5 ms·

China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. Ther

China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money. Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.

cassepipe 1y ago
They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
- throwaway29812 1y ago
  [dead]
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility. Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle? And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    > China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
    - ordinaryradical 1y ago
      You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective. I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA. Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
        1y ago
cempaka 1y ago
A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  countries have no friends or enemies, only national interests
  - throwaway29812 1y ago
    Dictatorships do they best to make everyone convinced of this. That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      sure, that makes sense… they will do the business that jeopardizes national interest is the way to go /s also I was not talking about dictatorships at all but all countries
      - throwaway29812 1y ago
        [dead]
  - cempaka 1y ago
    "Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country. One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      Governments have interests, people have interests, both are interested in the future of their country, which is just land. This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.
ben_w 1y ago
> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. 75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy". > increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US. Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted. Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  > Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem. But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally. For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month. If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons. A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
queenkjuul 1y ago
Yes the ever impending Chinese financial collapse I've been reading about since 2017 Any day now, right?
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  If you're incapable of recognizing the signs of an empire's collapse, slow as it may be initially, then you're trading a feeling of superiority in the present for being totally blindsided in the future when suddenly things accelerate and the world's governments begin to struggle under increasingly untenable energy and resource demands in the name of meeting quarterly growth quotas. The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017. Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I was referring specifically to "reports of bank closures" that were they actually happening with such frequency and scale as has been reported on since 2017 or so, would surely have already caused a financial collapse. Any day now though, surely.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I do feel the need to point out that there is in fact a reason that the US media has boldly proclaimed the impending financial collapse of China every month for the last ten years, and it's precisely to give you a feeling of superiority
    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      You don't know what my sources are, or my motivations. I don't have this opinion because of US media, and I always try to get to direct sources and not trust publications blindly. Who gives a fuck about feeling superior, I just want to understand what is happening around me. So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.

cassepipe 1y ago

They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.

throwaway29812 1y ago
[dead]
soulofmischief 1y ago
Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility. Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle? And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  > China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
  - ordinaryradical 1y ago
    You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective. I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA. Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
      - 1y ago

cempaka 1y ago

A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.

bdangubic 1y ago
countries have no friends or enemies, only national interests
- throwaway29812 1y ago
  Dictatorships do they best to make everyone convinced of this. That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    sure, that makes sense… they will do the business that jeopardizes national interest is the way to go /s also I was not talking about dictatorships at all but all countries
    - throwaway29812 1y ago
      [dead]
- cempaka 1y ago
  "Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country. One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    Governments have interests, people have interests, both are interested in the future of their country, which is just land. This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.

ben_w 1y ago

> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. 75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy". > increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US. Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted. Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.

giantrobot 1y ago
> Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
- ben_w 1y ago
  I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem. But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally. For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month. If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons. A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.

queenkjuul 1y ago

Yes the ever impending Chinese financial collapse I've been reading about since 2017 Any day now, right?

soulofmischief 1y ago
If you're incapable of recognizing the signs of an empire's collapse, slow as it may be initially, then you're trading a feeling of superiority in the present for being totally blindsided in the future when suddenly things accelerate and the world's governments begin to struggle under increasingly untenable energy and resource demands in the name of meeting quarterly growth quotas. The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017. Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I was referring specifically to "reports of bank closures" that were they actually happening with such frequency and scale as has been reported on since 2017 or so, would surely have already caused a financial collapse. Any day now though, surely.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I do feel the need to point out that there is in fact a reason that the US media has boldly proclaimed the impending financial collapse of China every month for the last ten years, and it's precisely to give you a feeling of superiority
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    You don't know what my sources are, or my motivations. I don't have this opinion because of US media, and I always try to get to direct sources and not trust publications blindly. Who gives a fuck about feeling superior, I just want to understand what is happening around me. So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.