self_made_human's profile

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago

Avatar 3: The Way of Fascism

Alternate titles:

The Way of Water 2

Can A White Boy (with dreads) Get Some Action?

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS

The movie was so unfathomably long and boring that my primary emotion during it was a nicotine craving. Once I was able to exit the cinema and get a puff on my vape, I was left with the lingering taste of strawberry, raspberry and regret on my tongue.

For more moments than I could count, I was genuinely confused if whole-ass minutes of the second movie had been mixed in on the cutting-room floor. Entire sequences of choreography, shots and events seemed to have been nabbed from earlier movies. The only thing that keeps me coming back to Avatar, namely the progressively cooler hard scifi military toys, proved to be stagnant. I couldn't spot a single hell yeah moment the whole movie. When the previous film opens with a hard montage of ISVs irradiating half a continent with the exhaust plumes of antimatter engines, anything less is lacking. It's not like the movie lacks spectacle, but like a secondhand eyeglass shop, nothing is new. Kudos to Cameron, or his overworked VFX team: they've clearly found a way to amortize their previous effort and expenditure over a longer time frame.

The plot, such as it is, concerns itself with Spider (the aforementioned white boy with dreads), who has apparently become such an insufferable presence that even his adoptive blue alien family wants him gone. After the Sully family's eldest son died in the previous film during what was essentially James Cameron directing Titanic again but with whales, Neytiri has decided that Spider is the problem. This is somewhat understandable given that he's a human teenager being raised by aliens, which is already a recipe for awkwardness without adding "your presence reminds me of my dead son" to the mix.

So the Sullys decide to exile Spider to live with distant Na'vi relations, which in any reasonable movie would be the inciting incident for a coming-of-age story about finding your place in the world. Instead, it's the inciting incident for 197 minutes of explosions and unconvincing family drama. I'd happily have traded all of the drama for more explosions.

Enter Varang, leader of the Ash People (the Mangkwan clan, for those keeping track of Cameron's increasingly convoluted Na'vi taxonomy). Varang leads a group who have rejected the deity Eywa after a volcano destroyed their homeland, which has apparently turned them into nihilistic fire-worshipping warriors. This is probably meant to be some deepity on how trauma can corrupt spirituality, but mostly it's an excuse for Cameron to film things catching on fire in high frame rate. While Eywa is definitely depicted as rather powerful, I feel like it's a bit much to expect it to deal with plate tectonics too.

The Ash People attack the Sully family's floating transport because, well, someone has to or we wouldn't have a movie. This leads to Sigourney Weaver (still bizarrely playing a teenager named Kiri, a casting choice that grows more inexplicable with each film) calling upon the goddess Eywa to save Spider's life. Watching a woman in her seventies perform motion capture as a Na'vi adolescent having a spiritual awakening is one of those experiences that makes you question the entire trajectory of cinema as an art form. Is the character supposed to be awkward and ungainly in universe, or is it all a consequence of asking an arthritic old lady to do somersaults? The people (me) wish to know.

Meanwhile, Colonel Quaritch, just as blue, just as mean. He's still hunting Jake, and also helping out with the general RDA pivot from unobtainium to hunting down the Tulkun whales for their anti-aging juice called Amrita, which is the kind of on-the-nose metaphor that would make a first-year film student wince. Humans harvesting alien whales for eternal youth. Get it? Do you get it? Cameron will spend another forty minutes making sure you get IT. After spending an entire movie on the same plot point last time. Is it that hard to find new macguffins?

The film briefly introduces yet another Na'vi clan called the Wind Traders, an airborne group led by a character named Peylak, who show up just long enough to establish that yes, there will be more Avatar movies, and yes, you will be expected to remember these people. They shelter the Sullys before everyone gets attacked again, because this is a James Cameron movie and if forty-five minutes pass without something exploding, his producer's contract requires him to forfeit his yacht.

I was somewhat concerned that the story would continue with a character assassination of Quaritch, but was pleasantly relieved at not being that disappointed. Sure, he goes off the reservation chasing blue poon, but is he the first Marine to do so? Not even in this franchise. Marines have needs, you know, and if the RDA doesn't offer Mustangs at ridiculous APRs... can you blame him for falling for a hot, murderous woman with the Na'vi equivalent of BPD (or CPTSD, if we're being generous)? I get the appeal.

