1st is that fascistic regimes is in theory one of the most efficient government you can have as you can easily circumvent due process and fast track whatever you want.
However in practice only investing or making the decision happen is what gets fast tracked, the actual task of running saif facility is another story entirely, where sustainable practices will degrade and corruption, stagnation and negligence will grow.
2nd is due to the lack of political, cultural and social research, innovation and development.
Instead the (hardliners of) CCP (like Xi Jinping) views these as fundamental threat to their rule, however these are just as crucial to your society as economic, scientific and technological research, innovation and development is.
It's why we in the west still have democracy, democracy is a lot more inefficient but its very flexible and sustainable.
The issue is even we haven't been focusing on these 3 policy areas as such we see certain negative cultural, political and social stagnation and degradation due to the insistence of neopolitics (neo-con, neo-lib, third way) that we only need to focus on economic, technological and scientific progress.
Democracy will only work when the population is well educated. US currently is an oligarchy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18877447
And an honest desire to see the country prosper.
There is an meme online titled "When China made a decision", followed by a picture of the Prime Minister of Singapore laughing (see link 0 for sample), hinting the fact that due to many mistakes made under Xi's administration, companies/economic entities (including Chinese founded ones) are moving away from China to Singapore, often citing social control and economic reasons.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/162oc8g/%E6...
However, I don't really think that's all Xi's fault. There are so many things you just simply don't know if you're a child of nepotism. The party highleaders created their own social class, and as result, they and their offspring became disconnected from the reality more and more generation by generation. Most of them has so little experience of real people and so many experience of nepotism, it is already a miracle if they can still maintain a healthy mental condition, let alone the capabilities needed to do things right.
The same kind of disconnection can also explain why the highleaders believed that the Wolf Warrior Tactic was a smart move: they simply don't understand how politics work, so the most primitive solution became the most obvious to them.
At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.
So they do the same thing elsewhere, and there's criticism, memes, humor, apologism, etc... all the features of a more open information space with diverse opinions.
But they have little basis for how to interact with that, because they didn't need any of the nuanced soft power skills at home.
And so you get Russia endlessly repeating 'Everything is proceeding as planned in the special military operation' and China saying the Philippines "deliberately stirred up trouble" by navigating and claiming Philippine UNCLOS-EEZ waters in the Spratlys.
The strategy seems more about decoupling and independence from foreign interference and potential sanctions. Likewise, when foreign investors leave it is also because they've seen what was done to Russia and thus don't want to repeat that with China, which would be massively more costly.
Edit with data:
In 2022 Chinese households accumulated $1tn in savings, just over that year (this is something typical in China because of lack of safety net and lack of investments avenues, hence also why everyone wants to buy property to invest their cash): https://www.crugroup.com/knowledge-and-insights/spotlights-b...
China also has $3.2tn in foreign cash reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves_of_C...
They also use that cash as a tool of foreign policy with loans to foreign countries in excess of $240bn: https://www.reuters.com/markets/china-spent-240-bln-bailing-...
At the end of the day, "wanting to be a superpower on par with the US or greater" and "isolating yourself from barbarians" are two incompatible goals. Superpowers need to build coalitions and attract allies; this cannot be done without some mixing of the involved nations, even if it just concerned students, businesspeople, investors, soldiers and diplomats.
Long term for the country it is terrible strategy, unfortunately short term for the dictator and his cronies it is profitable.
Tech companies are examples of runaway mindlessness. Their scale has lost purpose long ago. They are over valued and over rated from a social cost stand point.
Their capabilities don't translate to real world reduction in health costs, education costs, housing costs, energy costs, defense costs etc. They infact increase those cost for everyone with time.
It's pseudo innovation from con men or the clueless. Natural that govts are reacting and overreacting. Good times are over world over. Jurassic Park is out of control.
The CCP answer is that it's for the state. Policing benefits from enhanced data collection. Social media allows them to control and monitor domestic discourse. Consumer electronics exports create vast amounts of foreign exchange and very sticky attachments to international supply chains.
All other activities are fine, and specific areas basically are real tech are very much supported, eg, semi, semi equipment, chip design, EDA, etc. Chinese gov are saying instead of thousands of smartest phds trying to figure out how to play financial games, get them to build the lithography machine, cuz the latter creates real economic value.
They are simply trying to short China to profit, like they did before so many times.
This is not even news: in "Regulation of platform market access by the United States and China: Neo-mercantilism in digital services" published in 2022 you can read
Since 2009, both countries have progressively restricted access to each other's domestic information services markets. In both cases, the primary stated rationale involved national security claims rather than trade policy concerns
It's happening both ways.
"He was buried at sea, and the fleet turned back to China. Soon after, the emperor, supported by Confucian officials, ordered the ships to be burned and outlawed most maritime trade. In what was a purely political move, all official records of the voyages were systematically destroyed."
This fleet was light-years ahead of what Columbus had available. But it was Europe who conquered the world and colonized the so called new world, not China.
