Chinese and American flags

The period around 1980 was pivotal to the fate of nations. In the West Thatcher and Reagan came to power and finished the destruction of the post-world War II order, setting the West on a new path. This process had been ongoing since 1968, but the form of the new consensus was not clear until Reagan’s victory: financialization, crushing workers, destroying the middle class, asset bubbles and so on.

In 1978 Deng came to power in China and instituted reforms, especially market ones. This coincided with the West, and especially America, wanting to offshore and outsource their industry. This increased profits and impoverished the working and middle class. It financialized the economy: you could have the profits without the production and without dealing with uppity and powerful workers.

Reagan went after unions hard, Thatcher broke the miner’s union, the most powerful in Britain. The Federal Reserve started a long term policy of raising interest rates every time wages rose faster than inflation, meaning that over a period of decades wages rose less than inflation, and thus were reduced in real terms. The BLS moved towards understating inflation systematically, to undercut things like pensions with cost of live adjustments and to help “boil the frog”. Every change in how inflation was measured, for decades, which I am aware of, reduced the measured inflation rate. That doesn’t happen randomly or if your goal is the accurate measure of inflation.

Deng lucked into a geopolitical moment, and knew exactly how to take advantage of it. “Tired of dealing with uppity workers? Hate environmental regulations? Want more profits without the work of production? Move your production to China and we’ll make you rich!”

Deng exactly spotted the West’s weakness and knew how to take advantage of it. He also delivered: offshoring and outsourcing did make the West’s elites, and especially US and British elites filthy rich.

In exchange China got the industry and with the industry came the know-how and the technology. The technological lead always (always) moves to the country with the factory floor, and so it did in this case. It took quite a while for this to become obvious, so people could fool themselves, but the movement was inexorable. The same thing had happened when the industrial base moved from Britain to America (with tons of British financing). It took about 30 years for the tech lead to follow the industrial base. In this case it seems to have been about 20 years from China taking the industrial lead to tech supremacy, but the movement was the same.

American elites, wanting to be rich without real work and to destroy their internal enemies, those pesky workers who wanted a cut, got what they wanted. In exchange they destroyed their empire, because the real basis of the American empire was industry and technology.

The Chinese got what they wanted: China became the world’s leading industrial and technological power and a billion people were lifted out poverty.

The Gods often grant want we desire, if we’re willing to work for it. American elites got their wish. So did the Chinese.

Welcome to the Chinese century.

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