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China's fragile treasure
Tl;DR: after months of observation, I am convinced that DeepSeek has been an inflection point in Chinese AI development and probably beyond that, to the level of reforming national psyche and long-term cultural trajectory, actualizing the absurd potential they have built up in the last two decades and putting them on a straight path to global economic preeminence or even comprehensive hegemony. It is not clear to me what can stop this, except the idiocy of the CCP, which cannot be ruled out.
Last time I wrote on this topic I got downvoted to hell for using DeepSeek R1 to generate the bulk of text (mostly to make a point about the state of progress with LLMs, as I warned). So – only artisanal tokens now, believe it or not. No guarantees of doing any better though.
The direct piece of news inspiring this post is The Information's claim that DeepSeek, a private Chinese AGI company owned by Liang Wenfeng, is implementing some very heavy-handed measures: «employees told not to travel, handing in passports; investors must be screened by provincial government; gov telling headhunters not to approach employees». This follows OpenAI's new Global Policy chief Chris Lehane accusing them of being state-subsidized and state-controlled and framing as the main threat to the West, popular calls on Twitter (eg from OpenAI staff) to halt Chinese AI progress by issuing O1 visas or better offers to all key DeepSeek staff, and the sudden – very intense – attention of Beijing towards this unexpected national champion (they weren't among the «six AI tigers» pegged for that role, nor did they have the backing of incumbent tech giants; what they did have was grassroots attention of researchers and users in the West, which China trusts far more than easily gamed domestic indicators).
I am not sure if this is true, possibly it's more FUD, like the claims about them having 50K H100s and lying about costs, claims of them serving at a loss to undercut competition, about compensations over $1M, and other typical pieces of «everything in China is fake» doctrine that have been debunked. But China does have a practice of restricting travel for people deemed crucial for national security (or involved in financial institutions). And DeepSeek fits this role now: they have breathed new life into Chinese stock market, integrating their model is a must for every business in China that wants to look relevant and even for government offices, and their breakthrough is the bright spot of the National People’s Congress. They are, in short, a big deal. Bigger than I predicted 8 months ago:
Seems like this is no longer in the cards.
Recently, @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola has presented the two opposite narratives on China which dominate the discourse: a Paper Tiger that merely steals, copies and employs smoke and mirrors to feign surpassing the fruit of American genius born of free exchange of ideas etc. etc.; and the Neo-China coming from the future, this gleaming juggernaut of technical excellence and industrial prowess. The ironic thing is that the Chinese themselves are caught between these two narratives, undecided on what they are, or how far they've come. Are they merely «industrious» and «good at math», myopic, cheap, autistic narrow optimizers, natural nerdy sidekicks to the White Man with his Main Character Energy and craaazy fits of big picture inspiration, thus doomed to be a second-tier player as a nation; with all cultural explanations of their derivative track record being «stereotype threat» level cope – as argued by @SecureSignals? Or are they just held back by old habits, path-dependent incentives and lack of confidence but in essence every bit as capable, nay, more capable of this whole business of pushing civilization forward, and indeed uplifting the whole planet, as argued by Chinese Industrial Party authors – doing the «one thing that Westerners have been unwilling or powerless to accomplish»?
In the now-deleted post, me and R1 argued that they are in a superposition. There are inherent racial differences in cognition, sure, and stereotypes have truth to them. But those differences only express themselves as concrete phenotypes and stereotypes contextually. In the first place, the evo psych story for higher IQ of more northern ancestral populations makes some sense, but there is no plausible selection story for Whites being unmatched innovators in STEM or anything esle. What is plausible is that East Asians are primed (by genetics and, on top of that, by Confucian culture and path dependence) towards applying their high (especially in visually and quantitatively loaded tasks) IQ to exploitation instead of exploration, grinding in low-tail-risk, mapped-out domains. Conformism is just another aspect of it; and so you end up with a civilization that will hungrily optimize a derisked idea towards razor-thin margins, but won't create an idea worth optimizing in a million years. Now, what if the calculus of returns changes? What if risk-taking itself gets derisked?
And I see DeepSeek as a vibe shift moment nudging them in this direction.
