This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
While there is a population difference, I think the primary reason China is so much more capable than the west isn't cultural but economic. They have a much more potent economic model than the (more or less) free market capitalism that exists in the west. They limit the places their citizens can store money to largely just banks and real estate. They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures in order to super charge industries. While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale. The west, with its focus on individual rights, just can't compete.
I think a lot of the cope on this comes from people that have internalized the whole "capitalism is optimized asset allocation" thing. I don't see why that's necessarily the case. Clearly it outperforms feudalism or true centralized command communism, but why should we believe that it's the best possible economic system with so few data points. It seems to me like the Chinese have threaded the needle between communism and capitalism and created something better. Is it sustainable? Who knows. Centralizing economic authority can lead to some catastrophic failures when that authority becomes incompetent. But for now, being able to focus a country's pooled resources into any industry looks a hell of a lot better than the western economic model, where our best and brightest are incentivized to spend their prime years shuffling assets from one pile to another to make a buck.
Define "potent"? GDP growth? Per Capita / PPP? If we're talking economics, your terms should be defined and quantitative.
So they're more "potent" (however that is defined) by generating a negative return on investment? That doesn't make any sense. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps you mean the investments are high CAPEX and have long cycles towards net ROI benefit? If they are by definition unprofitable, they are by definition bad investments that will guarantee that the given industry fails.
You have to mean international scale, right?
This post is so poorly written and argument by assertion that I debated even posting a reply. But, I think the spirit of the Motte is often best exemplified by being hyper charitable to the other side, steelmaning poor arguments, and then presenting the opposite view.
My argument against China is the theses in The Great Demographic Reversal combined with an obvious failure mode of the Chinese tech innovation system.
The TLDR, for brevity:
China's demographics SUCK. They're going to have more olds than they know what to do with. The one child policy was a disaster. People aren't having children together now. And there's a semi-nomadic horde of about 50 - 100 million men who work seasonal migrant jobs from place to place. Their middle class isn't nearly large enough.
This means that China has no choice but to rigidly control their population. But at their scale, that's incredibly expensive to do. The social credit score system is an experiment; can we pay one half of our population to spy on the other half, and then use computers to spy on the first half? In a perverse irony, China, that does not have nearly the same social security safety net that the US does, is perhaps (the budgets are secret) spending more to not have one!
Technology wise, the Chinese model has been to find / steal western tech, reverse engineer it to the best of their ability, and re-deploy. People can quibble over if this is real innovation or not, the extent to which China has produced any new and meaningful "inventions" but it doesn't matter. This style of technological management eschews what has been the real engine of tech development over millenia; lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population. An interesting quirk of history is that from about 800 - 1200, the Muslim world of MENA was the most scientifically advanced on the planet. But they fell behind technologically; they knew how stuffed worked and were very smart, but lacked the infrastructure to actually build and disperse scientific knowledge into material things that normies could use to improve their life. Starting at about 1200, Europe starts to overtake in both science and tech because they deploy tech more broadly, and science and tech have a mutually re-inforcing feedback structure.
Chinese GDP per capita is about $15k. Even with the CCP trying to shit out new tech as fast as it can, most of their own people can't really afford it. Secondly, most of their people don't have a cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense. When the high esteem strategy in life is to grind 996, be an excellent bureaucrat, and a cold bug person, you're not going to get weirdo genius inventors and you're especially not going to get weird genuis asshole corporate leaders --- Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates et al would've been hammered into shit in childhood in China because they're non-conformity is off the charts. Jack Ma is the only homegrown Chinese "visionary" who didn't leave, and he was either some sort of plant by the CCP or became a permanent political prisoner because he did a good job and built a compelling tech company.
The tension at the core of all Chinese history is balancing a pathological need for control of a giant population and a giant geography against the economic growth potential of ceding some control. If the CCP let their people just do their thing, I would be a lot more worried about a Chinese Century because of the sheer numbers. But the CCP has not only chosen, but accelerated toward clamping down harder and "controlling" more.
As promised, I'm responding in more detail. Much of the below I could nitpick at myself, but I'll leave you the pleasure. My confidence in being directionally right is underpinned by having been optimistic about Chinese trajectory for years of seeing «Xi bad» and «China collapse» narrative. I was even right in expecting their failures – such as no EUV breakthrough or quick solutions to fertility and real estate problems. I was, however, wrong in predicting a stronger American showing in response to their success.
