We also saw something that really stood out, which is that the PRC believed the United States was in terminal decline — that our industrial base had been hollowed out, that our commitment to our allies and partners had been undercut, that the United States was struggling to manage a once-in-a-century pandemic, and that many in Beijing were openly proclaiming that “the East was rising and the West was falling.”
Sullivan can’t get away with this. He can’t just say a banger line like this and continue on without addressing it.
I feel like this isn’t surprising information. Quite a lot of the rhetoric and behavior coming out of China has signaled as much pretty openly for a while now.
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Some more absolute bangers in an earlier talk from Sullivan where he admits that the whole free market bullshit they’ve been promoting can’t actually compete with what China is doing. It’s an absolutely incredible read, Sullivan claims that the American economy lacks public investment, as it did after World War II. And that China is actively using this tool.
last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations. A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind.
The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.
He also opined that the market is far from being able to regulate everything, and “in the name of overly simplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that produced them, were moved abroad.”
Another problem he identified is the growth of the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial and infrastructure sectors, which is why many industries “atrophied” and industrial capacities “seriously suffered.”
Finally, he admitted that colonization and westernization of countries through globalization has failed:
Much of the international economic policy of the last few decades had relied upon the premise that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open, and that the global order would be more peaceful and cooperative—that bringing countries into the rules-based order would incentivize them to adhere to its rules.
Sullivan cited China as an example:
By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.
The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.
In his opinion, all this has led to dangerous consequences for the US led hegemony:
And ignoring economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous—from energy uncertainty in Europe to supply-chain vulnerabilities in medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals. These were the kinds of dependencies that could be exploited for economic or geopolitical leverage.
Today, the United States produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China.
America now manufactures only around 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors, and production—in general and especially when it comes to the most advanced chips—is geographically concentrated elsewhere.
At the same time, according to him, the United States does not intend to isolate itself from China.
Our export controls will remain narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance. We are simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.
Just a few weeks ago, Taiwan held historic elections without any major cross-Strait incident, in part because all sides — Washington, Beijing, and Taipei — worked to reduce miscommunication and misperception about their respective intentions. That is an outcome few may have foreseen in August of 2022, when most expected the cross-Strait situation to grow more tense, not less. But it’s no guarantee of future trends, and the risk remains real.
This approach has been the hallmark of Biden’s foreign policy. They’re working behind the scenes subtly and competently, making progress in ways that doesn’t really track with the 24-hour news cycle and clickbait journalism. It’s good to see the efforts paying off, but they really, REALLY need to work on their messaging.
Beijing has never cared much about the result of this Taiwanese election because the majority of Taiwanese support improving relations with China (see: votes for KMT, TPP). This entire claim of “tense cross-Strait relations” is a manufactured concern so Biden can knock a win.
The most significant recent tension in cross-Strait relations has been the declaration of the Taiwan Strait as international waters (induced largely by FONOPS declaring it as such) and the ending of some of Taiwan’s special economic statuses for trade with China (induced largely by increased arms trade with foreign powers). Everything else is just posturing to save face on both sides.
That’s nonsense, even if you pretend Taiwan is a part of China, which is clearly nothing more than a useful fiction for all parties, there is a space even at the narrowest point of the straight that is just EEZ. Which is a region that is free to navigate but the host country has exclusive rights to minerals, fishing etc within that region.
This is just strictly not true, otherwise Canada’s Northwest Passage would be considered EEZ and not part of internal waters. EEZ is drawn from the extant point outside of the baseline.
LMFAO imagine describing Biden’s foreign policy as subtle and competent while this senile dumb fuck is driving the world towards WW3. 😂
Your premise is the more ignorant of the two.
It’s not a premise, it’s an objective fact. Biden’s support for the genocide that Israel is conducting is literally leading towards WW3. Anybody with even a couple of brain cells to bang together can see that.
My brother, the entire world is sliding into ww3… with or without Biden. It would probably be sliding faster without him.
The reason the world is sliding into WW3 is literally because US keeps picking fights with everyone. Nobody like you and nobody wants you. Stop trying to play world police, shut down your occupation bases around the globe, and fix your shithole country that’s falling apart. US is a blight upon humanity.
Lol. Sure sure.
Your empire is crumbling, and you’ll probably get to enjoy a civil war soon as the standard of living in US collapses. Best of luck to you.
Turns out you can’t do regime change through the threat of genocide on a country with a bigger military than you. Go figure.
BRICS nations like China are desperately trying to move off the dollar, which is a major tool of US control. The problem is, nobody trust the Yuan, the Ruble, or any of their other fiat currencies. They can’t trust each other, so the US remains the global currency hegemon. But that is a privileged position it basically only got because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. The US’s position in this area will continue to erode.