No. Quaritch becomes increasingly unreliable, but remains loyal to humanity. It is unclear if that will persist to the next movie, since Cameron spends plenty of screen time (he's got that to spare) having Jake wax eloquent to him about the benefits of going native, and opening his third eye. He also wins dad of the year for being incredibly patient and understanding with his bitch-ass son, Spider, even after the latter shoots him with a crossbow. Another place where Cameron met my low expectations was not framing the hard-ass female general as a girlboss who can do no wrong. She makes several clearly correct decisions, and also demonstrates fallibility when Quaritch ungrounds himself and bails out her ass. Shame she dies in a magnetic fire tornado.

We've got the obligatory sequence of Jake reuniting the tribes and embracing the title of Turoq Makto, though I must admit that explicitly using a bundle of arrows to represent strength through unity was a bit much. In a movie that was less explicitly leftist to the point of tears, it might be interpreted as some kind of dogwhistle. I'm left scratching my head as to whether nobody in the production team noticed, or whether the screenwriters were having a giggle at Cameron's expense.

The climax involves Jake and Quaritch fighting in a magnetic vortex while rocks hurtle through the air, which sounds exciting but mostly makes you wonder about the physics of Pandora and whether Cameron actually listened to his consultants. They briefly team up to save Spider from falling to his death, have a moment of understanding, and then Quaritch throws himself into a fire pit rather than... continuing to live? Hope that the Na'vi signed up to the Geneva convention? It's unclear. We don't see him actually die, so presumably he'll be back for Avatar 4: This Time It's Even More Identical To The Last One.

Kate Winslet's character dies while giving birth during the final battle, which allows Cameron to recycle the emotional beats of Titanic one more time. Neytiri promises to raise the baby as her own, which is touching until you remember that this family already has approximately seventeen children and has proven spectacularly bad at keeping them alive. Someone also named Rotxo dies, but I couldn't tell you who that was even if you held a gun to my head. The movie has so many characters that deaths occur with all the emotional impact of someone announcing they're switching to a different cellular provider.

Cameron has been explicit that the runtime is longer than The Way of Water's already-punishing 3 hours and 12 minutes because modern audiences "long for a moment of focus." This is a man who has apparently never encountered the human attention span, or who believes that "focus" and "watching blue aliens have the same argument for the eighty-seventh time" are synonymous concepts.

The film cost over $400 million to make, which works out to roughly $2 million per minute, or approximately $33,000 per second. I spent several stretches of the film calculating how much money was being spent to make me feel absolutely nothing, which was more engaging than anything happening onscreen.

The movie randomly switches between 24 and 48 frames per second, I will admit that I didn't really notice, but I wish he'd been less of a coward and just went high refresh rate. It's 2025, we can do better than 24 hz. Others hated the inconsistency; Cameron insists this was intentional, which is the kind of artistic decision that makes you wonder if perhaps success has insulated him from people willing to say "Jim, this looks bad."

In the end, Varang disappears, Quaritch maybe dies, the Sully family adopts another child, and we're left with the certain knowledge that there will be two more of these films, currently scheduled for 2029 and 2031. By the time Avatar 5 comes out, the youngest cast members will have aged out of their roles, Sigourney Weaver will be playing a kindergartener, and I'll presumably still be standing outside theaters desperately sucking on my vape, trying to forget the preceding ten hours of blue people having feelings about colonialism.

The worst part is that it's not even aggressively bad. It's gorgeously rendered mediocrity, the kind of competent, expensive blandness that makes you wonder if Cameron has reached the apotheosis of blockbuster filmmaking. It's aggressively boring, but it makes billions. Solve for revealed preference. Every frame is painstakingly crafted. Every motion-captured performance is technically impressive. And yet the overwhelming sensation is one of exhaustion, of having witnessed something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human effort to produce an experience roughly as memorable as a particularly long elevator ride.

Cameron has created a franchise that makes enormous amounts of money while leaving almost no cultural footprint beyond "remember how those movies made a lot of money?" It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories: technically nourishing, massively consumed, and ultimately unsatisfying. All I ever saw of Avatar 2 after release were rather patriotic edits of ISVs scorching the ~~Earth~~ earth of Pandora. I don't think this movie can muster up even that much.

