They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years. The only difference is recently that upward movement has begun to surpass the US.
Given that the US has been number one for a really long time now it doesn’t sit well with a lot of the patriotic identity people have about the US. People either can’t accept reality or the make up some excuse about unfair economic practices.
The last thing they want to admit is that China is more competent or more superior.
The moment I realized this was going to be the truth was when the Chinese government essentially purged a bunch of unicorn social media companies overnight, erasing billions of wealth on paper. It seemed like the motive was to value and encourage actual economic value over worshipping whatever makes the line go up. When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
Previously I always thought democracy was a slow but eventually correct system of producing wisdom. And to a degree there’s been truth to this. However the missing ingredient has been what do we do with that success once we’ve had it.
The west would never have the guts to delete a billion dollar industry even if they realized it was a net negative. We simply don’t know how to guard against our passions, pleasures, and handle success in a responsible way. I think cccp has many flaws but taking bold action against this kind of problem isn’t one of them.
I do hope that I’m wrong about this though and that a democratic system can see its way out of a local maximum built upon an unsustainable way of doing things. I think the belief in the market as some kind of oracle that knows value and price is its language has a lot to do with this track we’re on.
I agree with your comments about the West. The fact that we continue to expand legal gambling is evidence enough that we don't care about the negative consequences of an industry.
But let's not pretend China is perfect. The purge had much more to do with a) eliminating a potential competing power to the CCCP, and b) Xi's boomer-era gut instinct that new media forms are bad.
Yeah, good points. Definitely not my intention to say China's perfect, and I'm probably reading too much into the wisdom of this vs. good ol' preservation of power.
>When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
It's not a better grasp on philosophy. It's a logistical issue. A centralized government can wipe this out because control is centralized. In a democracy the control is spread out among people who understand, people who don't understand and among people who have business interest in said topic.
Think about it this way. The very people responsible for the unicorn social media companies in a democracy have a say in whether or not there own companies can be wiped out. If they're rich they can influence the game even more with advertising and propaganda. They influence the outcome and thus self interest actually pollutes the decision making process in a democracy.
It's not about guts. It's literally that in a democracy even the conflicting business interests can stop the right thing from happening because of they are self interested in the bad thing to happen. It is a logistical issue. When business interests influence government then government decisions favor business interests. It's that simple. And right now since businesses are more centralized and have more power then individuals then the government actually favors big corporations. That's the eventual outcome of most capitalist societies.
In a dictatorship, the dictator is usually well removed from such things and thus can make decisions very impartially and with no resistance. But like an evil dictator can do stuff like behead your entire family if you talk shit about him. Good sides and bad sides. The problem is you live in a democracy so everyone talks about how shitty the alternative is because of bias. The reality is democracy and dictatorship are simply two sides of a coin.
> They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years.
Organically, sure. If a company has an opportunity to build higher value components profitably it would likely take it. But that is slow.
What I mean is state pouring massive amounts of money, every year for many years, into as-is unprofitable areas to build not just the products but education, infrastructure and support needed for the local companies to become competitive.
WSJ had a good article in the last few days on China's containership building which AFACR said the government poured over 10 billion at the time to become the world's shipbuilder. This is the time of effort I am talking about and, as far as I know, it is fairly new.
$10B is a drop in the ocean. If all it took was a bit of money the US could have stayed ahead. For perspective, they’ve earmarked $800B for clean energy subsidies, that AI fund is $500B.
You can’t buy back entire supply chains and a workforce, it takes generations.
It was 10B 20 years ago when China was significantly poorer. And it is not just money. It is planning, oversight and various care and feeding activities (china-style, including executing officials for corruption) for almost 10 years before that part of the system became mature and economically self-supporting.
Given that the US has been number one for a really long time now it doesn’t sit well with a lot of the patriotic identity people have about the US. People either can’t accept reality or the make up some excuse about unfair economic practices.
The last thing they want to admit is that China is more competent or more superior.