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Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.
Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.
There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.
But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.
An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:
True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.
GDP determines the quality of life that the country can offer to its cognitive elite; it is the country's equity retention package. From America's perspective, China has an alien culture and an alien language, and surely the difference is no narrower in the converse. Is China failing to retain its talented people? Do we have an objective measure of such, other than anecdotal impressions of more and more Chinese names showing up on Arxiv papers? It is a bigger country than America (4.25x), and a bigger proportion of its population comes from demographics that create cognitive elites than America's (~2x) -- so even low attrition should look conspicuous to us anecdotally.
Further, will its diaspora remain diasporized as China's GDP rises? Or will they RETVRN to a more comfortable environment when the economic differential is lessened, having absorbed the best of the West's tech? To what extent are they assimilating? I imagine assimilation requires at least a generation if not two or more -- glacial by the time scales we are considering here.
What I cannot dispute are (1) China's structural demographic challenges, although they smell to me like cope in view of the raw numerical advantages highlighted above, (2) China's governance failures, i.e. its tendency to step on its own dick every few years (most recently zero-covidianism & periodic destruction of its leading tech companies, etc. ... China is the country with the poorest Chinese people, as the saying goes), and (3) the adversarial might of the American empire which now appears to have resolved to engage in straightforward great power containment politics (although I don't know enough about semiconductors to contribute to the debate about how much or long US export controls will set China back). It's possible that China will fail, but it still doesn't seem preordained to me.
A lot depends on AGI timelines, as satisfying as it would be to have this debate solely on the basis of more readily extrapolable variables. I'm a bull on AGI timelines, having estimated the advent around 2025-2030 assuming continuation of current trends -- but that is a substantial assumption, it is not exogenous, and China is an intelligent and adaptive adversary. Destroying TSMC seems likely to set back the timing, plausibly by ten years or more, and China may act on that basis purely so America can't run out the clock.
Does it now?
China doesn't have much to offer to its cognitive elite, or to any cognitive elite: their best and brightest live precarious, stressful lives of exhausted virgins, worse than the Chinese in the US tech schools do, and about the same as in other poorer Asian nations like India and Vietnam. And this happens precisely for the reason that there isn't a sufficient concentration of cognitive elite in Chinese government, thus they cannot internally propagate and execute bold moves to work around their pitiful $10K per capita GDP. All they have learned is to a) double down b) throw money in the general direction of the problem.
So many attractive proposals the US cannot match for ideological reasons were on the table, so easy to grasp with Chinese state power (even literally state-mandated catgirl gf, like they joke in Russia), 4chan retards could come up with them. But it's one thing to vaguely conceive of a policy and another to develop and deliver it; the latter requires American levels of collective intelligence.
I trust my eyes and my brain's ability to infer tendencies from anecdotes. And in fact anecdotes are more significant than any but the most sophisticated statistical metrics, because extreme seminal achievements that catch the eye and not averages drive technology and history. Nevertheless, even the conservative picture demonstrable by statistics is telling enough.
Many certainly would have returned already, if only it were more comfortable. A priori it shouldn't be hard to provide a more comfy environment for your people than a race 50000 years evolutionarily removed. But Xi provides something else.
Yes, that's a very interesting question.
I can't pedict the future. But I bet on them bungling it one way or another: either staying mad and falling behind, or lashing out to no lasting benefit. We'll see.
I don't want to project too much confidence here, but basically yes: higher GDP means the market addressable by Chinese startups is larger, which means those companies are more valuable, which means they can employ more cognitive elite under more attractive conditions (some combination of higher pay, better hours, nicer amenities and better career growth prospects). This discussion has gone a little sideways: my thesis is that higher GDP will make China more attractive than the status quo to the cognitive elite, and your rejoinder seems to be that the status quo isn't attractive to the cognitive elite, but that really isn't a disagreement.
And if all else is equal -- pay, career growth opportunities, etc. are largely comparable -- then I'd expect such baseline comforts as being able to speak your native tongue, living closer to your family and having a social network with a common cultural background would make the difference. And given their advantage in population and in intra-population human capital, they should be able to close this gap. The fundamentals are on their side. IMO it really is just a question of how badly they fuck it up.
Very cool chart, and definitely satisfies my challenge. It's the most interesting thing I've seen today. Thank you!
Certainly a possibility. I hope you're right, for my own provincial interests, and for my preference in not seeing Xi Jinping Thought indelibly etched into the cosmos.
For the sake of fairness, Hsu challenges it here but I believe that's where my anecdotal impression of latest achievements settles the uncertainty.
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