And to be clear, DeepSeek is not alone. Moonshot is on a very similar level (at least internally – their unreleased model dominates LiveCodeBench), so are StepFun, Minimax and Alibaba Qwen. Strikingly, you see a sudden formation of an ecosystem. Chinese chip and software designers are optimizing their offerings towards efficient serving of DeepSeek-shaped models, Moonshot adopts and builds on DeepSeek's designs in new ways, Minimax's CEO says he was inspired by Wenfeng to open source their LLMs, there are hundreds of papers internationally that push beyond R1's recipe… the citation graph is increasingly painted red. This, like many other things, looks like a direct realization of Wenfeng's long-started objectives:
BTW: I know @SecureSignals disagrees on the actual innovativeness of all this innovation. Well suffice to say the opinion in the industry is different. Their paper on Native Sparse Attention, pushed to arxiv (by Wenfeng personally – he is an active researcher and is known to have contributed to their core tech) just the day before Wenfeng went to meet Xi, looks more impressive than what we see coming from the likes of Google Deepmind, and it has a… unique cognitive style. They have their very distinct manner, as does R1. They had nowhere to copy that from.
Maybe all of it is not so sudden; the hockey-stick-like acceleration of Chinese progress is a matter of boring logistics, not some spiritual rebirth, much like the hokey stick of their EV or battery sales. For decades, they've been mainly a supplier of skilled labor to America, which masked systemic progress. All the while they have been building domestic schools to retain good educators, training new researchers and engineers without entrusting this to Microsoft Asia and Nvidia and top American schools, growing the economy and improving living conditions to increase retention and have businesses to employ top talent and give them interesting enough tasks… so at some point it was bound to happen that they begin graduating about as much talent as the rest of world combined, a giant chunk goes to their companies, and that's all she wrote for American incumbents in a largely fake, sluggish market. DeepSeek, or Wenfeng personally, is not so much a crown jewel of Chinese economy as a seed of crystallization of the new state of things, after all pieces have been set.
The boost of confidence is visible outside the AI sphere too. I find it remarkable that He Jankui is shitposting on Twitter all the time and threatening to liberate the humanity from the straitjacket of «Darwin's evolution». A decade earlier, one would expect his type to flee to the West and give lectures about the menace of authoritarianism. But after three years in Chinese prison, he's been made inaugural director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Wuchang University and conspicuously sports a hammer-and-sickle flag on his desk. The martyr of free market, Jack Ma, also has been rehabilitated, with Xi giving him a very public handshake (alongside Wenfeng, Unitree's Wang Xingxing, Xiaomi's Lei Jun and other entrepreneurs).
…but this is all fragile, because China remains a nation led by the CCP, which remains led by one boomer of unclear sentience and a very clear obsession with maximizing his control and reducing risk to himself. In that, Wenfeng is similar – he's bafflingly refusing all investment, from both private and state entities, because it always has strings attached, I suppose.
But you can't just refuse the CCP forever. Reports that he's been told not to interact with the press seem credible; perhaps the story about passports will come true too, as DeepSeek's perceived value grows. In that moment, China will largely abandon its claim to ascendancy, vindicating American theory that Freedom always wins hearts and minds. People, even in China, do not acquire world-class skills to be treated like serfs.
…If not, though? If China does not just shoot itself in the foot, with heavy-handed securitization, with premature military aggression (see them flexing their blue water navy they supposedly don't have in Australian waters, see their bizarre landing ships designed for Taiwan Operation, see their 6th generation aircraft…), with some hare-brained economic scheme – where does this leave us?
I've been thinking lately: what exactly is the American theory of victory? And by victory I mean retaining hegemony, as the biggest strongest etc. etc. nation on the planet, and ideally removing all pesky wannabe alternative poles like Russia, China and Iran. Russia and Iran are not much to write home about, but what to do with China?
The main narrative I see is something something AGI Race: the US builds a God-level AI first, then… uh, maybe grows its economy 100% a year, maybe disables China with cyberattacks or nanobots. I used to buy it when the lead time was about 2 years. It's measured in months now: research-wise, they have fully caught up, releases after V3 and R1 show that the West has no fundamental moat at all, and it's all just compute.
In terms of compute, it's very significant to my eyes that TSMC has been caught supplying Huawei with over 2 millions of Ascend chip dies. This could not have been obfuscated with any amount of shell companies – TSMC, and accordingly Taipei, knew they are violating American decree. Seeing Trump's predatory attitude towards TSMC (them being forced to invest into manufacturing on American soil and now to fix Intel's mess with a de facto technology transfer… as an aside, Intel's new CEO is a former director of SMIC, so literally all American chip companies are now headed by Chinese or Taiwanese people), I interpret this as hedging rather than mere corruption – they suspect they will not be able to deter an invasion or convince the US to do so, and are currying favor with Beijing. By the way, Ascend 910c is close to the performance of Nvidia H800. R1 was trained on 2048 H800s; So just from this one transaction, China will have around 500 times more compute, and by the end of the year they will be able to produce another couple million dies domestically. So, it is baked in that China will have AGI and ASI shortly after the US at worst, assuming no first strike from the latter.