There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D
What will replace it? My bet is on Bitcoin. A few smaller nations (Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador) have embraced it as a way to reduce the control the US has over their economies. AThe blowback from the world bank etc has been very telling. They do not like the idea of a country that doesn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of debt, restructuring, and subservience to the dollar.
But it doesn’t change that Bitcoin is a politically neutral currency that cannot be controlled by any nation state or even group of nation-states. It is immune to corruption and human error or greed. It just works well to send money from A to B and nobody can cheat it. It’s market cap is 850 billion dollars, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On par with Switzerland. Higher than sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than vietnam.
Anybody can use Bitcoin with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. With Bitcoin lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for pennies in fees. No credit check required, no middlemen, no nonsense. It doesn’t matter if your country doesn’t have stable banking infrastructure or a government constantly devaluing your currency. And it does all of this with less than 1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables, since miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity which tends to be made from renewables at off-peak hours.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah because you outsourced the crap out of them and then acted surprised when they leveraged that economic power.
On the other hand, China is also probably the one country where they successfully kept the CIA out. Can’t coup your way put of this one.
In summary, he is saying China is not there yet, but they are going to get big enough to eat our lunch and we can’t do shit about it, so we might as well start getting on their good side or we’ll get fucked in the long term.
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Close up shop, boys. Looks like [email protected] knows better than the entire US Department of Defense.
You should definitely call Biden and let him know all the Ivy League college educated generals, expensive million-dollar think-tank groups, and hundreds of experienced advisors are all wrong in their assessment of China.
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Who said any of us here are trying to solve problems?
You sound like what we are talking about here is to resolve global issues like we are a bunch of dudes in a fucking cabal of globalists and as effective as Facebook “Thoughts and Prayers™️”
No, you need to read the remarks again. Paragraphs like this one do not support your interpretation at all.
The US is saying that China’s economic trajectory has been too optimistic in the past and that the US needs to focus on domestic improvements, force China to play by the rules, and then facilitate the US becoming the leader.Ah thank you for confirming my stupidity. I am dumb and will read the thing again.
“… holding in one’s head multiple truths at the same time and working iteratively to reconcile them.”
That sounds really hard, have you tried cognitive dissonance?
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A nation of 330 million cannot control a nation that has 1 billion more people. Nations should also be free to choose their own destiny. A logical fallacy many in the West fall for is assuming the rest of the world wants to be like them and should be like them. If I have a 3000 or 4000 year-old civilization why should I take marching orders from a baby state that’s not even 300 years old like the US?
You don’t need to invoke irrelevant arguments like the age of the civilization. Today’s China is nothing like the China of 3000 years ago.
The US and the collective West should just look at its past and its actions to realize it’s not a good model.
It’s even truer today with its support of Israel. It’s not in a good position to give anyone lessons about anything.
Those are relevant arguments to people with ancient civilizations with a long history of political and social development and philosophies. They are certainly relevant to me and many like me in the Arab world.
When China had its socialist revolution, it threw away some of its principles in an instant. While its history has an influence on its current reality, it’s far from being the main thing that explains why China is China and why it shouldn’t aspire to be the US.
This is essentializing nonsense, that only helps to further narratives that cement things in time, and fail to explain the changing reality of China.
There are much more solid arguments to be made against the West being seen as a model.
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Not every westerner comes from the US. Quit being so condescending.
You’ve been proven wrong anyway 🙄
I am a shoe.
I really can’t speak for China, a Chinese would be better informed here. But if I were to draw parallels to the discourse here [Arab and Muslim world], history plays a huge role, not just as a model to follow. As socialism is clearly a break from the past for China. But lessons to learn from and shape your world view.
For the Arab world Islam was the midpoint of our history and a new beginning. But we still carry on things that even predate our ethnogenesis as a distinct Semitic people, as past lessons.
it’s far from being the main thing that explains why China is China and why it shouldn’t aspire to be the US.
China is China because of its economic model. I do believe socialism is a better model than capitalism. But even some capitalist countries are closer to China than the US because the culture emphasizes things like harmony and shared prosperity, and places a greater burden on the government’s responsibility towards the people and their welfare. Things like this are motivated and informed by our own history and culture, at least for Arabs.
Source: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/state-owned-enterprises-global-economy-reason-concern
The British Empire and basically the world was controlled by a single city of ~1million. And besides the historical and current examples of smaller cities controlling much more land and people then they had themselves, the statement doesn’t make sense. Why can’t a nation of 330 million control a nation of 331million?
Those days are long past and were a historical anomaly. We live in a world where Afghanistan defeated the US-led coalition forces.
Nations should also be free to choose their own destiny.
Dictatorships are not about choice.
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Predictable and stupid.
Don’t be a tankie by gladhanding a power-consolidating autocrat-for-life.
