by Yuli-Ban
No matter how much you might want it to be true just to satisfy that tiny little itch on your nerve that the MSM has aggravated, there is actually very little chance that China will collapse.
“How is that even possible? Their debt is out the wazoo, they have a housing bubble larger than the whole goddamn planet, and their government is corrupt as shit! If anything, they should’ve collapsed 20 years ago!”
Exactly, they should’ve collapsed by now. But they haven’t. And the reason why is just too obvious, to the point that it’s hilarious— they know they should’ve collapsed and actively take steps to avoid it.
It’s a concept so foreign to the Western mind in our neoliberal age that I’m sure anyone reading this will automatically refuse to believe it on principle. But the thing is, China is not a neoliberal nation. They’re certainly not a communist nation but they’re also not quite capitalist in the Western sense. Their government is filled to the brim with faceless technocrats trained to watch for any aberration.
I’m not entirely convinced that the 2015 stock market crash wasn’t engineered just so these technocrats could test their efficiency in correcting their markets.
We’re applying classically-liberal and neoliberal concepts to a nation that has very little of either. Not only that, but we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that even if we’re applying foreign concepts, these concepts are still fundamentally right so it doesn’t matter if they don’t fit China. This despite the fact that these concepts are so broken that even their own worshippers say that failure is something that periodically happens. It’s a feature, not a bug! Thus, when some other concept comes along and works with far fewer bugs special features, it makes sense that we’d feel an existential dread. Nothing’s perfect, so we’re banking on that newer concept to eventually fail— except we’re also banking on it to completely collapse into a pile of ash. Sort of like a fanboy of Windows ME hoping that his personal scumbag’s Windows 10 computer won’t just crash but spontaneously combust.
The CCP’s history has been one of desperately trying to learn from others’ mistakes and this has been true from the very beginning— the reason why they didn’t slaughter the royal family after the Revolution is because they vehemently disagreed with the Bolsheviks’ tactics and because they had no real threat anyhow. And that was at the very beginning of their rule.
They already saw the mistakes Russia and Japan made in the ’70s and ’80s; that’s why they do things the way they do.
There’s also the simple fact that China is not an island nation.
When people say that China is about to experience a Japan-like crash, they completely and utterly disregard everything that had to do with the crash in the first place. Japan was destined to hit a ceiling sooner or later— the Japanese of a century prior already knew this, which is one reason why they became so imperialistic in the first place. Japan has virtually no natural resources to speak of, making any advanced economy fragile without global trade. It helped that they had the US as an ally. Their problem was that they opened up to the world far too late and their imperial ambitions were laid to waste within two generations, sort of as if England had gone isolationist and only opened up to the world in the 1870s.
China is the opposite; they have an enormous amount of resources, more than enough for some whole continents. Their only problem is that they have not properly transitioned into a consumer economy, and this despite having a middle class almost the size of the entire population of the USA. They’re more like a centralized United States of America circa late 1800s/early 1900s. With a more tightly controlled and watched economy, they completely skipped the various Panics that plagued us in the 1800s.
Let’s not forget one thing: the Western elite wants China to fall. We don’t want to lose their money; we want to be free from a potential rival power. Neoliberals are naturally opposed to authoritarians, even if they’re technically on the same side economically.
How else do you describe this?
- 1990 The Economist. China’s economy has come to a halt.
- 1996 The Economist. China’s economy will face a hard landing
- 1998 The Economist: China’s economy entering a dangerous period of sluggish growth.
- 1999 Bank of Canada: Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy.
- 2000 Chicago Tribune: China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin.
- 2001 Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas: A hard landing in China.
- 2002 Westchester University: China Anxiously Seeks a Soft Economic Landing
- 2003 New York Times: Banking crisis imperils China
- 2004 The Economist: The great fall of China?
- 2005 Nouriel Roubini: The Risk of a Hard Landing in China
- 2006 International Economy: Can China Achieve a Soft Landing?
- 2007 TIME: Is China’s Economy Overheating? Can China avoid a hard landing?
- 2008 Forbes: Hard Landing In China?
- 2009 Fortune: China’s hard landing. China must find a way to recover.
- 2010 Nouriel Roubini: Hard landing coming in China.
- 2011 Business Insider: A Chinese Hard Landing May Be Closer Than You Think
- 2012 American Interest: Dismal Economic News from China: A Hard Landing
- 2013 Zero Hedge: A Hard Landing In China
- 2014 CNBC: A hard landing in China.
- 2015 Forbes: Congratulations, You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing.
- 2016 The Economist: Hard landing looms for China
- 2017 National Interest: Is China’s Economy Going To Crash?
Batting a solid .000 so far for the past 3 decades, but the song remains the same. And the thing is, it’s not like we’re going to hit the ball sooner or later— we’re swinging our bat in the entirely wrong direction.
China is the greatest threat the West has ever known because China is buddied with India to be the only power in history to ever surpass the West. For the longest time, China and India were the true center of the world, and the only reason Europeans believed themselves to be the height of civilization was because of typical homocentric beliefs that all cultures possess— every culture believed that they were either the best or descended from the best and that the universe revolved around them. Europe just managed to finally make it possible due to a one-two punch of colonialism and industrialization, catapulting them far ahead of Asia. On top of that, Asia crashed right when Europe was rising to the top. But now they’re back and profiting from what the West has experimented, tried, failed, and succeeded with decades and centuries before without needing to worry about a prolonged period of trial and error. China is about to overtake the United States of America.
I’ve already talked about why attempting to say China is where Japan was in the ’80s is erroneous for many reasons, so we’re just going to have to see it play out. And Westerners don’t want that. We don’t want to play second-fiddle to anyone else, least of all Easterners. So we keep looking out for something to trip up China, some way to put the “Uppity Chinks” back in their place. War is a possibility, but China has nukes and may be defended by Russia. We don’t want to end the world just to establish dominance.
So the next best thing is an economic crash. We keep hoping that the CCP’s end is right around the corner, that there’s a summer of discontent bubbling up that’s about to explode into a revolution, that the Chinese economy naturally slowing its growth despite still growing 3x faster than the West means that they’ve entered a recession, that China is failing at some fundamental reform of itself. We want to believe it so much that, if you were to actually believe what these media rags keep harping about China, then they’ve already undergone ten corrections, five recessions, and three revolutions just in the past two decades while simultaneously having slipped back into hard totalitarianism and a complete exodus of its millionaires and billionaires due to communist taxation while simultaneously still having the most capitalist economy on Earth with one of the most unequal social structures. Nothing about our coverage of China makes sense unless you realize it’s all propaganda to keep ourselves calm in the face of a rival superpower.