Thank you for this great upgrade on China-related issues.
I would like to give my sensing here too.
Facts: China's total population is going down and the decline is accelerating.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's population fell by 3.39 million people to 1.405 billion. This marks the fourth consecutive year of population decline.
Sensing: I think this is a good sign. There are too many people on the earth, mainly caused by Poor people without a social safety net, which caused them to put a lot of children on te world to safeguard their Old Age. Europe showed this trend first. A good social safety net caused decline. And everybody was told that this was wrong an then they started the immigration and illegal immigration.
The best way to make everyone to afford living in peace and without worry about their future is to create social safety nets and let women take part in the productive side of life too. (including Robots and AI.)
We need NO WARS to cut the top of the population. We need properly organising the life of all people. Like they do in China.
“let women take part in the productive side of life too”… my opinion: that should only be voluntarily, that is: if they want. The forced independent position of the women in the west is in my perception not a success. I think it ‘destroyed’ much of the social cohesion and resulted in a high level of individualism, ‘selfishness’: childcare, eldercare, and meal preparations have been institutionalized or outsourced to corporate and state entities
Salaries didn’t increase with inflation and couples are forced to both make money to afford our way of living, that is promoted by government and industry: spend, spend, spend and when you have a big house, big car, luxury holiday, you are considered successful. The rat race. It also seems that more people stay single and don’t want kids. It doesn’t bring happiness I think.
"The forced independent position of the women in the west.."
A nice way of putting it. I have often questioned the "benefits" of the women's liberation movement and where they really accrue: who or what was really behind it?
You are absolutely right in 'The West'. They try to destroy all 'groups', including the Family. They destroy all groups, real parties, Trade Unions, the Pubs, etc.
But not in the poor countries where i spoke about, showing China climbing out of the 'no social safety net' situation. Yes that choice has to be made and should be possible. In China they try to stimulate the choice for woman to care for a child or even more. And even in Russia they stimulate that choice. But they have a clear shortage of people, still after 40-45 and the collapse of the USSR.
Living in Western Europe myself and reading through the massive propaganda here where they try to prevent people from seeing that elsewhere the system might actually be better. Yes, both china and Russia have their issues, but that is partly because the west can’t leave them alone and keeps on meddling to subjugate these countries to install a liberal democracy, so they can loot the place and in the process destroy the social cohesion. We are the cancer of the world.
Our 'Liberal Democracy' is NOT Liberal (freedom) and Neither a Democracy, just look at what % of citizens think their parties and governments are their choice. In the Netherlands it is currently:
Recent research by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) shows that only 21 percent of Dutch people aged 15 and older have 'a lot' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in politicians. Confidence in the House of Representatives stands at 25 percent. (AI).
The Chinese realized, decades ago, that the country can only support so many people and that unchecked population growth follows not a linear but an exponential rate. If every couple has three children, it means that 1 billion people will become 1.5 billion people in one single generation, and the one after that will be 2.25 billions, more than double the original number in just a few decades.
Leaving it unchecked beyond the maximum limit would mean disaster for everyone as simply there wouldn't be enough resources for everyone. So they acted to evaluate what the optimal number was and keep it at that level. Western "economists", who personally I rate as knowledgeable and trustworthy as a tarot card reader claiming to be descendant in a direct line from Merlin the wizard, are giggling thinking a single Chinese can't pay for the retirement of two parents, fooled, as always, by the religious dogma of capitalistic infinite growth and forgetting that productivity has been increasing more than twofold over the last few decades (which is also unconceivable: for the average Western card reader, a rise in productivity *must* mean layoffs to curb wages and higher profits for the stakeholders).
As always, the Chinese think long term, and that by itself is incomprehensible for biased, brainwashed western "experts" with the attention span of a mayfly.
I agree with your analysis on the Chinese visions, Doctor.
My sensing tells me that only in case the large majority of 'Countries', or whatever groups of people on the world, start living together on basis of friendship and trade in stead of war and robbery, we can prevent humanity to destroy the experiment 'Earth'.
(Some time ago, I was reading classic British comic book Judge Dredd - a brutal parody of right wing politics that the Americans, of course, didn't understand - and came across a story that back then would have sounded exaggerated and ridiculous, but not so much nowadays...
