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the JJ posted:Define 'dominant' or 'central.' And what I've been saying this whole time is that it doesn't make any sense to call something 'dominant' if it doesn't have any agency. The Qing state didn't, otherwise it would have been able to control its own trade policy. And the market didn't either because 'the market' is a composite of countless individual actors which does not have independent agency on a collective level quote:You're underselling the value of New World sugar here. The capital and mercantile seeds to kick start the IR start there. I also agree that per capita wealth is way more important than absolute wealth when judging, say, where I'd like to live or societal end goals or what have you. Do you have any sources for New World capital making a meaningful difference to European industrialization? I've read it was not, although I do not have sources handy. quote:By the metric you yourself proposed two posts ago, judging an empire by it's length of tenancy: I'm judging it by its length of tenancy of actual effectual power. The Mughal Empire had that for maybe 150-200 years, ending in the mid 1700s. You don't seem very good at reading icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 10:39
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Kassad posted:Not really. France went from being at its strongest in the 1910s to being entirely overrun by Germany in 1940 and losing almost its entire colonial empire in the 50s and 60s. Same amount of time. And that was a nation-state, much more resilient than a feudal dynasty like the Mughals. It completely implodes, from its zenith, in 50 years tops. From the enthronement of Humayun in 1555 it takes 50 years to secure control over the North and the next 100 years is spent slowly creeping south. Like, the statement that the Mughal Empire was not a particularly internally robust or long-lived state isn't super controversial. Most premodern states weren't, and my entire point is that it makes no sense to call such a state dominant especially in comparison to early modern europe and the nascent nation-states there icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 11:05
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Are you Tom Friedman IRL?
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Jan 21, 2016 11:41
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Freezer posted:Anyone know what percentage of the stock market is de-facto owned by the government at this point? I guess the line between government and private is really blurry sometimes (ie pension funds and such). All but one of the largest 20 Chinese companies as listed by Wiki are directly state-owned. So, a whole lot, probably the majority of all activity on the stock markets are just the government shuffling money between its accounts. The reason China even started encouraging a stock market in the first place was as a cargo cult approximation of what Western countries have instead of any kind of genuine need for private capital investment (as many of the companies listed are straight up state owned to begin with) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Chinese_companies Myriarch posted:Again, while China was large, it was not central, and often not the largest. Comparing it to poor medieval europe is not constructive. China never chose or controlled the market - the fatimids, Timurids, khanates, Mughals, and Ottomans did. Before the Dutch golden age the center of the world economy was southwest and south asia and was controlled by local empires in the region with no Chinese or European involvement. Quite honestly the world prior to the modern era didn't actually have an 'economic center', the economy of Eurasia was decentralized, the vast majority of trade was within a particular region and not between regions, and most regions were roughly as wealthy as each other. Remember they're not trading primary industry materials with each other, they're trading luxury goods, which did not actually have that great an economic impact. The fact that after 1453 the Europeans got locked out of overland trade with the rest of the world because Muslims was as much a geographic coincidence as any indication of the ability of the Middle East to dictate trade via a strong state or superior organization, and the ME in the late medieval period was not doing so hot because of massive depopulation from the Mongol and Turkic invasions which pretty much knocks them out of the game for the early modern period. The constant, desperate insistence that *Insert Asian Country Here* was actually the undisputed king of the world at some point before the perfidious Europeans temporarily got hold of superior technology is just so blatantly politically motivated and ahistorical. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 16:12
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Ccs posted:The World Economic Forum had a talk about China where one of the main speakers said that China is shifting from quantity of economic growth to quality of growth. It's a fig leaf to make China's declining growth look better, and also to support the CCP's official narrative that they've got everything under control and are fixing everything as we speak
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Jan 27, 2016 04:07
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Jumpingmanjim posted:SHCOMP making GBS threads itself again. Haha jesus, nearly the entire market cap must have been artificial inflation by the CCP because they wanted a cargo cult stock market
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Jan 27, 2016 04:48
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cheesetriangles posted:Have they considered becoming a liberal democracy to cure their massive corruption and inefficiency? They could probably take over the world real quick if they did that. Liberal democracy wouldn't help the corruption much necessarily. It would help the garbage human capital problem, which you can read about in the GBS China thread, though
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Jan 28, 2016 05:13
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tekz posted:I'm permabanned poster chinastomper38. I first started reading foreign policy when i was 12. by age 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of "hegemony" until my thought process got really bizarre and I would repeat stuff like "western values" and "liberal democracy" in my head for hours, basically prodormal schizophrenia. Don't doxx me
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Jan 28, 2016 06:27
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Fojar38 posted:But one belt one road? Consumer based economy? 6.9% growth is still high! The 5 year plan said "innovation" 17 times in one paragraph. The state news outlet of a Chinese puppet state is bullish on China? Wow!
