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 -
Dwarkesh Patel interviews Jensen Huang.
I'm no tech expert, and I'm pretty much a single-issue poster on China here, so I pay attention only from the 57th minute. It's worth a listen.
Here's my interpretation of the case laid out by Dwarkesh, although he didn't spell it all out. Some in the US, especially the Silicon Valley tech bros (exactly the kind of attitude Dwarkesh puts on display, and also Dario Amodei and his cult followers, and some here), believe that in the brief window before we hit the technological singularity, America can and will ride its computing power advantage to total dominance over AI and, by extension, the future of humanity. Under this logic, any computing power exported to China during this window is a direct blow to American national interests. The goal is very focused: sprint past the finish line, and everything else will sort itself out afterward, China included. If you want to solve the energy crisis? Invest in AI. If you want to end world hunger? Invest in AI. If you want to make sure the yellow vermin stay in their place? Invest in AI, told you already.
But 1) how far away that singularity actually is remains unclear (I'm not sure, again I am no expert on AI or anything this forum is familiar with, so feel free to lay out your thoughts on why the tech singularity is in sight). 2) US-China competition is a long game. Both countries are formidable, and in different ways. Both countries largest threat is from the inside, not the outside. There is no silver bullet that delivers a knockout blow. It's naive to think that restrictions on computing power, rare earths, or the like can permanently lock the other side out. What it will for sure do is generate animosity and bellicosity, with intensity up to a scale never seen before on this planet. This is probably partly why rare earth controls, effective as they are, haven't been deployed on a permanent basis. 3) There is a profound deficit of goodwill between the US and China, and that poses an enormous security risk to both nations and the world at large. This risk is far more real than the doomsday anxieties peddled by those types who love to brand themselves as "effective altruism" advocates, wringing their hands over alignment and the specter of a superintelligent AI annihilating the world. Export controls and measures of that sort are therefore much harm and dubious gain. At their core, they reflect a desire by certain people to take a shortcut, convinced that this one move alone can defeat China and "secure the light cone." I think this is pure fantasy, likely just another manifestation of a weird complex.
Which brings me to something more personal, because I realize I can't talk about this purely in the abstract. I love my country (contrary to what some seem to believe, people in China do love China, not all, but still. I can't believe this needs to be spelled out but apparently so). But I also like the Americans, in fact more so than most other peoples. I like power and I like a country that is strong and powerful, and I think that is a virtue in its own right. It demonstrates the vitality of the culture that country is founded on, which I think provide a lot for Chinese to learn from. I think for the most part the Americans I've met and know have treated me well, and respected me, and I think it is my duty to return that. But something has been puzzling me for some time, maybe because of my apparent inability to understand conflict. I do not understand why China and America have to be in conflict. I don't think the current situation is only any particular country's fault; it's complex and in many ways an extension of domestic issues; it's fueled by mutual misunderstanding which I think is somewhat lopsided given the lack of American in China but not vice versa; it's also because China for a long time until recently was not a functional society and ran by either corrupt (physically and/or spiritually) or megalomaniac people, and that itself creates all sorts of troubles that overflow beyond the border; it's also because of the growing anxiety among Americans due to societal rot, and the impulse to seek a simple explanation and target to avoid facing the real issues. But I do not understand it. To use what Xi said, the Pacific seems wide enough to contain two powers, and I think the years of collaboration and positive competition between China and the US have benefited both, tremendously so. I also believe that the right position on a wide variety of social and economic issues is somewhere in between those of China and the US, and that losing either one is like losing a mirror to reflect upon, which hastens the decadence of each. I can't think of "rational" reasons why this has to be confrontational.
Maybe this is all motivated reasoning, but all reasoning is motivated. Anyways, thoughts?
I am most familiar with the ACX-comments-section arguments which inevitably go like this:
The arguments in favor of selling chips to China are only ever aluded to, never stated or linked. Having now heard the arguments from Jensen Huang, I understand why they were never explicitly invoked. They presuppose that China having access to advanced AI systems is no big deal, which undermines the Xi-risk argument against X-risk mitigation.
ACX comment chain is boring and filled with midwits. That's why they follow the Great Man with such fervor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I strongly recommend the book "The Hundred Year Marathon" by Michael Pillsbury. The short version is that in the 20th century, Americans agreed with this, and made many efforts to support the fledgling Chinese state and connect economically. Unfortunately, during this entire period, China was doing everything in its power to subvert and take advantage of America. One of the best known examples is industrial espionage, which China continues to this day.
I know it may seem reductive to say "The Chinese are to blame" but the history backs this up. China and America are in conflict because China believes only one country can be on top, and that global relations are a zero-sum game. I personally think this is the natural consequence of a communist mindset, which is notably zero-sum about everything.
Of course there are plenty of people in China who don't think this way, mainly businessmen, but China is structured in such a way that those people are subject to the control of the ideologically driven politicians.
I also think the Tanner Greer theory about Chinese fear of US soft power is relevant.
The basic thesis (see for example this blogpost but it is a theme of much of Greer's work) is:
The Chinese regime cares about its own survival a lot, as you would expect
The Chinese regime is more likely to be defeated by American soft power (as the USSR regime arguably was) than by American hard power - there is no scenario where America (or a broader Western alliance) acquires the ability to enforce regime change in mainland China militarily. In fact, American (or western more broadly depending on your point of view, but probably almost entirely American) soft power is the main threat to the survival of the Chinese regime.
China spends a huge amount of resources (e.g. the Great Firewall) defending itself against American soft power, but as long as China has to do business with the rest of the world the potential effectiveness of this approach is limited.
The nature of American soft power is that America can't turn off their soft power threat to China, even if they wanted to.
Accordingly the Chinese regime will not feel secure as long as America looks like a powerful, attractive alternative, and Chinese policy reflects this.
All this applies whether or not China wants to spread their system - or indeed whether America wants to spread theirs. Freedom wants to spread even if individual free countries don't care about spreading it.
To relate this back to the chip export issue: even if you don't believe in the immediate threat or power of AI (you deny that the sprint finish scenario is going to happen), it seems obvious to me that there are intermediate abilities unlocked by advanced AI (and therefore enabled by advanced chips) that can threaten either side in this conflict. Cyber security threats are maybe first and foremost, and are of immediate relevance in the ideological/soft power battle. If AI advances to the point of rendering non-frontier AI driven cyber security obsolete, then how would that impact the ability of the Chinese regime to maintain the great firewall? What if advanced AI was able to hack or manipulate the censorship system, or edit broadcasts, or enabled manipulation of the Douyin algorithm? These kind of capabilities alone (if you assume an attack vs defence paradigm) would justify interest developing not just advanced AI systems, but systems that exceed the opponent's in capability. Chip export restrictions would then be relevant in this scenario.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do not like this "you started it first", "no, you started it first" nonsense. As with every competition before and after this one, the situation is complicated and dynamic. It does not have a simple, elegant explanation you can point to and say, "this is why we hate them!". I do not want to waste your time or mine digging up why the Chinese think it was the Americans who failed us. You can try asking Claude or ChatGPT or GLM or whatever, it will give you our point of view more eloquently than I can. It's a paralyzing train of thought, and it is why I think many disputes can never get resolved, whether Republican-Democrat fissures or the conflicts in the Middle East.
It means nothing to me, because it is not constructive. Where we go from here, and how people can solve this without putting everyone's lives on this planet at risk, that is what matters.
I don't intend this as confrontational, but you are also controlled by ideologically driven politicians. This is a simple fact. You yourself are also likely not one of those ideologically driven politicians. Your position is not meaningfully different from that of the Chinese businessman you disagreed with.
I have never understood this point about "being controlled by X". What does that even mean? Everything is "controlled" by something else if you think about it long enough. What is the whole point of pretending to have "individual thoughts" (of course it brings you comfort and I think that's good) in a debate? Have you ever thought about where those individual thoughts come from?
Looks like I really struck a nerve. If you want to actually understand this, read the book I recommended. I won't be going through the last hundred years of history in this comment.
Americans don't hate the Chinese. In fact many of us quite like your culture and people and find much to admire. However, we cannot trust you. We can't trust you because when America came as a friend, China lied to us and betrayed us.
This seems like performative outrage. I know you must be aware that the CCP has a much higher level of control over Chinese businesses, especially state owned enterprises, than in America.
Again, not trying to argue with you. I want to explain why Americans have this perspective. If you really want to understand, read that book, or at least the LLM summary.
