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Very interesting article. The irony is, if not for politics I think many more Americans would be unsettled by the many ways in which China is becoming extremely
by janalsncm 2y ago
Very interesting article. The irony is, if not for politics I think many more Americans would be unsettled by the many ways in which China is becoming extremely advanced. As it stands today our instinct is to dismiss it. But I think these trends are too big to ignore.
- yazzku 2y agoWhy is it unsettling?
- burnished 2y agoA common refrain in american homes and schools is about american superiority over all other countries, especially their rivals like china.
- rootusrootus 2y agoIs that perception why everyone online constantly shits on America and proclaims that every other country is superior? For as much as people like to accuse Americans of being "'Merica, fuck yeah!" the truth sure looks like it is mostly other countries with the arrogant attitude.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoCapacity for self criticism is part of what lets America reïnvent itself.
- dingnuts 2y agoyes and it's deeply ironic that you just quoted an American film which was satirizing that attitude twenty years ago! if anything I feel like Americans have become extremely self loathing in the passing generation since the release of Team America: World Police
- r14c 2y agoAmericans may feel that way, but "Team America: World Police" still applies to US foreign policy in 2024.
- Nasrudith 2y agoInteresting that the self-loathing seems to be associated with waging unpopular and losing wars. I didn't live through it but the Vietnam War seemed to have some similar impact that persists to this day with the utter loathing of conscription. It seems to be the same underlying cause: that bad leadership essentially permanently burned credibility for their country for no gain for their country.
- soperj 2y agoLots of gain for those in charge, and their cronies.
- dyauspitr 2y agoStop playing dumb, superiority is everything.
- typon 2y agoXenophobia
- uses 2y agoChina - under Xi specifically - doesn't have rule of law, acts as an agent of chaos on the world stage, doesn't care about international order, bullies its neighbors, and critically, has become a 1-man dictatorship in the past ~10 years. Under Xi, it's an aspiring evil empire that considers all humans of Han ancestry to belong to it, and genuinely doesn't care about the rest. Pre-Xi, China was on a positive trajectory. Post-Xi, hopefully that'll return.
- ridiculous_leke 2y agoUnlike several other authoritarian regimes, this is very much constitutional in China. Every institution pretty much reports to the CCP.
- juunpp 2y agoYour first sentence is exactly what the US has done since the Cold War through recent history. Why is it different when China does it, which it also hasn't to the scale that the US has?
- rustcleaner 2y agoIt's not different. Peace is always a temporary illusion, a cloaking of the war, and one shouldn't expect any consistency in these cases (akin to the peacock's tail-feathers, too much consistency costs).
- fyrn_ 2y ago
- heroprotagonist 2y agoBecause of how they treated Hong Kong. The way they curb free speech, even projecting that internationally. Their announced intention to become the world's superpower and displace the US militarily, technologically, and economically, and the risks to US interest which tie to that. Their active pursuit to enact that claim, specifically with rapid military technology development, and international organization of BRICS. Their aggressive tendencies towards US allies. Their aggressive spying on US military and industrial facilities.
- throwaway14356 2y agoWe deserve this treatment. Their entire personality on the international stage was created by the west. It could of course be that they would be much worse without us but that didn't happen.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoIt depends on how long you're willing to roll back US interventionism. If you're talking about pre-WW1, maybe. But even by the mid-late 19th century the US started sticking its nose in the Pacific (which alarmed Japan, which contributed to that countries subsequent militarism). So I'd say you'd have to go back even further. If not the US, it would probably be Europe and/or the Soviet Union. China and the Soviet Union nearly came to blows in the 60s. Europe decolonized largely because Hitler wrecked major continental colonial powers France and the Netherlands) and put Britain with their backs against the wall such that it had to partially abandon its empire in order to defend itself and avoid a complete disaster. So they let India go, but tried to hold on elsewhere. This worked to some extent, but not in others. What remained tried to morph into the Commonwealth, this was only partially successful. The US assumed the crown, this time with a different model, hegemony vs. colonialism. They had a rival in the Soviet Union, which funded Communist revolutions in many parts of the developing world. With the exception of Vietnam, something the Chinese did not do. They valued North Vietnam as a buffer against Wester imposition, but were not too keen on a reunified Vietnam, indeed they invaded a few years after South Vietnam collapsed.
- Prbeek 2y ago
- missinglugnut 2y agoWell for starters, Xi Jinping being the most powerful person on Earth is probably a bad sign for democracy. In their time as the dominant world power, the US hasn't always used their influence for good, but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge. I much prefer that to having a country with a permanent ruling party where critics go missing being the dominant force in world affairs.
- soperj 2y ago> the US hasn't always used their influence for good This is a bit of an understatement for anyone in latin america. > but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge as far as i can tell, those only apply to US citizens, not humans in general.
- juunpp 2y agoIf you want to see how much the US cares about democracy, read Noam Chomsky's How The World Works. Or just look down south to Latin America.
- 0x457 2y agoAmerica only cares about spreading democracy if some country they have beef with isn't democratic. America had no issue replacing democratic (and sometimes secular) goverments with dictatorships if dictatorship was more friendly to the US.
- pessimizer 2y agoThe US thinks of Chinese prosperity as a threat in and of itself. The US wants to call the shots, and the reason it has been able to since WWII is because it is wealthy (due to its innovation of not being a country in Europe during WWII.) It's not simply racism, though. The US also thinks of European prosperity as a threat. These sentiments are not hidden. They are openly spoken during policy discussions and in policy papers. Fake concerns about the nature of Chinese governance have nothing to do with it - the problem the US has with Chinese governance is that China is not governed by the US. The US is jealous of China's tools for censorship and the tight top down political control. edit: the US government is not at all concerned about the citizens of China. It also did not invade Afghanistan for women's rights, and it is not helping Israel to preserve gay rights. These are barely even serious pretenses. It is not in Ukraine because it cares about the freedom of 2/3rds of the population to suppress the other third. These are stories for children.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoThis right here.
