How Big Is The Chinese Economy Compared to The West?

Seems like yesterday when I opened my 9th grade world history book to find pictures of Chinese labor building a dam almost entirely by hand, carrying buckets of rocks atop their heads wearing the only clothes they owned, the green one with the red star cap.
The text claimed that Mao had just killed millions.

Today their descendants are developing high tech everything.

For some it may be amazing how one unchecked concentration of power can fail so disastrously, while another produces miraculous success. But for me, not so much. Power amplifies quality.

I’d happily discuss this, but I’m wondering where some of the good commenters have gone. I’m not talking about those who I agreed with or them me, but the ones who if asked for credible backup for some unusual or unpopular opinion, usually obliged without much fuss or bother.

Here’s a parting quote from one of the more reasonable ones:
…wall to wall trolls, all of them peddling various delusions and conspiracy theories. No attempt to understand anything. The few progressives or radicals or what you will who did show up here could always expect lots of yelling and name calling. But real discussion?

I’m betting that the Chinese leadership of old was intolerant of contrary opinion. I’m betting that the current Chinese leadership is open to anything as long as it provides credible backup.

One major thing we lost when we shipped manufacturing overseas was our ability to innovate. Sure, they innovate new financial products, they keep dreaming up ways to “innovate” regulations, they dream up new ways to steal money/avoid taxes, they’ve innovated how to purchase policy and politicians, how to lie with facts, and how to amplify their persuasion techniques, but little else. All they’ve really done is the same thing over and over and then called it “innovation”, like building a really cheap (for the owners) taxi company that uses an app on your phone instead of a phone call.

All the innovation is occurring in China, and that was true in 2000 as it is today.

Don’t go Willy! I enjoy your comments though I don’t always reply, and sometimes I go weeks without much internet use and then catch up.

This is all the proof you need the Great Voluntary Contraction will never happen and thus the world as we’ve known it will be no more because contraction is coming — it’s just a matter of getting out in front of it and managing it before it manages you.

Bragging rights for who has the largest economy is not in keeping with what needs to be done. I will submit that neither the West nor Asia nor Russia nor any other region is truly future-oriented in this respect. All economies of the world, or the world economy if you will, have/has stolen the future and despoiled the planet so even a return to hunter-gatherer or some perversion thereof will be nay impossible (all those nuclear power plants for example). So, I guess I’ll say, enjoy the top spot China while it lasts which won’t be long. It’s a dubious designation. A pyrrhic victory. Certainly not something to gloat about.

Ian, moderation is a sign of the times, not you. I too, can remember a time when the overall culture of commenting (at least mostly on the left) preferred a strong(er) respect for the rules of debate, when it was more about limiting logical fallacies instead of gaslighting commenters who couldn’t view everything in black and white terms, out of respect for the (sadly and ofttimes) complexities of reality, without also getting lost in stupid nuance for the sake of some FUD fetish. Comment sections were still imperfect as most humans are, but it seemed to be a better kind of imperfection.
Common goals seemed possible back then.

Enter the desperate cognitive closure crowd. Enter the black and white thinkers. The magical thinkers. The paid trolls.

I remember the only thread that I’ve ever seen get shut down around here. Maybe I was part of the cause. Maybe I spoke of a certain influencer (whose name I’ll never mention again) in such disparaging terms that some of his enraged flying monkeys arrived to try and de-straw me. Sadly for them, those confused idiots couldn’t see that I’m actually the tin man. And they were armed with the floppy pool noodles of ad hominem. Ever been viciously attacked by an enraged somebody armed with a pool noodle? I have. It was so excruciating that I peed my pants. From laughing so hard.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. Would it be considered impolite if I asked for extraordinary evidence whenever somebody makes an extraordinary claim?

I always wanted to be an architect, and finally made it to my local universities “Intro To Architecture” (weeding out) class. Our lead instructor was an odd sort. She was a pale-skinned buzz-cut artsy-fart, whose fashions mostly consisted of what looked like dyed burlap sacks and uncomfortably large ethnic jewelry. And yes, she wore sandals with socks a lot, especially in winter.