Looks like I’d have to do this particular dance again.
First of all, “I really struck a nerve”. What does that mean? It means I feel strongly about something you said. Does that automatically mean I’m wrong? This “oh you’re angry, hohoho, pwned” routine while basking in one’s own intelligence is boring and unbecoming of a decent discussion. One of the most commonly used tactics by Chinese nationalists back home is to say you’re “急了” (angry). You’re probably more familiar with the term “triggered,” though you didn’t exactly use that phrase.
I feel protective about China, yes, but I also feel strongly about arguments I find silly. I felt the same way about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when people argue over who started it first. You’d “strike a nerve” there too with those arguments.
You’re missing my point. I know very well that your people and your elite do not trust us. The fact that you feel the need to spell this out tells me you’re not getting what I’m saying. I acknowledged in my original post that there is little trust between the two countries.
The characters of both our countries have meaningfully changed in the past 80 years since the founding of the PRC. Neither yours nor mine can claim a coherent, consistent goal throughout that period. Saying “we trusted you in 1911, so we already gave you a chance” makes little sense. Your country now and Woodrow Wilson’s America are different in fundamental ways. And however much kindness and selflessness your missionaries and China hands showed, your country’s leadership has never had altruism at heart.
I’ll say it again: I’m against the whole exercise of assigning blame for complex events spanning decades or centuries. It isn’t helpful or constructive. By the same logic, I don’t think Chinese hatred toward Japan over wartime atrocities is particularly healthy either.
And this point stands: mistrust doesn’t matter, because the optimal choice is still engagement and dialogue. Mistrust can only be resolved through engagement, not sanctions, and certainly not violence. Maybe violence works for your mistrust toward Iran, though even that is doubtful. Needless to say, we are not Iran.
I’m not going to read that book, because I already know that history. I did read the AI summary you suggested, so I held up my end. Would you mind having your AI summarize our grievances in return?
I don’t agree with your grand historical arc that China betrayed America while Americans were being taken advantage of. Your people have a particular tendency to frame things as others failing you. It has happened multiple times with me on this forum, and at some point that pattern is worth reflecting on.
That said, I partly agree with you. Before the PRC, America was, as I’ve said elsewhere, one of the only Western powers that helped China in its direst moments. America did not participate in carving up China. It helped return Boxer Indemnity funds, along with numerous policies during Wilson, and it helped us tremendously, bravely fight the Japanese of course. But it also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and exploited Chinese labor to build its railways. Taking everything together, America was still probably the most beneficial Western country toward China during that era, with Germany perhaps a close second.
But after 1949, America was hostile. Are you denying that? The US government, driven by anticommunist fervor, treated China as an enemy and actively worked to obstruct Chinese development through sanctions, coordinated pressure from its allies, and most significantly, the continued disruption of reunification with Taiwan. You could argue that was opposition to communism rather than to China specifically, but I don’t think most Chinese people do or should care about that distinction. The rapprochement after the Sino-Soviet split was transparently a strategic compromise on both sides to counter the Soviets. You don’t get to claim naivety or selflessness for that.
You, and many others, have a habit of emphasizing your contributions while minimizing your gains. American actions are first and foremost in the interest of Americans, whether all Americans or specific segments of them. When those actions have genuinely benefited China, I have no problem acknowledging it. But if you insist on pretending America always acts out of the goodness of its heart, you’re certainly free to believe that. That’d just be naive.
I don't think I implied that America was acting out of the goodness of their own hearts. I'm simply trying to point out why we are in conflict.
To get off the historical finger pointing, I do think the issue is ideological.
One of the main points of the book is that Chinese grand strategy is based off the lessons of the warring states period, of a lesser state rising up to supplant the hegemon. The strategies that China has used towards this goal are fundamentally deceptive. From what I've read, this is not unusual in Chinese thinking, to the point that Chinese people consider deception to be completely normal and expected practice in dealings between states. Maybe you can correct me on this, but it's certainly the conclusion reached by American thinkers on the topic.
The issue, then, is that American moral thinking sees deception as fundamentally wrong. Whether this comes from Judeo-Christian or Puritan values is not important. What matters is that Americans have an instinctive distaste for the way the Chinese state operates as a matter of course. When it comes to our relations with other nations, at least those we consider friends, those nations do not lie to us about their essential nature and goals with the intent of harming us. China does. Americans even prefer a nation like Russia that is open about its conflict with the West over a nation like China that pretends to be our friend while secretly undermining us, which in our moral calculus is considered the lowest of the low and a moral evil.
I’m sorry, but this is self-serving, if I may, lies.
Your state constantly engages in lies and deceptions. What is the Iraq war but lies and deceptions? What is the Tonkin incident but lies and deceptions? Look at the current administration. Trump is probably the most quintessentially American president, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. What does he engage in? Lies and deceptions, constantly, to the point that people here argue you have to read him “seriously but not literally”. What is that but a convenient excuse for lies?
Your claim that “Chinese strategy is based off the Warring States” and the implication that this strategy is lies and deceptions makes little sense, and, to be very polite, smells of selective reading and biased thinking. The Warring States period left us with two major branches of thought: Confucianism, which grounds itself in virtue, idealism, and hierarchy; and Legalism, which grounds itself in force, realism, and statism. The rest of Chinese political history is the struggle and synthesis between these two schools, to put it simply. Legalism prevails during chaotic periods of imperial collapse and subsequent re-establishment. Confucianism wins during periods of peace and prosperity, and eventually leads to decadence and complacency until the empire shatters again. There is nothing insidious in this, as you implied, and if you want to know more, there are plenty of books on it.
Anyway, I’d like to thank you for sharing your opinions. It is, I admit, a bit shocking to see what some Americans really think of us. Shocking perhaps because I was slow to believe it. I never thought reasonable people actually held these views, and always wrote it off as politicians stoking fear, business as usual. I still think this is something that dialogue and engagement can help.
I appreciate your response! Again, the Warring States comparison is from the book I recommended. It describes the strategy taken by a lesser state to undermine and eventually supplant the greater, using tools like 'appear weaker than you are', 'exploit internal divisions in the enemy', 'control information' etc. We know that Chinese strategic thinkers base their thinking on this period because they write about it. What you have described as Confucianism vs Legalism is internal politics, whereas this is foreign affairs, two totally different things.
The other distinction I would draw is between the 'lies' of a politician and diplomatic subversion. All politicians lie, that has little to do with the relations between states. On the other hand, the US State Department operates on an extremely high level of trust. If a US diplomat were to deliberately deceive their counterpart from a friendly nation, that would be a serious breach of trust, a betrayal, that could badly damage relations between the two nations. Especially if the deception was in service of harming or undermining the other nation! Your example of the Iraq war only strengthens my point here - despite the fact that it wasn't even a deliberate deception (but instead bad intelligence about WMDs), this remains a point of contention and friction decades later. Now imagine if a country were conducting deceptions of this sort constantly and with malice - that's China.
I'll lastly just note that you haven't even tried to dispute the historical facts that lead American thinkers to this conclusion. Rather, it seems to me that you are passionately defending your country's honor, which I can certainly admire. But that sense of honor, and the passion it inspires, will prevent you from clearly seeing things from the outside perspective. Of course the Chinese see themselves as the hero of the story, just as everyone does, the Russians, the IRGC, everyone. That doesn't make it so.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Speaking in terms of industry, China did, indeed, start it first. China can claim the british/japanese started things even firster, but excepting perhaps the boxer rebellion, the United States didn't make any particular effort to stifle china's economic growth until well after china began it history of stealing american IP. I don't judge china for doing that because intellectually property law-- i.e. government-issued monopolies on ideas-- is fundamentally bullshit rent-seeking. But relative to the diplomatic agreements in place, the chinese government promised one thing and delivered another.
This isn't even going to be a debate in 100 years-- just like Americans don't bother denying our rampant theft of british IP during the early industrial revolution.
I don't count Japanese crimes as American crimes. I don't really think British crimes should be laid at American hands either, though Britain is no longer a country I can hold a grudge against. For many people, everything white people did naturally falls on the major white country with agency, but I don't agree with that view.
I agree with you that the Americans were particularly benevolent even during the most chaotic years of the Chinese nation. Of all the powers, America perhaps took the least advantage of us and helped us the most, owing partly to the missionaries and the old China hands. I think the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program is obvious evidence of that. It is taught in Chinese schools.