A Chinese emperor once famously said to the British: “Our celestial empire possesses all things in abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of barbarians in exchange for our own products.”[1]
Old civilizations are deeply connected to their geography, and once they settle down in a fertile area, they generally don't feel the need to colonize or fight people beyond their immediate neighbourhood. Barring a couple of exceptions, the Chinese and Indian experiences are very similar.
The only reason Europeans went out on their ships was to find a sea route to India after their traditional routes were blocked by the Turks and the Arabs.
[1] The Second Opium War (https://origins.osu.edu/read/second-opium-war)
"His book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history. Not a single document or artifact has been found to support his new claims on the supposed Ming naval expeditions beyond Africa."
China occupied and absorbed a lot of nearby nations during its existence. 4000 years ago, what passed for China was much smaller than today's PRC territory.
The fact that the Chinese (like the Russians) expanded on land instead of sailing towards their colonies on ships shouldn't play a role in labeling their activity as fundamentally colonial.
Even now they are trying to displace the Tibetans from Lhasa, with only the low atmospheric pressure (which causes health problems to people stemming from lowlands) standing in their way.
If (big if, I know) only short sellers are complaining, that's probably a good thing...
Norway's 1.4 trillion pension fund is shutting its Shanghai office https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/08/investing/china-norway-fund-s...
Ark invest with 9B is entirely out of China https://www.news-journal.com/arena/thestreet/cathie-wood-pul...
from the article
it owned shares worth about $42 billion in some 850 Chinese companies. Those investments will be managed in future from its Asia hub in Singapore, it said.
The decision to close its Shanghai office was driven by “operational considerations” and doesn’t affect the fund’s investments or its investment strategy in China, NBIM said in a statement on Thursday.
> Ark invest with 9B is entirely out of China https://www.news-journal.com/arena/thestreet/cathie-wood-pul...
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
I don't know you, but I don't trust someone who will only let me read a piece of information in exchange for stealing my personal data...
When your system relies on the whims of a single man, who sooner or later will become much smaller than his ego, bad things are going to happen.
Not going to psychologically profile Xi here, but he really reminds me of the Valley and crypto bros who walked into easy money during the past decade and are now convinced they are financial and leadership prodigies.
Also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/business/china-evergrande...
Knowing the history of such governments, there would be all kinds of higher level competitors, party factions, bureucracy, lower-level party and local government interests (and thus resistance to things going against it), and so on. With enough of their support, anybody at the top can be toppled, or even arrested. It's a nation of 1.4 billion people, with complicated politics and a well entrenched party rule, it's not some solitary James Bond villain running the show. We just get the simplified cartoon version of it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/world/asia/china-xi-jinpi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/23/xi-jinping-cho...
Anybody at the top can be toppled - if you understand the risks to you and your family when your, uh, eccentricities become known.
I don't think we ha "The Answer" before. But now we don't even have the questions anymore.
A country/economy can't "borrow from the future," or save for the future. We can invest in the future. We can eat the seedcorn, but those are very limited.
China used debt creation, like other economies did/do to catalyze increased economic activity. That economic activity is from the present, not the future. Present construction workers doing work, getting paid..
It demonstrably represents economic potential being realised. The "unsustainable" part is the debt. Meanwhile, paying back the debt (the economy as a whole) creates the reverse process. Economic activity recedes.
I think the prevalence of "jubilee" in ancient culture is a clue. Economies really do need a debt cancellation mechanism to be stable. Bankruptcy is insufficiently scalable.
The west's "solution" has been nationalisation of debt. But, instead of a preprepared plan, it's a chaotic, emergency event that only a handful of bankers understand before it's too late.
We need some new ideas here. China too.
For 1, the Chinese have built up unsustainable infrastructure with very limited usage that needs to be maintained. Even if you jubilee away the debts picked up future generations will still be paying for the maintenance of infrastructure that simply doesn’t have the usage to justify it.
For 2, a very significant amount of debt, especially in the property sector, is owed by massive hundred billion dollar businesses to ordinary people who invested their entire life savings into buying an apartment which has not been built. If you forgive the debt, you end up with the poorest people subsidizing the biggest companies in the world.
China did use debt like this but it has added too much debt at the provincial and company level for things that won't pay back ever.
Western countries do this too. If the US used debt to fund some of the infrastructure projects it sorely needs then that might pay off. If it uses debt to keep taxes lower then that can't have a payoff. It does both of course, but more on taxes and maintenance than on infrastructure.
What countries could do with is a way to stop themselves being able to make these bad decisions on spending. The EU had an idea of fiscal rules that you needed to implement to be part of the club, and that did help clean up some newly joining economies... but then everyone in the EU already just ignores the rules.
takes into account the Chinese youth's laying flat and full time children movement.
EDIT: in Italy we measure youth unemployment for people up to 34 years old
in the range 15-24 (the one used in the linked article) the unemployment rate is 40.2% on average, 38.8% for men and 42.6% for women
