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I think the aggressive border expansion and repression of the people living there by China is so especially galling to US and EU observers BECAUSE it bears such a resemblance to the historical atrocities that the US and Europe (would like to think they've) moved past. To some degree it is fair to say it's hypocritical, somewhat of a ladder pull, to declare a global rule about borders and self-governance after you've been the one drawing the lines and stealing natural resources for centuries. On the other hand, I would say that kind of expansionism has been pretty consistently decried wherever it happens in the modern day with the exception of Israel (at least, the US has not decried Israel sufficiently, many parts of Europe have decried those moves to greater or lesser degrees). China is pretty unique in terms of just how many square miles they have added to their claimed territory, with only the USSR having anything on par since WWII (at least that I can think of, keeping it to "added to an existing country" rather than "establishment of a new country that was previously a colony or region of a larger country" or "successor state to a state that existed within the lifetime of the populace"). Even with the USSR, the major border changes were prior to the end of the war, plus East Germany as part of the resolution. To some degree I think there's inertia to it, where the largest countries by land area have a tendency to continue going wide, but I really don't think it actually pays off, and it's pretty telling that the US has not tried to add any more of Canada or Mexico in a VERY long time, despite being viewed as the warmongers of the world internationally at several points in that span It honestly feels like a pretty iffy decision in retrospect for China to be so adamant about expanding to maximalist historical borders. I understand why it was done as part of the national story of historical China, Han supremacy and all of that, but it seems like a through line to a lot of the conversations that happen here about China loving up soft power with their "Wolf Warrior diplomacy" in recent years and pissing all their neighbors off constantly. It feels like the choice to annex was based on cargo culting prior empires rather than any sort of strategic or tactical necessity. In the same way that people have been discussing the Soviet periphery, it seems to me that those regions come with a lot of costs - both to maintain order in them and to deal with the international condemnation that comes with them. I guess what I'm saying is that, even separate from the moral aspect, it just feels so pointless to me. Tibet and Xinjiang could have been junior partners or puppet states or lendees or whatever other neo-colonialist structure without China loving up their religious traditions and making work camps. Whatever value the natural resources in the area represent, they could be had cheaply enough in trade; they are land-locked regions with few obvious potential trade partners, the mere act of building the same railroads would have cemented it. The people in these regions have to suffer because of the national myth of "historical China". BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Nov 25, 2023 |
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Nov 25, 2023 17:54
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ronya posted:Party policy in Tibet dates to the pre-Sino-US reappochement, but the pivot in Xinjiang is well within living memory: from post-Deng nationalities policy promoting varying degrees of Islamism and co-option to palliate post-Soviet ambitions, to responding to "China's 9/11" by committing to not only eliminating any sign of separatism but also forcing believers to continually publicly choose between religious tradition and Party orders. I think it's a mistake to take claims to historicism at face value. It's not that I think they believe it so much as they feel they have to maintain it. The actual reason why Mongolia is immune to "historical borders" is because of the support of the USSR over the main span of time when China was making those sorts of moves. Obviously, "historical borders" is cynically deployed just like any other justification for aggression, but the bigger issue is what "historical borders" symbolizes - the idea that more territory means a stronger nation, giving up territory is a sign of weakness. Obviously that is a pretty common way of thinking, and certainly losing territory IS a bad sign for the core of an empire most times, but that's a symptom of weakness, not a cause of weakness. If China had never re-annexed Tibet and Xinjiang they wouldn't miss them at all, but the most important historic borders are the most recent, and since PRC has held them since basically the start, there is no way they will ever be given up until the current era of governance falls apart I think you've alluded to an analogous problem in some of your of your other posts about there being too many "core interests" that the government considers non-negotiable. I think a big part of the modern era for Europe (and the US to a lesser extent) came about from cutting loose colonial holdings to reinvest in the population in the core, and China right now seems to have too many boondoggles, between Belt and Road, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and unnecessary and inefficient real estate projects.