I disagree. The US was hostile toward communist China well before China began its history of stealing American IP. You can argue the hostility was directed at communism, not at the Chinese people, but for the Chinese people, like the Iranian people right now, what difference does that really make? Should we really say thank you?
Anyways, I don't think this discussion is particularly fruitful. These "who's to blame" questions make my country revanchist and give us an inferiority complex that's hard to root out. It's also not helpful for Americans to see things through that lens, for the reasons I've already said.
Look, maybe the problem is that a lack of education is responsible for my ignorance of american attempts to restrict chinese economic growth. But if it is... what history lesson am I missing? As far as I remember, the rough chain of events was, WW2 -> chicoms defeat republican china -> korean war (attempt to constrain china's hard power, not economic power) -> sino-soviet split (leading to us/china rapproachment) -> vietnam war (again, not an attempt to restrain china's economic power specifically) -> nixon goes to china -> US/chinese economic alignment (including chinese stealing american IP) -> modern worsening of relations. Did I miss america backstabbing china industrially during the sino-soviet split?
I don't think it's a lack of education. Until very recently there was no reason or incentive for Americans to care about what the Chinese think. And until now there's been no reason for American media or policy wonks to represent Chinese perspectives.
From 1949 until Nixon, the US maintained a comprehensive embargo on China (through CoCOM/CHINCOM, which is even stricter than against the Soviets). You can frame that as anti-communism and constraining hard power, but it absolutely hurt and was meant to hurt the Chinese economy, which was already reeling from internal mismanagement and near-total isolation from the productive world. It's hard to imagine a country acting militarily against another without also acting economically, right? I'm not assigning blame here, because China did align with the Soviets.
A few things worth noting in this timeline.
There is a genuine window of collaboration, after Nixon and most notably during the Reagan era.
In 1989 after Tiananmen the US and the west placed comprehensive sanctions against China. The US suspended military sales, blocked World Bank loans to China, and imposed restrictions on technology transfer. Some of these were never fully lifted to start with.
In 1996, CoCOM, a Cold War era economical sanction against the eastern bloc, was succeeded by the Wassenaar Arrangement, which continues to prohibit a wide range of goods and technology sales to China. So even during the period of supposed "economic alignment," the US and its allies maintained significant restrictions on technology transfer. And there are the Cox Report followed by the Wolf Amendment, which China sees as baseless.
It's also important to consider the reasons the US gives for sanctioning China, usually framed around "dual-use technologies" and "human rights abuses." Especially given how the current administration behaves, it is very difficult for us to believe that these measures are genuinely motivated by concern for human rights in China, and even if a fraction of the American policy makers did genuinely believe that, I think they're usually carrying water for the hawkish Cold War types still. They are far more easily read as a hypocritical use of human rights to justify economic encirclement. And also what exactly do Americans want China to do to lift those sanctions? Regime change is off the table, there is a period (2000-2010s) where there is genuine improvement on the human rights front, does that lift the sanctions? My reading is that nothing can result in lifting the sanctions because sanction is the point.
And one cannot expect the other party to overlook outright provocations even if not economic, most importantly US arms sales to Taiwan, especially in the period surrounding the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. For added context: during that period the US Congress and the State Department were sending contradictory signals, which is part of why I've argued that the current worsening of relations is often an extension of domestic politics. In this case, it was the active sabotage of executive branch policy by the opposition party in Congress. One example here:
Edit: and this soured the relationship from the very beginning. Another example of the president's policy being sabotaged by opposition.
Things like this happens multiple times and I don't want to list them all. Just to show you that from the Chinese perspective it is difficult to trust the Americans, because when you negotiate with Americans you cannot guarantee that the other branches of the government, or the next government, will honor their promises. I think Iran understands that pretty well by now.
Again I think this particular practice of finding out who shoot first is unproductive. I think for China and the US, we're roughly even. And more importantly moving on is to find common ground and collaborate, which I think has great potentials.
I'll concede this argument, thank you for the history lesson and for citing your sources.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
America didn't help China out of the goodness of its heart. USA decided to be more friendly with China when Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, so all this generosity with intelligence and technology sharing was a strategic decision to create additional pressure on USSR by creating a problem right on its border. And China, being pragmatic, took full advantage of this opportunity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I recall reading somewhere that Western culture is fundamentally a proselytizing one and so it is difficult for Westerners to imagine a world in which the preeminent superpower is not forcing others to convert to its worldview. In their words, Chinese culture has, historically, been much less dogmatic and primarily interested in pragmatically advancing their own interests. Up until the past century or so, this has taken the form of some combination of internal strife and turtle-ing against invaders instead of active expansionism. You could say China has no interest in exporting socialism with Chinese characteristics anywhere so long as its absence is not a threat to its internal stability and prosperity, but this is so at odds with the Western mindset they cannot even consider it.
It always struck me as too much of an oversimplification, but I sense some element of truth in the broad strokes. Do you feel there is indeed less interest on the part of China to export its cultural views, its political system, its military bases compared to the US?
I do. I do not care for countries I have not meaningfully immersed myself in (which is to say anywhere outside China and the US, basically). Having been influenced by said "proselytizing cultures", this admission makes me feel wrong and guilty, if you will. I can try to make myself care, but I don't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's no need to talk about the Singularity: current AI models are already powerful enough to be dangerous. (if you had asked a year ago, though...)
Claude Opus helped plan the Venezuela and Iran attacks, and a special version (with less restrictive behaviour) is used in government biology labs. It's so important that the Department of War was flirting with the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to sell it to them before they went with the Supply Chain Risk designation instead.
Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing found many (thousands?) of serious vulnerabilities in common software. Anthropic chose to patch those bugs instead of exploiting them, but a foreign state wouldn't necessarily do the same. Heck, I don't think the US government would do the same.
Exporting chips to ensure there's an American "tech stack" behind foreign AI isn't quite as bad as exporting centrifuges to ensure there's an American tech stack behind foreign nukes, but it's similar enough to rhyme.
My understanding of those "many serious vulnerabilities" is that they're egg fried rice, egg fried noodles, egg fried vermicelli, shrimp fried rice, shrimp fried noodles... It basically boils down to a few categories of serious vulnerability, and the "many thousands" claim is marketing. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
I don't think we have any evidence beyond baseless speculation, but that sounds plausible.
The least impressive way to reach those numbers is still fairly impressive, though. It would be two steps:
Find a bad piece of code. Either as a novel discovery or else from someone else's work.
Search for that same code (either literally identical or practically similar) in a million projects, and get some hits.
They could probably get away with a couple dozen novel findings and a very thorough search, but that's still better than anyone else has done so far.
The fact remains that AI did find vulnerabilities that humans didn't. Even if it's only a result of low-skill drudgery, it still happened and it's still important.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
AI for military planning feels like a bit of a non sequitur. Both in the sense of 'what degree did they contribute' and in the sense of the USA being in a position of such profound advantage in technology and force projection that they could probably get a way with 'Rank these 5 sites in order we should hit them' and have it be a productive question to ask. It's not like AI is gonna bridge the gap and allow a country to suddenly swing way above their weight class
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Firstly, power is zero sum. With regards to conflict, power is the lens to use, not wealth or positive-sum dynamics.
It's idiotic for the US to sell China AI chips. China is already trying hard to make their own AI chips and chips generally. Any big power would want to secure such critical industrial, economic, military resources with domestic production. They're not going to stop if Nvidia sells a few billion more in GPUs. Nor is China going to accept a subordinate position in the US tech stack, they're not stupid and have been playing their well-honed playbook of imitation, innovation, espionage and absorption of foreign IP. Jensen Huang must think the audience are stupid with this rubbish:
'We need open source', no, Nvidia needs open source to increase competition amongst its clients.
And this is just bullshit. They don't have anywhere near '4x or 10x' as many chips because of export controls and a shortage of HBM too, because of export controls and sanctions. Amazon has more compute than all of China. Jensen is just nakedly grasping for any advantage, any line of reasoning that gets him where he wants to go, which is selling more.
Maybe Jensen should head off and try to convince China to stop hacking every drop of IP they can get their hands on, see how that works out for him. It's just a profoundly unserious way to look at the world. Jensen's abilities have made me lots of money, so I'm not opposed to him totally. But there's this shameless inability to accept that Nvidia and US interests might not be the same. He weaves around good faith argumentation like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix, just constantly attacking and pressing and cajoling and bullshitting. I'm not American either. But the nakedness of the duplicity is just staggering.
