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I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
Is anyone saying China isn't in some of ways impressive? But except for maybe industrial might it's still no comparison. For example, many Chinese people joke that the Chinese dream is "becoming American". It's an unpleasant place to live for all but a few. Much like the Soviets it's a poor totalitarian dictatorship forcing money into key sectors at an unsustainable rate to keep pace with America. I'm not implying it will totally collapse like the Soviets by the way, but acting like a country with a $13k GDP per capita is a true peer to America in most ways is on its face pretty tough to swallow.
I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.
This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.
*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.
Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).
Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.
This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.
I have spent a lot of time in China and more time with chinese expats in Asia and America. There is a subset of people who are absurdly pro-CCP, mostly party insiders and a subset of highly educated/succesful ultra-nationalists. These are the only people you will probably meet if you don't speak Chinese or another Asian language. Young people at large are very unhappy with the current state of corruption, know the wages there are awful, and furthermore know the youth unemployment rate is awful and rising. Of course, my sample set (so to speak) will be biased, (particularly the expat community in asia) but it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment. There is no more "the future looks brighter than yesterday" feeling in China now. Quite the opposite.
And when I say "The Chinese dream is to become American." I say it because it is actually a phrase thrown around many circles in (at least South) China. I didn't create it myself.
This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really? I mean, go just about anywhere and all Americans do is complain about America to the point of parody. Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in. You have some fair points about the sclerotic bureacracy, but undoubtedly it's much more complicated than the popular meme of "China just gets things done and America/the West doesn't".
I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now. However, I will admit a lot of that shine has worn off since America has become more and more like a European bureacracy laden all encompassing state. America is not as much the land of the free as it was, even if it's doing better than any other developed country I can think of.
EDIT: Let's also note that right now China is very poweful and nobody wants to become Chinese. Even me, somone who has an obsession with Asian culture and languages, who finds Chinese history very interesting, and loves parts of its (former) civilization would admit this.
But there is also a truth that people want to emulate winners, not losers. Britain and Europe at large are on large losing streaks to say the least.
Modern Chinese are becoming less materialist, less pro-democracy and more nationalist, even as life satisfaction falls, so I really don't think they're attributing their woes to the CCP.
Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.
I think that's proving his point. Like, this kind of framing strikes me as deserving of very harsh criticism, it's basically barbaric gibberish. But it's part of your culture, your "civilization", such as there is.
No, it's just a simple economic policy to increase export driven growth at the expense of people's quality of life.
https://treasury.gov.au/publication/economic-roundup-issue-4-2012/china-prospects-for-export-driven-growth
https://www.paftad.org/files/34/01_YANG%20YAO_Growth.pdf
To be fair, China didn't invent this. Japan and Korea used similar policies to drive export led growth, but China's internal passport system is kind of unique (I think the soviets had a similar system, but the effects are quite different in an export led economy), and one of the largest barriers to wage growth.
This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.
The first is a 2012 article, and I don't see its relevance. Likewise for the second, it's some mush about export-led growth in principle.
I wonder if you've ever tried to check your claims with simple arithmetic and googling.
Chinese annual wages in manufacturing, far as I can tell, have increased 2.3x between 2013 and 2024. Similarly for all wages (2,38x). Chinese GDP in RMB grew by 2.37x, for a discrepancy of <<1% for all wages and 3% in manufacturing. Chinese labor productivity increased in lockstep with wage increases, resulting in flat pseudo-unit labor costs. Inflation was low and decreasing over most of this period, resulting in 2024 108K wage being worth ≈90K of 2013 RMBs, an increase in purchasing power of 93%.
The nominal hourly wage of an American worker, over the same period, grew 47%, and real purchasing power, owing to inflation, only ≈11%, while GDP grew 72%. Admittedly employment increased and so did total number of Americans, but that's of no consolation to individual worker.
Labor share or GDP:
USA = [58.8, 58.9, 59.2, 58.4, 58.2, 58.5, 59.1, 60.3, 58.6, 57.4, 57.1, 56.8]
PRC = [[47.5, 48.2, 49.0, 49.8, 50.3, 50.7, 51.1, 51.5, 51.8, 52.0, 52.2, 52.4]
What exactly is the theory for claiming that this is evidence of wage suppression in China? Why should they have already caught up if not for Xi's evil wage suppression to nefariously boost export competitiveness?
This presumes that subsidies are inefficient, rather than efficiently suppressing costs of living, which in China are indeed absurdly low.
Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.
This is economically illiterate. Citizens can's save nor invest what they don't earn. You're confusing two separate lines of China Criticism. Wages and thus real income, as I've shown, are growing just fine and proportionately to GDP. Savings rates are genuinely high on the level of private citizens, precisely because they do not trust or cannot access investment channels (other than housing, which is collapsing).
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