades which could lead to innovation in those spaces. Creates a trade dependency however.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      It does not likely do those things consistently on a national level. Information technology was great for a handful of states - well, cities, really; I can't help but notice the lack of a MacOS Bakersfield - but not across the geography of the United States. The capital concentrated in those areas to an absurd extent. During the low interest rate days, VCs in these areas were far more likely to invest in an absolutely terrible idea within a fifty-mile radius of their offices than they were to invest in a good idea 800 miles away. They also drastically overvalue businesses that can throw on a thin whitewash of "tech company" on an otherwise-conventional business model, even if the execution of that business model does poorly in actually producing value for the non-shareholder parts of the market economy.
NegativeLatency 3y ago
In our society money is power. With great power comes great responsibility. Put your own desires over those of the people in your own country to a large enough extent and it sure starts to feel like something treasonous.

dboreham 3y ago

> didn't want to pay working-class Americans Consumers also like buying cheap products.

szundi 3y ago
Exactly. Either government should kind of ban this, or the ones who do find less cost are going to be quite rich. Of course they don’t care too much about anything else. This is why we have governments.
mhuffman 3y ago
>Consumers also like buying cheap products. Consumers also like having jobs and money to buy products of any type ... presumably.
lenerdenator 3y ago
Consumers like being able to afford things, preferably through increased wages. Since we no longer allocate economic growth towards wages, but instead towards equities, we see the need for cheaper products. If you look at the history of the DJIA, it wasn't really until the 1980s that it began to consistently take off (https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...). That money previously went to a wider variety of outlets into American society, like taxes paid to the government or wages paid to workers. When Milton Friedman argued that companies exist solely to return value to shareholders, shareholders fought successfully to see the value diverted away from those outlets and towards them. If your consumers are workers who no longer see rising wages, and you want them to buy your stuff, you have to find cheaper ways to sell things, so the argument was made that the PRC would politically liberalize if the world made its products there. The alternative was to not have all of the money go back to shareholders, and that was, of course, unacceptable.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Why are you only looking at the DJIA? Look at SNP500 or VTI and you'll see consistent positive growth.

klipklop 3y ago

All part of the managed decline of the US. These people are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing.

szundi 3y ago
I think they don’t. They see this something they can manage but will slip out of their hands. Just imagine what is going to happen then to them and their families. Of course they don’t care that much to weight the risks
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
  > Just imagine what is going to happen then to them and their families They'd flee the country because they have the wealth to do so.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- klipklop 3y ago
  For the VC elite-types they don’t really live exclusively in the US. Most of them likely have NZ passports already. Look at how all the tech CEOs and rich guys left the US during Covid. The (former) US wealthy elite don’t have the same strong ties with the US as they did in the past. They see themselves as international citizens free to go where it benefits them most.
greatwave1 3y ago
What "managed decline"? The U.S. is arguably as strong as its ever been, and China's economy has been crashing recently. The implications in this thread that US citizens are soon going to be running for their lives from foreign threats seem incredibly paranoid -- the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a ZeroHedge or InfoWars comment section, not on this forum.
- lenerdenator 3y ago

lurking15 3y ago

> The investor class argued that shutting down factories in the American Midwest (where almost none of the investors live, of course) and moving production to China would bring political liberalization to the nation. of course isn’t this a contention of most mainstream economists too?

alephnerd 3y ago

> why Bush 43 was supportive of China joining the WTO. First, It was Clinton, Bush 1, and Bush 2. Secondly, this was because of how (then much richer) Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Turkiye, and Eastern Europe democratized in the 1980s-90s. With those priors, it made sense to assume that economic integration and growth leads to calls for democracy. The jury's still out on this btw - China's median income in the 2020s is still 33-50% that of Thailand's, Mexico's, Poland's, Serbia's, and Turkiye's in the 2020s and these countries are still in the process of democratizing. > didn't slam the door shut on China after Tienanmen Square PRC was sanctioned by the US and the west in the 1990s in the aftermath of the massacre. This was why ascension happened so late. People forget that before the 2000s, most foreign investors to China were mostly from South East Asia and Taiwan. Western countries didn't enter until the mid-2000s.

eunos 3y ago
> China's median income in the 2020s is still 33-50% that of Thailand's, Mexico's, Poland's, and Turkiye's in the 2020s and these countries are still in the process of democratizing Uhh no https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/thailand/annual-household-income-per-capita https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/thailand/annual-househ... Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  CEIC's data is incorrect. LET ME REPEAT. CIEC has data transformation issues. The median household income in Thailand is around $7,000 [0] versus around $4,000 [1] in China - both are government provided statistics. > Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump In a way, but more so the economic stagnation and massive inequality towards the end of the Hu Jintao era as the Bo Xilai scandal proved. [0] - http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx [1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t20220118_1826649.html https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t202201...

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

> Of course, they didn't liberalize, and now China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US (and other Western nations) for global economic and political supremacy. China's going to be way too busy with internal affairs to try and start a showdown. China is not anywhere near a global economic supremacy. Nominally, China is close to half the size of the US. The idea that China is so big it runs the whole world is laughable. It's not even close to being the biggest player - and even the US is not that important like it was after WW2.

philipov 3y ago
yet.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Yes, yet. With time and second worst demographics in the world they will be way less relevant relatively soon.
AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
I hate to say it but that's a lot of cope. They are way more advanced now and in some ways have exceeded US capabilities technologically. Also, in case you haven't noticed, the US is struggling with some very spicy internal affairs right now too. The US's saving grace is that China's foreign policy is absolute shit and they've made themselves hated by every single one of their neighbors in a way the US could only dream of.
some_random 3y ago
Xi has made it pretty clear that he wants China to take Taiwan and it seems likely that he wants to do it personally before he retires. Currently, that would trigger a showdown without a doubt.

huijzer 3y ago

> Of course, they didn't liberalize History is always easy to predict in hindsight. Even after Tiananmen Square in 1989, things could have turned around. Imagine what would have happened if someone would have stood up to the regime and turned it into a democracy. We would now have been talking about how clever George H.W. Bush had been in lifting them out of poverty etc etc. Also, the Soviet Union was the biggest threat still on that point. It fell only in the early 1990s. So what was so bad about giving China some space as a counterweight to the Soviet Union? Their relations where pretty bad since the Sino-Soviet split on the 1960. Only in 1989 was there a first summit again between China and the Soviet Union. > China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US Probably better to talk about "The West" since many Western nations have imported goods and services from China and will potentially end up in a conflict.

tarsinge 3y ago

China doesn’t want a showdown, it’s not Russia/Iran/NK/Pakistan/…, why must Americans think that if they are not #1 it’s the end of civilization? China only really care about itself (and Taiwan, but that’s a very special and not a black or white situation). US extreme hubris (and increasing plain racism) regarding China is really making me nervous. Americans should instead be following the words of Kennedy regarding Pax Americana. I obviously don’t support China politics, but I fail to see how they are a risk for western democracies and why peaceful coexistence and trade could not continue (in contrast to Russia for example where I’m grateful of US support). I’m open to be shown otherwise.