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Oh sorry, do you not know how to respond if I don’t phrase it where you can go ‘no u?’
If you keep hearing these labels, maybe it’s because this is the reality. Xi is a dictator - Biden is not. Americans can talk shit about their leader - the Chinese cannot.
Lie better or fuck off.
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“Nuh-uh!” repeats troll, ignoring damning example of real problems in the next sentence.
Often described as an authoritarian leader by political and academic observers, Xi’s tenure has included an increase of censorship and mass surveillance, deterioration in human rights, including the internment of a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang (which some observers have described as part of a genocide), a cult of personality developing around Xi, and the removal of term limits for the presidency in 2018.
“Vibes,” says lying idiot. “Whatever I don’t wanna hear is just vibes.”
“Electoral interference” is illegal, but “shaping and changing the PRC” is just business.
Are you really not aware that literally all of foreign relations for all countries is about trying to change the behavior of other countries? Is this actually a brand-new concept to you? Just finding out that foreign ministries exist?
Of course it isn’t lol, it’s just poking fun at the obvious hypocrisy of US moralizing and pandering about foreign election interference
You are giving a very sinister lean to shaping and changing. I think its clear that they wanted China to be another Japan, not any number of failed coups in the middle east or Central/South America.
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You act like the Japanese didn’t want to lift their people out of poverty. That the people within SONY didn’t aspire to be one of the largest corporations in the world.
The Japanese owned a significant amount of real estate within the US at their zenith (kind of like China today). They faltered because it started to cost more to import certain materials then it did to improve those raw materials and export them. Econ 101, cheaper markets existed for that type of manufacturing. It took some time to transition to a service economy. They still excelled at heavy industry and still do. They’re still one of the predominant ship builders and car builders in the world.
Japan was also one of the first countries to be hit hard by an aging population, partly because of xenophobia, but I think mainly other cultural factors. It’s challenging to try to keep your economy going when the workforce is shrinking and more of a country’s wealth is going towards caring for the elderly. I think anyone with aging parents can attest to that.
It’s not always America ruined their lives, plenty more nuance than American geopolitics. Lest we not forget that America helped to build them up in the first place. And not having to fund a military can do wonders for a country’s growth (you know, so long as they aren’t invaded).
Your hate for America and capitalism has distorted your world view. I’d prefer to live in a world of opportunity rather than a world of schadenfreude.
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Your hate for America and capitalism has distorted your world view. I’d prefer to live in a world of opportunity rather than a world of schadenfreude.
“I reject reality and substitute my own.”
Sorry, at what point did the US benefit, let alone cause the lost decade?
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The only reason there wasn’t a coup in Japan like a lot of other small asian countries is that after the aftermath of WW2 there was no need of one
> democracy is good
> dictatorship is bad
Somehow this is a contradiction.
Turns out “hopefully they’ll be less cunty when they get rich and powerful” may not have been the most sound strategy.
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I was referring to the initial decision to normalise relations with the CCP and make them a major trading partner. Not quite sure how that relates.
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I mean, give us a little credit: we did fund & organize terrorists to try to destabilize Xinjiang.
That decision was made because US was shitting their pants that USSR and China would become aligned as a common adversary, sort like what’s happening with Russia and China currently.
Let’s be honest. If China became a liberal democracy now and keeps their economic trajectory, would the US really be cheering them on? When it means that China’s GDP will surpass that of the USA in about a decade and double that of the US in two more decades after that? Will America be okay with China becoming the leader of the free world and become China’s junior partner a la Britain?
The honest answer is no to all of the above questions. The strategy has never been to hope that China turns liberal when they get rich and powerful because America doesn’t want China to get truly rich and powerful. China’s political system is of secondary concern for the West. Their increasing wealth and strength is what really bothers the US.
Imagine if US spent all that effort changing itself and improving the lives of the people living in US. Maybe it could be half as good a country to live in as China today. 😂
But why would it do that, that’d be silly. The system is working fantastically for those who run it
indeed it is, rich people are making money hand over fist
If the US had embraced FDR’s vision of democratic socialism instead of letting Capitalists be unfettered Capitalist, I think we would have more people be way better off then China today since we wouldn’t have out-sourced anything to China to begin with (Unions and DemSocs wouldn’t have allowed the outsourcing.)
Thing is that US did embrace FDR’s vision and then capitalists dismantled it. As long as the country is ruled by capitalists then socialism is never going to be a long term option. You might get brief periods of sanity, but people at the top will work hard to revert these gains back.
I’m aware, but that’s why it’s a whatif. And honestly the Capitalists got way ahead of the Socialists before the 30’s so Communism was never going to take root as long as the “evil” USSR existed. The best we could have hoped for was a more robust FDR style Social Democracy which has a high probability of leading to what you are saying.
