China Is Eating the World
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As the notion that "China is eating the world" sparks debate, some commenters are calling for more substance behind the claim, with one skeptic requesting a more detailed analysis with citations. Meanwhile, others are taking a more experiential approach, enthusiastically inviting fellow travelers to visit China and witness its advancements firsthand, touting its streamlined visa policies and touting the benefits of experiencing the country's rapid growth. The conversation takes a turn when one traveler's concerns about biometric data collection during the visa process are met with a mix of nonchalance and cynicism from others, who point out that such practices are increasingly common.
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I'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.
I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.
At an airport, there was a sign that said "Stand in front of the camera and we'll tell you the way to your gate.". It scanned my face, and on the screen it showed me my name (I guess to make sure it's the correct person), my gate, and how to walk there. I never consented to this commercial use...
Although it's probably mostly a legal impediment, I can imagine if the authorities spotted an event and need to track a suspect, they can put all the footage into a system and it will return a sequence of videos/angles in which the suspect was seen.
They already have everything on us, and I mean everything.
I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.
While the U.S. has Eminent Domain, although China's version seems to be more impactful (displacing 1.3 million people for the Three Gorges Dam).
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
In fact nail houses were a thing in the U.S. long before in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)
"Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market."
Now, housing gets old, people upgrade, so that supply will eventually be soaked up.
But the debt overhang on local governments and indivudal Chinese is the killer. They've built up several years of housing supply and now get to pay for it all while it stays empty for a few years - plus the value is dropping.
It's a massive drag on the economy as all that investment is locked up and unproductive.
I think it's mostly this that makes me uncomfortable. I value Western ideals and am hopeful that they continue to spread.
I hear you though.
For those within the imperial core. War, death, sanctions, and dilution of wealth for everyone outside it/whoever attempts to disagree.
Somehow we ended up with Trump. Whatever system that brings you a Trump is a bad system.
For instance, California's Intercity High-Speed Rail Commission was created by the California legislature in 1993 (before my parents got married) to develop a plan that was to begin construction in 2000.
32 years later, it's still not done, yet China has built nearly 50,000 km of HSR in less than 20 years. The differences are as blatant as that between oranges and orangutans.
Unemployment rate for youth (16- to 24-year-olds) in China ticked up to 17.8% in July . The US youth unemployment rate in the U.S. was 10.8 percent in July 2025.
So a difference of 7%.
I'm gonna need a source for that one.
Best source I found quickly was Wikipedia, with 2023 data, showing China at about 2.5 times the US. That's surprising to me, but it's not an order of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-countries-by-ann...
What are depths you look?
Are you not familiar with China's relentless obsession with education and excellence? The cutthroat competition in business, the insane persistence in long-term planning and execution, the vast land of rich treasure underground, the emoumous long history of singular view of history and ancestry?
All these are traits of greatness.
And they have the brutal struggle from external invasion and internal turmoil since 1800s, those hard time breed generations of strong man, men who not only endure physical hardership, intellectual struggles, and spiritual torment, they embrace it, treat them as enjoyable and rewarding. They not only are instant in action, they are also ruthless in reflection. They dire to challenge the strongest coalition of power when they were just gained independence, they are also totally ok to subdue to the same super power when they decide so, without much of a mental conflicting, while still maintaining a unwavering commitment to greatness beyond anyone else's imagination.
China is bound to be the overlord of the nations on earth. That or it vanquish itself in its pursuit of that destiny.
What else do you need to know?
China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
And when I glance at pictures of cities in the US I see fascist armed goons terrorizing people and crumbling infrastructure
So why this particular comparison with a single country to you? Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore exceeded Western cities decades ago. Even today, Shanghai or Shezhen only is developed in certain areas, it does not reach the high level of urban development on ALL areas like in Hong Kong or Tokyo. And the mopeds or metro bomb checks aren't endearing either. It feels some people were either living under a rock for the last two decades, or they do have an agenda to push.
If one is debating in to inform, should you not point out that greater perspective here?
Even more, like OP said, why now specifically with all these articles salivating China. What were you doing back in 2007 or 2012, that you were not making the same comparisons could be made to Tokyo or Hong Kong, that you would well understand years ago. But there clearly isn't such a barrage from back then, either fron Americabs or Japanese or Hong Kongers themselves.
And that's not a false dichotomy? If I say which sport is more exhilarating to watch football or basketball? It's not a false dichotomy and it's weird if someone were to butt in with "What about baseball? Why didn't you mention baseball? What about soccer, what about tennis, this isn't a fair discussion!" I wasn't saying and didn't even imply those are the only options they just happen to be the ones we're talking about and it would be absurd to bring in the thousands of other sports to figure out which of the two is more exhilarating to spectate.
