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People forget there was a time Japan had the same reputation for producing junk. Nowadays look what they’re known for. They learned from their experiences overtime. It’s possible China may do the same.
The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition. The smart people have been predicting the ascent of East Asia and the possible surpassing of the West almost since first post-Renaissance contact.
India, on the other hand... the early Western explorers were like "They literally just stand there in the parade and let themselves get trampled by elephants. What the hell lmao"
There was and still is resentment toward East Asians among upper class whites, for providing a robust source of competition in knowledge work and the education credentialist system, and/or making more fashionable minority groups like blacks look bad.
There's also some amount of geopolitics that gets weaved into that, inevitably. For the upper class, much of the overseas Chinese diaspora gets associated with a state whose policies and values are very in opposition to that of The Cathedral (but that has done all too well from the 1980s onwards, and which threatens the milquetoast PMC idea that liberal-democracy-laced-with-social-justice is the ideal end state that all successful polities trend towards). For the more nationalistic, less cosmopolitan lower class, they're representatives of a state whose very existence is perceived as a threat to the Great American project.
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The ascendancy of East Asia was a problem with the timeline, not the above ground factual observations people were making of them, Japan developed after WW2. Yeah, they didn’t overtake the US as everyone was prophesying with “yenification” of the world economy back in the 70’s-90’s. China has also “ascended today,” whether that translates into a “triumph” over the west remains to be seen. Kishore Mahbubani is probably the most eminent scholar to date that makes this case but he’s been heavily assailed too.
The west doesn’t see India as a particular threat except maybe insofar as they have competing economic interests, although why the US aids Pakistan against India isn’t something I know about in great detail, except only to say we see it in our strategic interests.
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Personally I think it's likely that China will continue to produce a lot of junk, even as the top-line quality of their manufactures grows. (Basically, this has already happened.) It's possible to find some of the highest quality goods in the world in Guangzhou and Shanghai. But if I were a random manufacturing company in Europe looking to source parts I would not trust a random Chinese factory. I suppose given time the free market would correct this, but I think China also provides some unique qualities that could allow them to keep making junk for a long time.
No doubt they will, but they’ve definitely improved in some areas. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur in the west it makes economic sense to contact a Chinese outfit and get them to prototype a product you’ve designed. Plenty of people do it at low cost and reliably but you can also fall into traps. Word is that Vietnam is trying to make itself look very attractive to western companies by upholding their intellectual property and patent laws, and is undercutting even China as a lower cost destination for business to flourish. Not saying I’d easily trust them either, but provided you do your vetting, it makes business sense.
“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China and defines a lot of the activity about the way the manufacturing sector operates. Western companies are somewhat afraid to dip their toe in the water there (not that I blame them) for fear of getting burned by linking up with a bad partner. Last I read though is that’s beginning to change.
This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).
I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.
That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:
“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.
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