But hey, at least the vape was good. And the movie actually strengthens the case I made earlier, about Pandora being some kind of engineered high-tech-masquerading-as-low retirement home. The film explicitly confirms that Eywa maintains a high fidelity VR afterlife. It has the bioengineering chops to rewire a human to survive unaided on Pandora. It is described as having firewalls or "encryption". I enjoy being correct, or at least having takes more defensible than what the director intended.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr ago

Thank you, again. I try my best to deserve her ❤️

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Oh. I mean, passing the exam was definitely a sorely needed boost to my self-confidence. I needed that. It's always good to have objective markers of competence, so I know it's not all in my head. Perhaps it did give me the courage, to say fuck it and pursue someone a continent away, hoping I can put a ring on her.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

the sequence of two major events happening back-to-back appears like some sort of things falling into their respective places. maybe they are connected, maybe they aren't.

If you mean the story about the model, that was maybe a week before I reconnected with the new lady, one who can easily be described as a better model. No objectification intended, I treat my objects like women anyway.

I suppose the two are more related than I'm comfortable with. I was at maximum cynicism after encountering the former, but convinced myself that some of the women I had dated in the past weren't remotely as bad. Tentatively, some of them were good people! This turned to out to be more correct than I'd wagered for.

but it is really a good thing that instead of feeling completely cynical or apathy, you still are able to feel things intensely. keeps you human! with warts and all.

Burning out can feel pleasant, sometimes. The fire can't hurt you, if there are no pain receptors left to scream. But I'm not that far gone, it turns out my heart was only shriveled because it was waiting for rain. I hope the good times last.

those sound like more elaborate stories. with the kind of writing you do, definitely would be very very interesting. and you do have the next exam planned.

Thank you. But as I've said before, the Motte isn't treated to an indiscriminate catalog of my romantic trusts. Most of it doesn't strike me as particularly worth writing about! Guy meets girl, they think the other is nice, but can't quite make it work. You live and you learn, and look forward to something that is worth writing about, preferably the pleasant kind.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

There is no rule being broken. I think that's all I have left to say.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

Thank you for the information! I wasn't aware that Hainan had an SEZ before.

No that's what the SEZ's were this is something new.

Huh. It must have fallen out at some point in editing, but I did have a like going something like "Previous SEZs have allergen-tested the mainland, making the risk of rejection moderate"

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

Kind of? You are getting quite a lot of feedback right now that this particular writing is worse than your less-LLM-inflected (infected?) pieces, and are continuing to bluster on about how great it is.

I disagree with this feedback, to some extent. That is a matter of taste as well as principle. I am usually quite more corrigible.

So why are you doing it? Is there some shortage of actual journalism about China that needs addressing so badly that boring prooompted longposts on the Motte are required?

Because this essay is less boring than the original Reuters article? Being less boring is not the same as being exciting. This one has greater than zero jokes in it.

It is, for what it's worth, not a prompted post in the standard sense. I also wanted to hear what the better informed have to say, and providing a basis for discussion makes me feel the mission is accomplished. George W. Bush approves.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I don't think the draft would have been too exciting either, on top of lacking polish. It's a dry topic. China opened a new free trade zone. Nobody has been shot, yet. Even the Taiwan connection is tenuous.

I'm sure someone could make it exciting, that someone might not be me. I settled for accurate journalism with Chinese characteristics. Any more "spice" would have been the less palatable kind of Yellow Journalism.

In any case, given that you consider a boring end product undesirable to at least a certain degree, maybe consider the extent to which the LLM's "help" with your writing was actually having the effect of making it more boring to read before "writing" any more of these pieces?

Of course. Have I ever struck you as being not into introspection or lacking self-awareness? I have a lot of things written that I haven't shared because I think my own output or with LLM support didn't make it worthwhile.

I have seriously spent time considering that. My takeaway is that the answer is no. LLMs aren't the best at making things exciting or novel (not that they can't do it at all), so what I mostly rely on them for is to take something I think I've done well, then re-arrange, proofread and edit. Most of their suggestions go in the waste bin. Sometimes they do actually say things that make me sit up and go huh, not bad, and those are worth stealing.