Tokyo has been considered a high tech utopia for a long time no one is surprised by its modernity (similar with Hong Kong) whereas China over the last decades has been portrayed as being little more than poor starving farmers and slave labor in worn out factories, and that juxtaposition is what makes it an interesting point of contrast.
Also I did see a barrage of articles praising Japan in the last few decades. There's literally multiple terms for westerners who are obsessed with Japan.
Also if it hasn't been unique to China at all (although I never said it was) why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?
Except the Chinese model is literally based on the Four Asian Tigers' models. Making this analogous to different sports isn't really a correct analogy, because it's more like if a sports team that was previously doing terribly decided to change and copy what other, more well known and succesful teams were doing and predictably started finding more success.
So okay, you praise the success of this specific team, but if this has already happened 5 times (if not 8 times if you count Germany or Spain or Vietnam) with the same strategy that is well documented and understood, then it's quite iffy that you don't mention that prior context or successes at all. Is it really that country or is it just the strategy, then why not mention the strategy if you are using as basis of comparison to improvement back home. It's a highly naive and misleading way of portraying things, unless if you are just focused on nationalist triumphalism or mypoics.
>why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?
India is a highly diverse and multicultural state with dozens of different languages. Their political system is a compromise between those varying interests, not a single party that conquered everyone else. They pursued ISI, not Export-Driven Policies. South Asia is isolated from East Asia via mountain ranges, and does not have rich neighbours nor is a nexus of trade. India itself is largely the invention of the British Empire as recent unification. India is obviously not similar to China at all. The fact that you mention them as a basis for comparison is already quite strange.
When we talk about East Asian Tigers, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and then also Japan, these are all largely homogenous (if not fierecely integrationist as in Singapore) societies, they are literally the same region, one of them is literally an off-shoot of China, are the closest comparisons. And so if you have closest similarities become successful in the 70s following similar strategies, and you decide to copy such policies in the 90s, then it's utterly banal that you would follow a similar path as your most similar societies. So it's not unique at all, it's just the general trend, so why all the triumphalism now..
The early 80s were similar, when Japanese economy was in every single headline and being compared to the USA’s. The difference is, this time China has already surpassed the states in most of meaningful statistics.
Who is "everyone" here? MSM and Economists has been largely singing praise to China's model for the last 2 decades, unless if you count the occasional critique or caveats which they do equally for everyone including America.
Frankly speaking, I see far more complaining about the aformentioned "China will collapse" in every China thread than I see people actually saying "China will collapse", and pointing to some fringe youtube channels or individuals like Gordon Chang isn't really indicative of anything beyond strawmanning.
1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.
But China manages to make people write the contrary.
Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.
This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble. And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.
It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.
And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.
2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".
The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.
Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)
That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:
* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ? * wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ? * rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ? * assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU8zYS43TRg&pp=0gcJCbIJAYcqI...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/china-faces-economic-blow-populatio...
So, "we'll see", I guess ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltVl2Qlf6A
But if we look at MSM CNBC, NYT, CNN, etc, none of them are saying "China is going to collapse", and if anything I'd probably vouch there are more articles praising China than there are ones critiquing it.
I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.
There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population.
It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.
But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.
Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...
GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time.
The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.
You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.
- there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom
- US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
And how would you weigh life expectancy vs suicide rates? Let's say we try to create an index. You think life expectancy should be weighted at 80% and suicide rates at 20%? Why? There's no rhyme or reason for that figure, it just sounds good. Well it gets more and more confounding as you add up all the other vectors. Labor market participation now thrown into the same broad index, despite all three values being completely orthogonal.
There is no objective way to reconcile that.
Indeed. But what matters is whether Y is diminishing, not what's easy for you to prove. The world is not obliged to make the important things easy to measure, and it generally doesn't.
> I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.
It's quaint to think that but compounding interest is a doozy. If your competitors are growing at 4% a year and you're growing at 1% a year, they will triple their economy over 30 years while your economy sees a meak 30% boost. At some point you'll find your economy an entire century behind in development. And you'll no longer even have power or influence over the decisions made at the grown ups table.
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.
Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?
Because over the past decades the interests that used to focus on growing the pie have pivoted to scooping up more of the pie (usually by getting government, or government adjacent entity, to pull some string).
Imagine the year is 1950/60/70/80 and you are a lobbyist for a construction product manufacture. What do you tell your paid off political to vote for? Stuff that lowers cost, creates more development, etc, of course. Because for every mil spent industry wide you know your employer nets $10, or whatever.