The book is set a couple of centuries after a nuclear war destroyed most of the planet, and it was shown exactly how it all started. It was the American president, who, safe behind an impenetrable anti-ballistic missile shield, and having whipped the country into a frenzy, issued an ultimatum to the entire world: submit to American hegemony or be nuked into dust. Nobody submitted, the Americans fired their missiles, and everyone else fired back. And only then, the President realized his "impenetrable anti-missile shield" was a scam. Not only it didn't work as claimed, it never even existed in the first place, and nobody told him.)
There are several good commentators on China and the Chinese economy. The problem with economic analysis is that econ is wonkish. Without a good background it is difficult to know who is knowledgeable and who is gassing. There are two types. The first reports mostly facts on the real economy in China, along with other relevant information. This is suitable for most people.
The second type gets into the nitty-gritty. So approaching it necessitates some background. Those writings that this level assume that readers have the background. Be warned that common sense doesn't cut it at this level. This is where people like LJ go wrong. All that seems evident isn't necessarily. This is what analysis is about.
Michael Hudson is an economist with a lot of experience in finance, too. Kevin Walmsely, mentioned below, writes at https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/ He addresses business and financial professionals.
See also https://warwickpowell.substack.com/ (Warwick Powell). This is in-depth analysis that is not restricted to China, but he writes quite often on China.
While I can't contribute to economic technicalities (though I think you are correct about fundamental soundnesses beyond our ability to see, because of our biased framing), I think the biggest problem all westerners have in trying to understand China is very simply that China is not a prostelytizing culture (not for thousands of years), they are fine with other people being different, we are the ones so convinced of our superiority (because we're so determinedly ignorant about others, and like it that way) that we want to force change on others at the point of a bayonet (for centuries without pause, proving it a feature not a bug), even in areas where our own incompetence and policy corruption is decades (or indeed, as in banking, centuries) deep. We need to reset our basic picture of "morality" before we can judge anything, including the idiot in the mirror!
Thank you. You raise a good point about China not being a proselytizing culture, unlike . Western once upon a time Christian cultures . Something to think about.
Excellent article!! I agree with you, that Larry got that one wrong on China. Kevin Walmsley is the man on China and he doesn't do what you just did with your in depth article!!
Excellent analysis, Julian, it shows you ain't Agency material! ;)
Simplicius had a good piece on China about a year ago, during the height of their real estate crisis, in which he was presenting arguments for the resilliance of the Chinese economy and society in general.
One of his main points was CCP's determination to never allow the Chinese economy to be "monetized" in the same way the West had restructured its economy since the 1970's, which eventually marked the beginning of the end of the Anglo-Zio empire. That's when financial derivatives rules were laxed, which turned major banks into market casinos promoting their "financial derivative instruments".
It marked a moumental shift of capital from “low-yielding” manufacturing and into an ROI-chasing "service eCONomy" with a gradual, but constant decline of American industrial base being the certain outcome.
What we're seeing today throughout the entire "West" is a result of the shortsightedness of "Western" policy, choosing to run for "growth" and ultimately finding itself trapped in the quicksand of debt...
Just think of the economic oxymorons alternating "Western" news cycles, with an industrial base that isn't even a shadow of its former self (with plenty of practical examples, like the “collective West’s” failed struggle to dramatically increase artillery shell production, or the attempt to “reinvent” the technology for processing and refining rear-earth elements), while the S&P and DOW indexes are blowing through the roof; and why wouldn't they break records, when stock buybacks have become every major corporation's favorite “investment strategy”?
I remember S's article. It was much better than the usual fare in the FT or Bloomberg's but still accepted the Western point of view that it was a real estate "crisis" I never felt that it rose to that level for the reasons that I elaborated on .
As to "I read this longer-than-usual article expecting some insights into China. I was disappointed. What I got could have come straight from WaPo or the WSJ" Julian please look into Hua Bin on substack as his insights to China are refreshing as well as accurate.
I understood just enough to ask the following, probably dumb, question:
If China, which as I understand it has a modified 'command' economy, can flip the bird to the West and not have a deadly 'boom bust' cyclical, careening graph line economy, why could the USSR have not achieved the same success?
Not a dumb question-- a very good one. This issue has been debated a lot. Part of the problem is defining "command economy". The other problem is ideology. Chinese "communism" was not the same as the Soviet kind. That said, neither was really "communism". The dominant factors were history, culture, civilizational values, and geography. So once we had Mao-Think vs Stalin-Think. . Now Xi-Think vs Putin-Think. Umm... makes my head hurt.