You've raised a valid point, speaking generally, so I can only beg the benefit of doubt that I thought of it too.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I agree that it is a mistake to assume that people complaining about LLM-usage are monolithic or homogeneous.

When I object to LLM usage, I would point to aspects like:

Lack of effort/spam/false engagement
Factual inaccuracies
Being boring to read (less important than the first two)

At the risk of flattering myself, I think these are the "reasonable" reasons to disapprove of specific examples or LLM outputs as a whole. But I haven't made any of those mistakes, which is why I consider myself misunderstood rather than someone cheating their way into the discourse.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

On a personal level, I write as a hobby with pretensions of someday being published. I would never use AI for my fiction writing, even if you could prove to me that the AI writes better than me, because what's the fucking point?

Look, I wrote a novel (or a lot of it, it's unlikely to be finished at this rate) as an effort to prove that I am a genuinely competent writer, intentionally starting in 2023 when LLMs were becoming scary instead of today's scary-good. Nobody could accuse me of ghostwriting with them then, they were simply not good enough. These days, it is easy for me to go back to an older chapter, ask an AI to try rewriting it to be "better", and then having to (very grudgingly) accept that this version is superior.

I derive pleasure from both the creative release of writing, and from having my writing appreciated. I don't keep much of a private journal, I want this shit out there. When I'm truly gassed, I will probably write something, but in an artisanal capacity. It just won't be nearly as much.

But this place is for human interaction. If you're not using your own words, what's the fucking point?

Gestures back at previous arguments

What makes you think that there's no human interaction involved? Or, present tense? The intent of this particular post was to present a factual review of a news article, with added speculation where relevant (my speculation). The self_made_human house style was a secondary consideration. And here I am, using my very human words to engage. What is actually bad?

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

True, unless you go to the bother of finding a potent jailbreak or some OSS model tuned till the safety filters fall off. Unfortunately, I seem to recall @Amadan catching you using LLMs to generate "normal" posts and thus decrease the relative density of Joo-posting.

Sigh. With friends like these, who needs enemies? I feel like PETA would, if Hitler offered to do a public endorsement of vegetarianism. A very kind and humanitarian impulse, just... A lot of other things.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

That they are, but I must admit that I feel a lot of Stonetoss_rope.jpg at you being the person backing me up here.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

Come on, spare me the "But what about PHOTOSHOP????? What about SPELLCHECKERS????" I am not an AI newb, nor an AI-hater. But you should not be using AI to generate your words for posting here. That is my opinion, and it will remain my opinion.

I'm wounded that you think my argument is as unsubtle as that. What I intended to get across is that a black-or-white approach is closer to an article of fate. The real world is not made of pixels, it is made of atoms (or wave functions or...) which do not come with convenient metadata attesting to origin. Even a digital pixel can produce the same outcome, and so can the larger arrangements of pixels, regardless of whether meat or machine or meat machines placed them. I care about the image, not the brush. Eventually, knowing that there was (or wasn't) a brush will not add much information, or at least pragmatically valuable information. Just a Planck Time later (as implied by the Intermediate Value Theorem), the brush will be an active detriment. Are we there? I suspect we are oh so close.

I am powerless to change your opinion here, but know I do what I do for principled reasons and not laziness. You assume the slop will stay slop. It will be better than you, or me, sooner than is comfortable.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I honestly don't know. I haven't heard of any efforts to impose Mandarin in HK, at least, which is where I'd imagine the friction would show.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I genuinely do not understand the intuition at play here. Let's imagine someone who has an instinctual aversion to the use of AI image gen: is using Adobe Firefly to change a single pixel with it sufficient to taint a larger painting? Two pixels? Ten? To finish the blocked-in background that the artist would have been too lazy to finish had he not had the tools at hand?

What if the artist deletes the AI pixel and reinserts one himself, with the exact same hexcode?

(It is worth noting that at one point, in the not so distant past, that even Photoshop itself was treated with similar suspicion)

Where is your threshold for "too much"? When you recognize an AI fingerprint? The problem is that once you begin suspecting it in a particular user, it is easy to imagine that there is more of it than in reality. Of course, if you have an all-or-nothing attitude, then I suppose that sounds less horrible to you than it does to me. I skew closer to a linear-no-threshold model, or perhaps one where, for the average writer, there exists an x% of AI usage that will increase overall quality as measured by multiple observers. Preferably blinded ones.