In 2025 you'd wine and dine a bunch of IBC jerks and insurance jerks and maybe even government jerks to get them to phrase things so that the industry is "incentivized" to use your employer's class of products, to the detriment of literally every participant in your sector for whom a different class of product would have otherwise been superior in their situation.
This sort of pivot to zero sum behavior has permeated damn near every class of economic activity, only in the most cutting edge spots of cutting edge sectors and the lowest margin, lowest sophistication, lowest security/moat sectors do you see anyone lift a goddamn finger to grow the pie.
Until you have laws favouring one entity over another, it is not a free market.
Only works in a flawed democracy, in better democracies people vote out corrupt leaders that only listen to lobbyists.
I've also heard that in real communism everyone gets their needs met and anarchism would let the true human nature flourish and everyone would be happy. I'm sure one day we will habe a society of better people who will make all of these work.
So as a counterpoint, consider the former President of the Geographic Society of China arguing to that there was too much focus on impressing with speed and scale and too little big-picture thinking about door-to-door transport within cities, which would've benefited more from suburban light rail and buses https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-hig...
Communism works.
China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.
NIMBYs basically use property rights to their logical end. FWIW California is trying to fight this with laws that remove the rights of NIMBYs and their worst behaviors.
There are also 'green belt' laws (which ban construction on land in a ring around many cities) and there are 'environmental impact' laws (which require you to check for things like rare species) and there are 'areas of outstanding natural beauty' and national parks (where it's a lot harder to build things) and local government 'planning permission' rules (which have pretty broad powers to block development and dictate what type of development is allowed) and rules for 'nationally significant infrastructure projects' (giving national government a big say on things like airports) and also 'judicial review' for decisions that don't go your way.
And almost all of these still apply, even if the government themselves are performing the construction.
In the UK, just because you own some land, doesn't mean you're allowed to build on it.
This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.
You are falling for hype metrics on a flashy MVP and filling in claims that were never made with fanciful imagination. Pushing code straight into production works great until it doesn't.
They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years.
China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose.
At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out.
America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically.
You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America.
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...
[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.
Not recently...
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China nor does it have the industrial capacity to scale up production in a timely fashion.
Additionally, American shipbuilding capacity has completely atrophied both from a decline of infrastructure and even worse a startling decline in blue-collar institutional knowledge. It has become so dire that the US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.
It should be obvious at this point that China dominates in mass-production and they'll absolutely be able to out-produce the US in both ships and missiles in a long term conflict.
I think this is missleading conclusion, my reading of the link is that it says that in 4 week of active phase, US stockpile will deplete, it doesn't assess what damage China will receive, will it have enough ships/airplanes after US activated thousands of munitions, and will it rebuild them faster than US will restock missiles inventory (99% not).
> US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.
could you provide citation?
I recommend that you take a look at this document[1] to get a better picture of the shortcomings of US munitions stockpiles and manufacturing capacity.
I'm not sure why you think that China, a nation renowned for their mass manufacturing capacity would be unable to rebuild equipment lost in a war over Taiwan. China absolutely dominates in steel production[2] and aluminum production[3] and no one compares to them in electronics manufacturing and assembly. They completely own the solar panel and battery markets and it seems that no one can compete with their electric cars.
While America keeps chipping away at its own soft power, institutions and manufacturing capacity China is building the juggernaut industrial capacity necessary to dominate their region.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-milit...
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium...
its not for production but maintenance. Your link explicitly states that current law doesn't allow to produce Navy ships outside of US.
Furthermore, Koreans can't produce military ships for US simply because they can't produce such ships for themselves domestically, their newest destroyers have Korean hull, but propulsion, electronics, radars, many armaments are American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_the_Great-class_destroy...
> I'm not sure why you think that China, a nation renowned for their mass manufacturing capacity would be unable to rebuild equipment lost
I explained, it will be asymmetrical war: US will be targeting ships which cost way more than missiles cost.
Each of 4k tomahawk will target targets 10-100x cost of actual tomahawk (airplanes, power plants, docked ships).
Also, your previous report ignores old harpoon inventory, which if deployed in Taiwan will create denial zone for Chinese navy.
The point I'm trying to make with all of this is that the US simply lacks the industrial capacity to produce sufficient materiel for a protracted war with China. And not only does it currently lack the capacity, there is no indication that the political or social structures that dominate American discourse see this as a priority.
You describe this asymmetrical warfare technique of the US using missiles that have a fraction of the cost of the ships that they're targeting as if it's a unique strategy when it's the exact same thing that the Chinese are going to be doing.