- rootusrootus 2y agoI'm not as concerned about them advancing technologically as I am about their demographics. I just hope the resolution does not involve war, as it often has throughout history.
- Gibbon1 2y agoChina will have fewer people in 75 years than the US.
- pton_xd 2y agoSource? Wikipedia predicts US population of ~425 million, China ~632 million in 2100. Still a dramatic decline either way.
- tivert 2y ago>> China will have fewer people in 75 years than the US. > Source? Wikipedia predicts US population of ~425 million, China ~632 million in 2100. Still a dramatic decline either way. Also, assuming current trends continue for a ridiculously long time. The Chinese government has the ability to be massively coercive if it wants to. It's been less than a decade since they ended the one child policy. I wouldn't be surprised if that's deployed in the next 75 years to increase birthrates (e.g. "hey women under 35, you're fired unless you have two kids, kthxbye"). They already have a youth unemployment problem, and it probably wouldn't be too big of a deal for them to make sure all those unemployed youth are women having babies, and slot unemployed men into any jobs that are opened up.
- Gibbon1 2y agoThat massive coercion is exactly why the birthrate is dropping like a stone.
- tivert 2y ago> That massive coercion is exactly why the birthrate is dropping like a stone. Yes, but that was coercion in the other direction. Nothing's preventing them from using coercion to course-correct their previous policy. They're not timid liberals or libertarians afraid of using state power to do whatever.
- haccount 2y agoAs a European I've already come to terms with the fact that we're a consumer group dependent on china. A huge sector or our commerce can be summarized as "Alibaba but with expensive middle men".
- janalsncm 2y agoAmazon is similar. Their service is essentially to make buying the random, weirdly-named products from China as “safe” and convenient as possible. (By “safe” I mean a bare minimum of having a generous return policy. Not that they are actually vetting safety.) I would place Temu, Alibaba, and TikTok shop somewhere on that same spectrum of safety.
- eastbound 2y agoIt’s incredible how unsafe our products are. They are practically unvetted, and even when they are, Amazon sells counterfeits under the same SKU comingling. And risks nothing because the product was technically sold by “INXBDBA”. Having been to Armenia, which has practically no laws because it’s not part of the EU, I wonder what would happen “naturally”, if EU laws didn’t exist in the EU. Maybe we’d get exactly the same quality of products.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago> And risks nothing because the product was technically sold by “INXBDBA”. The kicker is that this is a classic "cobra effect" [1] that has bogged down government offices. Those useless brands exist because Amazon tried to cut down on counterfeits and no-name junk by implementing a policy of requiring the brand to be a registered trademark. Instead of cutting down on junk products, it led to an explosion of junk brands [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
- steveoscaro 2y agoVisiting East Asian countries and then returning to the US, I’m always struck by how behind and slow we are with large infrastructure projects.
- kwere 2y agoNINBYs at all levels love regulations
- Incipient 2y agoI don't think it's even NIMBY. It's just that doing big labour projects in us, EU, UK, etc is too expensive. Until we figure out how to develop our infrastructure without throwing manpower at it, we're going to get left behind. Our roads, rail, power, etc will all age and fail to keep up. We got to where we were because our great great grandparents all worked for significantly less, consumed significantly less. Our society shouldn't expect that of us, we need to have technology/IP that enables us to more with less people. One person controlling a bricklaying robot can get paid a respectable wage while keeping costs down.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> doing big labour projects in us, EU, UK, etc is too expensive To be clear, the EU is huge -- 27 countries. In the east, there are plenty of poor and lower income people who are happy to move to other parts of EU for construction work. As for US and UK, I agree: There is no cheap labour. How do you explain why there is so much infra construction in Korea and Japan, but the prices are reasonable? They are both highly advanced nations.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoJapan and Korea don't have unions like in EU.
- fakedang 2y ago
- nothacking_ 2y agoCompetition is generally good for consumers, forcing companies to make a better product then the other guy, rather then the crappiest thing people will buy.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tivert 2y ago> Competition is generally good for consumers, forcing companies to make a better product then the other guy, rather then the crappiest thing people will buy. If by "better," you mean "crappier but even cheaper." IMHO, we're kind of in a race to the bottom with product quality. You can't really tell what's good and what's bad online, so people gravitate the what's cheapest to minimize the risk of getting really taken advantage of. A lot of the stuff that's still good quality has massive luxury premiums tacked on, and a lot of the stuff that used to be good quality has been debased by some bean counter trying to convert goodwill into cash money.
- m463 2y agoKind of hard to tell, because sort of an optimal successful product is made from the worst possible hardware. If you were to look at this in terms of a CPU chip, the cheapest chip would be the chip with the most defects that runs, while the chip with the fewest defects would be overpriced to sell, or extra-overpriced and overclocked to barely running. Think about it - do you run out an buy a Xeon Gold blah blah for $15k or a core i7 for $200? Marketing keeps you from thinking the core i7 is "crappier and cheaper"
- rustcleaner 2y agoThis is why I prefer to underclock than overclock.
- tivert 2y ago> Very interesting article. The irony is, if not for politics I think many more Americans would be unsettled by the many ways in which China is becoming extremely advanced. As it stands today our instinct is to dismiss it. But I think these trends are too big to ignore. Yes. I think there's a lot of lazy thinking happening in the West vis-a-vis China, which will serve to delay hard decisions until it's too late.
- rustcleaner 2y agoDude, the next iconoclast is probably going to walk around with tablets playing videos showing every way China is kicking the US' ass, and why it's happening (his incumbent opponents).