This x% can be very high for the truly average. I'm talking average Redditor. It can be very low, vanishingly so for others. Scott has mentioned that he has tried using LLMs to imitate his own style and has been consistently disappointed in the outcome.

I think, for me, the optimal amount is 1-10%. 20% is pushing it. This essay is closer to 20%. But even that 20% is closely vetted for factuality. Alas, it has not been vetted for style as hard, or else this topic wouldn't have arisen. In fact, I didn't particularly try. Performing edits to launder AI commentary as my own strikes me as dishonest.

I envision myself as the artist using the tool to finish painting that unfinished background. Sometimes, it makes something so good it's worth bringing to prominence in the foreground. The day where I can see no conceivable value-add from my own contribution is when I pack my bags as a writer. I suppose it is fortunate that I've been at it so long that there is a sizeable corpus of time stamped, archived evidence showing that I am damn good without it. That I don't need it. I still think I benefit from it, though I'm not sure I can change your mind on the topic.

After all, there are a lot of people making pure slop. I try not to ever become one of them.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

Textbook narcissist? I've read the actual textbooks, and I'm afraid that I do not share your opinion. You can keep it, for what that's worth.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

That is high praise, thank you. I will say that the intent behind my use of LLMs was to both improve quality and maintain my distinctive style in the final output. If people are pointing out deficiencies in the latter, then I am clearly doing something wrong (by my own standards) even if the content itself is unimpeachable.

Looking back at this particular post, it's clear to me that I let the damned bots insert boilerplate and verbiage into my text that did not originate there. It is also on me for not being careful with more edit passes, by which I mean manual ones. I live and I learn.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

This is something I have considered (but let's be honest, I'm too lazy to do so). Last time this happened, I went to the effort of sharing screenshots of multiple versions of my drafts in progress, which is a serious pain.

The main issue is that there is no robust way to ensure that the text presented as "human" wasn't LLM influenced in some way. Even a system that monitored raw keystrokes is vulnerable to someone simply looking at another monitor and typing in LLM text manually. It is trivial to fake the whole process if someone wants to, especially when text is usually copied in wholesale. It is also trivial to pass off AI content as entirely human written, but it requires a degree of effort that the average troll is unwilling to devote.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.

Courtesy of too many web novels, I'm so Chinese that the nearest Chinatown is just "Town" to me. Unfortunately, I don't have the gumption to actually learn a fourth (fifth?) language, so I hope smart glasses and earbuds with live translation continue improving at the pace they are. Hopefully the Chinese Century will have Standard American as the lingua franca.

I do agree that HK seems quiet of late. Maybe too quiet. The majority of malcontents seem to have fled to the UK, which has embraced them with open arms. It certainly feels like half their doctors work for the NHS now, which I think is a questionable decision on their parts.

My take is that HK will likely continue being the financial capital, while Hainan becomes the cooler Shenzen. Of course, I doubt the CCP will object if more finance moves to the latter and makes HK obsolete.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I am not pro-CCP in the least, and I am genuinely unsure what gave you that impression from the essay. One would assume that LLMs would be anti-CCP by default.

All I can see is that I haven't opted to vociferously lambast the CCP for past poor choices. I think everyone here knows enough about Hong Kong or Taiwan to not need a detailed explainer.

I think that the Hainan FTP is a good idea, a great one even. It represents liberalization and something closer to true free trade, which I'm all for. It is a shame that the CCP is the one enacting it, but I don't want to correct my enemies when they are trying to do something positive sum.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I am aware. I find it most unfortunate, since I do genuinely believe that LLMs help make my writing even stronger.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

My man, I quite literally said, in the essay itself, that I used ChatGPT for help. That is not the same as using it to write an essay!

I am not an expert on geopolitics or economics. I asked ChatGPT for help with relevant theories (I do know about the Gravity model of trade and am tangentially familiar with Acemoglu). Why? Because nobody with more expertise brought this up first in a hot minute.

