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khallow (3766)
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Tuesday June 18, 19
12:22 PM
Once again, I read of the Chinese government "playing the long game". Too often people confuse long term planning with successful long term planning, whether it be glossing over some government's missteps or hysterical speculation about future disaster mostly unblemished by real world facts.
Well, just because you play chess, doesn't make you a grandmaster.
Well, just because you play chess, doesn't make you a grandmaster.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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Do not use if foil seal is broken.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:08PM (12 children)
...our definition of 'success' may not match China's definition of 'success'.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:03PM (11 children)
Or China's leadership's criteria of success, which goes something like "stay or rise in power personally, keep the communist party in power so we never get held to account, keep the people from uprising, prevent foreigners from taking our stuff, take stuff from foreigners, hands off otherwise". Pretty much in that order.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:24AM (7 children)
Pretty much covers it, far as I'm aware.
My sister's office does occasional business in China, and her official guide told her to her face: "All this new capitalism has one goal -- sucking all the wealth out of the west. When you're broke, it will end."
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:09AM (6 children)
One wonders if they'll realize the strategy isn't working when they have sucked much more wealth out of the west than existed when they started.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:37AM (5 children)
Most likely they'll just keep on sucking as long as the teat is offered.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:06AM (3 children)
And they can afford to be honest to your sister, because Western MBAs are still lining up to hand over their company's IP to their Chinese "partners" for the illusory access to "a billion customers".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:07AM
At least khallow has found some new "richies" to suck up to, after the whole Petro climate-denying gig went south.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:22PM (1 child)
True, I've even heard it put that baldly -- 'we're gonna have all of China as customers!!' No, you're going to temporarily have the Chinese social engine as a customer, but as soon as China figures out how to reproduce what you're selling, they'll undercut you and take ALL your customers. Have you learned nothing from the hundreds of bankrupt examples before you?
At least in my sister's case, they got paid cold hard cash to built something tangible that perforce stays in China (big fancy house for a newly-wealthy Chinese businessman who hadn't yet figured out he'd be far wiser to get his money out of China before that hyperextended real estate market falls apart).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:38AM
In other words, sucking at the Chinese teat. Who knew that would happen?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:11PM
Just like billions of other people. The problem with the viewpoint is that they are already part of the teat and a big part of the reason the developed world's wealth continues to grow despite said "sucking".
My take on that phrase is that it's just a sop to those who continue to follow the old religion of Communism. They lost badly in the past few decades and are coping by rationalizing that the current phase is temporary.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by khallow on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:06PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:29PM (1 child)
Interesting point. And while the long game is power and wealth for themselves,and they may have a fairly good hold on that vision, the short-term methods have been, as you say, fairly ill-planned.
Then again, that's symptomatic of communist-style central planning -- it demands a result, NOW, and how the peons achieve the result is not its concern, even if that ultimately destroys said peons' ability to live and work (Chinese industrial pollution being worse than the West ever achieved). Trouble with having a billion Chinese ready to hand is that peons are really easy to replace.
OTOH China has demonstrated an ability to turn on a dime and reasonable success (by its own lights) at enforcing its internal edicts, so never count on today's situation applying to tomorrow's China.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:17AM
And enforcing internal edicts works until it doesn't work. It's a fragile mechanism that works only as long as they can enforce it.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:48PM (5 children)
True. But, if you live in a village where 120 people play checkers, poorly, and only six of you can understand chess, even poorly, you and your buddies stand out from the crowd.
In the global population of nations, how many of our village idiots knows how to move the chess pieces around the board? It's sure as hell not the US! We can only look to the next election, or the next quarter.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:24PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday June 19 2019, @07:29PM (3 children)
At the moment, China is competing against some Western countries currently determined to operate tangentially to reality, whether that be denying climate change, starving the poor and throwing them out into the streets, selling off valuable national assets and removing themselves from their successful and advanced local trading blocs, encouraging racism and religious intolerance...
Since when was China a capitalist country? It has a "market" of sorts but it is heavily state influenced.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:49AM (2 children)
I suspect you're speaking of the US and UK. Let us note that the US and UK are doing better on many of those fronts than China is.
For decades.
Exactly. Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. China has that, just like most other countries.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:58AM (1 child)
Capitalism is a little more than that: it is also about accumulation and, especially, preservation of capital -- i.e. over generations. Which is likely to be China's big weakness: during the Empire times, the principle was that wealth originated from the Emperor, who gave it to his loyal servants. Part of that principle was that wealth, for nobility as well as for very wealthy businessmen, was not inheritable -- when a count or duke died, his property and money returned to the Emperor.
This prevented the rise of potential competitors, but might also be the secret behind why China's trade network remained limited to SE Asia: long-range trade expeditions required heavy investment; a game you could only play after your family had acquired some serious capital.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:30AM
What's the point of bringing up a historical system that doesn't exist at present? And if a capitalist system has to operate in perpetuity in order to count as being capitalist, then who has a capitalist system? One can't account for anti-capitalist decisions of people who haven't even been born yet.
And serious capital can always be taken away.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:18PM (2 children)
For example, anyone who doesn't get the large correlation between poverty and environmental damage, has no business putting forth environmental protection proposals that make poverty substantially worse. The plan starts by shooting itself in the foot. It doesn't matter that you're planning far ahead when your plans just make things worse.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday June 19 2019, @07:34PM (1 child)
It is. Many with the most wealth are heavily invested in fossil fuels and promote climate change denial. Some are even re-opening coal mines,
The progress has been undone by the Alt-Wrong movement in recent years including people like Bannon, Trump, Farage, Nigel Lawson, various large companies...
Who's saying that?
Like fracking for oil and gas, opening coal mine, removing subsidies for renewables (wind, solar), not building new nuclear power stations, expanding airports...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:40AM
Funny how this group seems to consist only of the Koch brothers. There are so many wealthy parties that could throw together a massive climate change denial propaganda, but don't. It's almost like they're profiting massively from the situation.
So why aren't we seeing Ohio rivers catch on fire? I notice a lot of whining and bitching about how we're going to revert to the bad old days just because there are political movements and ideologies which aren't fully invested in the environmentalist narratives, yet somehow that disaster never happens.
For starters the people who claim that developed world lifestyles are unsustainable. They ignore that those lifestyles are vastly more sustainable than exponential population growth from an impoverished, high fertility population which is permanently kept away from developed lifestyles.
Or the recycling advocates who completely ignore the near worthless value of recycling projects, some which cause more environmental harm than they purport to fix. And who think that a few minutes of someone's time is worth less than shitty bits of recycled plastic and paper and a little space in a landfill somewhere.