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Jan 30, 2016 00:03
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Jumpingmanjim posted:I remembering hearing on bloomberg that while China has a lot of foreign currency reserves, the lower bound (i.e the minimum they need) is lot higher than 0$, meaning they might run into trouble a lot sooner. Can anyone explain more? Foreign exchange reserves are used to manipulate a country's exchange rate / currency value. So them running out of dollar reserves basically would mean they have no control over the valuation of the yuan anymore. I'm not sure how big a problem that would be, though
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Feb 12, 2016 00:06
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it turns out the chinese century will begin when the SHCOMP goes negative and President for Life Donald J Trump sacrifices a live mexican child on a black altar of satan during a full moon. it's inevitable, really
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Feb 25, 2016 20:39
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BabelFish posted:I wonder what the guys at the IMF who voted to make the yuan a reserve currency are thinking these days. Relief that they cashed out the Chinese bribe money into Vancouver condos and real estate edit:dammit aurubin
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Feb 29, 2016 23:12
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gonna be fun times in 9 months when to stave off populist anger the next president of the US starts pressing China hard on its abuse of US demand as a driver of economic growth, right as the CCP desperately abuses it as hard as they possibly can to stay in power
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Mar 1, 2016 19:28
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joe biden
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Mar 1, 2016 22:33
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I guess China thinks it can simply avoid Japan's fate by just posting fake GDP numbers and hoping nobody notices?Myriarch posted:The other thing is that all those commodity based countries used to use the money they got from selling commodities to China to buy Chinese goods, and that isn't happening anymore. India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc, aren't commodity export countries and never have been Zarin posted:I'd wonder if looking at Chinese exports could be a leading indicator of the health of the global economy (or, at least, the US), but May 2009 was already deep into the recession. If China is hitting May 2009 numbers and we aren't panicking, then it probably doesn't work as a litmus test for the rest of the world. Pretty much. I think most of the export products that are crashing are basic construction materials one stage up from raw materials, stuff like steel, concrete, etc. China still isn't nearly as heavy on high value manufacturing of electronics, appliances and capital goods as like Japan or Germany are icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 12:03
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menino posted:So you agree pointing to a traffic light to generalize to the capabilities of the party is a good example? Tell me more about not understanding how examples work. Doesn't the federal/national CCP have very little control over many of the actions of the provincial and local party apparatus? I know Xi's trying to change that but that's how it worked for 40 years as far as I was aware. Most actual governing and administration is done at that level, and even if the national CCP is competent (  ) the local organization out in the boonies isn't. That's a totally real and legitimate critique
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 20:42
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Mange Mite posted:Yeah the central government is a joke most of the time unless they decide to focus their attention on you in one of the periodic anti-corruption probes they do to try and make the regular people think they're accomplishing something. Then they come in and clean house and straight-up execute people. But it doesn't actually matter if the central government is competent because they don't actually run most of the country
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Mar 8, 2016 20:55
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Krispy Kareem posted:I was reading that there are still lots of productivity gains to be made with modern mining and manufacturing methods. In regards to all their excess steel capacity, they will be able to close older less efficient operations and ramp up the shiny new factories. Which could increase growth in areas the Japanese couldn't since they were already pretty efficient. menino posted:Japan's per capita GDP grew at roughly the same rate at the rest of the developed world throughout the 90s If China has similar growth to other countries at its level of development it's going to be in for a nasty surprise. Look at Russia, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Looking at this website most middle-income countries do about 5% GDP growth in a good year, and that's without demographic issues. China will probably do worse than that in the short-term future to balance out the last 15 years of hyper-growth and because of the banking issues. Then in 15 or 20 years when the demographic bomb implodes China like Japan will be completely hosed. Arguably even more so, at least Japan could theoretically fix the problem with more immigration and better family policy and just don't because of political dysfunction, with China it's going to be actually impossible to fix because 1.5 billion people can't really be topped up with immigration icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 20:11