Discussion of using AI in general, though not one particular circumstance: https://www.themotte.org/post/3411/a-broken-model-of-the-world/392472?context=8#context

You do realize that's in the context of an essay with no AI involvement beyond feedback? I have few qualms about disclosing it when it's actually relevant, or denying my usage. You don't have to use GPT-Zero, which is an unreliable tool at the best of times. You can just ask. The honest answer here is I ran into a very interesting article, wrote a rough draft of an essay, asked multiple models for feedback and edit passes, then did the tedious work of checking for hallucinations. This was over multiple days, and several good points noted by the AI, such as the applicability of various economic models, was probably accepted by me into the final version. As far as I can tell, there are no hallucinations, beyond quotes from poorly sourced Chinese literature that I can't read (suitably signposted and kept as a joke).

Self_made, your writingnis better than this. AI or not, I can't read this, but I read the entire essay about broken world models just fine. As a mod, I'm sure you're much more familiar with the rules than I am and wouldn't break them, but whatever AI or other peocess used here made the final essay worse in my imo.

The current moderation consensus is that the use of AI to generate all or even most of a post, particularly in an attempt to pad effort or mislead, is a clear violation of the rules. We have refrained from declaring what proportion of an essay or post must be AI written to be worthy of action. It is a ruling mainly made to dissuade spam or bad-faith actors, and using it for editing or proofreading is, as far as I'm aware, above board.

While it's very kind of you to say that you prefer 100% raw SMH, you haven't even seen the raw essay! How would you know if it's better? I don't, or I'd have posted it.

The previous essay on China was a throwaway written in the middle of the night, it lacks the spit and polish of an effortpost written over hours or days. You will see a lot of variance in my style based on how much effort I'm putting in.

Much like goods "manufactured" in Hainan, I believe I have added enough additional value to the base product to post without qualms. It is, after all, mostly mine. Or perhaps the AI added enough value to my base product. The day I throw raw ChatGPT output in here is the day I welcome public crucifixion.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago

Hey man, I'm no expert here. All I can say with a semblance of confidence is that the Chinese seem to disagree with you. Hence the whole FTP shtick.

Perhaps they think the two systems are complementary. Or perhaps it's a massive proof of concept, albeit one with the usual amount of Chinese bloody-mindedness. They rarely half-ass these things.

You get Communism with Chinese Characteristics, something more experimental on Hainan, and maybe integration down the line when one decisively does better than the other. It's very pragmatic.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

We Have Taiwan At Home

There is a story that Su Shi, the great Song Dynasty poet, was exiled to Hainan in 1097. At the time, this was a death sentence. The island was a malarial backwater, the literal end of the known world, inhabited by "barbarians" and venomous snakes. Su Shi, being a stoic and a gourmand, reportedly (and perhaps apocryphally) made the best of it by learning to cook oysters and writing poems about how nice the weather was. Fast forward a millennium, and the Communist Party of China has decided that Su Shi's place of exile is the future of global capitalism.

On the 18th of December, 2025, Beijing officially "closed" the customs border around Hainan. This sounds bad. Usually, when you close a border, it means tanks are rolling in. In this case, it means the opposite: Hainan is now treated as a separate customs territory for goods, with a "first line" between the island and the rest of the world and a "second line" between the island and the mainland. The Reuters headline calls it a "$113 billion free-trade experiment." The details are drastic, the implications, as far as I can tell, immense. If you are a foreign company, you can ship a wide range of inputs into Hainan, subject to a negative-list regime, tariff-free. If you process those goods there, adding just 30% value under the Free Trade Port's eligibility and supervision rules, you can sell them into mainland China with zero tariffs (while import VAT and consumption taxes may still apply, depending on the product).

This is the "Hainan Free Trade Port", and if the Chinese government is to be believed, it is the successor to Hong Kong, a pilot for joining the CPTPP, and a strategic hedge against a hostile trade war with the US, all rolled into one tropical island.

This is a very big deal. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a big brain play at "dual circulation" economics or a doomed attempt to simulate a free market inside a panopticon. I for one, tend towards optimism.

Let's look at the mechanics, because they are fascinatingly game able. I suspect that might even be the intent:

The core purpose of the Hainan FTP is what we might call the 30% Loophole.

Under normal circumstances, if you want to sell a widget to a consumer in Shanghai, you pay a tariff. If that widget comes from a country currently annoyed with China (or vice versa), that tariff might be punitive. I wonder why tariffs have been a hot topic of late.