With hindsight, it seems the Soviet leadership lost their self-confidence. Whereas the Chinese leadership never did lose confidence in the need for a stable state system to lift China out of poverty into long term prosperity. I understand some analysts think the Soviet Union could have overcome the problems that they confronted , but in the end lost their self-belief and bought into belief in the superiority of capitalism. I am probably oversimplifying this but that is the general gist.
Consider that, besides the differences in the Chinese and Soviet (and Cuban, Vietnamese, North Korean, etc.) approach, there's the huge elephant in the room of post-WW2 economic planning in the USSR, which was, to be honest, pretty lunatic.
To keep it short, the Stalin-era 5-year plans considered a shift from wartime heavy industry focus and raw resource export to light civilian industry and self sufficiency (aka: Soviet-made fridges built from Soviet steel, Soviet rubber, Soviet wiring and so on).
Kruschev, in one of his innumerable strategic and political mistakes, threw all of it out of the window and went for continuing the heavy industrial focus, which in turn led to the infamous chronic shortage of consumer products in the USSR for decades.
Brezhnev also largely kept course, mostly due to a heightened world tension, the oil crisis, the perception of a potential major conflict, and at that point raw resource export was the major source of capital for the USSR, every change in it would have taken decades of careful restructuring and the potential for a major economic crisis, so the solution was mostly keep driving straight and hope for the best.
Then Gorbachev (who, to this day, I cannot decide if he was a well-meaning fool or a traitor) took the worst decisions ever in human history and flooded Soviet markets with expensive Western imports, paying for them out of cheap raw materials, paving the way for an entirely new and powerful criminal class profiting from contraband.
So yeah, the USSR couldn't "flip the bird" at Western economy because it had tied itself to it by relying on exporting commodities (oil, gas) whose price could be easily manipulated by other actors.
(Ifs and buts don't make history, "but"... I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Malenkov / Molotov won the struggle for leadership against Kruschev)
So far it looks like another "megamachine" in the making . . sucking up resources from wherever they can be obtained to power obscene, bright cities with no stars in sight.
I understand that if you don't create a megamachine you will be absorbed by one bigger - but I believe there's little or no evidence it's a real alternative to industrial civilization - which is not sustainable . . . period.
The wheel turns. Off the top of my head and without much thought can I suggest that "ecological civilisation" already existed for thousands of years amongst many of the "stone age" aboriginal societies around the world, before the arrival of the Europeans; people who were of the land rather than imposing themselves on it ?
Culture is king! The question is: Who controls your culture? In China it's China - in 'Western Civilization' it's DaSynagogue of Satan - www.crushlimbraw.com - the pieces simply fall into place as CULTURE forms all institutions......and eventually succeed or self-destruct based on eternal laws of cause and effect - REALITY arrives when CULTURE is allowed to be corrupted by the apathy of a populace induced into its own self-destruction by a proxy of DSOS.....itself a proxy of dagod of this world.
Churchianity is a perfect example - NO it is NOT Christianity - most folks have never seen Christianity.
"Choose the narrow gate - wide is the way to perdition."
Nice economic analysis. It looks like Larry Johnson relied on some US Empire propaganda or wishful thinking. Everything they said about China is far more true of the US.
Some points the Western economists mentioned by Larry Johnson make are absolutely hilarious. The attempt at portraying Chinese debt used to build up infrastructure and manufacturing as "bad" as opposite to American debt used to finance bailouts and military procurement grift (called, rather shamelessly, "defence spending") aka 5000$ toilets that don't work and billion dollar destroyers that can't go at sea as "good" is pure surrealistic comedy.
Much supposed critical analyses from America or the Anglos in general are not the dispassionate, objective, and impartial critiques they masquerade as.
Whether it be from think-tanks, academics, media shills, Congress, White House, or US spooks, Anglo-American commentary is usually nothing more than psyops and disinformation.
The point of this Anglo-American psyops is to wage information warfare against official enemy nations--not to present a fair and balanced picture of whatever topic is addressed.
Whether their target is China, Russia, Iran, or fill-in-the-blank country, this is how the Americans instinctively operate. This warped behavior is fundamental to America's cultural and political DNA as an entity.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin captured the essence of the United States (and its crime partners) in his famous 2022 speech when he called the USA for what it truly is: the Empire of Lies.