In terms of cyberattacks for first strike, AIs are already good enough to meaningfully accelerate vulnerability search; coupled with the vast advantage in computer-literate labor force (and to be honest, actual state-backed hackers), China will be able to harden their infrastructure in short order, and there's no amount of cleverness that gets past provably hardened code. So this is a very uncertain bet.
In terms of economic growth, this is usually tied to automation. China seems to be on par in robotics research (at least), controls almost the entire supply chain, and has an incomparably bigger installed automated manufacturing base (see their EV factories, which are now also producing robots). They will have OOMs more humanoids and probably faster compounding growth. This more than covers for their workforce aging, too.
Then I hear something about Malacca strait blockade. Suffice to say this seemed more convincing when they really didn't have a «blue water navy», which they now clearly have, contra Peter Zeihan. They're also making great progress in weaning their civilian economy off oil (high speed rail instead of planes, normal rail for freight, EVs again, nuclear and renewable buildouts…) and have stockpiled giant reserves so oil cutoff won't really deter them. They are not quite food-secure but likely won't starve without imports. So blockade is no solution.
Lastly, I've seen this theory that Starship (once it's ready for prime time) provides the US with insurmountable advantage in mass to orbit, thus all the old Star Wars plans are back in action and Chinese nuclear deterrence is neutralized. This doesn't seem feasible because they're working on their own economical reusable rockets – across multiple companies as usual – and are very close to success, and there are signs that this project has very favorable scalability, to the point the US will lose its mass to orbit lead in under three years, or at least it will be diminished. (Personally I think Zhuque-3 is a more sensible design than Musk's monstrosity, though it's just a tasteful interpolation between Falcon and Starship. Learning from mistakes of others is a common late mover advantage).
Sector by sector and attack vector by attack vector, it's all like that.
So… what is left?
As far as I can tell, at this trajectory only China can defeat China – the hidebound, unironic Communists in control, fulfilling the mawkish Western prophecy they try to avoid, bear-hugging to death the young civilization that grew around their mandate and is now realizing its destiny. Confiscating passports, banning open source that widens the talent funnel, cracking down on «speculative investments», dragging them back into the 20th century at the brink of the long-coveted «national rejuvenation».
…Parallels to the US are probably clear enough.
The US/allied theory of victory is mostly cope, rehashing the Cold War strategy of technological superiority to overcome numerical inferiority.
Only it's hard to retain technological superiority against a state with such a gigantic amount of STEM talent and a non-broken economic system ruthlessly prioritizing capital investment and technological superiority.
Plus numerical inferiority will be staggering. Chinese shipbuilding capacity is roughly 52-55% of world shipbuilding, roughly in line with their steel production. We're just not winning a naval war here, it's not going to happen. The little formation that circumnavigated Australia recently has roughly similar firepower (measured by VLS tubes) as the whole Australian navy - Australia is a useful ally for something like subordinating Papua New Guinea or clobbering sand people with special forces but we have negligible competence or firepower in a war of mass. South Korea and Japan are both heavily reliant on food/fuel imports and are de facto islands, they will struggle to sustain a long war against such a big power despite being somewhat serious. And we should assume a long war, all great power wars become long wars.
What stops China executing a full-court press over the Pacific, sweeping elan, training, tactics, fortifications and all else aside with numbers and production capacity just like the US did to Japan? Only temporary factors like the size of the US navy at present, incomplete Chinese autarky... But Chinese autarky is developing and the US navy is still shrinking!
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/the-u-s-navy-has-a-big-problem-shrinking-away-to-nothing/
What hope do we have when the biggest, strongest power in the bloc is withering away in peacetime!
The worst thing is that the Western world has decided that it's impossible for us to strike first, that's apparently unthinkably unsportsmanlike behaviour. Never mind that we have rapidly diminishing advantages in fleet tonnage, areas of technological superiority and training. We also have to concede the opportunity for the first strike, take another Pearl Harbour. This 'serious and thoughtful' blogger (clearly ex-military or otherwise initiated in these matters) wants to systematically eradicate Chinese military industry and academia but still refuses to consider a first strike: https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2018/10/china-war-setting-stage.html
The grand plan is to fight the final battle for world dominance with a shrinking fleet against a continuously growing industrial juggernaut... letting them pick the time and place for the final showdown? What have our thought leaders been huffing?