The difference is that the Chinese have the ability to build many more missiles, and many more ships, and they're not nearly as exposed to cyber attacks and fifth column sabotage as the US is. So what will likely happen is they'll both survive the first round of engagements over Taiwan with the US narrowly winning and then the Chinese will rebuild more and faster and will win the next round of engagements. Or even worse the US will just let China have Taiwan because the political structure of the US is so unbelievably dysfunctional.
It's not like I want any of this to happen either. I'd love to live in a world where China was a non Authoritarian country that didn't have ambitions of dominating its neighbours but that just isn't the world we live in.
I find it dismaying that anytime I bring up my concerns about this matter online people are so quick to dismiss them with little thought. There are a lot of people who consider the US being the hegemonic military force of the plant to be a fundamental part of reality and they just can't fathom a scenario where that isn't the case.
Either way we're all going to find out in 18 months. I hope I'm wrong about this.
lol, you wrote clearly: "Here's a recent story about the outsourcing of ship production to South Korea[0]"
I am confused how else it can be read as not "about the outsourcing of ship production to South Korea"
> if it's a unique strategy when it's the exact same thing that the Chinese are going to be doing.
they won't be doing this, they are surrounded by US military bases and don't have ability to project power to US territory, and US doesn't have plans to invade China, so ships don't need to come close to coastline.
sorry, ignored rest of your speculations, because imo they grounded in nothing.
Russia was supposed to be the 2nd military power in the world, and they couldn't do in 3 years what they thought they'd do in 3 days. A much smaller country, with a much smaller army, with surplus 90s western tech (at least in the first year) held against them. They didn't get air superiority at any point. Their navy was taken out of the warzone by a country with no navy of their own! And so on, and so forth.
China being a military superpower isn't credible. It sure wants to be seen as one, but an army is more than numbers on a pps presentation. They build tons of ships but do they have trained people to man them? (recent incident with PH coast guard making the cn navy have a kiss should be a hint)
Total displacement is meaningless when you put in conscripted, untrained people, no matter how motivated and patriotic they are (and I don't doubt they'd be).
Or their rockets that were found to have subpar prop mixtures. Or.. or.. or...
---
I say this as an european: the US isn't the best because they have big number goes up in military power. They do, of course, but it's much more than that. They have been actively involved in a conflict since the 2nd ww, with only a few years breaks. They have good training, practice in real world scenarios, and more importantly practice and are actively working with lots of allied forces.
Militarily, desert storm, iraq, syria and all the other coalition actions were "done" in 3 days. With air supremacy in 24 hours, usually. Watching the reports on how those operations unfolded always seems like a game of starcraft with cheating AI. You build turrets and cannons in your base, and the enemy brings stealth banshees and blink stalkers. It's not fair.
China's navy isn't the only one that has accidents.[0][1][2][3] and the kind of corruption that lead to their rockets having improperly mixed propellant also isn't unique to the Chinese navy either.[4][5]
You're absolutely right to question the quality of new recruits or conscripts in the armed forces and again China isn't the only one to have these kinds of problems.[6] After wasting trillions on losing two pointless wars the general public opinion of the US armed forces is in the dumpster and I'm skeptical that morale and enlistment will see a boost if the US goes to war with China over Taiwan.
Should a conflict with the US and China escalate you will see an unprecedented level of cyberattacks and fifth column attacks on the US due to the ubiquitous presence of Chinese technology in America and Chinese immigrants, some of whom will undoubtedly play the role of spies and saboteurs.
The US can have all the fancy stealth planes they want but it doesn't mean anything if they don't have enough missiles to arm them or the infrastructure to build missiles because they spent the last 25 years air conditioning tents in the middle east[7] and their electrical grid has just been sabotaged.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/us/uss-harry-s-truman-ship-collision...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)#J...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_M...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
[5] https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/retired-us-navy-admiral-f...
[6] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
[7] https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...
By what measure? All the declared objectives - "denazification" (the destruction of Ukraine's sovereignty), "demilitarization" (the destruction of Ukraine's armed forces), "protection of ethnic Russians" (now dying under Russian missile attacks), and so on - have obviously failed. The frontline has been static for years, while Russian losses are at record highs. Despite hundreds of thousands of dead and nearly a million wounded since 2022, Russia has not managed to capture even a single one of Ukraine's 22 regional capitals. Is this how victory is supposed to look like?
Meanwhile China has risen to become the dominant industrial superpower. So I don't even care much what China's military looks like at the moment. If they see fit to switch to a wartime economy, they will, and woe be the nation that thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with them.
