Chinas Moment der Schwäche: Wirtschaftsverfall und Amerikas strategische Öffnung
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-moment-weakness
Chinas Moment der Schwäche: Wirtschaftsverfall und Amerikas strategische Öffnung
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-moment-weakness
5 Kommentare
[Excerpt from essay by Logan Wright, Partner at Rhodium Group and author of the book *Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What it Means for the World*.]
The pressure on China’s economy means it will struggle to continue modernizing its military and maintain technological innovation. Although budgets can always prioritize these efforts, China’s overall fiscal resources are trending lower.
Herein lies both the urgency and the opportunity for the United States. China’s impressive industrial base means it has secured chokepoints over some key supply chains and intermediate inputs—indeed, it weaponized its control over rare earths to alarming effect in the advanced industrialized world. Its economic decay at home is making this threat more severe: as economic woes further drive down export prices and force companies to expand their markets overseas in search of profits, China will erode industrial bases elsewhere, including in the United States and among its allies. If countries lose the industrial bases needed to protect their own economic and security interests, Beijing will have even more opportunities to weaponize supply chain vulnerabilities in the future. The world will see episodes like Beijing’s restrictions on rare earths expand to other industrial components and even consumer goods.
I think the article is interesting because I’ve argued before that china benefits enormously from a us and western led trading system that lets it sell goods across the world. If chinas economy really is becoming more dependent on export then the balance of leverage starts to change. The west seems to be waking up to how much of its own industry has been hollowed out but the relationship is still deeply intertwined. The question for me isn’t whether trade ends it’s who needs who more and how that use that advantage.
China shills fail to understand that the country has 2 unsolveable problems in the horizon:
1 – Questionable dependency from other nations on China imports as manufacturing becomes easier and it makes geopolitical sense to diversify your sources.
2 – An extremely competitive society where having children is financially unviable for a very large portion of the people in reproductive age. This is certainly not a China-only problems, but combined with 1, it hits China more acutely than countries like Spain or Argentina. Especially because there is negative net migration rate in China.
[removed]
Broadly the globe is heading for stagnation of some sort with no clear leader. I suppose it was a bit inevitable, the exponential progress had to stop at some point.
America is def in the midst of something. China isn’t the replacement. Who’s that leave? The EU has a boatload of issues as well. Russia is def not it. India has a series of headwinds too.
The tldr is it’s a period of serious uncertainty.