Disclaimer: the load-bearing phrase in your spiel is «cold bug person». Your perception of China is downstream of finding Han Chinese people, politely, uncharismatic, and bluntly – not hot, in terms of a vibe rather than mere looks. You are inclined to believe that «not hot» people are categorically lesser than hot ones, incapable of True Creativity/Courage/Honesty/Ambition/Valor/Decisiveness etc., and unconsciously reason backwards from that about object-level evidence. This is compounded by the historical and contemporary distortion that the Chinese themselves have done to their image, like painting a 1.9m tall cannibal commander from that famous "decisive Tang strategic victory" meme as a pompous literati with long nails, and today taking advantage of leftist grievance narratives. A PLA soldier can point a Dongfeng DF-17 missile in your face, and you'll laugh about how it's filled with water and compensating for something, Bugs Bunny style. It's similar to the blindspot the Kzinti had for human females. More controversially, this is a common bias that I think is genetically hardwired in peoples of Northwestern European extraction/WEIRD cluster, due to greater historical female mate choice and thus disproportionate returns to thinking about mate value and general charisma signaling on evolutionary timescales. This being basically a misgeneralized instinct, arguing about it is a waste of time. I will argue about downstream confusions, though.
As a Russian, I don't really mind – actually, I'll welcome it – if China becomes the preeminent power of this century (which seems more likely by the day) and you guys get knocked down a peg with your flabbergasting ill-earned provincial chutzpah. Given their traditional isolationism, I estimate the damage to be mostly confined to morale. I am not cruel, however, so these cowboy jeers are worrying me, because their popularity, coupled with populist incentives and low cultural level of American officials, implies you may wade into a serious war in the South China Sea and get mauled, with massive economic devastation and losses for you, them, and everyone else. You'll directly drag other nations into it, too, it has already happened on trade, and the escalation potential is pretty much uncapped. So we can't be too cautious and I will present my attempt at dismantling this theory of Chinese doom and American exceptionalism.
What I want to accomplish, however, is not just dunking on this particular laundry list of assertions. Ideally, I want you is see how your very frame of thinking, embedded in (the quite recently established version of) your civilization, is just one of possible frames. Your notions of how to evaluate success, what is hard and what is easy, what makes nations strong or weak – those are just opinions of a 21st century American (or mental American). China doesn't think in this way, it has a compelling claim to the priority of the very different Chinese stack, and it's not some vague Orientalist wisdom but a comprehensible, pragmatic product of millennia of social evolution.
One aspect of it is the theory of Mandate of Heaven, which amounts to a claim that the source of legitimacy is neither birthright nor opinion of some constituency, but undeniable object level performance, and that the people ought to obey performant rulers but topple those who had clearly lost their touch. It has its shortcomings, of course, but I am not sure if the justifications for representative democracy with universal suffrage are stronger than the case for Mandate. Another is focus on cultivating everything under the state's control, starting with human capital, which is the only truly irreplaceable resource. Mencius, 4th century BC: «The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain come next; the sovereign counts for the least.» The clearest example of this is how they played the Rare Earths card. In 1992, during his Inner Mongolia tour, Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed «The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths». This wasn't because he had stumbled on the biggest pile of REEs known to man, like Americans in Bumfuck Indiana often boast of; it was because dominating REEs required long-term grit and investment that he could expect other nations to prove deficient in. In 1995, Deng's sons-in-law bought out Magnequench from General Motors. Over the next 30 years, China has indeed invested in relevant education, capex and R&D, evolved from mucking around in toxic sludge to 6N HREE refinement, consistently forced ≈everyone else out of business, and now can make Trump play ball with a single export controls announcement, even as it's building actuators for legions of robots of all kinds (flying, wheeled, legged, seaborne, industrial…) using a late evolution of this very Magnequench technology and others. All of that has been done more or less in plain sight, documented in official 5 Year Plans of the Communist Party of China and programs like MiC 2025, inciting decades of WTO-mediated outrage, «maybe we can substitute it» procrastination and «wake-up call» rhetoric on the West, and yet nothing has been done successfully to counteract it. That's one measure of each system.
