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OK, but how does this make the previous system sustainable? You consume more than you produce, and you cover the delta with IOUs. It's a time bomb, people just got accustomed to the explosion being repeatedly postponed, developed a mindset that American “reserve currency” grift is so strong that this is no biggie. I think they're wrong.
Unfair. As you can see I'm arguing in favor of selling high-end GPUs, where you actually dominate. Soy and LNG obsession was Trump (before recent course adjustment).
You currently can't “not let” them dominate there, they are simply dominant, like you are in aerospace, so it's not exactly a choice. And in your own logic, all of that “let” becomes effectively charity soon after you have AGI (unfortunately, a necessary evil to fight Red Chyna!). It's just a question of maximizing comparative advantage by tolerating division of labor, while you complete the Total Labor Eraser Machine 9000; in fact a continuation of the earlier mustache-twirling “let the broke ass yellow bugmen assemble our gadgets for pennies, while we deepen our design and basic research dominance” strategy, justified by the Smiling Curve logic. Sorry, one doesn't have to be Xi to see how it works.
And of course, your personal distaste for Trump won't change the reality of him forcing allies to rebuild their core industries in the US. This is American policy for the foreseeable future and I don't think it'll be rejected by the next admin, like Biden didn't reject and only reinforced core pillars of Trump's China policy.
Xi was born in 1953. He's 72. Trump was born in 1946, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I get the “leaders are like underpants” logic but humans are not really underpants, which quickly get dirty but do not appreciably age in storage; and I wonder if a well-functioning autocrat really is worse than a structural inability to elect people born after 1946 AD (Biden dates back to 1942, of course). Xi's father lived to 89, after 16 years of persecution. A very interesting man. Xi's mother is apparently still alive at 99 years of age. I think Xi is pretty damn lucid and will remain so for another decade, and the “progressively isolated from bearers of bad news” bit sounds like a lazy trope. Maybe Zero COVID applies but that was more about excessive paranoia than desire for good news. He's quite obsessed with calamity consciousness and “preparing for danger in times of peace”. Xi's China has systematically derisked its position, to the extent that when Trump ranted “the U.S. has Monopoly positions also, much stronger and more far reaching than China's. I have just not chosen to use them, there was never a reason for me to do so — UNTIL NOW! … For every Element that they have been able to monopolize, we have two.” – it was hot air.
Apparently you think that the reason China could only take export controls on the chin 6-2 years ago, and can clap back and force US concessions now, is just that Trump is a venal corrupt moron and in fact he did have those two elements. The fact of the matter is that he used to have them but does not anymore, because Xi is not like Trump, nor like Putin. In 2018, when Trump cut ZTE off from US kit, Chinese state newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” published a series of 35 articles “What Are Our Chokepoints? Core Technologies We Urgently Await Breakthroughs In”, obviously building on Xi's rhetoric. I recommend reading it in detail. Xi kept scolding everyone for not doing enough – in 2020, in 2024. As of now, at least 30 out of 35 items are deemed solved. We know very much about their efforts to break all such chokepoints, they are in fact increasingly well organized, the graft of Big Fund I was eliminated. This is not the behavior of a delusional autocrat in an echo chamber. Your whole society looks more like an echo chamber, given how shell-shocked DC China Watchers were after Oct 9, how they kept saying that Xi miscalculated, overplayed his hand or whatever. He clearly did not.
But I don't expect to convince you. “Arrogant power-hungry strongman kills goons who report bad news” is a staple of your scholarship, a justification of your system, and a powerful trope of your media culture. After all, Free American Men do not need to stoop so low as to seriously scrutinize the policies or behavioral profile of some bugman chief (who wasn't even born in 1946 AD). It's not like there can be any consequences of being wrong.
I think they're much more afraid of lying than of any demotion for underperformance, because being implicated in some graft gets you expelled from the party, jailed or executed, and the CPC is designed with good incentives for mutual surveillance. Of course there's the American trope/cope that corruption investigations are just selectively applied for “purging rivals”, everyone is corrupt and corruption adds no risk. We'll see. For now, you can be thankful to Xi for doing USG's proper job of not letting advanced chips into China.
I don't oscillate, those processes are just in tension. Liang Wenfeng said: “NVIDIA’s dominance isn’t just its effort—it’s the result of Western tech ecosystems collaborating on roadmaps for next-gen tech. China needs similar ecosystems. Many domestic chips fail because they lack supportive tech communities and rely on secondhand insights. Someone must step onto the frontier.” And yet even DeepSeek has not yet trained anything on Ascends. You need usable chips and frontier AI talent, working together. Frontier talent has options – go to the US, work with domestic chips under duress, work with Nvidia chips in the PRC (but those were becoming scarce), work with domestic chips because they literally are the only thing they can get, and so on. Nvidia can create a vendor lock, not unbreakable in principle, but sufficient to slow down their ecosystem and prolong the vulnerability to export controls. Domestic chips will have both low utility and slower hardware progress if domestic software has no adoption at the frontier. China ultimately wants good AI and less talent flight (that is a thing, you realize) and so won't meddle egregiously in frontier roadmaps.
