Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: China Page 4 of 10

China Leads A Successful Middle East Summit

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On March 16, 2023

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Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other. Elijah Manjier has a decent summary (part is behind a subscriber wall) from a pro-Iranian point of view.

It’s also interesting that in this conference no English was used!

Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.

On the Saudi side this shows the continued movement away from being a US ally. It suggests continued movement towards China, and that the petro-dollar really is under significant threat.

For Iran, it suggests that the days of the US being able to coordinate sanctions over it are likely numbered. If the Sauds break out of the US bloc, one can expect the Gulf States to follow if Iran is also in the Chinese bloc: these are the regional and cultural great powers. As Chinese/Russian payments expand and with petrochemicals priced in Yuan or Rubles, and with the most important Middle Eastern powers friendly to China, the US is reduced to its core allies. These are important countries, no doubt—Europe, Japan, South Korean, Taiwan and so on, but it is a minority of the world and is filled with countries terrified of US sanctions, looking for a way out under the potential hammerlock.

I don’t want to over-state how important this mediation by China was, but it was important and it’s one of those milestone moments. It wasn’t the US or Europe who the Sauds and Iranians went to, and just as importantly, they didn’t feel they needed US approval. Saudi Arabia using China, whom the US has declared an enemy, to move towards peace with a country the US has been hostile to for about 45 years is an earthquake.

Whether the peace will really happen is more dubious, but if movement, even hesitant 2 steps forward, one step backwards movement continues, it will be worthwhile. I am most interested to see if this will mean some sort of peace can be worked out in Yemen, or if it means the Iranians will abandon the Houthis, which would be sad.

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The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made

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On January 18, 2023

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Most people don’t really get just how extensive European conquest of the world was.

The map’s a bit inaccurate over in Russia: most of Russia is “not Europe” and was conquered — most of it should be green, like North America. Likewise, Japan was conquered by the US, which is a European colony. Leaving aside their brutal war crimes, they were stupid to pick a fight with an industrialized continental power: there was never any chance of winning against the US, as Admiral Yamamoto told them.

But the point is fairly simple: Europeans made the modern world. Wiped out almost all the natives in North America; conqured all of Africa and South America, and almost all of Asia. We went around and imposed our form of capitalism. We destroyed local industry, as in India (which was at least as industrialized as England before the conquests) and forced the natives to trade with us on negative terms, the most famous example being the two Opium wars to make China allow the Opium trade, since England had almost nothing else the Chinese wanted to buy.

World War I and II were a competition between the European powers (which include the US, who had by then essentially completely wiped out the natives) and the US and USSR, the peripheral continental powers won the war, divided Europe between them, “de-colonized” and then ruled the world between them till the USSR collapsed, at which point the US got to tell almost everyone what to do and how to do it for a good twenty-plus years.

A few nations managed to sort of resist: Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, but they were made to suffer vastly for their defiance.

The era ended, I would argue, when Russia sent troops to Syria. They defied the US directly, and fought, and the US backed down. One could argue for Georgia, but it was on Russia’s border. Syria was an assertion that the US could not overthrow any government it wanted and that it didn’t control the Middle East minus Iran.

But Russia, important as it is, is now a junior ally to China. They have the nukes, but they don’t have the economy to stand up to the West and NATO without China’s support, and they know it. The competition is not really between Russia and NATO or Russia and the Ukraine, but China and the US, even though neither side has anything more than observers on the ground.

The Russians have chosen their side: chosen not to be Europeans but to be Asians. They say this frequently, it’s a deliberate choice. If this century is to be the Asian one, Russia will be Asian. This change from looking to Europe and being essentially European is massive, and it’s what makes it possible for China to win. Losing Russia, with its vast resources and land ties to China makes it nearly impossible to use American sea-power to “choke out” China thru trade interdiction.

The coming cold war, and possible hot war (or a series of proxy wars) with China is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. Everyone recognized that the US was Britain’s heir, ruling indirectly, but ruling nonetheless. It is about a different, non-EuroAmerican elite being powerful: people who don’t believe in exactly the same things as the trans-Atlantic rulers.