Even if the singularity were not imminent, it'd still be dumb to sell these chips from an American strategic point of view. AI is useful for chip development, Google has been using AI for chip design for many years now. AI would be helpful for squeezing out more yield on their inferior processes. Selling China chips accelerates their chip development. Selling China chips also accelerates lots of other research, AI cyberwarfare capabilities, military ISR and economic competitiveness generally... And he's just going on about how they need to be open source developers on the US stack, like that matters at all? It doesn't matter at all. The notion that huge companies are going to spend tens of billions of dollars training massive AI models and then open sourcing them so they won't make any money from them is absolutely retarded. Open source can only lose, in the long run. I like open source and use open source but I'm realistic about it. Nvidia doesn't open source anything if they can actually make money from it: they patent CUDA architecture, tensor cores, NVLink architecture. They're not retarded. Facebook has switched to proprietary with Muse. Even Facebook has cottoned on here.
In the Cold War the US was loathe to sell the Soviet Union advanced machine tools. It was obviously stupid to sell tools that could make stealthy submarine propellors, C&C tools with high tolerances for advanced engines. Fortunately the Soviets could mostly only copy and not innovate like China can.
Secondly, the US government and elite as a class does not accept the legitimacy of any non-liberal democracy. They might decide that it's too hard to overthrow any given power at a given point in time, that the costs aren't worth the gains at any given point. But if they have the power, they'll give it a shot. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Russia are all to some extent considered targets. So is China. The US leadership class is not going to change its mind about this.
Even if China was a liberal democracy it'd still be very threatening because of how big and rich China is. If you read Colby's book on strategy he lays this out. If China reaches a certain level of strength, China becomes the lynchpin of Asia and the rest of Asia falls into China's orbit. If Asia falls into China's orbit, Chinese standards, Chinese technology, Chinese markets, so too does much of the rest of the world. Then China can start interfering in the Americas and undermine US national interests. The US will not have sufficient power to resist this, since it's a fundamentally smaller country. Colby makes all the song and dance about how they're only really opposed to the Chinese government... but at the end of the day we know the Chinese government has the support of the people, they're nationalistic and quite reasonably so. They want the best for their country and that means expansion overseas, in one form or another.
It doesn't matter if current Chinese leaders say they have no such interests, or even if they're being sincere. Leaders change. The US used to be isolationist and changed. Power corrupts. Huge powers have global interests, especially today. They get drawn into conflicts, they feel immense pride in their power, glory in their victories. China is no different from any other country in potential for rapacity and aggression.
Furthermore, America does not have a chance in competing with China on an even playing field. Chinese people are smart and very hard working. The Chinese system is very capable. They don't have a construction sector that squanders billions building imaginary railways. They don't have a fent zombie infestation in their biggest cities. They don't have a political class behoven to Israel. They don't have people like Jensen running around undermining export controls with their lobbying, China's economic elites obey instructions. China's internal problems pale in comparison to America's.
America would have to be 4-5x more capable per person to compete with China just based on pure population. That's incredibly difficult! Without AI, without its ever-diminishing time-based advantages in technology, America cannot compete with China. The great hope seems to be that Chinese demography falls off ... in an age of automation where China already has a huge industrial and robotics base. In an age of AI. In an age where everyone has growing youth unemployment. The demographics cope is just cope. China is huge, has enormous cohorts of highly educated young people. Demographics will not avail America.
China's optimal strategy is 'lets be friends, win-win cooperation, surely you'd never attack a peaceful country like ours, lets trade and cooperate and especially share technology'. Then once they have the technology and a giant fleet, a military budget 2-3x America's, all-domain technological superiority, then comes revenge for past humiliations, real and imagined. That's the privilege of size and intellect.
America's optimal strategy is looking for some kind of force-multiplier, a wonder-weapon that can be used to lock in its advantages. AI fits perfectly. Frankly, America has been ridiculously, impossibly generous to China, as generous to China as it has been destructive in the Middle East. America opened up domestic and world markets to China, China systematically grabbed every strategic market it could with aggressive state-backed industrial expansion. And exported inordinate amounts of fentanyl precursors and toxic social media like tiktok to America. They're playing the game. The US can also play the game and take steps to cripple and constrain China.
There's a lot to respond to, but I feel like these points are repeating themselves, and I'm getting tired of it.
I think the insinuation that we will always cheat and always take advantage of naive white men is idiotic. You are one of the people who hype up our capabilities enormously, to the point where I'd love to live in the imaginary world you inhabit.
It might be true that with a larger population, even assuming equal productivity per capita, China will be four times more productive than America, and America will inevitably lose. But is that reality in the room with us right now? And do you think those puny measures of chip sanctions, McCarthyism against Chinese scholars, and "eagle warrior" diplomacy can level the playing field created by this stark difference in power and human resources? That's laughable. If we will always, eventually get there with all this power, wouldn't it make more sense to kowtow now to avoid the "revenge for past humiliations, real and imagined"?
It's defeatist, exactly like what Jensen said. He's not a loser, and he doesn't think the United States is a loser. He believes there is something intrinsic to the US, magic dirt, puritan spirits, "freedom and democracy", whatever, that makes it competitive against China even with these disadvantages in human capital. I don't know if I necessarily agree with him, and I'm not sure he meant everything he said, but he runs a trillion-dollar company and rose to the very top of humanity from the very bottom. I trust his instincts more than most.
White men quite clearly have been naive and greedy and you guys exploited that masterfully. It was idiotic to invest so much in a hostile country because something something middle class democracy liberalization. China certainly isn't making the same mistake, they're not investing in outsourcing their manufacturing to India, they're trying to constrain Indian manufacturing.
This is our repayment for saving China from Japan, I suppose. The Hump, the Burma Road, all the Australians, Americans, Brits who bailed out China ended up fighting them in Korea, getting displaced economically later on.
Unfortunately for China, I think it's too late. The compute advantage is too great, singularity too close, Chinese fabs too far behind. Chip sanctions, albeit inadequately enforced, albeit undermined by Jensen's heroic lobbying/bullshitting efforts, will be sufficient. Mythos and its successors will overmatch Chinese human capital. The ultimate outcomes may well be bad for most of humanity but it'll surely be crushing for China.
I don't understand this mindset of sneering at the other side for being 'defeatist' if they pursue their strongest strategy in a straightforward competition, while simultaneously bragging about one's own power and the inevitability of their defeat. At least Jensen is trying to sell his chips, what are you trying to sell to a presumably mostly white, mostly American audience? It's not defeatist to take the most plausible path to success, jettison all the cope about magic dirt and wield some power.
You're implying that we're the party responsible for this. When will you learn that your own elite is responsible? Go find them and voice your concerns. If you fail, try again until you succeed. What is this nonsensical lashing out at others, grasping at every straw to dodge your own responsibility? Also you did not save us from Japan. You're Australian if I'm not mistaken. The Americans can claim to save us from Japan and they'd be partially right, and they are quite the benevolent empire from the very beginning. You cannot.
You've said similar things before about how formidable our industrial base is and how the West basically lost. Hyperbole is a pattern with you.
Save me this insinuation. I am not sneering at the other side. I am sneering at the people who deserve to be sneered at, and that's not everyone on "your" side.
I have also not bragged about China's power or the inevitability of your defeat. Are you unable to read?
I have been very clear about what I was trying to sell to this mostly white, mostly American audience: there is risk to confrontation, and it does not have to be this way. What are you trying to sell to your fellows?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a minor pet peeve of mine, so please forgive the digression (your post as a general rule I agree with).
The Soviets actually, from what I can tell, were quite innovative, and beat US and Western countries to technological "firsts" repeatedly, even though they were often behind in important, even critical, areas (particularly in electronics and computing). Part of their innovation had to do with engineering around their inferior tech base.
A few examples of Soviet innovation and "firsts":
Some of these are due to philosophical and/or doctrinal differences - for instance, the Soviet emphasis on antiship missiles was developed as a counter to the carrier battle group; the US saw submarines and aircraft as their ship-killers. Or, to use another examples, tank autoloaders have serious drawbacks compared to hand-loading (particularly, as I understand it, in earlier iterations of the tech). My point here isn't about Soviet technological superiority (there were some areas where they were ahead, of course) but rather about the fact that their difference in circumstance led them to develop doctrines and weapons systems that were often vastly different and divergent from Western designs, instead of being copies.