The elephant in the room is that China remains a relatively heterogeneous nation, albeit with at best a medium-trust society and remains somewhat committed to being that sort of nation, while the US, which started as a relatively heterogeneous nation with a high-trust society, has decided to double down on diversity to tranform a nation into a homogeneous medium-trust or even low-trust country.
Country ≠ Nation
Country < Nation
Of the two, the US has decided to take the down elevator, while China can plod along, and regardless of any economic advantages the US might have now, its long-term prospects are far dimmer. You could quadruple the US population, but if you are doing it with a diverse mix of low qualification, low-trust people, are you end up doing is turning the US into another India or sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most resource-rich regions on Earth; why does it remain what it is?
A simple query of DeepSeek reveals there to be at least 50 ethnic groups in China. There are more than 100 “distinct linguistic-cultural regions”. This suggests that the Middle Kingdom’s success is derived from encouraging a diverse community to work together, probably contributing to the common good.
The key concept is relative heterogeneity. China’s ethnic groups are an agglomeration of largely Eastern Asian peoples who have lived in proximity for centuries. The US started out as a collection of ethnic groups largely from Europe, ergo relatively heterogeneous, and in a less than a century started diluting that with imports from the rest of the world. The Middle Kingdom had a lot easier task and a lot more time to evolve into what they have become.
Thank you for this great upgrade on China-related issues.
I would like to give my sensing here too.
Facts: China's total population is going down and the decline is accelerating.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's population fell by 3.39 million people to 1.405 billion. This marks the fourth consecutive year of population decline.
Sensing: I think this is a good sign. There are too many people on the earth, mainly caused by Poor people without a social safety net, which caused them to put a lot of children on te world to safeguard their Old Age. Europe showed this trend first. A good social safety net caused decline. And everybody was told that this was wrong an then they started the immigration and illegal immigration.
The best way to make everyone to afford living in peace and without worry about their future is to create social safety nets and let women take part in the productive side of life too. (including Robots and AI.)
We need NO WARS to cut the top of the population. We need properly organising the life of all people. Like they do in China.
Just saying.
Cassandra
“let women take part in the productive side of life too”… my opinion: that should only be voluntarily, that is: if they want. The forced independent position of the women in the west is in my perception not a success. I think it ‘destroyed’ much of the social cohesion and resulted in a high level of individualism, ‘selfishness’: childcare, eldercare, and meal preparations have been institutionalized or outsourced to corporate and state entities
Salaries didn’t increase with inflation and couples are forced to both make money to afford our way of living, that is promoted by government and industry: spend, spend, spend and when you have a big house, big car, luxury holiday, you are considered successful. The rat race. It also seems that more people stay single and don’t want kids. It doesn’t bring happiness I think.
"The forced independent position of the women in the west.."
A nice way of putting it. I have often questioned the "benefits" of the women's liberation movement and where they really accrue: who or what was really behind it?
You are absolutely right in 'The West'. They try to destroy all 'groups', including the Family. They destroy all groups, real parties, Trade Unions, the Pubs, etc.
But not in the poor countries where i spoke about, showing China climbing out of the 'no social safety net' situation. Yes that choice has to be made and should be possible. In China they try to stimulate the choice for woman to care for a child or even more. And even in Russia they stimulate that choice. But they have a clear shortage of people, still after 40-45 and the collapse of the USSR.
Cassandra
Living in Western Europe myself and reading through the massive propaganda here where they try to prevent people from seeing that elsewhere the system might actually be better. Yes, both china and Russia have their issues, but that is partly because the west can’t leave them alone and keeps on meddling to subjugate these countries to install a liberal democracy, so they can loot the place and in the process destroy the social cohesion. We are the cancer of the world.
Amen !
The selection of names has been weaponised.
Our 'Liberal Democracy' is NOT Liberal (freedom) and Neither a Democracy, just look at what % of citizens think their parties and governments are their choice. In the Netherlands it is currently:
Recent research by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) shows that only 21 percent of Dutch people aged 15 and older have 'a lot' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in politicians. Confidence in the House of Representatives stands at 25 percent. (AI).
Neo Liberal eh ?
Cassandra
The Chinese realized, decades ago, that the country can only support so many people and that unchecked population growth follows not a linear but an exponential rate. If every couple has three children, it means that 1 billion people will become 1.5 billion people in one single generation, and the one after that will be 2.25 billions, more than double the original number in just a few decades.