I lay the blame on lib-racism. If you go back and read The Rising Tide of Colour you will ironically find a much more measured and sophisticated analysis of world affairs from a white supremacist writing 100 years ago than soaks through in vibes and in media today. Stoddard believed that the Nordic race was the master race with innately superior martial qualities and yet he still concluded that the Chinese were a serious threat through numbers and sheer tenacity if nothing else. He made the hypothesis that even though European troops would be better at fighting, when it comes to long marches and enduring privations the Chinese could even the odds. And indeed we saw something like that in Korea where clever Chinese tactics, night marches and similar proved highly effective against firepower superiority.
Of course, caring about how tough one's soldiers are in forced marches is suited more for the world of 100 years ago than today. But the abstract logic of looking at the situation as it is rather than as we'd like it to be is rare indeed. Maybe the country that wins all the physics and chemistry olympiads is good at physics and chemistry? Maybe the people that produce so much of the world's manufactured products would be extremely tough to fight in wartime? Maybe the country that's producing the most robots will have highly efficient industry? Perhaps the country that makes the most drones will be advantaged in the drone age? None of this is an extraordinary leap of logic, yet everyone seems to miss it.
People assume that the Chinese fleet is all 'Chinesium', that the concrete can be punched through, it's all slave labour and cheap copying, all their figures are invented and surely they'll collapse soon to the property bubble... Maybe in this fantasy world it is reasonable to let them get in the first blow and control the sequence of events. But we don't live in the fantasy. We can't rely on the B-21 or NGAD showing up to save everything, NGAD may not even arrive at all. There are going to be Chinese equivalents produced at growing speed and numbers (as we are seeing this year) because they have a rich country with vast resources to tap. Meanwhile our resources seem to be shrinking away into the ether and we can't seem to beat Yemen or outproduce Russia. This bodes ill.
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It hardly qualifies as a theory of victory, but something to mention is the Mar-a-lago accords. I can’t find any discussion of these on TheMotte; it is loosely connected to "Are US gold reserves still in Fort Knox?" Musk/Trump talking point, so maybe this was discussed then.
The rough idea appears to be for allies to baghold US debt (a "soft" default? garnishing interest as back pay for the security the US provided in the past?) and to significantly devalue the dollar, giving US industries a shot at competitiveness. More a rumor woven from US officials’ grumbling than a concrete plan, but it raises questions:
How feasible is it for the US to overhaul the financial system in its own favor, again? Can drastic steps even make a dent? Or would it all implode if tried?
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Evolutionary theory to explain disparities in conformism are at least as plausible as i.e. Cold Winter Theory to explain disparities in IQ. The descendants of a race that invented wheeled transport, domestication of horses, and then conquered/colonized virtually the entire world, and then invented pretty much everything else in history, does have a spark of Main Character Energy that fundamentally lacks in a race of eternally subjugated rice peasants. "Guess which people are more conformist and which are more bold and daring?" People can/will scoff at that argument, and its relationship to HBD but in my opinion it has more evidence than it does for the notion that IQ differences emerged because of cold winters (not that it isn't a decent theory as well).
The more important fact is that AI may become the Great Equalizer on these higher-order traits. A spark of genius that does, I think, give whites the "main character energy" can be integrated into AI just the same and maybe allow the Chinese to escape some local minima downstream from their own psychology. For example, if the Chinese diligently follow AI-generated plans prompted to achieve Chinese geopolitical goals, that will simulate a different racial psychology than world history has manifested until this point, because the strategy of the plans and their underlying innovation, aggressiveness, creativity and so-on will be a product of AI and not of Chinese psychology- except the extent to which Chinese psychology influences the LLM which was also a point I touched on before. I think that argument applies to whites as well, who also demonstrably suffer from being stuck in local minima but may able to escape them if their own psychological weaknesses are overcome with assistance from AI.
The pedant in me feels the need to point out that half of China grows wheat, not rice. Interestingly, there is some evidence that the psychological differences observed between wheat and rice farming societies are not deeply rooted and are subject to change on the scale of one or two generations, but I digress.
As far as the relative achievements of these two peoples in the grand scope of human history, I think it's entirely possible that Europe and her children will be devoured by the consequences of their own philosophical and technological creations, leaving Asia to pick up the pieces and integrate them into some sort of sustainable paradigm. Who then is superior, the tragic genius driven to suicide or his diligent successor without whom his ideas would be lost to history?
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I think this is still too self-serving and frankly racist a spin: “Chinese are robots, sure, but they can train robots on Western genius and follow their lead, still copying the West by proxy”.