It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power. Oh, they have problems–but so does everyone.  Cries of how they can’t do it because of culture seem weak to me: China was the civilization leader for most of the last 2,000 years, the idea that Chinese culture can’t produce science, music, arts and all the other flowers of civilization is absurd and they’ve certainly been able to adopt our innovations, just as we previously adopted gunpowder and the printing press from them.

Everything ends. We Europeans had our day in the sun (though my Irish ancestors missed most of it) and now the sun sets, as it always does.

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China’s Trade Surplus Grows, Including With the US

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On January 17, 2023

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There’s a lot of talk about friend-shoring and bringing industry back to the US and its allies, but the reality is quite different.

The bottom line, right now, is that if the US went to war with China, the American (and Western) economies would virtually collapse.

The US is making serious preparations for war: they are fortifying allied countries in Asia in a similar fashion to how they did Ukraine after 2014, although obviously with less of an eye to ground invasion. Japan has doubled its military budget and stated that it will no longer obey the “peace” constitution but will participate in offensive operations with America.  US bases are popping up around China wherever they are allowed.

But to fight a non-nuclear war with China, the West has to genuinely re-shore its critical industries, and it isn’t doing that beyond a few steps with regards to semiconductors. A vast swathe of basic industrial goods are made by China, and not by the West, or not in sufficient quantities.

However, to seriously repatriate industry requires reducing the cost-structure: and that means reducing housing costs, and in the US, health-care and tuition costs, so that Western industry is cost-competitive. Right now the US is grabbing a swathe of energy price sensitive industry from Europe, and especially Germany, but that doesn’t help much in an general war: they’re taking from their allies, not their enemies.

Genuine oligarchic plutocracies, which is what most of the West is, including the US, are generally very bad at industry and war, though there are exceptions (Venice, at various points. But being merchants concentrated their minds on naval power.)

The steps required for America and the West to rise to the challenge of China require Western elites to make painful choices they so far are avoiding: they simply have to give a better deal to their populations, and not concentrate on keeping wage increases under inflation increases (which is what has happened in the US.)

America’s elites can be absurdly filthy rich or they can just filthy rich and have a chance of retaining their global pre-eminence. It’s unlikely they can do both, though I suppose they could bet on ruling a post-nuclear wasteland, if they’ve gone fully insane.

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America Will Lose Its Scientific Ascendance To China & When Disruptive Science Will Recover

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On January 11, 2023

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And thinking otherwise is tiresome and delusional. From Nature:

Young Chinese scientists who got their PhDs overseas and returned to China as part of a state-run talent drive published more papers after their return than did their peers who stayed abroad. The productivity bump can be explained by returnees’ access to greater funding and an abundant research workforce, according to the authors of an analysis published in Science1. The findings come as geopolitical competition between the United States and China mounts.

The only things which could derail this are a major war which China loses (though no one’s likely to “win”), or being disproportionately effected by climate change and ecological collapse and unable to handle it.

As regular readers are probably tired of me saying, this happened before with the UK and the US. The research center moves to the manufacturing base.

Meanwhile, a study found that “disruptive science” has declined.

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

A chart is instructive:

 

Study authors suggest the following:

The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same.

David Graeber had another (partial) explanation:

“There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers”

I’m fairly sure this is a matter of institutionalization and the wrong style of professionalization. Institutions stifle creativity in most cases. Exceptions like Bell Labs are rare; unicorns in modern parlance.

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The old German academic system which took over the world was extremely productive: to become a “doctor” you had to produce new knowledge. It worked fine until the massive expansion of  universities after the war. I’m not an academic insider, but I’m virtually certain that the current system would be unrecognizable to those professors and scientists from the 19th and early 20th centuries: similar to the Roman Empire keeping for the forms of the Republic and pretending the Senate mattered and so on.

The other issue is that “disruptive” isn’t the same as “paradigm changing”, it’s one step down, and I’m guessing that paradigm changing discoveries have genuinely declined. We are mining the same coal seams, and have been for a long time. Quantum mechanics was discovered pre-war, the structure of DNA briefly after the war, Von Neuman and Turing Machines date from the same period. The basis of semiconductors were discovered in 47/48, and so on.

We’re mostly living off the legacy of a past civilization now (because yes, the civilization of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries are dead). We haven’t made a lot of fundamental discoveries since, or if we have they haven’t been followed up. Even really fantastic stuff like quantum computing is mining that same vein discovered a century ago.