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Krispy Kareem posted:Really? Well, the EU includes poorer countries with faster growth than the UK/France/Germany. Japan did pretty OK compared to them. Japan actually appears to have outperformed France and only slightly underperformed Germany.   It was beaten handily by the US though icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 20:45
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Myriarch posted:
 Never mind, I'm not sure what I was counting there. But yeah you're right, although stopping at 2002 is weird and if you go to the present French growth is 22% to Japan's 18%, which is a lot less bad than 15 vs 6
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 23:27
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Are we looking at the same graphs? France in 1991 had a gdp per capita of 28500 and ended 2002 with 33500 - a growth of 15%. Japan in 1991 is at 32500 and ends 2002 with 34500 - growth of just 6%.
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Trammel posted:Couldn't they just pass a law saying it's illegal to sell a stock for less than you paid for it? That would lose them face too. The whole system of face breaks down if anyone explicitly acknowledges the underlying problems
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Mar 22, 2016 02:37
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Fojar38 posted:So I was perusing the CIA World Factbook today and saw that there was a note next to China's official exchange rate GDP saying I'm not an economist but I know the currency undervaluing is not nearly as bad as is often made out, certainly it's much less pronounced than with Japan in the high postwar years of the 60s and 70s. China has actually taken substantial steps to float their currency in recent years. And on top of that I suspect the effect of exchange rates on GDP is a lot smaller than that note makes it out as. I would lean towards the note being there to avoid hurt Chinese feelings. It's probably a measurable effect but not very significant. Normal GDP is still the proper measurement for cross-country comparison And also the last thing you said is also true icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 23:26
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Fojar38 posted:Are Chinese smartphones any good? I mean I will never buy one as long as China is an authoritarian country but are they basically just cheaper Iphones? Chinese smartphones are 'pretty good' in that they're identical clones of Samsung Android phones. Unfortunately Android is a Linux and therefore for autistics and third worlders, so Apple still wins. They're cheaper Galaxies, not cheaper Iphones asdf32 posted:They've had the Thinkpad brand for a decade and it's still a good brand. A decade is ample time to gently caress something up. So they get the credit now. Neither SK nor Japan were Leninist single-party states. Neither of them were or are particularly liberal in opinion but they at least had the political economic structures set up in a liberal way, China meanwhile very much does not. And the state-backed export investment economic model, as we've seen with Japan, fails once you've saturated foreign markets for exports and reached the technological frontier in terms of capital investment, which China has. And both Japan and SK, despite having nominally liberal institutions, have failed miserably at moving beyond this economic problem for the last 25 years, so there's no reason to think China will outside of orientalist navel-gazing about 5000 years of history and civilization-state stuff, which seems to have receded pretty strongly in the last year or two icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:49 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 01:36
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Private Speech posted:SK GDP/c has grown considerably in the last decade or so, even though the job market there got a lot tougher the economy has been going up steadily. They are still surprisingly mediocre for a high-income country, but 15 years ago they were poorer than a bunch of Eastern Europe. SK is basically a marginally better-run Japan from 15 years ago. They're still at the low end of wealth for developed countries, their demographics are as terrible as Japan's but on a 15-year offset, from what I understand they have the same hosed up labor market, their education system is even worse, their politics are somehow even more broken, and they have the same persistent lack of demand and deflationary pressure we all know and love They didn't gently caress up the 1997 crash as badly as Japan hosed up the early 90s crash, which made a big difference, but other than that the only real advantage they have is that they're smaller than Japan and thus the export model works better because foreign markets can better absorb their smaller total amount of overproduction 