I thought you'd mention that they put the first man made object in space and first human in space. Aren't those the most obvious accomplishments? Is it because those do not count as innovations in your mind, a mere extension of rocket technologies?
My mind went to military stuff, with the context of Ranger's post.
But when it comes to innovation, obviously when it comes to rocketry the running joke is that ultimately the American Germans beat the Russian Germans...
(Although on the subject of Russian copying, it's worth noting that Buran, despite looking like the space shuttle, had notably different design features.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
True, they sort of could innovate. Soviets were a capable technological opponent, the T-64 was far ahead of contemporary tanks and they made good use of what they had. But they were usually behind and only rarely ahead, there was no general trend of them creeping forward in all these domains, only occasional exceptions to the general rule. Soviet goods were also very uncompetitive on world markets, it was mostly just natural resources that they could export.
I was mostly thinking about electronics and chips where they had this excellent espionage system that secured all these chips and blueprints but never really got around to domestic R&D and quality production, usually they just copied and that kept them behind. Soviet innovation was not like Chinese innovation. China is not restricted to the most godawful cars and leaky refrigerators, televisions that occasionally explode...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe I'm just geopolitics ignorant, but what does it actually mean for countries to be in China's orbit. Does it mean they frequently make major policy concessions to Chinese whims? Is that currently what places like UK/France/Germany/Japan/SK in the "US orbit" do? Or do you mean a different kind of relationship?
Yes, the UK and France send ships to help with US wars at times, UK aircraft help defend Israel, UK bases are used for US bombers. Australian AWACs planes are helping the US and gang out in the Middle East.
Or how the US instructs the Netherlands not to sell ASML chip equipment to China. They're squarely in the US camp.
More options
Context Copy link
To me, it means they decide cultural practices. Cultural practices decide labor practices. Labor practices establish the lowest common denominator lifestyle that every country gets gravitationally drawn towards.
Eg: Working weekends is frowned upon in the US. China works 996. If all Chinese orbit countries work 996, then Americans will be forced to work those same hours to compete in an open market.
Eg: American businesses usually operate in a grind-chill-grind-chill cycle. The early years require grinding. But once you've established yourself, you can breathe easy and the $$$ keep flowing in. It allows Americans to enter lower stress periods in life, where they can have families and self actualize. This is a pl cultural practice of the US. Chinese companies operate in a grind-grind-grind pattern of ruthless eternal competition. You never get to rest. IMO, China's low birthrates (which were plummetting even before the 1 child policy) are a direct result of an all consuming work-life.
Separately, Cultural monopolization also affects aspirational and luxury spending. The west dominates luxury because global elites everywhere are cultural descendents of ivies-oxcam (nyc-london-paris) culture. If luxury and aspirational experiences take a Chinese shape, then people stop paying 100k for patek phillipe. People stop flying to see NYC and Niagara falls. People stop paying $100k/yr at ivies. A lot of money dries up.
Ofc, it won't be a wholesale shift. But a steady erosion of western cultural capital is a sufficient setback. The west has turned entitled, obese (mentally) and wasteful. There is no appetite for austerity driven pain. Much like Iran has proven in 2026, it only takes a few bruises to trigger domestic turmoil in the west.
I've worked in China. I married a Chinese woman. I've visited a lot including within the past year. I have posted to the Motte from China. I have somehow never noticed anyone working 996. My Chinese coworkers certainly didn't. My inlaws don't.
I think some miniscule portion of Chinese people work 996. Like stories of American Wall Street workers working insane hours and sleeping under their desks. That's real to some degree. But not the typical experience.
I'll defer to your best judgement.
My opinions come from first hand accounts of my Chinese coworkers. They complain about their jobs before coming to the US and they complain about how their parents still have to work long hours and are constantly worried about getting obsoleted. It's definitely true for some industries. Chinese tech companies have a reputation for 996. Foxconn factories are known for long working hours. In general, China's longer working appear to play a role in industries where China is accelerating past the rest of the world or competing neck-and-neck.
It's easy to forget that most people work boring jobs in unchanging industries like healthcare, education, general maintenance, restaurants, etc. ...... I can imagine that people work sane hours in those industries.
More options
Context Copy link
The dudes at Huawei certainly work 996, but otherwise I do not disagree with you. It's a very "first world" problem for the Chinese as a whole.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have the American orbit countries in West Europe/Canada/Latin America developed more of a grind mentality to reflect American culture? Have Japan and South Korea developed less of a grind? I think these things have far too much domestic cultural inertia to drift more than marginally.
All of these sound like good things to me. Is there any real loss to society if the bottom falls out of the market for Western luxury goods or the prestige laundering at private universities? If Patek Phillipe disappeared today no one but the negligibly few who are directly employed/invested would appreciably suffer.
No, but the US had to adopt strong protectionate policies to stop that from happening. America's outsourcing phase was intended at moving the now necessary exploitative practices to 3rd world countries to keep competing with the east asian grind. ofc, outsourcing only works as long as you hold the leverage. Once those nations upskill, they bite the hand that feeds them. In industries that are free for all (like tech), the culture is indeed becoming a 996.
Europe's economic decline is what happens when nations stop trying to keep up. You either enter a slow decline or suck it up and join the grind.
It starts slowly at first, followed by a transition all at once. China has been kind of historically incompetent at producing novel art or aesthetics....so they may fail because of their pathetic marketing. But, that's more the west winning by default than them valiantly resisting a cultural transition.
Btw, Patek Philipe was an example, the tip of a much larger iceberg. I mean every luxury boutique band that creates aspiration, every fast fashion brand that copies it and every indie artists who creates quirky renditions of those same designs.
We loved your aesthetics. Your people do seem to be better at imagining the unimaginable.
I'd like to know what an Indian, diaspora or not, thinks of India. There was someone (mrvanillasky?) who posted something before, but I think he's nuts and I didn't take it seriously. If you have time to write something, that would be great.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The idea that we are going to beat China because of AI fails because of other hardware constraints. Do we have enough raw materials for some enormous booms in the economy? Lets say AI invents a cure for cancer, it would still take 15 years to get it passed the regulators. If AI invents a flying car, are we capable of getting it certified and ramping up production before China copies the design?
That only a superhuman model can beat China seems to be what Dwarkesh agrees with, and it is a point repeatedly made by many AI "salesmen" if you will (and also endorsed by some truly intelligent man). Do they not know the material constraints?
More options
Context Copy link
I mean if God himself interceded with Western Democracies tomorrow and raised everybody's life expectancy to 110 it'd probably be bearish. The chances of getting retirement age reform through would be minimal and the social benefits calculus would be even more fucked
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly, if China wasn't run by Godless Communists, I'd have far fewer issues with them competing against America economically (or otherwise). Not to say there would be zero concern about those things, for example I don't like US manufacturing being hollowed out by Chinese competition, but the overwhelming weight of my concerns about China are the ends they are using their economy and political and military and cultural influence towards.
US-China great power competition looks a lot less like god-fearing capitalists vs godless communists and a lot more like godless capitalists with Anglo-Hispanic characteristics vs godless capitalists with Chinese characteristics.
America is not god-fearing in any meaningful sense compared to the America of fifty years ago, and China is not communist in any meaningful sense compared to the China of fifty years ago.
More options
Context Copy link
Which is it, the Godless part, the Communist part, or both? The communist part is less and less true by the day, unless you're the communist plan trusters who think we'll get there eventually and all these reforms are just means to an end. I think there are true communists among the high echelons of the party, but if they keep going down the current economic path they're not going to get what they wished.
Which ends? What do you think the endgame for the godless communists is? World domination? World revolution? Spreading atheist ideology across the world?
I think most people in senior positions in the party, including Xi himself, are true believer communists in a ideological sense. Nothing the CCP has done since Deng really contradicts Marx and Engels, who were clear that a long capitalist phase was necessary (implicitly to drive down widget costs by competition) before socialism could be achieved. Amusingly this may be the best way of justifying the highly destructive involution / neijuan process going on now.
Even Lenin agreed with this, hence the NEP - only Stalin and those inspired by him (Mao, Castro) didn’t (and that ideological turn was largely self-serving in his battle to consolidate state power, eliminate Trotskyism, and prevent the emergence of anyone with influence or wealth who could challenge him domestically). The turn to capitalism was an about-face, sure, but it isn’t inherently a rejection of communism because communism is a process that in theory involves capitalism (and feudalism and so on).