Further, we have refused to really change our physical plant, beyond the widespread telecom/computer revolution. If time-traveled to the present from 1960, once you learned how to use smartphones/computers/payment systems, you’d be fine and fit in. Oh, there are plenty of small changes, I remember the 70s well enough to know that, but the basic structure is the same.

Physical plant changes demand new solutions, but we’re still running on hydrocarbons and even our “alternative energy” is old. Solar panels were invented in 1883. Windmills are ancient and windmills producing electricity are essentially as old as electricity itself. Our advances in batteries are impressive, but they are extensions.

We don’t really want to change anything fundamental. Computers and telecom were adopted wholesale not because they improve productivity (it doesn’t show up in the macro data), but because they allowed people in charge more control. But in the face of known catastrophes we have done essentially nothing.

When we decide to make fundamental changes to our physical plant and to our institutions (including universities) then there will be a massive upsurge in “disruptive science” and there will be new paradigmatic changes and discoveries, assuming we don’t wind up in a Dark Age.

That will happen when civilization collapse makes maintaining the shell of a 70 year old way of life impossible.

 

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As China Rises, Europe Falls

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On January 3, 2023

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Some interesting news in the semiconductor wars:

Now, ASML had indeed opposed US restrictions. They said explicitly that in the case of sanctions, China would learn how to make the machines themselves.

Europe’s technological lead is being destroyed by following US policies. Energy intensive firms are fleeing Europe because US energy prices are much lower (this is due to sanctions on Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines) and following US sanctions on China means that China just learns how to make what Europe supplies them now.

It’s sort of rocket science, actually. As you may remember, the US banned China from the International Space Station, so China just built its own and now looks likely to have a base on the moon before the US.

Woops.

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China, to repeat myself, is the world manufacturing floor. Mercedes moved their auto-design center to China. When the US took the lead over the UK in manufacturing, the UK retained its tech lead for about 20 years, but it did lose it.

Repeated sanctions on any area where the West has the lead, whether space, aerospace, semis or anything else only provide a perfect complete tariff to a country with millions of engineers and scientists and more manufacturing capacity than any other country in the world. They speed up, not slow down, the day when China will both have the tech lead and the manufacturing base.

Back in the late 90s and the early 2000s I warned, repeatedly, against transferring the manufacturing floor to China. That was the decision point, that was when it could have been stopped.

Sanctions against key points only make sense if you’re going to either go to war or move massively back to industrial policy, and the West is not going to do either of those things. I’m not sure a full move to industrial policy would even work, but it’s certainly what should be done. However, it could only be done if you were willing to crash real-estate and securities prices by about two-thirds, because the cost-structure matters.

What Europe should be doing is aligning itself with the rising power, China, or remaining a neutral bloc and negotiation places where they will keep the tech lead with China, as part of specialization. China wants trading partners and they see benefits in not having to rush every tech sector out of fear of sanctions. The US is both going down and fundamentally, at a policy level, willing to feast on Europe to slow its decline. Euro elites though they were part of a trans-Atlantic elite, but they only sort of were. When push comes to shove, American elites will let Euro elites swing. Generations of dominance have created an American elite willing to almost anything, or perhaps even anything, to retain dominance.

Europe has hitched itself to the wrong ship, and trusted the wrong nation, thinking that being a satrapy is the same as being an equal ally, and they have joined a cold war that will hurt them more than help them.

They will pay the price.

 

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A Map Showing The Two Main Geopolitical Blocs

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On December 28, 2022

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Yeah, it is mostly this simple:

This is pretty much the map for UN resolutions aimed at Russia, too.

As I’ve noted before the bottom line is that if you are a developing country, China offers cheaper loans and cheaper and faster development work like ports, airports, hospitals, roads, railways, schools and even cities. If you aren’t close to them, they don’t care about your internal politics, either.

I remember reading an interview with a minister of an African state who said approximately, “every time a western minister visits us we get a lecture, every time a Chinese official visits we get a new hospital.”

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As for sanctions, well, everyone’s scared of them, and everyone in that green zone knows that they could be sanctioned at the drop of the hat and that the sanctions never go away. Even if they don’t approve of some things Russia or China does, they don’t want the precedent of more and more sanctions and they want to belong to a monetary system which won’t lock them out.

