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As trade war escalates, economists bet on China resilience
As trade war escalates, economists bet on China resilience
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36 comments
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Kinda hard to argue against a country that consistently focuses on increasing the development of their productive forces. Tarrifs in the US are a way to protect dying industries from competition with more productive and efficient countries. The only way out for the US is re-industrialization, either through strong federal expansions a la FDR with some type of mega Green New Deal, or replacing the system with Socialism (at which point relations with China would likely cool down).
Social Democracy, however, would only delay the inevitable.
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you forgot the third option: military and/or financial intervention, forcing other countries to stop trading with china or face consequences like regime change; political instability; economic destruction; etc.
the mindset of american "patriots" since the cold war when it came to a nuclear holocaust was that if 4 russians are still alive after the nuclear missile stopped falling and there were 5 americans left alive, then we've won; that mindset is still alive, well and in charge right now.
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forcing other countries to stop trading with china
This is not a war the US could or would win.
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that's never stopped us before and the proof is in the pudding with vietnam, iraq & afghanistan.
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I mean, I find it hard to argue with that. It's a pretty devastating argument. lol
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Yeah but they're fully content in simply delaying the inevitable as much as they can.
China by itself is only really behind in microchip litho fabs which is probably the most advanced and complicated tech humanity has created. What they truly lack is currency stability backing for trade.
For the time being, BRICS will just be a stepping stone because USD still has an iron grip on the global economy. China is playing the long game by letting it slip away slowly via loans and foreign investments to replace stuff like IMF loans. Any huge action to strip USD now would result in country heads getting magically arrested or assassinated overnight (cough Pakistan cough).
The US knows it can't keep up the control for long, yet their solution is to essentially pretend China will never catch up.
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Even if the US doubles down on millitary action, and commits, that isn't a way out. The US has no other manufacturing overseas or domestically that can keep up with its consumption, it needs to re-industrialize regardless.
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re-industrialize
The US economy is too based on rent seeking for that to happen without a system disintegrating crash.
That is, maybe some polity occupying the territories formerly known as the United States could do it.
Which might be something motivating this "network state" bullshit.
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Hence why I said it would need essentially a mega-FDR admin or Socialism to achieve, and the mega-FDR admin would merely be a delay of crashing.
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This is still a financial assessment, not a real one. There aren't enough people who know how to architect, build, design, deploy, and operate the kinds of factories America would need. It would take 30 years minimum to even get to place of approaching where China was 20 years ago. By 2055, China will be so far ahead it's ludicrous.
And that's just the US trying to play catch up. China dominates academic research in high tech. The US would take at least 30 years to rebuild its university system to produce enough research and innovation that it could compete in the next century's high tech arena.
And the US's public schooling system doesn't have what it needs to produce workers for that economy. Another multi-decade project.
And all of that doesn't even touch the infrastructure problem. Transit just for employees is untenable for what would need to be done due to suburban sprawl and lack of public transit. But the rail, the roads, and the bridges aren't in good enough repair to handle reindustrialization. And neither is the power grid, the water system, nor waste management. China is so far ahead on all of these aspects of infrastructure, it would take 30 years and about 4 New Deals worth of investment to just be able to compete with China of 2015.
There's no way. The US is well and fully cooked.
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For what it's worth, I agree, hence why I said it would delay. The US's only real hope for the future is Socialist revolution and building ties with the PRC so they help build up the US's real productive forces.
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PRC will never help the USA build up industry because the USA is a criminal settler colony. China will help whatever state emerges from the ashes of the USA rebuild after decolonization.
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That's more what I was talking about.
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And how exactly do you imagine this "decolonization"? I always hear these slogans such as "land back" but nobody ever elaborates what stuff like that actually means, so I come to the conclusion that either it is just another empty slogan so "progressives" can feel good about themselves or what they have in mind is basically ethnic cleansing and they don't want to say that (out loud).
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The fact that you think no one ever elaborates means you're not actively engaged in the ongoing conversation. This has been a conversation within the the indigenous community for decades. There are indigenous academics all over the world writing about this stuff at high levels of discourse analyzing the problem through a plethora of critical lenses.
The fact that you think it could be anything near ethnic cleansing shows that you're not ready to have the conversation. You think you're a victim and that you don't deserve to have your life disrupted. The indigenous discourse has been so very clear on this topic that the only excuse for you still saying this is that you think you're curious but you haven't read a single indigenous scholar, listened to a single indigenous podcast, or asked an indigenous person about the topic. That's not curiousity, it's intellectual dishonesty.
Decolonization means repairing the damage done by colonization through the dismantling of all structures that colonization relies upon. Ultimately that will mean redrawing borders entirely. Right right now what that means is fighting to have all treaties recognized and enforced. In the middle it means the transfer of sovereignty over portions of land from the colonial state to the indigenous people.