On demographics, the problem is overstated. To return to the meta level, people often assume that if the Face-Saving Paper Dragon China admits a problem that's because the situation is too catastrophic to deny. No, they simply communicate clearly to coordinate their own policies. Yes births are plummeting, population contracting, median age and dependency ratio climbing, there are miserable men etc etc. It's rough. The same and far worse is happening in Korea, which despite some efforts hadn't had a comparably strict One-Child Policy (ironically enough, TFR had never reached 1.0 during 1CP, and only reached it once Xi abolished all limits and turned pro-natalist) and has no plausible policy response either, same as everyone else sans Israel. China is de facto running a massive research program, in parallel across provinces, counties and towns, with some promising results, so if anyone figures it out, I reckon it'll likely be them. But any success will take 20+ years to manifest so it's probably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. And in the grand scheme of things they're retiring peasants and construction workers who've seen Cultural Revolution, and graduating more STEM cadres than the rest of the world combined, so even with the unfortunate pyramid shape the total productivity is expected to grow. The Party itself is becoming a hive of Tsinghua STEM Ph.Ds who (just a guess) might become even better technocrats than the current set of boomers in control, nevermind boomer lawyers or the US.
More to the point, the median age of a White American is ≈44 years vs 40 for a Han Chinese in the PRC, White American TFR too is well below replacement, and the population contraction has been offset via immigration, largely of people who aren't doing that well on MSAT and often don't speak English well. Around the time when average ages are projected to converge (2040s, age 49-51), non-Hispanic Whites will have become a minority at home, and equal to roughly 1/7th of the PRC's population. This community knows well what Trump thinks about such a strategy, and many agree. (Btw, contra racist stereotypes, South American fertility is in free fall and I expect Mexico to join soon, so this gig isn't going to work forever anyway). Given such factors as a) poverty level pensions for rural citizens of the PRC (citizens who were largely excluded from the 1CP, had TFR ≈2.5 in the 80s, and so actually have > 1 children today, unlike urbanites and party members – there's a fascinating aspect of an accidental inter-class contract), b) retirement age only ≈60 in the PRC, and c) 17% youth unemployment at 5% economic growth… I'd say they have plenty of gas left in the tank, are more demographically robust than the West and even the US specifically, and Zeihan-level doomposting is simply innumerate.
One last note on this. India also tried to implement population control, psyoped by the same Limits To Growth style western concern trolling, but India doesn't have Chinese state capacity, so after an atrocious sterilization campaign they gave up and now they're the most populous nation. They're also probably the only nation in modernity that has seen height decline without ethnic mix change, because they're unable to feed themselves and now their children are fucking stunted, exactly as had been predicted by the big bad Ehrlich; and now young Han Chinese men are like 10 cm taller than young Indian men, which no doubt adds to the cross-border seethe. On the economic growth side, both nations having started from subsistence agrarianism and Subsaharan poverty level in the 70s (with sizable Indian per capita lead), enough has been said. I am still ideologically quite disgusted by the 1CP, but like most things Chinese, it deserves deeper consideration.
Bullet point 2 is pure assertion. High tech surveillance is not very expensive when you make all the tech for it and are surveilling unarmed 40+ year old East Asians. By all accounts the primary goal is genuinely to improve public conduct and it had already been largely achieved, the people are more polite, they drive lawfully, there's less scam, corruption and squalor, and on the ground level China is looking more «Japanese» than ever since the Southern Song Dynasty probably. It's a pity that this is now mostly seen by Russians because Western tourists don't want to come after Covid. «Social credit score» as commonly imagined is a mythologization of ad hoc regional programs to do stuff like penalize public transport misbehavior (which you sorely need) and, well, actual credit scores you already have. And they do have a social safety net which is evidenced eg by virtual absence of homelessness, it's just implemented via in-kind transfers (6-7% GDP) such as community canteens, rather than direct cash redistribution, which makes sense given that they're a materially productive socialist society. It could be more robust but, again, the issue is blown out of proportion: «Social expenditures in China have more than doubled as a share of GDP since 2010 and are on par with Mexico and Turkey.»