In my understanding the idea that the communists are being ideologically sidelined in the party elite is more of a fantasy of very online Chinese nationalists who are more ambivalent on Marxism and the CCP (even if they’re often very careful to only imply this rather than say it outright) and who care more about a grander trajectory of Chinese civilization to which the ideology of 1947-present isn’t central. But to the actual rulers of China, the children and grandchildren, by and large, of the revolutionaries themselves, it is central.
I see that you read Tanner Greer perhaps, and those books from the red princelings.
I don't pretend to know what the Standing Committee of the Politburo thinks. But the fact is that China is less meaningfully communist, in both the ideological and material sense, than it was in Mao's era, and even less so than in Deng's era (yes, even that; Deng was surrounded by old guard revolutionaries, and of course he himself was one). If you read whatever documents they publish in Chinese now, they do invoke "socialism", "core values of socialism", and all sorts of jargon frequently. But what are these socialist core values? "爱国、敬业、诚信、友善 (Patriotism, Dedication, Integrity, Friendliness)." Tell me what's socialist about that. "Patriotism" is literally the first value they think individual Chinese citizens should have. The "Socialist Concepts of Honor and Grace"? "以热爱祖国为荣 以危害祖国为耻 (Love the motherland as an honor; harming the motherland as a disgrace)." Tell me again what's socialist about these values.
"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is transparently a middle ground between communism and Chinese nationalism. The old aesthetics of red banners, "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", and steel-jawed workers have been replaced by LED hellscapes, "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation", and steel-jawed workers. I understand that it is possible that none of the material conditions matter to the Great Man, as they have proven again and again. But even they cannot pretend that they will certainly, certainly get to their communist paradise one day. They will not live to see it; they cannot guarantee it. What they do know, perhaps, is that the Chinese nation will outlast them, for millennia to come. Mao himself certainly knows that and acknowledged that. I hope they realize this sooner rather than later, and I think they do.
I find the comparisons to the Soviets beside the point. I do not think we are as ideologically devoted as the Russians were, in fact that's partially what's charming about the Russians, that their populace truly believe those nonsense. China have not exported the ideology abroad since Mao, and even Mao himself was, like Stalin, a "socialism in one country first" type, less ideological fervor than proselytizing Trotskyites. Our people have been materialistic, or what I prefer, realistic, in the sense that actions are dictated by things on "this shore" (I believe this is a Buddhist term, "this shore" being our world, "the other shore" being the spiritual world).
Mao, megalomaniac as he was, and a sincere believer in communist ideology, was both a Chinese nationalist and a communist. He behaved like the emperors, he ruled like the emperors. He had communist ideals and aesthetics, but he was not meaningfully different from the First Emperor and many after him. He even compared himself to the first emperor, a lot in fact. I do not know if Stalin thought of himself as the latest repetition of the Tsar lineage, but Mao certainly did to some extent, as did his wife, who compared herself to Wu Zetian or Empress Lyu. He destroyed a huge fraction of meaningful Chinese culture, but that impulse was not atypical for 20th century Chinese intellectuals, who believed the root of all ills of the Chinese state was Chinese culture itself, who wanted to abandon Chinese characters, Chinese clothing, and Chinese ways of thinking. The Nationalist KMT is filled with those people too, who think Chinese culture is what's stopping China from being powerful. Are they communists too? All of them were still Chinese at their core. The Chinese communists did not reject communism; they did believe in it. But I have a hard time believing that they placed their ideology above the Chinese state.
The Chinese state is the Chinese religion. It is what people believe in. It is "the other shore" of the Chinese people.
Guilty as charged. I do not think the communists are being ideologically sidelined; I think they are less communist than you believe and more nationalist than you give them credit for.
How many very online Chinese nationalists have you actually interacted with? The majority of them practice a confusing and self-contradictory brand of Chinese nationalism, syncretic with socialist third-worldism. It is not a clean or coherent ideology and I do not like it.
It doesn't matter. Like the Manchus before them, they are surrounded by, and have to source talent from, a largely Han nationalist base. Are the revolutionary families breeding like rabbits? Unless they are, I don't see how they can maintain their true communist selves without being absorbed by the nationalism around them.
I agree that modern China barely qualifies as communist, and mainlanders care way more about the Chinese nation-building project than they do communism as an end-goal. However, I do want to touch on a tangential comment here as an excuse to talk about something that annoys me:
I always hear this stated, but in spite of its popularity as an idea I've never actually heard anyone base this off any proper quantification of the mentioned losses in Chinese culture, and this sentiment is often expressed by people with a clear China Bad agenda to illustrate the illegitimacy of the modern Chinese state and to distance it from the history its people seem to derive a huge amount of national identity from. It's not incorrect that Mao's actions were often destructive, it's also not incorrect that criticism of Chinese tradition was a huge trend in early 20th-century Chinese thought (and not just communist ones), but in general I actually think Chinese culture has proven surprisingly resilient in the turmoil of the 20th century. In the Deng era there was a huge resurgence of many religions and ideas that had been thoroughly criticised throughout the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism being a big one. This article makes a pretty good argument that it never "died out", and its resurgence was less revival and more an example of ancient tradition experiencing organic evolution through the stressors of the 20th century. I also remember reading a book about Cultural Revolution culture that basically argued that it was often based off aspects of traditional culture (such as the yangbanxi model plays being based off Beijing Opera), which often had the ironic effect of indirectly inducing more interest in traditional Chinese culture in many of those who were exposed to it. That book also contained a large number of anecdotes from people suggesting that in practice they maintained a lot of traditional customs in the countryside outside of the purview of authorities during the CR, that in spite of the official party line they continued to practice what they knew. Chinese culture survives reasonably well in my opinion, and there are many visible manifestations of that in the rural celebrations and religious festivities that still continue within the country.
It's also helpful to consider how China fits into larger East Asian context in this regard. Pretty much no East Asian country survived its modernisation period intact; even Japan, a country which is (IMO incorrectly) perceived as uniquely preservationist, was no stranger to iconoclastic campaigns that criticised Japanese culture and in general had its culture hugely altered in virtually every way during modernisation. I would say that many aspects of Japanese culture that exist today and are thought to be ancient practice date back 20th/late 19th century at earliest, given the immense change the Meiji period wrought. It's known that Meiji destroyed a large amount of feudal castles, but he also issued a shinbutsu bunri doctrine forcibly separating Shintoism and Buddhism, pretty much ending the centuries-long syncretism that had characterised Japanese religion; this separation continues into the modern day. Due to the Buddhists' deep association with the Tokugawa shogunate, there was a period of violent iconoclasm against Buddhists and their relics known as haibutsu kishaku, which saw approx 40,000 temples and their relics destroyed; there are some Japanese prefectures completely lacking extant pre-Meiji Buddhist temples for that reason. Shintoism was reformed and repurposed into a cult of the emperor (State Shinto), an alliance which Buddhists also tried to emulate for survival, and this period also saw Buddhist priests brought down to the level of the laity once the Meiji state abolished the dictums that priests should avoid meat and remain celibate. To this day, Shinto as a distinct and unitary religion is actually a modern concept whose organisation derives from Meiji-era State Shinto. Japanese Buddhism is still characterised by the lack of its Vinaya Pitaka disciplinary code for practitioners, and they often eat meat, which is very not in line with Mahayana tradition. Many other related aspects of Japanese culture that are seen as traditional are actually modern - for example the association of torii gates and shimenawa ropes with Shinto shrines or the custom that Shintoists wear white while Buddhists wear black are actually distinctions that really only stem from Meiji period separation policy. There's also other things I could talk about, such as the forced closures and decline of food-cart yatai culture, or the adoption of Gregorian dates for the Japanese new year and heavy westernisation of the celebration.
All this is to say that sure China did not survive the 20th century unscathed, but deep cultural modification is something that occurred in most East Asian countries during their modernisation, I don't think it's at all a given that China has been the most modified by modernity or iconoclasm in the region. It's always very jarring whenever I see the "death of Chinese culture" being brought up; the amount of times it gets mentioned is just disproportionate relative to the degree of cultural loss it experienced, especially when you compare it with the rest of East Asia.
You have a more balanced take on China than most here, I think. Probably because you have actually been to the country. Looks like you've had a good time.
I don't think we're actually in disagreement here at all. I agree with this completely. Different emphasis of course.
