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It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financ
by JimmyBuckets 2mo ago
It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financial warfare absorbs the brunt of the power struggle.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoCan you elaborate a little? I suspect it is a well known concept, but its the first time I heard of it in this context.
- ForHackernews 2mo agoRising power challenges the fading imperial hegemony. In this case, CNY displacing USD.
- baxtr 2mo agoIs China still rising or already in decline?
- ForHackernews 2mo agoRelative to the US or Europe? I think you know the answer to that.
- edgyquant 2mo agoRelative to the US it’s not a straightforward answer but China is definitely not rising in the way it was a decade ago and has been outpaced by the us
- myrmidon 2mo agoChina has a massive demographic problem in the near future (after 2040ish), and it is extremely unlikely (IMO) that it is going to catch up/surpass the US in GDP per capita within the next decades. But its relative GDP growth has been higher than the US for decades, is higher stil and is probably going to stay higher for years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-growth?country=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-growth?country=U...
- edgyquant 2mo agoBut the gap between the us and China in terms of GDP has widened in recent years making it look like China will never surpass the us
- myrmidon 2mo agoNever surpass in what exactly? If you look at absolute numbers (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-usd?tab=line&country=USA~CHN&mapSelect=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...), it seems likely that China will surpass the US economy pretty soon (they're a lot more people though, so per-capita is much worse). Personally I think its most likely that chinese GDP will be larger than US GDP within 2035, but that the median citizen is NOT going to catch up to US standards in the next 50 years. And their whole society will run into the exact same problems that many western countries are dealing with already (increasing fraction of retirees), so I'd be very careful with extrapolating their currently superior growth rate past 2040 or so.
- tokai 2mo agoThe answer is really not a clear cut as you assume any longer.
- Markoff 2mo agotheir yough unemployment rate sure is rising, it sure ain't great to be young Chinese looking for job now https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/china-youth-unemployment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/china-youth-unem... https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01203/ https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01203/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pedov5/oc_the_rise_of_youth_unemployment_in_china/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pedov5/oc... also there are salary paycuts for people who already have work, my Chinese clients tried this, but not gonna accept it, I will rather lose such client than lower my rate, I am losing money by not increasing my rates over many years already despite huge EU cummulative inflation and EU salaries growth by my experience visiting country after almost 10 years last year just by looking at salaries, restaurant prices, real estate prices/rent their economy seems to be stagnating in last 10 years, restaurant meal cost pretty much same as 10 years ago, same goes for entry level salaries like waitress, cook and other you can see in street they are getting stronger overall, though doesn't seem like middle class is benefiting from it, my CN family bought apartment many years ago and they would have problem to sell it for same price, let alone make any profit on it
- curuinor 2mo agoCNY displacing USD would entail allowing people outside China to buy really significant quantities of CNY-denominated financial products. This would entail CNY/USD changing so CNY is more expensive, because the default currency for financial products currently existing is USD. Which would slap a corresponding huge price increase with 0 increase in quality to all Chinese export. Which would murder Chinese manufacturing export. Which would entail laying off some grand proportion of an industry that employs 5% of the _human_ race. Which is why they're not gonna do that.
- pocksuppet 2mo agoSame thing that happened to USD, right? Once the USA stopped having to actually manufacture things to get money, it stopped actually manufacturing things.
- WarmWash 2mo agoChina is step by step learning that communism actually sucks and doesn't work. Unless you can have a super intelligence that can monitor every aspect of everything all the time to ensure optimal decisions. Hmmmm...
- quickthrowman 2mo agoI’ll believe it when I see it, there’s a spread between onshore and offshore yuan exchange rates due to currency manipulation. It becomes harder to manipulate a currency as more of it is created, and AFAIK countries are not loading up on Chinese govt debt, but I may just be unaware? The USD hegemony isn’t because of oil, it’s because everyone wants dollar-denominated assets. Treasury bonds, US real estate, US equities, etc. Possibly Chinese exports could soak up some of the yuan demand?
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoI don't think China wants to make the CNY the reserve currency because it would decimate China as a manufacturing hub. They prefer China to be Jakob to the U.S. being Esau. The red lentil soup can be quite bitter.
- detourdog 2mo agoPresident Xi of China mentioned it when the US President visited him in May. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/international-relations-security/president-xi-jinping-invokes-hks https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/i...