I try to approach this technically. Technically you say that Asians are incapable of thought in full generality, that – speaking broadly – they can only “execute” but not come up with effective out-of-the-box plans; that their very robust IQ edge (Zhejiang, where DeepSeek is headquartered and primarily recruits, and where Wenfeng comes from, has average around 110 - that's on par with Ashkenazim!) – is achieved with some kind of interpolation and memorization, but not universal reasoning faculties. To me this looks like a very shaky proposition. From my/r1's deleted post:
R1 might understate the case for deep roots of Western exploratory mindset, but where we agree is that its expression is contingent. Consider: how innovative is Europe today? It sure innovates in ways of shooting itself in the foot with bureaucracy, I suppose. Very stereotypically Chinese, I might say.
What I argue is that whereas IQ is a fundamental trait we can trace to neural architecture, and so are risk-avoidance or conformism, which we can observe even in murine models, “innovativeness” is not. It's an application of IQ to problem-solving in new domains. There's not enough space in the genome to specify problem-solving skills only for domains known in the bearer's lifetime, because domains change; Asians are as good in CTF challenges as their grandfathers were in carving on wood. What can be specified is lower tolerance to deviating from the groupthink, for example as cortisol release once you notice that your idea has not been validated by a higher-status peer; or higher expectation of being backstabbed in a vulnerable situation if you expend resources on exploration; or greater subjective sense of reward for minimizing predictive error, incentivizing optimization at the expense of learning the edges of the domain, thinking how it extends, testing hypotheses and hoping to benefit from finding a new path. Modulo well-applied and tempered IQ, this eagerness to explore OOD is just a result of different hyperparameter values that can also produce maladaptive forms like useless hobbies, the plethora of Western sexual kinks (furries?) and the – no, no, it's not just Jewish influence, own up to it – self-destructive leftist ideologies.
One anecdote is illustrative of the conundrum, I think. Some time ago, a ByteDance intern came up with a very interesting image generation technique, VAR. It eventually won the NeurIPS best paper award! Yandex trained a model based on it already, by the way, and Yandex has good taste (I may be biased of course). But what else did that intern do? Driven by ambition to scale his invention and make an even bigger name for himself, he sabotaged training runs of his colleagues to appropriate the idle compute, fully applying his creative intelligence to derail an entire giant corporation's R&D program! Look at this cyberpunk shit:
This, I think, is peak of non-conformist genius, the stuff of the Romance of Three Kingdoms and warlord era. This is the essence of what the Confucian paradigm is trying to suppress, crushing benign self-expression at the same time.
But what if your peers cannot backstab you? What if resources are abundant? What if all your peers are rewarded for exploration and it clearly has positive ROI for them? It might not transmogrify the Chinese into archetypal Hajnalis, who engage in these behaviors without stilts, but the result will be much the same.
Only on greater scale.
R1:
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Descendants of serfs who were subjugated to their lords for millenia with little protest, or descendants of peasants who were continuously revolting for all recorded history? Hard guess.
I would have thought that it is visibly the case that both Chinese and Europeans have been extraordinarily restive throughout history?
The generalisation you're responding to is indeed obvious nonsense, but I take a certain baseline level of rebelliousness as a constant. The idea that Chinese people are hereditarily passive, obedient, and conformist, in contrast to wild Westerners, is one that has snuck into some Chinese writing as well, but I think it can only be sustained by an arbitrary cherry-picking of history. The same is true for Europe as well.
I realise you're probably just parodying the claim to show how silly it is, but I sometimes completely miss humour, so...
I think a case can be made that whenever the Chinese state is stable, it is very stable and very good at suppressing peasant rebellions. This is perhaps grounds for an unflattering stereotype about cruelty and power distance, but not so much about obedience of the masses.
Even stronger case could be made that no matter how weak is traditional European feudal system, it is excellent in suppressing peasant rebellions. There is no case in recorded European history of peasant revolt even slightly endangering TPTP (unlike China).
See the ease how even the most extensive revolts were put down. And they were, by Chinese standards, not very revolting at all.
edit: links linked properly
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Yeah my ancestors were probably serfs in Old Europe, then they got bored and decided to conquer America. Many such cases- a very classic Indo-European impulse.
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Unfortunately, if China plays their cards right, America can't win. American economic dominance is largely because it's the only country with a stable and trustworthy legal system that also doesn't kneecap all innovation with oppressive taxes and regulation. Investment dollars flow across borders very easily, as the article above notes investors realized India is a money pit and moved all the money back to China. China has more and better human capital than the US, and if they build a system to allocate it correctly, then they can leapfrog any other nation.