Afghanistan is a particularly “amusing” case: when the US pulled out it then sanctioned Afghanistan and froze its foreign reserves. There was an immediate famine effecting millions. Biden is a perverse evil genius: by ending a war he was able to kill FAR more people than if he’d left troops in country.

Then there is Iran, where a treaty was signed under Obama which would remove sanctions. Iran kept its side, but the US pulled out anyway under Trump, and lo! Biden did not reverse him. Even the Europeans disagreed with that one.

China simply offers a better deal now than the West, and there’s a couple centuries or more of resentment towards Europe and America and Japan. Most countries would rather be allied with China.

And that’s why this map is fairly close to what the cold war map will look like. A few “green” countries will cut deals with the West, but most will go with China and Russia. And why wouldn’t they?

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Consequences Of The End of Zero Covid In China

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On December 20, 2022

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Back in November I wrote that China’s Zero Covid policy was the right thing done the wrong way. Briefly after, consequent to some protests against Zero-Covid, China basically abandoned the policy.

The main problem is the same that exists in almost every country: even the most competent elites in the world today are, when not graded on a scale, incompetent buffoons incapable of running anything properly. Zero-Covid should have been about making necessary infrastructure changes to clean air so that over time restrictions could be eased.

This does not mean Zero-Covid did not have benefits: by shifting the oncoming wave downstream, China has significantly decreased mortality. Current protocols mean that Covid is much less deadly than if they’d given up early. A lot more people are vaccinated and the protocols for treating Covid are much better than earlier.

But massive public health measures should have been an opportunity, again, for improving infrastructure.

In the short term I would suggest that this will cause a supply shock, not make one less likely. If you need things made in China, stock up with a two to three month supply.

 

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There will obviously be a wave of hospitalizations in China. Their hospital capacity per capita is much lower than most of the West’s. They do have the ability build temporary hospitals fast, but the choke-point isn’t facilities, it is trained staff. The CCP has plenty of warm bodies they can throw at low skill hospital jobs, but no great surplus of doctors and nurses.

The longer term consequence is the same as the longer-term consequence in the West. The best reason to do Zero-Covid was never about short term deaths, it was about avoiding Long Covid and a population which gets infected over and over again by a virus which screws up immune systems and damages organs, including the brain. The population level effects of Long Covid will be massive. The UK and US already have about 2% of their workforce disabled because of it.

China is a decade out from the start of a demographic crisis, with an aging workforce. Their dependency ratio (the number of people working / number of people not working but who must be supported) will rise and keep rising.

Long Covid will have a devastating effect on the population. There is no particular reason to expect Covid to miraculously disappear. We’ve had chronic serious diseases that lasted for centuries or millennia and the damage Long Covid does is not a serious enough evolutionary disadvantage for there to be significant pressure for its reduction. Indeed, if, as seems to be the case, much of it is related to immune dis-regulation, it’s likely to be selected for.

China’s elites policy was the right one, but public health measures at massive scale are what you do to buy time to clean up the water/air/find a cure. Since no cure has been found for Covid, and there is no cure on the horizon, well, infrastructure needed to be changed.

China isn’t worse about this than most other places. There has been no mass refitting of ventilation infrastructure in almost any major country (Japan seems to be a partial exception).

But it is tragic to see incompetence and short-sightedness destroy the last major uninfected pool of people in the post-Covid world.

China will pay a grave price for this, and Western triumphalism at the end of Zero-Covid is like cheering when the last stronghold falls to an invader. “It was so embarassing that they were holding out when we surrendered so easily.”

Pathetic and sad.

China’s Zero-Covid Is the Right Policy Done Stupid (How China/The West Could Kill Covid)

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On November 29, 2022

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Imagine policy on two axes: Good vs. Bad Policy, and either type of policy done well vs. done badly.

Invading Iraq was Bad Policy, and it was done badly beyond the initial conquest.

Quantitative easing was Bad Policy (unless you were very rich, it was good for the rich and bad for everyone else) and it was done well: It saved the rich then made them much richer. (They aren’t concerned about long term downsides.)

Social Security, Medicare, or Canada’s Universal Health care system (when first created and for a few decades afterwards) was Good Policy done well.