Under the new Hainan rules, the flow looks like this:

Import raw materials or components into Hainan (Tariff: 0%).
Do "processing" in Hainan that increases the value by 30%.
Ship the finished product to Shanghai (Tariff: 0%). This sounds like a standard Free Trade Zone, but the scale is different. Most FTZs are fenced-off industrial parks near airports. Hainan is an entire province of 10 million people. It is a vacation destination.

Imagine if the USGov declared that Florida was a separate customs entity. You could ship French wine or Japanese steel into Miami tax-free. If you turned the steel into a car in Orlando, you could sell it to New York tariff-free.

Perhaps just as important, the tax regime is aggressive. Qualifying firms in encouraged sectors can access a 15% corporate income tax rate (versus the standard 25%), and eligible "high-end" or "urgently needed" talent can be brought down to an effective 15% personal rate via refunds of the portion above 15%. This is a direct shot at Singapore and Hong Kong.

The economic incentives here are powerful. The "30% value added" is a low bar. The accounting details matter: bill of materials, processing costs, overhead; but 30% is low enough that assembly, testing, packaging, and integration often get you there. If I were a German chemical company or a Japanese electronics manufacturer, I'd be looking at this and calculating the margin. You can bypass the Great Wall of Tariffs by setting up a factory in Haikou.

Why is Beijing doing this?

The standard answer is "economic growth." China's FDI dropped ~ 10% in the first three quarters of 2025. The property sector is still a mess. They need a win.

But the specific timing and structure suggest two other motivations: The Hong Kong Problem and The CPTPP Gambit:

Hong Kong used to be the interface between China and the world. It was the airlock. You could keep the mainland pressurized with communism and capital controls, while Hong Kong remained a vacuum of common law and free capital. It worked great until 2019-2020, when the airlock started leaking politics. Beijing has effectively integrated Hong Kong politically, but in doing so, they damaged its unique value proposition. Trust in Hong Kong's distinct legal system has eroded. The "Hainan Option" is an attempt to build a backup airlock.

The theory goes: We don't need the British Common Law or colonial judges to have a financial hub. We can just simulate the economic conditions of Hong Kong (low tax, free trade) without the political pains (protests, foreign judges).

On the other hand:

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is the trade deal that the US abandoned under Trump, leaving Japan and others to run it. It has very high standards for data flows, labor rights, and state-owned enterprises.

China wants in. Joining CPTPP would be a geopolitical coup, effectively isolating the US from the Pacific trade architecture. But China, as currently constituted, cannot meet the standards. The state subsidies are too high; the data laws are too strict. Hainan is the "pilot." The Reuters article quotes Vice Premier He Lifeng calling it a "vital gateway." The idea is to adopt CPTPP-compliant rules only in Hainan. If it works, they can tell the trade bloc, "Look, we can do it. There's enough trade in the Pacific without the US wagging its dick at us."

The skepticism here is high. As one diplomat noted in the Reuters piece, CPTPP members generally demand nationwide commitments, not just a gated playground for pilot projects. Beijing hopes Hainan will serve as a proof of concept; trade negotiators suspect it will be a showpiece rather than a structural reform.

Will it work?

If you are a fan of Gravity Models of Trade, you should be bullish (I do not know enough to claim to be an expert, I'm just doing this because it's been a few days and nobody else has bothered). Hainan sits right in the middle of the South China Sea, one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth. It is closer to Vietnam and the Philippines than Shanghai is. If you lower friction/tariffs in a high-gravity area/massive population centers, trade will happen. The physics of economics demand it. If you are a fan of Institutional Economics (think Acemoglu and Robinson), you should be skeptical.

The institutionalist argument is that Hong Kong worked not because of the tax rate, but because of the Rule of Law. If you had a contract dispute in Hong Kong, you knew a judge in a wig would apply English common law, regardless of what the Party Secretary thought.

Hainan does not have judges in wigs. It has the People's Courts. The "Hainan Free Trade Port Law" passed in 2021 promises protection for foreign investors, but we have seen how quickly laws can change when they conflict with "national security."

However, there is a middle path: the "Good Enough" Equilibrium.

