You guys are getting fifty cents?
I know they've always been bad, but boy China seems to have taken a real turn for the worse this decade.
Yeah, the treatment of the Uyghurs really shifted my opinion. Even though my economic interest is in selling them beans.
I once heard that the complacency of the 1990s and early 2000s w.r.t. China arose from two sources: First, China was a fantastic tool for enriching the American business class. Second, the US security services had so thoroughly penetrated their government with agents that we believed that they could never be a threat to us. Our people would be their government.
And then, in the mid 2000s, all our assets were compromised and then executed. And we were left with this unchained leviathan, a creation of our own collective greed.
I always thought the idea was to tie China into the global economy so they couldn't afford to start a war. I don't think there was ever much thought that they wouldn't eventually become very powerful regardless of what we did. But maybe Kissinger got to fuck the pandas.
@10 Ties to the global economy didn't stop the Triple Alliance in 1914 (and world exports as a percentage of world GDP didn't return to pre-WWI levels till the mid-1970s). And ties to the global economy didn't stop Putin in 2022 (or in 2014, or in 2008).
Yeah, it's not a great plan. But I think it was a better plan than thinking they could stop China from becoming a world power again.
I had no idea about 9.last, but seems to be literally true. Dozens of assets executed in two years. I had no idea. The original article about this in the news seems to be:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html
I think especially in the 1990s there was a certain amount of naive, end-of-history-style belief that anything resembling capitalism and free trade would automatically lead to political liberalization. Probably also some parallels between people thinking China would open up its political system and people (especially in the W Bush admin) thinking that there would be a wave of successful democratic movements in the middle east, patterned off of what happened with the end of communism in eastern Europe.
Maybe someone in the political science/international relations field has studied this; I just have a vague memory that the belief in free trade and liberalization was part of the rhetoric surrounding establishing closer economic ties with China. Certainly, a lot of people engaging in that rhetoric also stood to benefit personally from the deals to be made. And it might have been possible to look at the tail end of the Deng Xiaopeng era and believe that there was a realistic chance of China opening up the political system. Some countries - like Hungary under Kadar (again leaning on eastern Europe as an example) - had followed brutal crackdowns with economic, and even some political, liberalization.
14: That's how I remember it as well. Plus, one country two systems was supposed to work so well in Hong Kong that the mainland Chinese would decide they wanted the same freedoms!
14, 15: It's hard to believe now, but I think that even just ten years ago there was still a lot of optimism about the internet setting the world free.
Stupid history is now the name of a course taught in Florida high schools.
Long game, we only set the leaders up by letting them imitate our freedom. Free trade there is now leading to this:
Nearly 90% of new homes are presold. While this model is not unique to China, buyers in the country typically must pay 100% upfront. As a result, more than half of Chinese developers' financing needs were generated from presales in the past decade, while construction loans from banks accounted for less than 15% of their funding.The more people there do not pay, the bigger the bailouts from the state will have to be.
15: that did kind of happen - it's why they did a massive crackdown on the HKSAR!
more generally people shouldn't be surprised that a communist state is....communist. The All China Association of Women, to take the example, is a so-called mass organization in the Marxist-Leninist sense, whose mission is to be a transmission belt between the masses and the party. That means it's not meant to, and isn't, a membership organization that represents its members back to the party - it's a party-controlled entity that represents the party to the public, that helps it get its message into sectors of society the party itself needs help to reach. You wouldn't join it to lobby the party; you'd join it to impress the party and hope to be asked to join the party yourself.
(It's worth taking the transmission belt metaphor literally. Think of an old-school mill or engineering plant where the power comes from a big steam engine driving line shafts over the work space. The transmission belts lead down from the line shaft to each work station, and when they're engaged, all the machines spin at some function of the engine speed. They carry load back to the engine rather than feedback control. The Nazi term Gleichschaltung means the same physical phenomenon, although the engineering is a bit more modern, either automotive or electrical.)
also it doesn't do to assume some left-wing version of "Who Lost China?" here. China had enormous agency through the whole process. The PRC and its predecessors had been determined to achieve industrialization by adopting state-of-the-art technology since the late 19th century and made a decent start despite the wars, before going off on one with the Great Leap and then the Cultural Revolution. Once they sobered up from the CR they were always going to develop and we had neither much choice in the matter nor any right to tell them not to.
Personally, I have the right to tell them. But they won't listen.