- nubg 2mo agoutterly repulsive ai slop
- igorkraw 2mo agoThe how of the reference seems important, it's not like he brought it up first apparently >Xi has referenced Allison’s term before. In a speech in Seattle in 2015, Xi said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” And in an October 2023 meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Xi said, “The ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.
- detourdog 2mo agoDo you think Xi's comments are specifically that war is imminent?
- JimmyBuckets 2mo agoEssentially its the idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two. I was expressing my hope that if this does happen, the war can play out in less destructive arenas - one of which is in the competition for reserve currency status which the US has held for the whole of the modern era. This article possibly points at China's first shots in this conflict. Edit: credit LarsDu88 for correcting me on its age. I originally stated the idea was very old (2.5k years) but actually its a recent idea based on an ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta
- WJW 2mo agoThe obvious counterexample would be the previous most powerful empire in the world (ie the UK) ceding that title to the USA after collapsing after WW2? No war between the UK and the US was needed.
- JimmyBuckets 2mo agoThe UK was a declining power that had been absolutely gutted by war and owed huge debts to the US that it had accrued to fund the war. I believe Thucydides Trap is more about the situation we have now with the US and China where both are moving from strength to strength.
- WJW 2mo agoI'm not really seeing the USA moving from strength to strength lately TBH. Iran is a disaster, the Navy now has 3 (or 4, depending how you count) failed warship projects in a row, economic growth outside the AI/datacenter boom has dropped to near zero and the internal political climate is polarized to the point of inactivity. Most of its traditional allies have been moving to distance themselves from the USA and worldwide trust in the USA as "leader of the free world" is at the lowest point in decades. But quite beyond that, I'm just saying that the Thucydides trap is not an iron rule. The first place I looked was a counterexample and I'm sure there have been many more over the centuries.
- kachnuv_ocasek 2mo agoI, for one, would appreciate if we could just move on past these incessantly destructive power struggles as humanity.
- edgyquant 2mo agoHumans can not “move on” from human nature no matter how much people try to will it
- kachnuv_ocasek 2mo agoIt's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoConflict between humans is much much more nature than slavery was. Just look at animals. Flock animals often have conflicts which others. But none of them have ”slaves” (at least no how humans understand it)
- usrnm 2mo agoThere is a different between a conflict and a war. Humans are uniquely violent and cruel to each other, there is nothing even close in the animal world
- igorkraw 2mo agoYou should learn about chimpanzee wars and how dolphins treat tortoises, and about the enslaving ants
- joshuaissac 2mo ago> how dolphins treat tortoises Do you mean porpoises? Dolphins are not known for mistreating tortoises but porpoises.
- aprentic 2mo agoChina has some internal documents that address the Thucydides Trap with a Chinese idiom, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn Period."
- andsoitis 2mo ago> China has some internal documents how did you get to see them? that must be a very interesting story.
- aprentic 2mo agoIt depends on what you find interesting. No crazy spy stories but I've been learning Chinese, so I've spent more time looking at things that are only written or said in Chinese. Project 2025 wasn't really secret but it wasn't in the public consciousness until about a year later https://trends.google.com/explore?q=project%20202&date=today%205-y&geo=US https://trends.google.com/explore?q=project%20202&date=today... China also has a bunch of political philosophy nerds that crank out wonky policy papers. I keep finding references to this one by Wu Bikang, https://www.rmlt.com.cn/2014/0403/253621.shtml https://www.rmlt.com.cn/2014/0403/253621.shtml I'm still very bad at Chinese and I don't assume that I understand that paper well, even with translations, but that paper clearly interprets the Thucydides trap very differently from how it's discussed here.
- igorkraw 2mo agoWhich of I understand the Wikipedia article correctly would mean it's a euphemism for "there are no just wars"?
- aprentic 2mo agoChinese idioms can be notoriously difficult to interpret. From what I've seen, they're often an abbreviation of some passage from a famous text. The listener is expected to know the rest of that text and all the major commentaries that go with it. I absolutely do not have a solid grasp of the full works of Mencius and I have fairly anemic knowledge of the derivative works but I'm fairly sure it's not just a simple euphemism. My read of the idiom is that Chinese political philosophers claim that the basis of Western political philosophy is the balance of power between hegemons and the basis of Chinese political philosophy is the concept of the righteous rule/mandate of heaven. His implication seems to be that Western nations are held together primarily by force whereas the CPC primarily maintains power by serving the people.
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