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:47 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 04:44
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Crashrat posted:I get that, but just because they were banned from selling the stock doesn't necessarily mean that the ownership of that small parcel of the company was rescinded. The government saying "gently caress you laowai, no why". The Chinese government doesn't care about the law, lol
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May 31, 2016 16:54
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China's going to run into a lack of aggregate demand very quickly, I wonder if this latest round of cheap credit and infrastructure spending won't be their version of the late 80s in Japan where they opened the money spigot to max because their economy was starting to cool off, and basically caused the 91 crash in doing so
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Jul 15, 2016 06:46
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Fojar38 posted:What sorts of "catch up with proven concepts" are we talking about? More construction? Pretty much, more construction of factories, buying new and better machine tools, etc. Too bad there's not nearly enough demand for the poo poo made with them inside or outside china to prevent permanent economic depression
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Jul 15, 2016 08:10
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Fojar38 posted:Is the idea that these millions of middle-income (ie around $5000 a year) factory workers will take the money from their jobs at the zombie factories and spend it on things, thereby adding sufficient consumption to what is accomplished by the coast to make up for the decline of China's industry? If these factories aren't profitable (and everything I have seen seems to indicate that most are not) then where are their wages coming from? Government loans to the companies that own the factories? Where is THAT money coming from? Bank loans? But the banks are lending to factories that will never make the loan back. It's paid for through current and future savings from other, non-manufacturing sectors of the economy. Chinese people don't spend their money on goods they put it in a bank which lends it to unprofitable manufacturing companies. China's savings rate is incredibly high, around 50%. Japan in the 70s never went above 35%. Note that that savings directly detracts from consumption. This is sustainable unless you spend so much money on unprofitable factories that even leeching off consumption can't pay it all back (Japan in the late 80s, China today?). The real problem with this is that it causes deflation, because you're producing way more stuff than people can possibly buy, because you're taking money from consumers and giving it to producers. Deflation acts as a retardant on the whole economy because nobody will invest money if the nominal value of that investment tends to fall over time, and nobody will spend money because if you wait a year everything will be cheaper. Japan, despite herculean efforts at printing money, has only managed to hold deflation at 0% since the early 90s. Looking at indicators it seems China is struggling to maintain 2% right now, and that will probably fall more over time. So that's one potential problem, the other problem is productivity growth which is slowed by government intervention and support for unprofitable enterprises, along with rigid and inefficient labor markets. Japan has both, especially the second, so it's labor productivity is hilariously low (~$40/person/hour worked compared to ~$60 in the US and Western Europe). China thus far has been doing the first worse than Japan ever did, and although I'm not really up on China's labor market I suspect they either will or already have moved in the direction of Japan with extremely strong job security (despite poo poo wages) to mollify the public. The answer to why China will somehow avoid all these problems is the standard "Inscrutable Oriental Empire ruled the world for 4800 years until evil white people ruined it, and will return to its rightful place in the future". If you read the op-ed pages people will literally spend a paragraph bitching about how Japan was unable to / refused to reform, and then in the next paragraph confidently state that of course the CCP will fix China, it's practically guaranteed icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 10:19
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Krispy Kareem posted:What is China spending all this Yuan on? I didn't think they had the same entitlement problem as Western governments. I guess they spend a lot on defense, although that's the Central government and not its provinces. Useless infrastructure, unprofitable state owned enterprises, and more generally subsidies for manufacturing that's no longer profitable in China
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Aug 8, 2016 23:33
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Shifty Pony posted:I don't think that's an accurate description of the article at all. the 5000 year old galopagos economy
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Aug 12, 2016 17:00
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they were supposed to revive the A shares, not the B shares!
