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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Spengler: American Narcissism and China |
| 2018-07-21 |
| [PJMedia] I notice that my July 16 post, "President Trump is Magnificently Right -- This Time About Russia," drew over 650 comments. My July 19 post, "A Letter to Larry Kudlow: You Need a Different China Strategy," drew 9 comments. It ought to be the other way around. Russia has an economy the size of Italy; Putin has managed his slender resources cleverly and made himself something of a pain in the neck, but Russia's diminished position in the world makes any problem with Russia soluble in principle. China has four times our population and an economy that is already larger than ours on a purchasing power parity basis, and it represents a formidable challenge to American preeminence. And they have (approx) 20 million expendable (no matching women) young males. The U.S. elites didn't anticipate the rise of China because they couldn't believe that a country so different from ours with a repugnant political system could succeed. Gordon Chang first published his book The Coming Collapse of China in 2001 -- since when, China's economy has quintupled in size. China succeeded, and kept succeeding. Yet we continue to hear (for example from Steve Bannon on CNBC yesterday) that China's currency and economy will collapse if we give them a swift kick. Steve is a friend, but in this case he's catastrophically wrong. ...This is the same kind of narcissism that led us to waste $7 trillion in sand castles in the Middle East. We believed that our political system was a universal solution to all human problems, and if we imposed it on other people, they would act like us. In the case of China, we believe that a radically different culture and political system is ready to collapse. ...When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, Russia and its satellites had a population of 375 million, vs. 225 million for the United States. Although Russia's economy was rotten--as Reagan and his team insisted against the prevailing consensus--its military power threatened to make Western Europe a Soviet economic colony. Reagan beat Russia in the Cold War and broke up the Soviet empire. Russia now has 146 million people, less than half of America's 300 million. Game over. The problem at present is managing a rancorous spoiler rather than a competing superpower. China is entirely different. Its per capita GDP has risen 45 times (that's 4,500%) since Deng Xiaoping began China's economic reforms in 1979. Although its growth rate has cooled from double digits to between 6% and 7% a year, China's economy still doubles roughly every ten years. China now graduates four times as many STEM bachelor's degrees and twice as many STEM doctorates as the U.S. During the past two years, moreover, Chinese applications to U.S. graduate schools (where foreign students comprise about 4/5 of all students) have dropped by about half during the past couple of years, because Chinese universities are roughly on par with America's in math, physics and computer science. One out of 3 Chinese university students majors in engineering. The number in the U.S. is one out of 14 (and that counts Chinese foreign students at U.S. universities). But USA has a lot more (proportion wise) womyn in STEM - take this Chicoms! ...As I showed in my open letter to Larry Kudlow, China's exports to Asia are three times larger than its exports to the U.S., and have grown three times as much as exports to the U.S. during the past 10 years. China has a $1 trillion program to assert economic dominance over Asia called "One Belt, One Road," and its Asian business is booming. ...Our problem is that we are still living off the basic innovations of the 1960s and 1970s -- fast and inexpensive integrated circuits, LEDs, semiconductor lasers, solid state sensors, flash memory, liquid crystal displays and solar panels. The big money made in U.S. tech has been in software (think of Google, Facebook, Netflix) or design (Apple), not in manufacturing. There's virtually no venture capital going into actual, physical production of goods. We are the geeks in a new Roman Empire. We're addicted to entertainment driven by powerful electronics provided by the Asians--China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Our biggest import from China is smartphones. The second biggest is computers. Making Americans pay more for selfies and Grand Theft Auto won't solve our problem. We won the Cold War because the innovations of the 1960s and 1970s became the weapons of the 1980s. That was the result of Eisenhower's response to Sputnik, including a crash program for tech education, the Kennedy moonshot, the tech investments at Harold Brown's Defense Department, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. America remade the world. Wages and salaries rose in real terms by 20% between 1981 and 1998 as a result. But we have been coasting on these innovations, making incremental but not fundamental changes, and real wages haven't budged since 1998. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #5 When will China make a move on Russia? Siberia seems like a tempting target. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2018-07-21 16:13 |
| #4 #3 The obvious irony in all of this is that our elites continue to demonize Putin while acting as if China is our friend. Bloombergism writ large and on a geostrategic scale. Ignore the big substantive problems and obsess over comparative minutiae. |
| Posted by: charger 2018-07-21 12:50 |
| #3 The obvious irony in all of this is that our elites continue to demonize Putin while acting as if China is our friend. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2018-07-21 12:24 |
| #2 China's exports to Asia are three times larger than its exports to the U.S. So, the Asian countries are just like Germany. Business with the threat but expect protection from the American taxpayer? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2018-07-21 11:33 |
| #1 China is entirely different. Its per capita GDP has risen 45 times (that's 4,500%) since Deng Xiaoping began China's economic reforms in 1979. With our help and money. Moreover, much of our manufacturing base has gone away as the result. There are strategic issues in the clobbering of our manufacturing. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2018-07-21 06:47 |