When she told the class that studies had shown that most successful architects had “just fallen into the field”, and that less successful were those who’d always wanted to be architects, I lost interest in architecture. Her style of teaching didn’t help much either.

In engineering school we learned about Mimar Sinan. He rose from being a poor Greek civil laborer/technician to Ottoman Empire chief public works engineer and eventually became one of the world’s top architects. The general style of Istanbul’s mosques, with their distinctive pendentive domes and rocket ship minarets, are his.

WTF does this have to do with China, you say?

Well, Sinan knew how fortunate he was. The Sultans at the time were practical doers, more ethical than corrupt, demanding results on time, on budget, and built to last, and they rewarded the result doers. He had Hagia Sophia to learn from and improve upon. The ongoing Renaissance wasn’t just an Italian thing but influenced everything from Spain to India and beyond, and he had access to knowledge of practically everything being built in those lands. He’s said to have known Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and was familiar with the plans for St. Peters. His many apprentices and worldly contacts could be relied upon to bring back good information from which they could together, build upon.

In short, he was a practical ethical achiever living in a practical ethical achieving age.
Like China today methinks. And unlike todays America. I don’t think one needs to be a rocket scientist to believe that if Sinan been born in todays America instead of today’s China, that he’d be just another disgruntled misanthropic schmuck pitifully emoting on blogs.

Still, I do sometimes wonder how an oddball grifter upstart like Elon Musk can find and get people to collectively outperform established giants like Boeing. On second thought… maybe I don’t.

@Feral Finster

Feelings aren’t strategy. Just saying. There are people reading here who’re tired of worrying about their futures, who may not be lucky enough to live in large suburban homes with a double income and a garden designed to provide through the coming apocalypse. I think they might be hoping for actual results, someday.

“American” policy about China is being fought over by two elite mafia groups with their two sets of hands on the one same steering wheel.

The “diplomats” and “geo-strategic power politicians” view history as a story of empire-follows-empire. They are psychomentally invested in the success of ” American Empire Hegemony” and want to prevent China from becoming the next World Imperial Hegemonist. They want a Cold War with China to prevent that or at least delay that. They also want a Cold War with China so as to be able to control and manipulate mass social sentiment and political activity by the non-elite masses within America itself. They want to re-impose the top-down social discipline and control which their predecessors achieved through the Cold War against Communism. They want to manage and contain the American masses through the Revolution of Falling Expectations as it plays out over the next few decades.

The Global Plantationist Free Traders want to impose Free Trade everywhere against everyone not in their own class. They want continuing Free Trade between China and America because America still has some industry which has not been all the way destroyed yet, and they want to make the money they can still make by working the differential costs-and-conditions arbitrage rackets between China and America all the way down till all of China is at least Middle Income rich and all of America is one great big Youngstown , Ohio. Then they hope to continue making money by working the differential conditions arbitrage rackets in the other direction, by mediating and toll-skimming Chinese Colonial Investment in New Poverty America. They fear a runaway Cold War could interfere with their profitable Free Trade Arbitrage Rackets and their undisturbed management of the Corporate Globalonial Plantation.

In a perfect world, we-the-American-masses could shoot all the members of both policy mafias in the back of their heads and bury them all in pits and trenches. Then we could abolish Free Trade between America and the Outside World and we could begin restoring a social survivalist remnant of America’s former industry within our own borders so that we could keep eachother employed making and selling to eachother all the basic survival necessities we need to stay alive with. I suppose we could keep the Trade Fetishists happy by making absolutely frivolous luxuries to sell TO China in order to raise the money to buy other absolutely frivolous luxuries FROM China in return. But for basic survival necessities there would be zero contact of any kind between China and America, so both countries could be free from eachother.
But we would need a Protectionist Movement to conquer America society from within and amass so much social and monopoly-violence power within American society that we actually could round up and physically exterminate every single Free Trade supporter living within America’s boundaries-on-the-map. If we could kill them all, thoroughly and in detail, down to the very last one, then we would be free to establish the United States of Autarkamerica to become the Hermit Republic we need to become in order to survive the Free Trade Aggression of an Evil Free Trade Outside World.

