shipwreck [comrade/them]

On the contrary, America cannot possibly compete with China on industrial and technological terms. Its best bet is to control China’s growth through global trade.

This is possible because China relies heavily on export revenues. We know this because China’s annual budget deficits have been kept below 3% for the past decade except for 2 years. This means that the vast majority of Chinese budget came from exports and credit, not fresh central bank money creation.

What this also means is that if you can block countries, say businesses from Southeast Asia or other parts of the world, from using native Chinese technology on the grounds that they are technically incompatible with Western made ones, and make it extremely costly for them to switch, then China’s exports will fall, and together with it investment in their own technology. Countries will literally have to choose between doing businesses with China at the expense of losing US and EU customers, which they have served for decades.

This is what “decoupling” means, and it is actively pursued by the US. As I said, this is the landlord strategy. Do you really think Microsoft came to prominence because it made the best products? No, it relied heavily on legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the scene.

This is why China’s best bet is to become self-sufficient, and to do that it needs to stop being a net exporter country.

The US wants China to become technologically independent. That’s why they are restricting foreign components into China because they want China to develop their own native technology through Huawei.

This is also why only Huawei is specifically targeted in US sanctions while its domestic competitors like vivo, realme etc. are allowed to export unchecked. The result is that Huawei displaces all its domestic competitors within China, but the other companies are now also taking over Huawei’s share in the global market.

The US knows it cannot compete with China technologically, but it can use its control of global market to damage China’s economy as long as China continues to stay as a net exporter country. The vast majority of the businesses around the world are too deeply tied to the US controlled infrastructures like Amazon/Google and the US is going to make it extremely costly for them to want to switch to the new Chinese ecosystem, no matter how much better the Chinese technology is. Few is going to want to replace their entire infrastructures that they have been operating for years, and losing the ability to conduct business with their regular customers and suppliers. Far too risky for any capitalist to do that.

The US is a landlord empire and will always behave like a landlord. Remember that. China’s only way out is to give up its net exporter role and transition into a domestic consumption model.

They can’t abandon the dollar, that’s the problem.

Russia’s manufacturing PMI index is on a 18-year record high.

This goes beyond just regaining lost ground, this is a dramatic shift towards re-industrialization to curb the effects of foreign sanctions, including the establishing of new supply chain and trade routes (most notably towards the Far East with China, and with Iran) that naturally stimulate growth in previously neglected regions.

One sector that has slowly been declining though, is the mining industry. All other metrics including industrial output, construction, freight turnover, retail, agriculture, electrical consumption (a metric for economic activity) etc. are all trending up.

How did you think the US got out of the Great Depression?

A lot of people say the New Deal, but that was only part of it, and in fact by 1937 FDR was on the verge of reintroducing austerity again.

The war economy during WWII got the US out of the Great Depression. Every single automobile plant in America was turned into a war factory overnight. Record unemployment fell to zero, and the American citizens registered one of the highest increase in living standards soon after the Great Depression that went well into the 1950s and 60s, one that would not be repeated in their history again.

You see, when a state puts in a huge order, military or not, it is spending a lot of money out of thin air. Those money spent will naturally flow into the hands of the companies, and then the workers they hired in the sector. With more income to spend, they will go to the local grocery stores and buy more stuff on the way home. This drives up demand and stimulates the local economy.

It doesn’t where the money is spent on. You can spend a huge ton of money on military but the excess money will eventually circulate into the economy itself.

The problem with Western neoliberal economies is that most of those money went to the stock market, real estate (including when you’re paying rent), debt repayment instead of going into the real sector of the economy.