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Nov 27, 2023 07:20
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Tei posted:Edit: I don't think the eastern provinces have less debt in an absolute sense, the point here is that they have more solvency or a higher chance of repayment. The factory owner may have $200,000 in debt, but his debtors are secure that they can repossess the factory in the event of a default. The hobo would never be issued the same debt because he has no collateral. To step away from analogy, the construction projects further from population centers are not guaranteed to have use value - a factory's value is premised on being able to employ people and create saleable products, an apartment building's value requires there to be unmet housing need now or in the near future. To take debt on to pursue these projects is to make the claim that the use value of these resources will exceed the interest rate on the loan such that they have some hope of paying of the principal in the long run. When loans are made for construction projects in the biggest cities they can show a track record of success and demonstrate that existing loans have been successfully paid off. When loans are made for projects in the western regions the track record is spotty at best, and a bunch of smaller governments are competing with each other to capture portions of the shrinking rural population to generate economic activity for them. Put another way, factories (like any tool/technology) are a multiplier to productivity, but you need baseline labor inputs for that. By the same token, housing is valuable if you have more potential jobs than you currently have people, but the jobs have to be sufficiently attractive to get people to relocate, and be compensated sufficiently to pay whatever rent you need to set as your break even point for the loans you take out to build it. As it stands, it doesn't seem like that has been the case
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Nov 30, 2023 15:28
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Stringent posted:To paraphrase, a western audience who have never set foot in China or Poland, but have a preconceived notion of Poland? The point is that the most urbanized parts of China are essentially up to EU standards of wealth while the periphery remains comparatively under-resourced, it's not intended to be a claim about any other facet and expecting an analogy to instead be a literal description or a complete model is unreasonable If you were going to nitpick I feel like the better place to do so is by pointing out that Poland likely has its own urban/rural divide, though I have no clue how stark it is. In the United States, at least, the relative wealth of each state varies so widely that people accept that some should have a minimum wage of $7.25 while others have it set at more than double that, so it obviously isn't unique to China in any way
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Jan 16, 2024 16:57
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Stringent posted:That's my point entirely. An analogy should have some unique point of comparison. Why compare China to Poland instead of the US or anywhere else? Why Poland? Because China isn't comparable to the US even in the richest areas still, at least on the metric we are discussing? I'm going to use Wikipedia for this because I'm phone posting and they already have maps in the articles which makes life easier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP You can see that Mississippi, the lowest US state, had ~$47K GDP per capita while the highest number for a Chinese region was Hong Kong at ~$49k, with the remaining regions at least $15k lower. On top of that, Mississippi and Hong Kong are obviously COMPLETELY dissimilar, given how rural Mississippi is. A US observer might then say "ah, I see these levels of nominal economic output are outside of the ranges that I have any lived experience with, I wonder what I might use as a comparison instead?" At which point they pull up a table of countries by GDP per capita and check what countries might fit that range: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita If you choose to exclude HK and Macau due to being special administrative regions, the coastal zones people have been talking about range from $28294 to $12786, so on the upper end you have Portugal ($28123) and at the lower end you have Mauritius ($12773) (China in aggregate is the next highest from Mauritius, somewhat ironically). Poland is somewhat on the high end for possible comparisons, at $23,434, but most of the ones that are closer would be weird comparisons (small island nations, Oman, Panama). Maybe Romania would be a better choice, at $20,214. So why are we talking about stapling a different county on? Because the range on the coastal regions is already wider than the range between Mississippi and New York (~$50k to ~$110k) and the inner portions of China haven't been accounted for at all yet For the regions not touching the coast, the range is $14343 at the high end with $6686 on the low end and the median around $10k. That's basically Kazakhstan (14396) or Malaysia (13913) on the high end and Ecuador (6630) or Fiji (6490) on the low end. For a median comparison, maybe you could say Dominica (10090) or Armenia (9 091) Why does this matter? Because we are talking about nominal productivity going up by a factor of 4 or more depending on which zone you look at, which is well outside the norm for any given country. It more resembles the difference in wealth between member state of the EU - which is relevant and important, because it gives us a sense of some problems that might be inherent to that level of regional inequality when all members have a single currency and must follow the same government lines
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Jan 16, 2024 20:26
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