There are plenty of non-indigenous non-tribal-member people living on reservations right now. Reservations are not ethnically "pure", so why would anyone be talking about ethnic cleansing. When you worry about ethnic cleansing, you are projecting the crimes of your own people onto the victims of that crime and then saying the reason you're going to continue oppressing them is because of you don't they'll commit the same crimes your people did.
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First of all, you make a lot of assumptions. I do not see myself as a "victim". I was not even born in the US and am not from the Americas or any other country with a settler colonial history. I could always go back to where I was born, so I do not view this through some kind of personal lens. But some European (or other non-indigenous) descended Americans actually have lived here for many generations and then there are non-white Americans who came here as refugees, for example, and they do not have the luxury that I have. You are correct that I have not read the work of an indigenous scholar on this topic. That is because my exposure to this kind of rhetoric has been through people chanting this in unrelated contexts/activism. AFAIK those people were not even indigenous themselves. I am sure that there are books and academic papers written by indigenous people out there outlining ideas on this topic.
But let me also say that it is unclear to what degree the people who chant these vague slogans believe in what any given academic paper or book espouses. This is essentially similar to the whole 'defund the police' situation. Many "left wing"/" progressive "/liberal people claimed that this did not actually mean abolishing the police and that claims that it does are merely right wing fear mongering. Then someone literally writes an op-ed in the NYT that " yes, we do mean abolish when we say defund". And I have seen people online express the opinion that all European descended Americans should just "go back" to Europe. Maybe this is an extreme, fringe view, maybe it is not. But the vague language surrounding this subject does not fill me with hope that it is. My worry about ethnic cleansing is not the result of some kind of projection; it is the result of people chanting these kinds of slogans and talking about "decolonization" being (seemingly deliberately) vague about what this actually entails in practice and the knowledge that rhetoric about people 'not rightfully belonging" somewhere historically has led to horrific bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. None of that anything to do with historical European colonization of the Americas but with much more recent history.
So assuming that you are in fact familiar with a wide body of work on this subject by actually indigenous people and that are your views on the subject are informed by that, what does "ultimately redrawing the borders" mean in practice. Does everybody who currently lives within the borders of the United States get to stay within that area at least (which does not inherently mean there would be no ethnic cleansing but at least means it would be far less egregious than expelling people from an entire continent)? I am not in favor of the exploitation or oppression of indigenous people but at the same time I am not in favor of ideologies that believe that we can simply turn the clock back centuries and achieve some kind of historical "justice" through violence. That is in my opinion only slightly better than traditional fascism. We have to achieve the closest possible thing to justice within the constraints of the realities of today and with the people who are alive today and who are not responsible for the actions of people generations ago. Finally, I am not a fan on vague slogans in general, especially in the context of issues as sensitive as this one.
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Not really. In the scenario of the US no longer being the world empire, I don't see why the US couldn't enlist help from other countries to re-industrialize. It could rebuild industrial capacity and educational capacity in parallel if say, it imported capital from China. You could drastically cut down rebuilding times with a planned economy.
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What other countries? England? Germany? France? The industrial center has moved to China. The only country that could help would be China. And China is not going to help the USA build up the industrial capacity of a genocidal settler colony that will use that industrial capital to produce weapons.
No, it's not realistic to assume that anyone is going to come and just help America. When America is no longer the world empire, the process of decolonization will eliminate this particular state and replace it with something unrecognizable. It won't be called America, it won't be Eurocentric, it won't be trying to compete in world markets. It will be dismantled and gone.
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What other countries? England? Germany? France? The industrial center has moved to China.
There are plenty of other countries with decent levels of industrial manufacturing in the global south. India, Brazil, Russia, Vietnam come immediately to mind. But that's besides the point, since by the time that the US collapses, more global south countries will join the ranks of moderately/highly industrialized countries.
It won’t be called America
Well, uh, the thing that comes after America would be helped by the rest of the world. America would be gone, but the land and the people won't be.
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100%, and is the most optimistic path within the realm of possibility.
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the posthumously beloved mexican dictator, porfirio diaz, proved that the military alone wasn't sufficient when he instituted his successful "bread or stick" policy; i forsee the american military being that stick and the financial inducement as the bread, luring other countries away from continuing to trade with china on mutually favorable terms.
you're 100% right in the end since there's a time limit; but unlike diaz, the american pockets are practically infinitely deep and our military is absurdly large and well placed in our equally absurdly large number of bases all around the world; along with a large enough desperate population that will serve as cannon fodder for that military.
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I'm more of the mindset that the US, at this point, is a Paper Tiger. It has strength to project, but not an industrial base to maintain it.
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Either Trump is a Russian puppet or the Russian annihilation via nukes, make up your mind.
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i'm convinced that the russian puppet thing is american liberal notion and i don't ascribe to it; it think he's just a ordinary american conservative who aligns politically with russian conservatism.
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36 comments