Author: Ian Welsh Page 3 of 439

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Thirty years ago I knew that China would be the next “America”. The next “Britain.” The next industrial and technological hegemon.

I wrote about this back in the early 2000s, at BOPNews, the Agonist and FDL. When the Chinese were let into the WTO by Bill Clinton their rise and replacement of the US became inevitable.

At one time the British were the greatest in the world. They were exceptional: smarter and more powerful than anyone else.

Then we had a century of American exceptionalism. The American way was the best way. Americans were superior. They were more creative. Their government system was the ideal system, etc, etc…

American exceptionalism was and is ugly. The American system was not the best of all time (contra the idiotic “End of History” thesis) and neither was the British or, more generally, European “Liberal Democracy”.

Nor is the Chinese system the greatest of all time. Chinese culture is not the world’s greatest culture. The Chinese people are not innately superior to other people.

China industrialized the same way that almost everyone did. They had support from the current industrial hegemon, same as both America and Japan did. (Japan had British help during the Meiji period and American help after WWII.) They ran a protectionist mercantile export policy. Instead of tariffs they used currency manipulation.

British financiers built a ton of American industry, because profits were higher in America than in the more mature industrial state of Britain. Americans offshored and outsourced to China because profits were higher in China.

There’s no way to do mass offshoring to a country without also transferring technology, but more than that, wherever the manufacturing floor is, the technological lead follows. It takes twenty to thirty years to gain the tech lead once you’ve gained the manufacturing lead.

China also ran the rest of the Japanese playbook: get your population educated, starting with getting everyone primary education. Then get everyone secondary education. Only then do you go all out at the university level.

This is the way almost every nation (there are less than five exceptions) has industrialized. If you want the full explanation, read “Bad Samaritans.”

What makes China different is what made the US different from Britain: it’s a continental power with a much larger population than the previous hegemonic power. So it can scale better and once it takes the leads the previous power is cooked.

This is why Japan had to cut a deal with the US: why it could be forced to give up its tech and industrial lead: it’s an island nation with a smaller population than the US. That can’t be done to China, because it’s larger and because so much of what it needs now comes from uninterruptible continental supply chains. (Plus, very soon, they will be a greater naval power than America.)

We’re going to have a “Chinese Century” and we’re going to have to put up with tons of claims of Chinese exceptionalism. Their system is innately better, they have a superior culture, they’re more creative than everyone else and heck, as a race they’re superior.

They aren’t. They don’t even have as good a claim as Britain did: they weren’t the first. They just did what a ton of other countries did, including the US, Japan, South Korean and Taiwan.

This doesn’t mean they don’t deserve admiration and credit for becoming the hegemonic power. They still had to do a lot of things right, including taking advantage of a foolish and stupid financializing elite in America, just as the Americans took advantage of a foolish and stupid financializing elite in Britain. They worked hard. They worked smart. They deserve their century in the sun, and if they’re smart and capable, maybe they’ll get two centuries if climate change doesn’t take them down.

But they aren’t innately superior. They’re following a well worn playbook, taking advantage of the usual cycle of ideological change within hegemonic powers.

The screams of America exceptionalism were bullshit. Claims of Chinese exceptionalism are also bullshit except in the sense that they are currently on top. Over time they will be corrupted from within, because this is a universal pattern which always happens and someone else will take the lead. They will remain a great power if

1) they avoid collapse into warlordism, however, because they are a continental power who will retain a large population even after the onrushing demographic collapse; and,

2) There isn’t another true revolution in production and technology like the industrial revolution, which happens somewhere other than China.

America exceptionalism was ugly and tiresome. So is Chinese exceptionalism.

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I want to spend more time writing about the baseline assumptions of our political economy.

One of the worst is that people have to work to get resources. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.

This made sense at one time, when famines were common, food and resources were scarce and predatory nobles and priests took most of the surplus. There wasn’t a lot of space for people who didn’t work.

But it doesn’t make sense now. Buckminster Fuller most famously said it:

The fact is that we have more than enough of everything basic, or could easily make it. Food, housing (there are less homeless people in the western world than empty homes), basic electronics, health care, etc, etc…

We waste vast amounts of resources, and we make people work at jobs that either produce nothing or are actually a negative.

Most of those administrators spend their time denying care, not providing it. About a third should become technicians, nurses, orderlies and doctors, the rest aren’t needed at all. The same chart exists for schools:

And while not quite as bad, for universities:

The vast majority of all of this is sheer waste, but it’s also a waste of human lives. These people aren’t doing anything necessary, but they are forced to spend their lives doing meaningless “work”.

At least much of this administrative bloat is just wasteful. People working shadow banking, Private Equity and Wall Street make their money buy rolling up companies, loading them up with debt, laying people off, raising prices and then causing bankruptcy of firms which were actually profitable, who provided real work and products at reasonable prices.

They are actively damaging. It would be more than worth it to forbid such people from working at all and pay then low six figures to stop hurting other people.

Same thing goes with most prison guards and police, who do not reduce crime, but do increase incarceration.

The truth is that at least half of jobs shouldn’t exist. They either aren’t necessary, or they’re actively harmful. It would be better just give people money.

None of this is to deny that there is work which needs to be done. But a vast switch from administration and financial industries and dochebags selling internet ads into actual productive enterprises would produce a far better economy. Even so, all our advances in production mean that we genuinely do or can produce far more than we need. So just give people enough money to live a good life, reduce the standard work week to three days, and let people who want to contribute work at jobs which make the world better, not worse, and which aren’t makework.

We can’t even imagine a world where we don’t force people to spend their entire lives doing things they wouldn’t do if they weren’t scared of starvation and homelessness. We can’t conceive of a world where we don’t create goods designed to wear out, and instead create long lasting appliances and computers and roads and cars and high speed rail and so on: goods designed to last. We need profit, so we produce vast amounts of crap we only need because of of that “need” for profit.

This insanity has caused global warming, mass extinctions and vast amounts of needless unhappiness, bad health and lives wasted doing meaningless or harmful work.

We need a better way, and the first step is to end the idea that if you don’t work you shouldn’t have a home, food and a decent life.

More on this in the future.

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