As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability.
China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult.
Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis".
America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years.
Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.
China simply has a population around 4x larger than America's, so even at a much lower level of development/standard of living it can still have a very big impact on the overall global economy.
China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.
Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it.
That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.
I would be cautious applying broad statements and simple causes. Often we take these opportunities to connect it with whatever pet issue we individually care about. That's why you can see people blaming everything from zoning policies to DEI.
Meanwhile, US development strategy post-WW has been 100% based on projecting military [1], political [2] and economic [3] power on a global scale.
So war isn't just "spending", but trading off investment on your own country vs. extracting value from somewhere else. That's how you get large defense funding but not public health care.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-known-u-s-mili...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
You'd be surprised by how much the rest of the world does not care about these things at all or even finds their presence degrading
More countries need to take a tip from Bermuda.
https://www.bermuda4u.com/faqs/mcdonalds-bermuda/
So it's not bland, because what is the weight of a single culture to the combined contributions of a dozen. And through that, possibility is created, resulting in a far greater range of diversity than the traditions stuck in the past.
I don't think of China as producing cheap crap, I think of it as producing everything. A lot of that stuff is cheap crap, I know because I bought it. But clearly they also produce high tech and high value goods.
I also don't think it's surprising or new that an authoritarian country can deliver material progress for its people. I think the same was true for the early Soviet Union and the fascist countries of 20th century Europe. Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.
I don't know how old the capitalism/democracy conflation is, but it's definitely more than a few decades. The political and economic systems are inextricably linked in the minds of many.
Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.
In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.
What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:
1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.
2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)
3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks.
Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?
The US literally had a civil war in the 19th century. And judging by the current polarized political sentiments, I wouldn't be surprised if another one happened in my lifetime. But yes, I don't think anyone will be invading the US any time soon.
> More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place.
Prior to the Renaissance, the West languished for centuries in the dark ages and middle ages whereas China prospered during the Tang and Song Dynasty. So it clearly isn't something that's uniquely about, say, Christianity or chivalrous knights, that allowed the West to develop so well. Cycles of dominance like the Islamic Golden Age and stuff seem to be mostly driven by institutions and luck rather than fixed cultural traits. Probably what got the West to become the dominant power and industrialize was the development of scientific thinking, which translated to advantages in every respect such as ship navigation and making cannons, which then led to colonialism and extracting resources from every part of the world. But now everyone has scientific thinking, and if anything, China is embracing science a lot more while America is regressing back into superstitions (for example, the current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist).
Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.
China has the same demographic problem that Japan has. It has a declining population and a lopsided population pyramid, made particularly stark by the implementation of one child policy many decades ago.
And scientific thinking is very much a consequence of cultural trends in Europe, many of which were explicitly religious in nature.
It seems impossible to think that Mexico could conquer the US, but far more implausible things have happened in past history.
Japan leapfrogged China by industrializing quicker than they did. Industrialization is an obvious force multiplier for an economy and military.
At any rate Mexico/U.S. situation is completely different than Japan/China.
Mexico is growing rapidly and America wants Mexico to succeed. It eases the burden on U.S. from excessive immigration if Mexico is able to develop its economy to a comparable level.
Mexico still has tons of problems though not least of which is the insane violence and heinous crimes committed by their cartels. It's far more likely Mexico cracks up from the cartel activity than the U.S. at this juncture.
> America wants Mexico to succeed.
The America that signed NAFTA rationally wanted that. The America that ripped up NAFTA? Not so much. That America is stuck in destructive zero-sum thinking.
You're right that it's unfathomable to think that Mexico could conquer America 50 to 100 years from now. It's highly unlikely to happen.
But my point is that it was even more unfathomable that a few dozen horse archers could snowball effect their way into conquering China, or that the desperately poor and backwards Japan could reform themselves into a position to conquer China. History is full of stories that you would dismiss as unbelievable if they were written down as fiction.
One of us has not been watching the news lately.
Generals are always preparing to fight the previous war.. Look at China's actions (or the West's, for that matter). Rarely is it an invasion with guns and bombs (with the notable exception of the US Middle East policy). Mostly it's slow economic takeover. What good will guns do you, when to sell your wares, you need permission from a Chinese market owner [1], or when the only jobs are in Chinese-owned chains and conglomerates?
It won't be as bad, but it could be differently bad - for all the invasions China suffered, they are still today 91% ethnically Han-Chinese [2], in stark contrast to the dramatic demographic transformation of the US since 1965.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/chinas-jdco...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic_g...
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