Naturally every member of the Clinton, the Bush, and the Obama families would be among the very first to be shot in the back of the head and buried in the pits and trenches to be filled with all the Free Trade Traitors against America’s existence and survival.

About surviving the coming onslaught of Global Heating . . . if any organized societies at all can survive it, they will be some East Asian societies. Korea and Japan will have the inner cultural cohesion needed to adapt and absorb all the bumps on the way down with minimal violence and hysteria. China has the milleniums-long tradition of Imperial Command and Control directed towards huge survival projects needed to try surviving that way. If anyone can build a Great Seawall of China, it will be China.

But if the goal is still wealth and comfort for the National Masses of any one nation or another? That garbage barge has sailed and sunk. If the ChinaGov Elites think their masses will have a rich future, they will find that China is all dressed up with no place to go and no way to get there. And they’ll find that everybody else is in the same shape along with themselves . . . . except for a few Hermit Countries who will be able to seal themselves off within their own borders and exterminate anyone who tries to force trade, immigration, or any other form of survival-destroying contact.

The next few decades will reveal if my vision of the future is reality-based or fantasy-based.

@Astrid, apocalypses are only ever local, so I wouldn’t bank on us all not living to see 2023. Hurricane Katrina, the March 11 disaster in northern Japan, tornadoes, all of those are apocalypses, but elsewhere in the world people were having a regular day.

You’re right that Europe has a rough future ahead of it and the rather idyllic post-war days of peace in much of Europe are surely over. We live next to a center (in an empty parking garage) where Ukrainian women and children line up to receive blankets and warm clothes, so I’ve been thinking about this on the daily.

There is plenty that you can do to help the genuine, actual peasants in America. There are people in your city who have to walk because they cannot afford a car, and who have to sit on poorly designed public transit because they have no choice. If there is a rat-infested ghetto in your city, they could use someone writing the city council and asking for more affordable housing to be built, or for the ghetto to receive an upgrade, even if it means your suburban home goes down in price. Your own life experience shows that you have to make wheelbarrows of cash, if not truckloads of cash, in order to achieve any kind of human decency in the US. Half the population or more doesn’t make it.

I’m not saying the poor should be elevated to a suburban car-dependent lifestyle in the US. That design is terrible for the environment. What I am saying is that there are a lot of peasants in the US, and there will be many more in the future, so it makes sense for there to be options for living with a lot less but still with dignity. Decent apartments to live in, decent sidewalks, building things closer together to be reachable, mixed use buildings, etc.

There’s a lot you could do to help, and in “teaching a man to fish” kinds of ways. Where things are currently headed is more along the lines of looting the suburbs by organized crime or other disenfranchised young men. You might own a gun, but you have to get in your SUV and leave that house sometime. Can you afford the upgrade to a gated community with an armed guard? That’ll prolong the prosperity lifestyle by a few years, but what would genuinely make life better in the US is if people had ways of living humbly but still with decency.

Elites of all stripes are the enemy, not JUST Western elites. Russia has its elites, China has its elites and all the various regions of the planet have their elites. Say no to the elites. Say no to elites and elitism, full stop.

The media recently is underscoring the suspicious deaths of various Russian oligarchs. Curiously, or maybe not, the media doesn’t see this as a positive outcome. I do. I think it’s incredibly positive. Not because it’s the RUSSIAN elite but because it’s the elite. I celebrate their death by whatever means. Let the recent suspicious deaths of these abhorrent Russian oligarchs serve as a catalyst and precedent for the fate of ALL elite everywhere.

https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-oligarch-who-has-died-since-putin-invaded-ukraine-full-list-1700022