Zero-Covid in China is Good Policy, but in most cities, and generally across the country, it has been done badly. (A lot of these criticism are taken from Naomi Wu, who is worth reading — don’t be fooled by her appearance.)

Understand first that China doesn’t have nearly as many hospital beds, and especially ICU beds, per capita, as most of the West. If Covid gets out of control, a higher percentage of people will die than did in most Western countries. Indeed, probably many more. Even if they only lost as many as the US has so far, we’re talking about five million people or so, but it would easily be double that.

Second, understand that China has an onrushing demographic issue and is still a manufacturing state. They need workers. They fundamentally regard their population as a productive asset, while most Western elites regard their populations as passive assets to be consumed. (One argument for why Japan has handled Covid better than most developed nations is that they need their population. They regard the people as a productive asset.)

A third principle to understand: Long Covid would disable a lot of Chinese. That number, today, would probably be around 40-50 million, and would increase every day. Again, in China, people are productive assets, and you especially don’t want working age people disabled.

There is also a moral argument: Stopping people from dying or being disabled is ethically the right thing to do.

Keeping Covid under control via a “Zero Covid” policy is thus firmly in the Good Policy bucket. Even if there are some short- and mid-term economic costs (and actually, in a lot of metrics, China has done better economically than the “let’er’rip” countries) the long-term costs are much more significant.

Now the next thing to understand is that the way most people think of China, in terms of authoritarianism, is essentially wrong. Oh, China is an authoritarian one-party state, for sure, but regional elites have a lot of freedom. Only about 30 percent of the overall government budget is controlled from the center, for example. In the US, that figure is about 45 percent. States and cities are often rich, not poor (i.e., they have discretionary money), but they also have a lot of policy freedom within the guidelines set from the center.

So, different cities have done Zero-Covid differently. In Shenzen, where Naomi Wu comes from, there has been a total of one week in full lockdown. That’s it. Other cities have had more. When Hong Kong and Shanghai lost control in the summer, they had not been doing the same thing as most cities – they, in fact, didn’t lock down early, or totally, but tried a more “Western” approach.

We’re now seeing some fairly significant anti-Zero-Covid protests in some cities, including Beijing. This thread is a fairly good and balanced summary:

The issue isn’t that Zero-Covid is Bad Policy, it is that it has been done stupidly. To pick out a few major points:

One: Surgical masks are still being used. n95 masks are much more effective, and China has the capacity to manufacture them on a mass scale, almost trivially.

Two: Most Chinese homes don’t have p-traps (that little bend in your pipes under your sinks and toilet). P-traps keep water in the trap so that fumes from the sewer system below don’t get into your house. Not only does that mean your home smells better, it’s reduces disease transmission significantly.

Three: There is no mass move to install proper filtration or use of ultraviolet light in ventilation systems.

All of these actions would be low-hanging fruit for China. They can easily manufacture and install p-traps, filtration, and UV: China is the manufacturing capital of the world, and with the construction slow down there are plenty of people who need the work and are capable of doing it with respect to upgrading ventilation. It would be a win/win — more economic activity and an improved chance of achieving Zero-Covid.

Public health methods like testing, track and trace, and lockdowns work, but the real method is to fix the air quality and transmission through structural changes — exactly as we did in the 19th and early to mid-20th century to defeat diseases like Cholera, but with the water and sewage systems. Studies on the effectiveness of filtration, p-traps, n95 masks, proper ventilation, and so on show decreases in transmission that are massive — often over 90 percent.

Public health measures like mass testing and lockdown should be largely temporary; you use them until you figure out how to deal with a disease more permanently. In Covid’s case, that is NOT going to be vaccines. While they are helpful, they are not a silver bullet. Instead, what is required is the infrastructure transformation — make buildings and cities more healthy, thus reducing transmission massively (and in the meantime, for mitigation, move to n95 masks).

China has no excuses here: The science is clear and they have the industrial and installation capacity.

For China to achieve “Zero Covid,” they must move beyond emergency public health measures to permanent fixes. We know how to do it, and they actually have the capacity to do it.

That would be Good Policy, done well.

China’s mistake is trying to control Covid, not end it. The West’s mistake is not even trying to control it, let alone end it.

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