But why does America have to win? Chinese ascendancy just puts America in USSR's shoes in another cold war, where the second rate power dominates its own coalition, but there are still only two players playing the game. The USSR collapsed due to its own failings, but an American iron curtain can supply enough bread and circuses to keep its people docile indefinitely.
Of course if China forces WW3, it's a different story, but it's anyone's guess who will win.
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I think your analysis is broadly right. But I think a lead time of months for building 'geniuses in a datacenter' + for running more copies of them is a huge advantage, especially in a few months as more and more of AI research is automated. Anthropic et al. will win due to compute and not cleverness.
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I remember writing about how I was incredibly disappointed when China jailed He. He (pronoun) deserves to be celebrated, and it was a heavy blow against my view of China as a based, technocratic, forward thinking nation without the usual Western hangups and hand wringing about bioethics preventing millions or billions of lives being improved.
I take immense pleasure in liking all his posts on Twitter, he's a living meme, but I've always had an inordinate fondness for mad scientists. Now he's talking about gene editing (non-crispr) to eliminate Alzheimer's risk. You can see the begrudging concession to his adversaries and critics as he/He says he won't proceed with the work without IRB approval. They should shut Wuhan down and write him several blank cheques with the funds.
I agree with you that the biggest hurdle China faces is itself. That Xi is able to admit fault and make concessions towards people the regime stomped on, like Ma, is a good sign. If only they'd fucking give up on Taiwan, by the time they're likely to take it, TSMC would be smoldering thermite. The US would do that, even if the Taiwanese were ready to capitulate.
I too want there to be editing of humans for the betterment of mankind. Maybe I'll do an effort post to this end on what's been tried, what's possible, costs and the near future of gene therapy and editing. The latest I've seen from him involved working on DMD, but I don't see any recent papers by him in PubMed or Google Scholar.
Regardless, I'm not certain I want to throw behind a shit-posting scientist. Is it too much to ask our best and brightest minds and leaders not to shit-post and troll (Hsu, Trump, He)? Is it too much to ask leaders to have gravitas and not give in to spite just to own their enemies? I guess I'll just resign myself to wait for someone to develop a cure for ALS and announce it on twitter with something like, "Despite the FAGGOTRY of ESTABLISMENT midwits, my 10X team has developed a SAFE and EFFECTIVE treatment for twitchy fuckers w/ALS. You're welcome gaybros! See below for preprint 1/n"
It is unclear to me that He/He shitposts at all. It comes across as charmingly misguided sincerity. Too much social awkwardness or the inability to conform gets labeled autistic for me to pin that label on him, but I don't think he's consciously shitposting or cultivating a persona.
That's probably just how He is.
And when he says "I will not give a lecture in Harvard university for free.", all I can is that he knows his worth, king.
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A few destroyers (or even a lot of destroyers) aren't enough to break a blockade supported by aircraft. The 055 (which is really a cruiser) has 112 VLS cells and an extra 24 point defense missiles. That means with 100% of its VLS cells loaded with interceptors and a 100% interception rate, it gets sunk by a mere six B-1s carrying 144 LRASM. China probably needs aircraft cover to make a breakout there against bombers (properly supported by ISR assets) work.
However, I tend to agree with you that the blockade is not a solution (outside of putting economic pressure on China). China's navy can't be in two places at once, but I am not sure it would even try to bust a blockade, because I think they will be able to get vital imports (food, oil) from Russia. Xi would have been foolish not to secure this in his meeting with Putin over the war in Ukraine.
Watching DJT & Company, I think that they are comfortable with the US being "first among equals" in a multipolar world. In that state, there is no "theory of victory" – America slims down its hegemony to a more traditional sphere of influence and coexists with China, Russia and possibly India as peer states. But I think you are too quick to write off robotics as a replacement for China's aging population. I don't know that it's impossible, but a destabilized population pyramid can cause problems besides merely economic ones. I think we've seen sufficient evidence in the United States that domination of the political sphere by older generations can cause "lag" in apprehending new geopolitical developments (or an overemphasis on relitigating old ones!) So I do think one American theory of dominating China is just letting it fall apart of its own inertia.
But, if America wanted to be more aggressive, I think you are correct that baiting China into overreaching militarily is an easy option. Perhaps not a safe or smart one, because once the dogs of war are loosed there's no telling where they will run. But the US could probably bait China into invading Taiwan within a year at any given time. If the US believed it could win a war – and I've been trending pessimistic about China's capabilities in this regard – it would wait until it had sufficient LRASMs and Taiwan had adequate sea mines and Harpoons, and spring the trap. If the US does this, I imagine it will do it in the next decade, and probably once it gets its newer hypersonic anti-ship missiles to actually work.
