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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.
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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 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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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