First of all, I am Chinese. Not just ethnically Chinese, but Chinese Chinese. Of course that does not mean that I’m always right about China, but I'm not your average "China bad" westerner who barely knows anything about the country but still has the chutzpah to comment on it profusely, nor am I someone who left the country with hatred and is desperate to prove they didn't make the wrong choice by refusing to acknowledge China's progress. You can check my post history if you like.
When I say Mao destroyed a huge fraction of meaningful Chinese culture, I mean exactly that, no more, no less. I never said he completely destroyed Chinese culture, which as you correctly note is resilient, shared by hundreds of millions of people (at his time around 400 million), and rooted not only in tangible things like architecture, art, and clothing, but also in customs, mannerisms, and ways of thinking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could destroy it completely, even someone wielding Mao's level of power, which again is like the First Emperor who changed the trajectory of Chinese history but did not “destroy” the culture despite his effort. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Communists all changed Chinese culture meaningfully, but none of them managed to destroy it, and hopefully none in the future will either.
And as I said in the original post, and as you've acknowledged, this destruction was part of a broader reformist project stretching from the Opium Wars (or the Xinhai Revolution, depending on how you frame it) through the founding (and I’d say the subsequent ~60 years) of the PRC. There is a long history of Chinese scholars and politicians who considered Chinese culture itself inferior and in need of total reimagination, so that our people could survive in the modern world. (And to be honest, that impulse is itself very Chinese. The ruthless utilitarianism aimed at maximizing our people's survival).
Do you speak Chinese? Next time you visit, if you find someone willing, you can ask them. The people who answer this question will certainly have their biases, but those who decline to answer probably have nothing interesting to say anyway, so you're not missing out. I hope translation tools these days can help you communicate better with the locals.
The early Chinese communists had little respect for their own culture. I wish someone had told them about Chesterton’s fence. They tore down things they didn’t fully understand. The rituals, the mannerisms, the syncretic folk religions, the Confucian virtues, the family structures; these existed for reasons. Like their counterparts in Russia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, they demolished before they had anything to put in their place. I’m speaking abstractly for now, but I’ll try to quantify what I mean.
For tangible losses, I'll spare us both the time. I believe Wikipedia has a page on artifacts destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But that's not actually the main point.
What we lost in direction: The most important loss, to my mind, is that we lost the ability to modernize in a way that was Chinese rather than Western (or Russian, which is of course Western but with its own flavor). At the critical turning point of the 20th century, it was not Chinese culture and its traditions guiding the reform movement. It was Western models of industrialization and modernization that shaped Chinese society. The result still has a distinctly Chinese flavor, I won't deny that, but it is not a natural extension of Chinese culture; it is precisely the outcome of a rejection of Chinese culture. The breakdown of the Confucian value system had profound effects as well, but I won’t elaborate here. It may be true that given time, the Chinese state will revert toward its roots, and I think we're moving in that direction (in other words, the kids are alright), but I'm not entirely sure.
What we lost in aesthetics: We also lost a significant part of the aesthetic sensibility unique to Chinese civilization. The Chinese aesthetics I love deeply are not what the median Chinese person understands or prefers today. Take any Chinese city you've visited. Almost all of them, except a select few in the Yangtze Delta, are ugly by my standards: a strange amalgamation of cargo-cult Western style, remnants of Communist-era aesthetics, and some uninformed, almost orientalist imagination of what "Chinese" culture should look like, eg those replica “old towns”. People wear clothing littered with nonsensical English. People listen to trashy music in English (and Korean and Japanese, from cultures that are themselves culturally colonized to varying degrees depending on how you see it). Mention traditional Chinese aesthetics to random dude on the street and and you get a blank look or a vague appraisal without specifics; at worst they tell you it's 土, "crude" "hillbilly”. I know that kids these days are getting better, but it’s difficukt for me to know how widespread this newly found appreciation for traditional culture is, given how isolated everyone is in their respective social circles.
What we lost in transmission. There is a generational loss of Chinese culture spanning the period from the Opium Wars, through the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Eight-Nation Alliance and the Boxer Rebellion, and all the devastation and famine these brought, up through the end of the Cultural Revolution when revolutionary fervor died off and people began to live "normally." Many ways of thinking, traditions, and techniques were lost because more than one generation fits inside that window of absolute chaos, and cultural knowledge, tangible or intangible, needs living people to carry it forward. If generations grow up without that cultural exposure, they come to see their own culture as foreign. We can recover a lot of the aesthetics and tangible artifacts, but the intangible things lost are not so easily restored. Even for myself, someone who has read far more history and is far more aware of the tradition than most, feel distant (not exactly the right word but I hope you understand what I mean) from traditional Chinese culture. How many of us have read the entire Dialects? The 四书五经, which every scholar in the old days could recite? I can tell you confidently that even among the most educated Chinese, the graduates of Tsinghua and Peking, the number is surprisingly low for the former and almost unheard of outside of people who study Chinese and history for the latter. I'm trying my best to regain it. Maybe it's because I hold a higher standard than most, but I find it disturbing how much Western literature and culture I've absorbed while my knowledge of Chinese literature remains comparatively sparse compared to Chinese back in the days that are in the same social stratum. Also I suspect I am simply more sensitive to what has been lost than you might be, if you're not Chinese yourself.
Precisely, and you can actually see the damage by looking at the regional variation. Compare the more clannish, "traditional" provinces of Fujian and Guangdong with the less clannish, more turbulent north. Northern China is surprisingly culturally barren. It contains some of the most important symbols of Chinese civilization, in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan. But the people who live there today are nothing like that heritage would suggest. What traditions do they preserve? I'm a northerner myself, and my honest assessment is: surprisingly little. Of course we still live a Chinese way of life, celebrating the things that matter. But look at the Cantonese and compare how much tradition survives there, precisely because their clannish nature insulated them from the worst effects of the Cultural Revolution. The difference is pretty clear. Again, I'm not saying the culture is destroyed. I'm saying it's more damaged than I would prefer.
I don't perceive Japan as uniquely preservationist either. Their culture, especially after WWII, is meaningfully different from their traditional culture. And as you note, much of their current "traditional culture" dates to the 19th and 20th centuries, when the modern nation-state of Japan formed and began constructing its founding mythos around nationalism. My rough gauge based on my lack of knowledge in Japanese history: I think we fared a bit better than post-WWII Japan, but worse than post-Black Ship Japan. You can use that to calibrate where I stand.
I did have a good time, I’ll probably be back again this year. And having a more balanced take on China than most here is not too difficult; in general much of the 外网 has a tendency to paint China as Great Satan. It happens pretty often with countries that don’t align themselves with the U.S.
To provide some background, I am ethnically Hokkien, though not of Mainland origin (so don't expect me to speak putonghua well). I'm Malaysian Chinese and was born and raised there, which kind of makes me a good control group since we didn't experience the revolution. And my relatively conciliatory attitude towards the mainland is largely consistent with that background - most of us Straits Chinese don't appear to have the same adversarial attitude towards the mainland that Taiwanese or the Western-integrated parts of the diaspora do.
We're mostly not disagreeing, I think. I'll just take this opportunity to elaborate on what has been a large hobbyhorse of mine for the last little bit. As noted I am not a mainlander so I have limited experience on the ground there (apart from my travels), but I do have experience with the region in general which contextualises my view of the mainland.
There’s a good number of things in your list that I think would have happened anyway, Maoism or not.
Tangible losses were definitely a thing during the Cultural Revolution, not disputing that. But I'm primarily looking at this from a comparative perspective derived from travelling extensively through Asia; I'm well acquainted with the region, and it's very common to find that much tangible heritage has completely vanished in all of the Asian countries I've visited, sometimes due to iconoclasm or warfare, sometimes due to modernisation. Travelling the larger East Asia region has been pretty eye-opening, and in spite of everything, I find the mainland probably has the largest concentration of well-preserved extant East Asian architecture.
But as somebody that's specifically invested in Chinese culture, wants to see it flourish and has been dismayed by the scale of loss, I understand why your position is the way it is, and why you would focus in on China specifically.
I assume by the select few in the Yangtze Delta you mean Suzhou, Yangzhou, perhaps Hangzhou’s West Lake and a bunch of the water towns in the surrounds. For my part I would add Pingyao to that list (touristy but the historic quarter there is the most complete in all of Asia), in addition I think Quanzhou and Langzhong belong there too. Southern Anhui, Zhejiang, Fujian and Yunnan provinces have a very large number of rather well-preserved and non-rebuilt villages. Actually quite a lot of them. But yeah most Chinese cities are not designed like that, the vast majority of people live and work in anonymised concrete blocks. I do understand why this is the case though, and I don't think it's a matter of aesthetic preference as much as it is pure necessity. Massive crowds show up anywhere there's even a sliver of traditional architecture in China.