But who knows, maybe things could have been different. Maybe Karl could have moved to Texas in the 1800’s and the communist revolution could have kicked off once oil was discovered.
not sure what you are talking about, as far as i know(!), the states have communism well integrated. free university, free housing, free medical treatment, free retirement, you just have to enter the military community, they will even protect you for free with all they have from international sues for war crimes you commited. all of above is “as far as i know” only. so to speak, AFAIK “communism” by itself is not the “enemy” of the GOV of the states and has never been, maybe it is just something they do not want >you< to profit from ;-)
I’m sure history could’ve played out in many different ways. Capitalists at the time were smart enough to realize that they would have to give workers concessions to avoid a Soviet style revolution. It’s not clear that the current crop of capitalists have that level of self awareness. The whole green new deal thing Bernie was proposing was a necessary measure to keep the system going in my opinion. Yet, the idea never got traction with the ruling class and things continue to spiral out of control now.
That’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie for you.
China is great, yeah. I see a lot of Chinese people fleeing China and coming to the West, but, weirdly, the opposite is not true. I wonder why that is?
Could it be because they don’t want to be overworked? Could it be that they don’t thrive in an overly competitive environment? I don’t have an answer to that question, and I’d love to hear the point of view of a Chinese person living there. Mind you, I do know a few Chinese immigrants that left the country but they might be a bit biased.
Do you live there yourself? Or are you just peddling tankie shit as usual?
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China is not the only implementation of socialism in the world. You can be for communism and also not think of China as the best model to implement communism. I’m talking about China specifically, though.
This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.
Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.
The means of production are mostly out of the hands of private hands though, and are in the hands of the state, which does not run the economy for pure profits for the very few. Private property is (thankfully) less of the sacrosanct guiding principle it is in the West.
It’s definitely not “public” as we leftists think it should be, and corruption gets in the way, but I don’t think capitalism is the right word to describe the economic model of China. State “something”, sure, state capitalism, hell no. The goal is not accumulation of capital.
I agree it’s not socialism though, because I feel that the state is too much of a self-preserving entity that outlived its purpose as the mean to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Well, feel free to suggest a term you think fits better, but I think it fits, even if it is clearly a different flavor of capitalism than the US or other similar economies.
The point is that socialism means the economy is managed by and for the benefit of workers and ordinary people. In all major imperialist countries like the US, China, and the Soviet Union, the economy is managed by and for the ruling elite, whether that may be private owners as in the US, party leadership as in the Soviet system, or a blend of these two as in modern China. That is why I feel they are similar and belong in similar categories, despite some differences.
Your definition does not fit though. It contradicts the very definition of the word “capitalism”, which is defined by the accumulation of capital, which does not seem to be what’s driving the Chinese government.
I’m not being pedantic. If you’re going to come criticize the authoritarians on their home turf, you’re going to have to be rigorous in your terminology.
Actually existing socialism (AES) is a term commonly used to refer to socialist states, that is, states governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The five predominantly recognized AES states are China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and, Korea, while examples of former AES states include the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
It helps to learn about the subject you’re opining on. Here’s a book you can read that explains in detail how China is very much a socialist country https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red
And if China was capitalist as people like you argue, then we’d expect China to follow the development path of actual capitalist countries.
I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.
China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.
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Message me if you want a copy, I can get the epub for you. It’s really good.
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If you can’t figure out how to get the book for free on your own then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe ask your friends to teach you what bittorrent is. There are however plenty of other free resources explaining how Chinese system works. It’s interesting that you decided to slander me here though. It suggests to me that you’re not interested in having an constructive discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ll address your misinformed claims for other people reading the thread. If China was following the same path as other capitalist countries than it would look like India or countries in Latin America today where standard of living isn’t improving for workers in any meaningful way. China is pretty much the only developing nation where the standard of living is rapidly improving for the majority. This does not happen in any capitalist country. Here are a few concrete examples of what I’m talking about.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
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Oh, I understand. You’re right, i don’t think China is bleeding people in any way. That wasn’t what I was going at, and I can see why it could be understood that way. Sorry.
What I mean is that some Chinese people leave China being pissed at China and come to the West. When Westerners are pissed at their own respective societies, they don’t do the opposite. They tend to migrate to other Western countries, usually. Chinese immigration is different from the purely economic migration you can see in other places, where people migrate to just survive. The Chinese immigrants I know are now are relatively wealthy.
But yeah, that’s a question I’ve had for a long time: how’s life in China for the average “white-collar” Chinese person? What I’m very skeptical about is that it’s some kind of paradize on Earth, which I’m pretty sure is complete horseshit, but I’d love to hear the other side because I don’t trust the media in the West to paint an accurate picture.
