Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AtlasBarfed

Pick your economy-ending force in China:

- Xi's cult of personality and curtailing of capitalism

- A Taiwan invasion attempt that brings massive blockades and boycotts

- Demographic collapse from decades of poor fecundity

- Financial house of cards / property crisis

Zeihan used to be a cuckoo clock of saying this stuff every year, but recently most of the poo-pooers have gone quiet and even started saying things that quietly agree with him, so I think China doomism is entering mainstream policy planning.

China is undeniably being far more militaristic and aggressive in recent years, and this combined with the COVID shock has led to a large rethink in policy and a questioning of outsource manufacturing reaching the point of sharp security concerns.

Globalization being "over" is debatable, but the notion that the world is in a post-war "new history" is dead with the Ukraine war and China's increasing aggression.

View on HN

The underlying big effect is that countries that are industrializing can grow economically at about 10% per year by copying the advanced countries. When they catch up, growth drops to about where their new peers are, because the fast catch-up phase is done. Happened to all the "Asian tigers" - Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore. Now it's happening to China. Normal part of progress. Good summary in "How Asia Works", by Studwell.

Everybody has a property overbuilding crisis. "Build it and they will come" seems to be a universal for developers. What matters is how they come back from it. Japan took about three decades. The US took about three years.

>>Xi's cult of personality and curtailing of capitalism

The president of China is just a glorified code reviewer to some policies made by policy agency bodies. Sure he commands lots of political control over the broad contours of those policies, but nevertheless the control is limited.

What matters is making the right decisions, regardless of whichever 'ism' camp they belong to. Just do what is right, and what it takes to win.

This is seems to be more like a guiding principle behind whatever China does. During Deng era they redefined what communism means, they keep redefining communism as whatever they have to do to win.

Which in itself is a strange thing. They don't seem to care all that much ideologies, or anything for that matter. Only winning and what it takes to win seems like their ideology.

>>A Taiwan invasion attempt that brings massive blockades and boycotts

Another great part about China seems to be a stubborn refusal to fight wars. Which is a very scary thing if you think about it. The USA has perfected one weapon in all its existence, and its biggest nemesis is inert to it.

By and large they are just minimising going down decision trees that end in failure.

>>Demographic collapse from decades of poor fecundity

Tall order. Every one's fertility rate is declining. More importantly due to proliferation of AI and automation, this is actually a welcome thing. Lesser the mouths to feed, lesser instability when the machines inevitably take over.

China fought Vietnam after America. It didn’t go very well. It’s a defacto island with difficult terrain to the south, west, and north, while the first island chain keeps the lid in it. It hasn’t been until recently that it had a navy which could seriously reach beyond. It has been building everything it can and needs to break out of the first island chain by taking Taiwan and it knows that to do that it would first need a force capable of beating the Americans before doing anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com