Their plan seems to be letting Tier A labs do what they want with their own money, subsidizing power for domestic compute, forcing Tier B to match procurement of Nvidia/AMD with domestic compute, and building public datacenters with domestic compute. In time, this will result in an okay-ish domestic ecosystem and wider adoption of those chips, after which they may require, incentivize or naturally get some frontier training runs. But the end goal is to downgrade Nvidia from a chokepoint to basically another commodity, not ban it. They can ban commodities in retaliation, as with soy, but it's not about a commitment to never buy American produce. So long as they have security and optionality and it makes basic economic sense, they don't mind importing soy, or LNG, or chips, or airplanes, or anything.
indeed. Except, “every market that exists” is the same issue as a singular pivotal technology. The simple fact is that either you move up the value chain relentlessly, or you get some sort of “lost decades” or “middle income trap” and then you're American chewing toy. When you actually have the potential to be a great power and not just some cute intermediate supplier with no security like the Netherlands, Americans will chew on you until you have no potential. China is not special, it's just the only remaining contender after Europe and Japan were done with. Clearly an American can have Chinese family and remain committed to the hegemonic project. All you can offer to the weak is to be in your orbit, sell cocaine or cheeses or whatnot; all you can offer to the strong is defeat. That's normal realpolitik. I just want you to acknowledge that the noise about “quality of life of Chinese people” is disingenous.
Bought and paid for, minor (yes, minor) extralegal fraction aside. Unlike Japan, these nations were not forced to transfer technology under duress, as China does not control their security.
There's also a big difference between being on the giving or receiving side of export controls and Wassenaar Arrangement. This isn't about Xi bad, Americans have been working to keep China non-competitive in the semiconductor segment for at least over three decades: “We found that the executive branch practice was aimed at keeping China two generations behind the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry. On March 1, 2001, the under secretary for export administration (a policy-level official), described this practice and reconfirmed it in a follow-up January 2002 meeting with GAO after he left office”. That's “Jiang Zemin good” era, growth, engagement, all that soapy bullshit. Meanwhile, your semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on Chinese brains. I won't moralize on the hypocrisy and laughable entitlement, obviously you feel entitled to allocating progress conditional on how much you like a given regime. After all, “if we weren't worthy, they wouldn't have come”. The point is that even modulo their autarkic preferences, proactive derisking – for every industry with a chokehold – makes perfect sense.
Speaking of local cell phones. I loved Nokia. Very cute story of plucky little Finland doing well in tech, connecting people, all those 3310 memes. The era before total Chimerica dominance. Was pretty sad when it got killed. I recall @Stefferi even speculated that it led to the decline in birth rates. I suspect Elop did that intentionally, though he just wanted to deliver fresh game to Microsoft and fumbled the company altogether. Now it's either iPhone or Chinese phones, and you tried to kill Huawei too.
This is partially fair. There are two components to this. One is subsidizing the base undifferentiated layer of economy - energy and raw materials, agriculture, infrastructure, “wasteful SOEs”. This makes it possible to not just produce anything effectively but discover new physical products faster, without the pathologies of American financialization. Another is provincial competition with duplicate companies and “involution”, spurred on by national plans like MIC 2025. Not even Xi likes involution, but they seem to be unwilling to tackle it, because it also produces very fit companies. Overall, I think that in the long run this strategy works fine as it makes goods cheaper very quickly at the cost of slower growth in nominal consumption.
Well, it's fueling Chinese pharma companies too, and now they're licensing miraculous drugs to you, and you buy the end product at 30-fold markups. “In China, a single-dose vial costs US$280 but in the US it will have a wholesale price of US$8,892”. Though the US distributor, Coherus, classified as a manufacturer, captures 80% of this markup, on merit of its role in dealing with the FDA. Who knows where we'd be if the Chinese could rip you off directly. Maybe all cancer would've been solved already, and your healthcare would've been cheaper too.
Maybe but that's a quantitative question, I think rent+health+education are uniquely Baumoled in the US relative to China (which subsidizes them), constitute non-optional spending, and cover a large fraction of the gap. The accounting of US consumption is pretty different from Chinese approach too, as @FrankishKnight explains here. Anyway, as I've said, low Chinese household consumption is not more anomalous than high American one. Nations have all kinds of ratios, and the US ratio is not characteristic of a prosperous state.
Those are worth peanuts in comparison to their current trade volume and surplus. They'll be fine, at least it won't be their biggest problem. If the world stops buying their ships, they also won't need quite so much iron.
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