There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility.
Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle?
And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life....
> major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy
Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
It's not just China, it's a global problem.
75 years is a long time. At lot can change.
75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".
> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.
Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad worker:retiree ratio, is already set in stone, by the tininess of the millennial and Z generations, especially in China.
That said, I hedge my bet by saying that if AGI arrives and happens to have a wildly positive impact on human lifestyles, I can grudgingly accept the possibility of an unprecedented baby-boom in a decade, fueled by a complete end of scarcity. Wouldn't bet on that catalyst though.
Millennials are having less kids because they proportionally have less access to energy and resources. I am 30 and we just bought our first home at 200x its original value in the early 20th century, and 4x what its previous owners payed 25 years ago. And the ratio of wage to housing costs in the US is the worst its ever been.
I notice how many less things I and my friends have compared to our parents and grandparents at my age. I know I'm significantly less of a materialist than the post-WWII generations, but the discrepancy is massive.
I want kids, but currently my significant other does not, nor does her sister. My significant other cites concerns about economic and mental stability in our rapidly evolving political climate. I cite concerns about the need for fostering resilient communities through effective child rearing. The majority of my similar aged friends today are childless. Comparatively, my mother birthed me at 21.
In the late 90's and early 00's, you could be a full-time meth head and still afford property in the suburbs and some cities. Now, sober post-graduates are living in their cars working an impenetrable gig economy at the behest of big tech, the new oil industry. In this sense too, we could also measure an individual or community's health by how much influence an individual can exert on their increasingly digital lives. The app economy has eroded our rights and turned us into cattle. Even if they can't articulate it, my peers feel this and are continuing to put off kids, at risk of becoming infertile from waiting too long.
Even if later generations pick up the slack, there are still unavoidable bumps in the road ahead due to what is happening right now with my generation. If things do not improve, birth rates will only continue to go down and possibly even nosedive, given some catastrophic global event that leads to an extended reduction in supply chain resiliency.
Much less of a problem if the government mandates gender selection for the unborn resulting in 1/1.18 etc. of live births being women.
Already technologically possible. I don't know if they could make that culturally, even dictatorships have limits, but the technology is there.
It can go both ways. 75 years ago Great Britain was superpower. Nowadays people are struggling to afford living there. And future is grim.
Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally.
For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month.
If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons.
A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
Any day now, right?
The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017.
Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
Any day now though, surely.
But the interest in Palmerston's case going against Portugal and hunting the slave ships with the intent of ending the slave trade. That's what he felt was England's interest.
Other things Palmerston cared about was that no country would end up powerful enough to dominate the entire world-- that's another thing he saw as part of England's interest. How sad to reduce interest to economic concerns or maintaining traditional alliances, when the idea was initially to justify this act of going against Portugal and the traditional alliance.
One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