Xi was perhaps foolish; China hasn't been willing to (publicly?) sign (further) long term deals (necessary to finance more pipelines) and instead enjoys limited flows from older contracts while with most Russian production capacity lacks a way to reach China. Further, they're reducing consumption due to new sanctions.
I have a pet theory that Chinese green hydrogen will cause a $80BOE ceiling on gas. N.b. heavy vehicles now consume over half of LNG in China. Now, it's just a theory and I am bullish on gas in the short term, but the financials on new projects are breathtaking.
@Magusoflight this, you see, is my "motive: trading commodities for a profit. As a long believer in some commodities supercycle to raise the next 2 billion people out of poverty, we're not seeing the same growth drivers but rather a decrease in Chinese construction aligned with long term government policy etc. I was rather shocked to realize that the CCP literally announces its policies in 5 year plans, which it actually does, enriching investors positioned to enable it. You jump to accusing me of "lying" instead of digging a bit deeper into something "well known". How do you know this? Do you agree with the same sources when they e.g. preached diversity, immigration etc.? It's particularly perplexing that @Dean claims my "economic narrative waves aside the property bubble" when I specifically wrote about it. Isn't OP's very point that we, the West, have lost, because we can't get our heads out of our asses, honestly look at the world and act? Hell, I'm not pushing the technological envelope and seeking transcendence either, I'm just seeking alpha in society's delusions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2018/03/19/ghost-towns-or-boomtowns-what-new-cities-really-become
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-ghost-cities-2021-binhai-zhengdong-new-districts-fill-up
@phailyoor I know the government takes passports in general (particularly for people working on financial infrastructure) but DeepSeekers have said in the last days that this is not happening. I asked OP if he has proof for it, because it would really solidify his narrative.
Those articles are all quite old and I can find much more recent ones that seem to find those ghost cities are very much still a thing. Let’s leave that aside however, the construction of those buildings is horrific - the corruption in China means nothing is built to code, with them using literal beach sand in their concrete. The result? Tofu dreg quality that falls apart after only a few years. And with a population falling almost as fast as South Korea, having already peaked and no immigration to speak of, who will buy the excess inventory? Why are home sales plummeting along with home prices?
It’s true the gov announces 5 year plans but it’s not that easy to profit off it. The Chinese stock market is famously difficult to make money in.
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Perhaps it perplexes you that you were not the subject of that comment?
Your own comment on the subject of the property bubble was certainly wrong- the overproduction of buildings and ghost cities were not issues that were resolved by 'filling them up'- but I did not make a claim about your specific argument because I was not addressing your specific argument.
Is it? I've known the poster formerly known as Ilforte for years, and the fact that he defined 'theory of victory' in terms of-
-strikes me as both characteristic enough of him and disconnected enough from American political paradigm to move on without further engagement or consideration, had you not invoked me by name.
The OP certainly has enough viewpoint differences with members of this forum and broader political coalitions that I would doubt his ability to characterize, let alone speak for 'we' or 'the west,' let alone defer to his judgement or assessments on the world. For example, it is certainly a common enough perspective to believe the American end-state is hegemony as a goal in and of itself. But that perspective demonstrates a general lack of cultural awareness of how dominant American political conceptions often view American geopolitical power as a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. There are certainly elements of American politics which value geopolitical power for power's own sake, but the reason that the American electorate has gone for the domestic-priorities President for every election for the last 30-odd years is because those foreign-affairs interests are not dominant. It is a cultural inclination which almost only the Americans get to afford thanks in no small part due to geography and geopolitical separation from revanchist and ethnic-solidarity cultural paradigms.
At which point, consideration of what that the goal of US policy and thus 'victory' would be needs to be something 'the West' would agree upon. Whether that is Americans in a comfortable isolationism even if the world burns, or America ensuring other states don't get devoured by blobbing neighbors, or any other American paradigm of what the American goal is- would be rather relevant to what a theory of victory would be.
Put another way-
IF American victory is being the hegemon, then lack of hegemony is failure and China wins by being individually strongest.
However-
IF American victory is China not establishing military domination of eastern Eurasia, then raising potential costs of Chinese intervention to degree that China doesn't engage in territorial conquest on revanchist grounds against its regional neighbors / military intervention spree in east asia is victory, regardless of whether China or the US is individually the strongest.
