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 plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead.
The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA.
Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
Then the argument would be CCP dynasty is just starting - 70 years into multiple generation spanning 250+ year cycle where they're already cooking, and TBH more geographically and culturally cohesive than any past periods. Or, US is 250 years into cycle, i.e. potentially approaching bulkanization time. But that would defeat / be contrary to the entire is PRC collapsing / bulkanizing meme. It's based on hopium.
It's not just China, it's a global problem.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
https://www.aei.org/articles/fewer-and-faster-global-fertili...