The problem is that Asian architecture, as much as I love it myself, is decidedly a premodern architecture and adapting it to modern standards often presents a serious challenge. Traditional Asian vernacular architecture often sits flat and low to the ground; it's fundamentally a single-story, at best double-story affair made largely of earth and timber, with the exception of some unique architectural typologies that were built primarily for defensive purposes, like the diaolou or tulou. Throughout the modernisation period there has been a large number of attempts to bring Asian aesthetics into the modern era; on the mainland these attempts stretch all the way back to Republican China where Chinese architecture was often adapted to contemporary needs by simply tacking Chinese-styled roofs onto a modern concrete structure (see: Wuhan University), which inevitably end up looking a bit strange. They are largely not suited for extremely high-density urban living, and a major goal of many East Asian governments during their modernisation period was to urbanise and industrialise a very agricultural, rural population.
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population. A city like Beijing that houses over double the population of Greece is large and unwieldy enough as it is with these looming high-rises, trying to build in hutong style throughout the city would create serious logistical and infrastructural problems. Even the already-existing hutongs are a challenge to deal with. The standard of living in unrenovated hutongs is noticeably lower than the surrounding areas; many residents are just crammed into one sihueyuan, share one very dirty public toilet and often lack proper plumbing and other amenities. I understand the Chinese government's need to modernise these hutongs, but often the task of renovation is challenging, and in order to comprehensively meet residents' needs you just end up fucking up the space badly anyway. Preserving old houses such that they still can be lived in while still remaining authentic is a difficult tightrope to walk, especially in the Asian context. I do however think the government's policies on hutongs have gotten better as the years have gone on; they appear to be increasingly prioritising renovations over just wholesale tearing down a neighbourhood and rebuilding it.
The homogenisation of China's cities is one aspect though where I'm pretty certain the lion's share of the blame can be placed on the pressures of modernisation and not on Maoism, especially considering how large the population they were trying to urbanise was. Seoul and Incheon and Hong Kong possess much of the same features as any mainland Chinese city, repeated tall tower blocks dominate the landscape. Tokyo is a hyper-concreted sprawl of a city featuring a globalised turn-of-the-century aesthetic. Singapore never experienced such a revolution, and yet its cityscape and aesthetics are also noticeably globalised, high-rise and rather Western; big cities in Malaysia are much the same way. Apart from a small handful of heritage buildings here and there, Kuala Lumpur is increasingly becoming a modern city built in a modern fashion, and the newer the construction, the less local identity there is. IMO no country in Asia has managed to successfully tackle the task of respectfully adapting Asian architecture to modern life and high-density living thus far. The very weird modern parodies of "Oriental" architecture that receive such backlash in Asia are an attempt at precisely this, and they're not limited to China in the slightest. Malaysia and Singapore's more modern temple constructions often look like the Disneylandified architecture people complain about in China (see: Kek Lok Si, Penang; Thean Hou Temple, Kuala Lumpur; Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, Singapore). We're really not doing any better in that regard, and I honestly think some of the new traditional-style construction in China actually can look better and more authentic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the biggest fan of how many Asian cities look, and I often do wish they could have retained more of a traditional character. But the kinds of pressures that Asian countries generally faced weren't trivial; they possessed very large and very rural populations that they needed to quickly bring into the modern day, and in that light their decision-making starts to look a lot more understandable. Ruthless utilitarianism perhaps, but what else could they have done?
The general disinterest in traditional Chinese literature is something that's occurring in a lot of places unfortunately; all I can really say in response is that there’s barely anybody in the Straits who has actually read the bulk of the Four Books and Five Classics either and I would be surprised if you found someone who had ever done that, particularly among the younger generations. I’ve had a gander at the Analects, and I’m pretty certain that makes me more Sinophilic than most of my peers. I’m also not aware of any Malaysian Chinese who are proficient in, say, the 四艺. And unlike the situation in the Mainland, where it seems that levels of interest in traditional culture are higher among the younger generation, if anything in the overseas diaspora the youth are less likely to have read any Chinese classics, and less likely to engage deeply with the culture than their forebears; that’s old person shit. Granted, I can't speak for Taiwan and have no experience with it, but it appears from my limited engagement with their politics that they're slowly deprioritising the classics in education as a part of "de-sinicisation", whereas in contrast it seems the opposite has been occurring on the mainland; guoxue has started to gain some steam, and the number of classics included in the gaokao has grown.
Again, this is not to downplay the losses that have occurred. China has changed a lot in the modern era, and I certainly sympathise with culture revivalists. But in this regard, the mainland really isn't too different from the diaspora. Honestly the replica old towns and Xiaohongshu hanfu-wearing girls is actually a good sign I think, even if it does at times look like a quite distasteful parody of Chinese aesthetics, it's at least a signal that there is some latent interest in engaging with the traditional aspects of Chinese culture again.
It’s not uncommon to hear the sentiment that many practices have been preserved in overseas Chinese communities, but speaking as one myself, frankly I don’t think we’re preserving all that much. It's possible we have some stuff that’s no longer on the mainland, but the reverse is true too and possibly to a greater degree - for example I had never heard of the youshen festival or Yingge dance until doing research into China, as far as I can tell Straits Chinese simply don’t practice these things much at all despite many of them being able to trace back their heritage to Fujian/Chaoshan where they're a very visible aspect of traditional culture. I really don’t know if we’re any more authentically Chinese than the Southern Chinese on the mainland are, coastal Southeastern China has preserved a lot of stuff I’ve barely heard about before.
I thought you were Russian for some reason. Silly me, you traveled so many places and it’s hard to imagine non ethnic Chinese doing that to be honest. On this site it’s usually either Russians or ethnic Chinese sympathetic to China. The Chinese part is self-explanatory; I consider self-hate the cardinal sin. Russians because they’re perhaps well-positioned to calibrate American propaganda on China by looking at their own experience of it.
I mostly agree with your post. On a modern vision of Chinese architecture, there are many working on that, reviving traditional forms and bringing them into contemporary life. Chinese humanity studies are very weak though, and the better human capital usually don’t go there, so I’m not sure how well it goes.
I’d also note that modernization greatly damaged Western traditional cultures first, through sheer proximity. We’re certainly not alone in this homogenizing trend. If anything, we’re better positioned to navigate it. I’m not hopeless, especially compared to the western black pillers here.
I have no illusion that Chinese culture is better preserved outside of China. China is the root, and without the root, how do the saplings survive? What’s happening in Taiwan is tragic and pathetic, but I think given enough time the gravitational pull of mainland China will change the Taiwanese culture enough that we don’t have to walk the same tragic path as the Russians.
My rough read on Malaysian Chinese is that you’re numerous than most diaspora Chinese, and analogous to borderer types living adjacent to foreign (and ethnocentric and underdeveloped) Malays, so probably retained more customs than most diaspora communities. But I don’t think youd preserve more than the Cantonese in Guangdong or Hokkien in Fujian, so I’m not really disagreeing with you there. What the Straits Chinese actually think of China is a question I’d like to understand, considering how heavy censorship is at home and how difficult it is for me to know the opinions of Malaysian Chinese (I did ask a few on my trip to Semporna, but only a few samples), but that’s for another time.
More options
Context Copy link
A great discussion, and keep in mind that this is true in the West as well! Big tower blocks are no more native to my British culture than they are to yours, where beautiful stucco Georgian houses completely fail to scale, as do thatched cottages or the stone of Oxford.
One can draw a lineage from the Swiss to brutalism and from the Americans to skyscrapers, and thus call these things ‘Western’, but I think it would be more accurate to say that Globalism and the pressures of urbanisation swallowed Western cultures first and then Eastern countries very soon after.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The majority of senior leadership now lived through getting yeeted into the fields by the cultural revolution. They have nil interest in letting honest to God socialist zealots ever get anywhere near the steering wheel ever again.
More options
Context Copy link
A nitpick: the turn was in essence an adoption of Trotskyism in all but name to counter Bukharinism (later reborn as Dengism). The only significant difference was Stalin's willingness to establish foreign relations with capitalist countries and jumpstart the industry by purchasing whole factories abroad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link