On technology, I have pretty strong opinions. The catch-up growth with IP «theft» (overwhelmingly, not theft but joint ventures, M&A and other above-board mechanics that foreign entities myopically signed on to) is tale as old as time, from Britain-Germany to USA-Japan, only made special by their sheer scale. At this point they have everything, invention AND innovation AND tinkering. They fucking license anti-cancer drugs to you, Intel is testing their wet etch equipment, they run circles around you in hypersonic warfare and EMALS and radars and power electronics… but certainly they are doing better in the «lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population» department. That's the whole story of Shenzhen – a giant singularity of small shops with narrow expertise, doing swarm process innovation. That's what they build dozens of technoparks and industrial zones for. That's why they rapidly churn through zany concepts like here– semi-autonomous truck caravans, the exact sort of product-oriented tinkering innovation Americans were doing before they had assembled their own centers of basic research (mostly from European human capital fleeing Apocalypse). Their ever-growing trade surplus, driven by expansion of exports and contraction of non-commodity imports, is not about «weak RMB» or «subsidies» (you also do subsidies, you're just bad at subsidizing structural growth factors) – it's about trivial, brutal and unceasing productivity increases. Per unit of labor, a Chinese worker produces 2-3 times as much equal quality physical output as an American one:
That's not because they're superhumans who work 996, that's decades of learning and coming up with ideas, on a level that Americans have forgotten how to think about, and now cannot even conceptualize as a dimension of innovation. You have like one guy who's thinking about this and screams DESIGN IS OVERRATED MANUFACTURING IS UNDERRATED, and half your country wants to cancel him for being an asshole. Well, Elon Musk is venerated in China, because he's the apex of what every Chinese industrialist wants to be, and there are thousands of these guys. Accordingly every Chinese EV company is now an AI company and a humanoid robotics company, and other companies try to catch up and differentiate, and XPeng IRON 2 is in my humble opinion a more impressive piece of hardware than Optimus 3 (to the extent that people were suspicious it's amputee in a suit), and UBTech will be the first company to ship thousands of factory-grade units with Walker S2 while FigureAI CEO Brett Adcock is hyping on social media and trying to deboonk their video as CGI, and so on and so forth, in every single industry. What MENA now.
On domestic market side and weak demand, this is again a problem acknowledged as a big one by the CPC (Xi's entire «dual circulation» agenda) and thus overrated as a catastrophe. They are still heavily dependent on exports but that isn't an existential problem, seeing as they've cultivated an enormous and growing market in the Global South/ASEAN, for high-margin capital goods (that these industrializing nations can't afford to tariff heavily) rather than Walmart trinkets, while the US and EU have stagnant demand for material exports, tariffs or not. They're eating up German capital goods market share even in Germany, anyway. Historically, raw superiority in productivity wins against contingent trickery, it's what defeated China the last time, shattering their self-conception as the most productive civilization (indeed the only real civilization, because for them the civilization is largely about productivity), and they have a very clear «never again» position here. As with other points, I don't seek to deny real problems, but the doom narrative gets somewhat embarrassing when put in proper context. This is what is supposed to collapse them? They're «merely» consuming about the same volume of goods as the US, while producing more electricity than the next three biggest entities combined? They're a much bigger economic power than the Soviet Union ever was, and you had a decades-long meltdown about the genuinely poor and dysfunctional Soviets, but China is a nothingburger? Sure I'll grant that us Ruskies are more charismatic. And more handsome. Gagarin, Korolev, Zhukov, Kasparov, Baryshnikov… But please, guys, that's getting weird. Be real.
On «cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense», maybe you need to install RedNote and see what they're actually doing, because they absolutely tinker like mad, as they have been tinkering for centuries, it's the same energy as young Palmer Luckey but on an incomparable scale. They are natural shape rotators and tinkerers, what they lacked was precisely systematic scientific inquiry (and risk-tolerant patient capital). Do you realize that this is the people who've developed treadmill-driven paddleships in the 5th century and mechanical landmines in 15th? That «four great inventions» is just a PR term and they had invented vastly more stuff along the way? When Meta is desperately trying to build a Superintelligence Lab at any cost, paying $100M sign-on bonuses to highest-alpha talent, this is what the list ends up looking like, 20 out of 30 «research scientists» are Han Chinese (18 of them holding PRC citizenship). VAUK is a furry weirdo who tinkered with wolf-head exosuits and now works with the PLA to build actual exoskeletons for «wolf warriors». Here's a more Reddit-coded example of their tinkering (considered lame in the Mainland because it's «not hardcore»). But more to the point, I'll just repeat what I've already quoted:
Liang Wenfeng proceeded to tinker his way to National First Prize in the Electronic Design Competition, then to tinker full stack marine navigation systems, then he tinkered away 3 years in isolation as he developed quantitative trading strategies, then he tinkered into building one of the 4 biggest quant funds in China, then he tinkered and somehow now we have DeepSeek in the open source, from their in-house file system to weights and methods published in Nature (he's on top 10 this year). All that said, Liang agrees with you that the default Chinese mindset is suboptimal:
Their slogan is «Unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity. Answer the essential question with long-termism» and they're the highest-prestige lab in China, with 5 IOI Gold winners on a team of ≈200 and a crapload of comparable talent. Liang is a hereditary teacher and I think he'll succeed in teaching China that his way is the right way, as I've previously argued. He's already impressed Xi and Li Qiang a year ago, he's just matched GPT-5 on a shoestring budget after a year of pundits saying that 100x compute advantage will erode his competitiveness, I think that's a big part of the reason Trump has abandoned Biden era containment and greenlit H200 exports. That's a very compelling set of facts, much more compelling than Jack Ma's (btw Jack Ma was at the same meeting with Xi and he's back in control, only now Alibaba is building AGI rather than shady fintech; that said, Ant Group also has an AGI division doing DeepSeek-style MoEs) and… it's pretty clear which way the process is going.
