Waiting for China to collapse is a lot like when righties and lefties in the US crow that "the walls are closing in" on Trump or Biden. People keep thinking that "this is it for China," but China keeps on lurching ponderously forward. The following video gets into China's recent billion-dollar loss and speculates on whether a collapse is imminent:
I doubt a collapse is imminent, but I'd love for it to happen. Note, too, that this video mentions the possible use of Chinese tech against itself.
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.
A collapse of the Chinese economy would probably be catastrophic for the region, so I'm not sure how much I'd really want to see that.
ReplyDeleteI used to be more of a believer in that idea—that we're all globalistically woven together in an inextricable network such that, if one strand of the web is plucked, the whole thing vibrates. There may still be some truth to that. But the need to decouple from China has been paramount for a while.
ReplyDeleteShould China collapse (and I'm not sure it will anytime soon), certain American businesses invested in China would be hurt, but not the whole American economy—at least, not equally. The flip side of network thinking is that America might suffer some, but it has other trading partners throughout the world, and a Chinese collapse might finally motivate the US to pivot more fully toward India (although, admittedly, India has ties to countries like Russia, not to mention all the home-grown Indian corruption).
And here's the weird thing: China is itself trying to decouple from the US at the moment! I think China sees this as some sort of punitive measure, but I personally would love to see US companies (and this includes Musk's Tesla facilities, based in Shanghai and Xinjiang) divest from China. China makes and sells low-quality crap to the world, a lesson South Korea really should have learned by now. Further, China has curdled into North Korea writ large. Should a society like that really be what is supposedly the world's second-largest economy?
But the dark side of capitalism is that it's hard for greedy moneymakers to deny the power of China's cheap (and often forced) labor, so China-based US firms probably won't be divesting anytime soon. I think China needs to be starved out like a cancer, and if it wants to decouple from the US, I say All the better.
A Chinese collapse would have a ripple effect on the global economy for sure, but a large fraction of the Chinese economy is basically just an overinflated sham, anyway, so ultimately, a collapse could be healthy. What has feeding the tumor gotten us, right?
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of the US. Despite being a US citizen, I don't live there and I don't have any intention of ever going back. I was thinking more of how it would affect where we actually live. And regardless of what we think South Korea's relationship with China should be, there's no way of getting around the reality--a collapse of the Chinese economy (which I also think is unlikely, by the way) would be bad.
ReplyDeleteWith China being Korea's largest trading partner, a Chinese collapse would indeed be bad for Korea. I've long advocated for Korea also to pivot away from China, but when you're stuck in an addiction vortex and immune to reason...
ReplyDeleteA partial record of my pivot-away-from-China advocacy:
ReplyDelete• earlier this year
• December 2017
• April 2017
• September 2004
All the way back to 2004. In every case, I use a phrase like "cruel mistress" or "harsh mistress" to describe China, so all I had to do was search for the word "mistress" to find these entries.
I see the relationship between China and South Korea to be similar to an abuse dynamic, with Korea, the abused party, unable and/or unwilling to pull away and seek safety.