Leaving it unchecked beyond the maximum limit would mean disaster for everyone as simply there wouldn't be enough resources for everyone. So they acted to evaluate what the optimal number was and keep it at that level. Western "economists", who personally I rate as knowledgeable and trustworthy as a tarot card reader claiming to be descendant in a direct line from Merlin the wizard, are giggling thinking a single Chinese can't pay for the retirement of two parents, fooled, as always, by the religious dogma of capitalistic infinite growth and forgetting that productivity has been increasing more than twofold over the last few decades (which is also unconceivable: for the average Western card reader, a rise in productivity *must* mean layoffs to curb wages and higher profits for the stakeholders).
As always, the Chinese think long term, and that by itself is incomprehensible for biased, brainwashed western "experts" with the attention span of a mayfly.
I agree with your analysis on the Chinese visions, Doctor.
My sensing tells me that only in case the large majority of 'Countries', or whatever groups of people on the world, start living together on basis of friendship and trade in stead of war and robbery, we can prevent humanity to destroy the experiment 'Earth'.
->https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HCs6eruXcAAscRi?format=jpg
Cassandra
Absolutely. We have one last shot at this.
(Some time ago, I was reading classic British comic book Judge Dredd - a brutal parody of right wing politics that the Americans, of course, didn't understand - and came across a story that back then would have sounded exaggerated and ridiculous, but not so much nowadays...
The book is set a couple of centuries after a nuclear war destroyed most of the planet, and it was shown exactly how it all started. It was the American president, who, safe behind an impenetrable anti-ballistic missile shield, and having whipped the country into a frenzy, issued an ultimatum to the entire world: submit to American hegemony or be nuked into dust. Nobody submitted, the Americans fired their missiles, and everyone else fired back. And only then, the President realized his "impenetrable anti-missile shield" was a scam. Not only it didn't work as claimed, it never even existed in the first place, and nobody told him.)
There are several good commentators on China and the Chinese economy. The problem with economic analysis is that econ is wonkish. Without a good background it is difficult to know who is knowledgeable and who is gassing. There are two types. The first reports mostly facts on the real economy in China, along with other relevant information. This is suitable for most people.
See herecomeschina@substack.com (Godfree Roberts). He has a newsletter, too. Also https://huabinoliver.substack.com/ (Hua Bin). Arnaud Bertrand is also knowledgeable about China. But his articles on Substack are mostly available only to premium subscribers. (https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/) Those who don't want to become premium subscribers can follow. him on X.
The second type gets into the nitty-gritty. So approaching it necessitates some background. Those writings that this level assume that readers have the background. Be warned that common sense doesn't cut it at this level. This is where people like LJ go wrong. All that seems evident isn't necessarily. This is what analysis is about.
Michael Hudson is an economist with a lot of experience in finance, too. Kevin Walmsely, mentioned below, writes at https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/ He addresses business and financial professionals.
See also https://warwickpowell.substack.com/ (Warwick Powell). This is in-depth analysis that is not restricted to China, but he writes quite often on China.
Thanks for providing links. I follow these sources. I have spent a lot of time in China myself over the years
Great piece - and thank you for it, Julian.
While I can't contribute to economic technicalities (though I think you are correct about fundamental soundnesses beyond our ability to see, because of our biased framing), I think the biggest problem all westerners have in trying to understand China is very simply that China is not a prostelytizing culture (not for thousands of years), they are fine with other people being different, we are the ones so convinced of our superiority (because we're so determinedly ignorant about others, and like it that way) that we want to force change on others at the point of a bayonet (for centuries without pause, proving it a feature not a bug), even in areas where our own incompetence and policy corruption is decades (or indeed, as in banking, centuries) deep. We need to reset our basic picture of "morality" before we can judge anything, including the idiot in the mirror!
Thank you. You raise a good point about China not being a proselytizing culture, unlike . Western once upon a time Christian cultures . Something to think about.
Excellent article!! I agree with you, that Larry got that one wrong on China. Kevin Walmsley is the man on China and he doesn't do what you just did with your in depth article!!
Excellent analysis, Julian, it shows you ain't Agency material! ;)
Simplicius had a good piece on China about a year ago, during the height of their real estate crisis, in which he was presenting arguments for the resilliance of the Chinese economy and society in general.