Can the US change its process after seeing new facts? Or do you lack the self-awareness to notice its defects?
On self-awareness. I think one of the greatest Chinese strengths – in addition to their sheer intelligence, endurance, their concept of the performance-based Mandate and the legitimacy (in fact, moral imperative) of rising against a degraded power, their notion of cultivation of the realm on all scales – is simply that they're an old, continuous, cultured civilization. They're jaded. They have seen it all, usually centuries before us; before you. Military overextension, proto-capitalism, proto-fascism, proto-Nietzscheanism, currency debasement, religious zealotry, multiethnic assimilation politics, infrastructure boondoogles, whatever. They can draw on an immense wealth of examples, positive and negative, and unlike modern Americans it's not restricted to the 95th percentile of cultural elites. Along the way they have developed a language to talk practically of how societies on the scale of modern Western powers fail and collapse, what moves people, how to make them act better, what is the «superior person» and how he differs from a «thief of virtue»… They have all these terms like «mianzi» and «guanxi», and Westerners look at it with condescension, Orientalist excitement or cold zoological curiosity, not realizing that these are human univerals, that Westerners themselves are driven by fairly similar if not cruder mechanisms. From what I can tell, the US today is a lot like late Qing, and its people are trying to save face before a more productive and well-ran civilization that they have grown used to regard as a barbarian shithole (and also, as I've said – «not hot»). And there's a whole lot of Guanxi going on in this Administration, too. Trump is trying to do a Self-Strenghtening Movement. Godspeed, I guess.
P.S. On cope. One of the most popular copes about China is «we've already heard all that about Japan». To me, that alone exposes Americans as an intellectually washed people. You heard that about Japan because Japan was seriously challenging you in trade, like it had previously challenged you in the war. In both cases, Japan was doomed. It's simply too small, too resource-poor, has too few people, and after the war it was under occupation and dependent on your security umbrella. Still it became enough of a problem to prompt that unhinged prophesying of the sexy scary neon-illiminated Japan Inc. turning the US into one big Detroit, and force Congressmen to smash a Toshiba radio on the Capitol lawn, like a bunch of rabid chimps. No other nation, save the USSR, had merited the distinction of such fear. So you won again. So what? The correct takeaway is not this self-congratulatory «America fuck yeah baby, our values!» attitude, but understanding that a structurally disadvantaged nation of 120 million East Asians can push you to the ropes; that in some very relevant ways they are more productive than you. Then, you ought to have noticed that China is 12 times larger in population, 25 times larger in territory and resources, is fully sovereign, and (contrary to the very strange stereotype divorced from what we see in everyday individual performance) Chinese people are not racially inferior to the Japanese. It's more or less Japan times 12, with unsurprising extra benefits of scale, clustering and on top of that a more competent industrial policy (MIIT>METI, as evidenced by the rigid embarrassment of Basic Hydrogen Strategy vs the civilization-scale triumph of the «New Three»).
To predict that they'll somehow fizzle out before eclipsing your global power (ie, more than 25% of your «per capita power») is to assert that either you have some near-supernatural tricks up your sleeve or that they're, bluntly, subhumans. Bugmen. An euphemism like «barbarians», «commies» or something also works. You're free to say that, but I think it's a bit too bold of a strategy to bet your nation's future on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link