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Oct 18, 2016 07:42
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Freezer posted:Be that as it may, FX rates and scales of variation can be waaay larger and more violent than a country's actual economy. It you want GDP to be a meaningful measure of whether a country's economy is growing or not, you've got to tone down or eliminate the exchange rate effects. Comparisons of nominal GDP are made using a fixed exchange rate, the variance in it doesn't show up in historical measurements. Canada's GDP over the last 3 years or 30 years is measured with the exchange rate of a fixed point in time PPP measurement is affected a lot by cost of living differences in things that aren't easily tradeable internationally like construction, healthcare, education, food (in countries with heavily protected agriculture like France or Japan). To my mind those things aren't all that relevant if you're trying to measure the industrial might of a country in the high-20th-century, coal and steel production sense, which is what people talking about China usually are doing icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 10:16
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Fojar38 posted:China has been economically stagnant since about 2013 and is fast-tracking its way to irrelevance in the global economy. Here's a good post about urban planning in china and how the government still practices Really Existing Socialist style policies to try to evenly distribute urban growth throughout the country and to keep a sizeable rural population https://andrewbatson.com/2017/05/11/friedrich-engels-is-still-shaping-chinese-cities-120-years-after-his-death/ From a world bank report quote:In an economic sense, these administrative barriers work like an expensive tax on migration; based on current productivity differences between agriculture and urban occupations in industry or services, every 1 percent more migration from rural to urban areas would yield 1.2 percent more GDP. At the current level of mechanization, agricultural surplus labor is estimated to be 105 million people, and this could increase as China’s agricultural modernization accelerates. If China’s migration rates had matched those of Korea’s in the past, China’s economy would be nearly 25 percent larger today.  R. Guyovich posted:imperialism being a specific stage of capitalism and not "a government doing things" goes all the way back to lenin and has plenty of theoretical backing. that definition clashing with a more broad use of the term doesn't make it an incorrect framework It goes to John Hobson, Lenin came later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism_(Hobson) And anyways it fails as an empirical theory. European colonies did not make their home countries any money, and in the case of Britain they didn't even practice exclusivist trade policy, IE other Euro countries were granted the same tariff-free access to colonial markets that Britain was. Imperialism happened for other reasons, much like racism is not solely or even mostly a product of economic forces Here's a good blog post on this and other topics https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/05/08/bm/ icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 13, 2017 |
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May 13, 2017 18:55
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stone cold posted:Counterpoint: the urban/rural hukou split is actually pretty bad and basically has created a quasi caste system. That's exactly what that post is saying. The hukou exists in order to facilitate that kind of socialist planning. Just letting anyone who wants to move to Beijing or Shanghai do so is what the World Bank recommends instead. Chinese planners instead have Soviet-era ideas about the proper balance between large cities, small cities and the countryside Raenir Salazar posted:Is this being portrayed as a good thing or a bad thing? Bad, hence the observation that China would be 25% richer had it not done this
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May 13, 2017 19:07
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stone cold posted:Oic, I read the Batson and it didn't really seem all that condemning in terms of tone. Well it is a historical study into the origins of the policy I do get a sort of smug neoliberal-elite "obviously socialism can never work, i know this but the chinese don't"
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May 13, 2017 19:24
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To be fair, at this point it doesn't seem like China is exercising the same influence on domestic politics that the US used to. That may change in the future but at the moment they're basically just running jobs programs for chinese construction workers in third world countries, not having the Chinese-CIA fund death squads to murder anyone who ever said a bad thing about the 5000 year reich
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May 16, 2017 20:24
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Peven Stan posted:HIlarious how liberals are basically neocolonialists at heart "Neo"? Modern American liberalism was formed pretty explicitly as a project to continue the worldwide domination of free trade ideology that decolonization had threatened to end
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Jun 28, 2017 05:14
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:no surprise that first-generation chinese american deplorables are also deservedly reviled by a lot of vietnamese-americans and filipino-americans (among others) as well lol We should split China in half down the Yangtze and give the southern half to Vietnam and the Philippines to rule as colony
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Jul 3, 2017 11:02
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