One of his main points was CCP's determination to never allow the Chinese economy to be "monetized" in the same way the West had restructured its economy since the 1970's, which eventually marked the beginning of the end of the Anglo-Zio empire. That's when financial derivatives rules were laxed, which turned major banks into market casinos promoting their "financial derivative instruments".
It marked a moumental shift of capital from “low-yielding” manufacturing and into an ROI-chasing "service eCONomy" with a gradual, but constant decline of American industrial base being the certain outcome.
What we're seeing today throughout the entire "West" is a result of the shortsightedness of "Western" policy, choosing to run for "growth" and ultimately finding itself trapped in the quicksand of debt...
Just think of the economic oxymorons alternating "Western" news cycles, with an industrial base that isn't even a shadow of its former self (with plenty of practical examples, like the “collective West’s” failed struggle to dramatically increase artillery shell production, or the attempt to “reinvent” the technology for processing and refining rear-earth elements), while the S&P and DOW indexes are blowing through the roof; and why wouldn't they break records, when stock buybacks have become every major corporation's favorite “investment strategy”?
I remember S's article. It was much better than the usual fare in the FT or Bloomberg's but still accepted the Western point of view that it was a real estate "crisis" I never felt that it rose to that level for the reasons that I elaborated on .
As to "I read this longer-than-usual article expecting some insights into China. I was disappointed. What I got could have come straight from WaPo or the WSJ" Julian please look into Hua Bin on substack as his insights to China are refreshing as well as accurate.
I second you on that and beat me to it.
I know Hua Bin quite well and have exchanged messages with him.
You lucky dog! His work is excellent.
Sorry about that!
Larry needs the feedback and owes you a coffee.
It’s lonely in the glare of fame but for you .
I wrote him a message (in the comments) But he hasn't replied.LOL. He never does.
Excellent correction to Larry's article!
When I read his article this morning I felt the same as you described.
I think I will post this to Larry's article to trigger a few Amerimutts there.
Thanks . Posting it to Larry's site should simulate a lot of discussion.
I understood just enough to ask the following, probably dumb, question:
If China, which as I understand it has a modified 'command' economy, can flip the bird to the West and not have a deadly 'boom bust' cyclical, careening graph line economy, why could the USSR have not achieved the same success?
Not a dumb question-- a very good one. This issue has been debated a lot. Part of the problem is defining "command economy". The other problem is ideology. Chinese "communism" was not the same as the Soviet kind. That said, neither was really "communism". The dominant factors were history, culture, civilizational values, and geography. So once we had Mao-Think vs Stalin-Think. . Now Xi-Think vs Putin-Think. Umm... makes my head hurt.
With hindsight, it seems the Soviet leadership lost their self-confidence. Whereas the Chinese leadership never did lose confidence in the need for a stable state system to lift China out of poverty into long term prosperity. I understand some analysts think the Soviet Union could have overcome the problems that they confronted , but in the end lost their self-belief and bought into belief in the superiority of capitalism. I am probably oversimplifying this but that is the general gist.
Consider that, besides the differences in the Chinese and Soviet (and Cuban, Vietnamese, North Korean, etc.) approach, there's the huge elephant in the room of post-WW2 economic planning in the USSR, which was, to be honest, pretty lunatic.
To keep it short, the Stalin-era 5-year plans considered a shift from wartime heavy industry focus and raw resource export to light civilian industry and self sufficiency (aka: Soviet-made fridges built from Soviet steel, Soviet rubber, Soviet wiring and so on).
Kruschev, in one of his innumerable strategic and political mistakes, threw all of it out of the window and went for continuing the heavy industrial focus, which in turn led to the infamous chronic shortage of consumer products in the USSR for decades.
Brezhnev also largely kept course, mostly due to a heightened world tension, the oil crisis, the perception of a potential major conflict, and at that point raw resource export was the major source of capital for the USSR, every change in it would have taken decades of careful restructuring and the potential for a major economic crisis, so the solution was mostly keep driving straight and hope for the best.
Then Gorbachev (who, to this day, I cannot decide if he was a well-meaning fool or a traitor) took the worst decisions ever in human history and flooded Soviet markets with expensive Western imports, paying for them out of cheap raw materials, paving the way for an entirely new and powerful criminal class profiting from contraband.