Foreign capital might not need perfect British Common Law. It might just need "predictable enough" rules and "high enough" profits. If the 30% value-add loophole generates a 20% increase in net margin for a German carmaker, they might be willing to tolerate the risk that the local court is biased.

Dubai is a good comparison here. Dubai is more chocolate than it is a democracy. It does not have English Common Law (though the DIFC does). But it functions as a global hub because the ruling family understands that screwing over foreign investors is bad for business. If Hainan can establish a reputation for "commercial neutrality", even within an authoritarian state, it could siphon off a lot of the manufacturing-adjacent services that are currently leaving Hong Kong.

There is also the Trump Factor (implied by the fact that 2025 of all years is the date of implementation). If the US is ramping up tariffs on "China," Hainan offers a fascinating shell game.

If a product is made in Vietnam, shipped to Hainan for "processing," and then shipped to Europe, what is its origin? If a product is made in Hainan and shipped to the US, does it get hit with the "China Tariff"?

Probably yes. Customs agents are not stupid (alas). Outside China, origin is usually about substantial transformation or "last substantial transformation," often implemented through tariff classification changes or specific processing rules, not the Free Trade Port's internal 30% threshold.

But for the rest of the world, Hainan offers a way to interact with the Chinese economy without the full weight of mainland protectionism. The "30% value add" rule effectively turns Hainan into a giant mixing vat. You pour in global commodities, stir them with Chinese labor (which is still cost-competitive for high-skill work), and pour out a "Hainan" product. This helps China move up the value chain. Instead of just being the "World's Factory" (doing the scutwork), they become the "World's Processor" (high value add-ons).

Let's look at the numbers again. Hainan's GDP is $113 billion. Hong Kong's is $407 billion. To catch up, Hainan needs to grow at explosive rates. But it has a handicap: talent. Hong Kong is a nice place to live if you like cosmopolitan cities. Hainan is... nice if you like beaches and humidity. But it lacks the schools, the nightlife, and the cultural cachet of HK or Shanghai.

The "talent" question is usually where these top-down economic zones fail. You can build the airport and the office towers, but if the bankers and engineers don't want to live there, you just have a very expensive ghost town. However, the tax incentives for "urgently needed" talent are the counter-weight. In a world where Western nations are talking about wealth taxes and China's mainland tax is high, an effective 15% cap is very attractive. It might attract a specific class of mercenary expatriates and Chinese tech workers looking for a tax haven.

Explain the implications like I'm an idiot, or a precocious 5 year old:

I predict a golden age of smuggling. The "Second Line" (the border between Hainan and the mainland) is the critical point of failure. If you have a zero-tariff zone separated from a high-tariff zone by a ferry ride, the incentive wedge is enormous. Expect the "Second Line" to become a cat-and-mouse game of drone deliveries and mislabeled cargo.

Hainan is geographically closer to Hanoi than to Beijing. The marketing for the FTP explicitly positions it as a gateway to Southeast Asia. If Hainan works, it becomes the de facto capital of the South China Sea economic zone. It pulls Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines closer into China's economic gravity well, regardless of the naval disputes.

I suspect this splits the functions that used to be united in HK. It makes HK less indispensable to Beijing, which in turn makes HK more vulnerable politically. Hong Kong keeps the IPOs; Hainan takes the supply chains.

And of course, the Taiwanese elephant in the South China Sea. I get more than a whiff of "we have Taiwan at home", an effort to make a China that is less... Chinese. Perhaps a proof-of-concept that Beijing can take the boot of the neck if you unite amicably.

In a letter from exile in 1097, Su Shi wrote of Hainan: "I have no meat to eat, no medicine for my illness, no house to live in, no friends to visit, no coal for winter, no cool spring for summer. But for some reason, I've got a lot of raw fish. FeelsBadMan." (I am not sure he said any of this at all, I asked ChatGPT for cool quotes. At least Wikipedia confirms he was exiled to the area)

In 2025, you can get all of those things in Hainan, tax-free, likely imported from Australia or France. The fish, you probably want from somewhere with lower levels of mercury.

China is attempting to engineer a free market organ and transplant it into nominally communist body. The rejection risk is moderate. I, for one, am interested in seeing how it all plays out.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago

Thank you!

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