China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
I'm most of the way through reading Moral Mazes which covers this part of American culture in-depth as it relates to chemical and textile manufacturing. Specifically, it discusses psychological attitudes to perception of chemical manufacturing as being dirty, and the rationalizations employed by middle managers towards their work.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
Feels like Chip Wars more aptly lays out the material reality of why and how we historically ended up here if you prefer that to what shape the propaganda took.
"We want even bigger profit margins. We sought the globally cheapest labor pool we could. Whoopsie, they got better at it than us and started competing. Let's catch up with government subsidy to compete or get SotA at a different piece of the market. Ok we caught up with state money, time to offshore a different piece of the puzzle to an even cheaper labor pool for even bigger profits." repeated until: "Whoopsie, an island off the coast of our 'rival' makes 90+% of one of the most vital products in the world."
> The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists
> Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations.
Come on. For the west to combat the “anti-industrialists”, you would have to suppress the choices and decisions of normal people, who don’t want to see others die for the sake of factory owners.
Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
Get to the actual heart of the debate. Trying to replicate the Chinese economic model, while dodging the moral and philosophical choices that supports it, results only in deception and prevarication.
Anti-industrialists is arguing via classification and nouns; it just grants a short term win which fails to live up to its pomp when it hits an obvious counter point.
Seize the major question, have people accept and acknowledge the tradeoffs in all their misery and glory.
> Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
There is no evidence of that to date. Western liberal democracies are much nicer places to live than China and at some point the Chinese autocrats will probably collapse internally - they're gambling on the CCP being competent which isn't a winning strategy long term. The problems are a bit more subtle - things like security implications and rates of progress.
It's not even about China. Asia as a whole has seen massive economic growth in the last 40 years. Countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are self confident enough to no longer kow tow to America.
Politics and propaganda tend to dominate national "learning", and those forces tend to escalate to prevent awareness. So not a lot of learning happens, historically ("history tends to repeat itself"; "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes", etc)
If facts don’t work, intelligent, rational discourse and compromise don’t work, and economic pain don’t work, well, you’re out of options (at least options that can be discussed here).
Propaganda works. But it works better if the creator(s) are unethical and strongly committed. Usually the most unethical cooperate somewhat for their own gain, rather than compete.