So yeah, the USSR couldn't "flip the bird" at Western economy because it had tied itself to it by relying on exporting commodities (oil, gas) whose price could be easily manipulated by other actors.
(Ifs and buts don't make history, "but"... I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Malenkov / Molotov won the struggle for leadership against Kruschev)
Thank you for that. I have taken it all on board. Are you Michael Hudson?
Hah! I wish I was Hudson. That's great praise here, appreciate it a lot. Thanks.
“ Collective welfare” is for humanity not other forms of life.
Industrial civilization in whatever manner it’s pursued - is not sustainable . . . period.
The concept of "ecological civilization" takes collective welfare to the next level.
We'll see. A 'concept" for sure.
So far it looks like another "megamachine" in the making . . sucking up resources from wherever they can be obtained to power obscene, bright cities with no stars in sight.
I understand that if you don't create a megamachine you will be absorbed by one bigger - but I believe there's little or no evidence it's a real alternative to industrial civilization - which is not sustainable . . . period.
The wheel turns. Off the top of my head and without much thought can I suggest that "ecological civilisation" already existed for thousands of years amongst many of the "stone age" aboriginal societies around the world, before the arrival of the Europeans; people who were of the land rather than imposing themselves on it ?
Culture is king! The question is: Who controls your culture? In China it's China - in 'Western Civilization' it's DaSynagogue of Satan - www.crushlimbraw.com - the pieces simply fall into place as CULTURE forms all institutions......and eventually succeed or self-destruct based on eternal laws of cause and effect - REALITY arrives when CULTURE is allowed to be corrupted by the apathy of a populace induced into its own self-destruction by a proxy of DSOS.....itself a proxy of dagod of this world.
Churchianity is a perfect example - NO it is NOT Christianity - most folks have never seen Christianity.
"Choose the narrow gate - wide is the way to perdition."
Nice economic analysis. It looks like Larry Johnson relied on some US Empire propaganda or wishful thinking. Everything they said about China is far more true of the US.
Some points the Western economists mentioned by Larry Johnson make are absolutely hilarious. The attempt at portraying Chinese debt used to build up infrastructure and manufacturing as "bad" as opposite to American debt used to finance bailouts and military procurement grift (called, rather shamelessly, "defence spending") aka 5000$ toilets that don't work and billion dollar destroyers that can't go at sea as "good" is pure surrealistic comedy.
Much supposed critical analyses from America or the Anglos in general are not the dispassionate, objective, and impartial critiques they masquerade as.
Whether it be from think-tanks, academics, media shills, Congress, White House, or US spooks, Anglo-American commentary is usually nothing more than psyops and disinformation.
The point of this Anglo-American psyops is to wage information warfare against official enemy nations--not to present a fair and balanced picture of whatever topic is addressed.
Whether their target is China, Russia, Iran, or fill-in-the-blank country, this is how the Americans instinctively operate. This warped behavior is fundamental to America's cultural and political DNA as an entity.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin captured the essence of the United States (and its crime partners) in his famous 2022 speech when he called the USA for what it truly is: the Empire of Lies.
How true!
The elephant in the room is that China remains a relatively heterogeneous nation, albeit with at best a medium-trust society and remains somewhat committed to being that sort of nation, while the US, which started as a relatively heterogeneous nation with a high-trust society, has decided to double down on diversity to tranform a nation into a homogeneous medium-trust or even low-trust country.
Country ≠ Nation
Country < Nation
Of the two, the US has decided to take the down elevator, while China can plod along, and regardless of any economic advantages the US might have now, its long-term prospects are far dimmer. You could quadruple the US population, but if you are doing it with a diverse mix of low qualification, low-trust people, are you end up doing is turning the US into another India or sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most resource-rich regions on Earth; why does it remain what it is?
A simple query of DeepSeek reveals there to be at least 50 ethnic groups in China. There are more than 100 “distinct linguistic-cultural regions”. This suggests that the Middle Kingdom’s success is derived from encouraging a diverse community to work together, probably contributing to the common good.
Perhaps the US has a management issue.
The key concept is relative heterogeneity. China’s ethnic groups are an agglomeration of largely Eastern Asian peoples who have lived in proximity for centuries. The US started out as a collection of ethnic groups largely from Europe, ergo relatively heterogeneous, and in a less than a century started diluting that with imports from the rest of the world. The Middle Kingdom had a lot easier task and a lot more time to evolve into what they have become.