It could even be regardless of a Taiwan scenario outcome. A loss over Taiwan / successful Chinese conquest over American objection would certainly be a defeat, but if the Chinese experience is bad enough that the next 50 years are spent on Chinese internal stability issues rather than trying to blob like Russia when it thinks it has a shot against the former soviet sphere, that would still be a begrudged 'victory' by a 'China doesn't dominate eastern asia' standard. It would be a victory even if the Americans are globally considered a secondary power compared to the glorious China. It would be victory even when people who insist that the American position is just cope for having lost hegemony weigh in.
Victory conditions are typically pre-defined if they are to be useful. Pre-definition requires accurate characterization of a party's goals or objectives.
This is the distinction from judging victory by a relative power relationship paradigm rather than an outcome paradigm, and more specifically which outcome. And this distinction, in turn, leads to different considerations- such as whether the US needs to be Number 1 at all times, or just be close enough for China's long-term issues to constrain its middle kingdom ambitions.
Now, presumably OP believe more of the former- it's hist standard that requires hegemony. However, it is not clear at all to me that 'the West,' or at least the Americans and their Asian allies who matter in Asia, do not believe the later. And if the OP believes one way, and 'the West' believes another, it is not obvious that it is only heads-in-asses to blame for not deferring to the OP's paradigm.
Which will probably be taken as some hostile insult by the OP, when it is not, since we get along like that.
(I love you too, Ilforte, and I'm glad you're safe and still writing even if I am unconvinced by you.)
Functional American hegemony, whether as a means or as an end, has clearly lasted for decades. Do you simply concede that it's not going to survive and the US accepts that since its continuation is not worth or not feasible fighting for?
Do you argue that people like Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, Alex Wang, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman are, similarly to me, clueless and in disconnect with your political culture? Because they definitely argue for the maintenance and indeed revitalization of hegemony, not some strategic retreat to domestic affairs. Says Amodei:
As you can see he deems bipolar outcome unacceptable, since it's merely a prelude to American (and all Western/liberal) defeat: either the US wins a “durable strategic advantage” by capitalizing on its compute edge, or China does by capitalizing on its industrial capacity. For my part I think he's wrong and dumb, the US is highly defensible and not at risk of Chinese unipolar dominance. But that is his argument, and others are making near-identical ones.
From CSIS, I don't know, maybe you hold them too in contempt, but they use the same terminology:
All of this does not look to me like acceptance of coming multipolarity.
Do you write it off as inconsequential self-interest of individual players, because the vote of salt-of-the-earth rednecks is more influenced by price of eggs?
No. I tend to not concede to strawmen of arguments I did not make.
A second no. I thought it was clear that I argue that you do not understand how well connected people like they are or are not to the dominant American (or western) political cultures.
A third no. Though I do applaud you for ever-consistent efforts for an acerbic condescension, Ilforte.
So, how well connected are they? Enlighten me. Being a clueless Imperialist (or however you see me), I have developed the impression that Peter Thiel and his creatures, and Palantir specifically, are fairly well connected in the current American establishment.
I am under the (admittedly probably incorrect) impression that Thiel works from the sidelines, and even if he is well-connected, will not exploit these connections and opportunities to the hilt so as to keep his exposure to risk within an acceptable level. I say this because I think the single most overt political act he ever did was bankroll Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, and he only seemed to do that because it was personal. After that, it's mostly just donating to political campaigns. Palantir, I have no clue.
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Ah, ok.
I read this as him coming to terms (at least starting to) with there not being a West qua actor with concrete goals etc. similar to whoever, a few weeks back, noted alt right thoughts about the deep state were all wrong, since it didn't resist Trump and just ...let itself and its consensus be dismantled. This is why, in my original comment, I mentioned Western traditionalists' growing support of China. Aschenbrenner et al. are case in point, self important little men plotting how to play the wrong game. I believe, in the past, OP simply feared Western actors might flip the board before we achieve the cosmicists' dream, but now believes the US lost the ability to stop it and only China still has the ability (by error).
I sure see power as mere means (and believe OP does too). I like the spirit of this exchange, although I think it's built on a fundamentally unstable foundation (assumptions about what the author means instead of just asking him) and there are more constructive things than building it. What is your telos? What do you think the CCP's is (or at least Xi's)? Dito for any other relevant actors.
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Is this actually happening and not just coping accusations from a dying empire? We've known for a long time they're ahead. But truly, where Liang last year spoke of Chinese industry seeing its place as only productizing, they see true innovation's around the corner.
I don't believe it exists. The only articulations thither I've heard involve the Benedict option or deportations, but lack positivist goals. Hajnals of yore built cathedrals, today's don't even hope to build, let alone transcend. It's shameful what they've taken from themselves. This is the West's century of humiliation, but worse as the sell themselves to the youthful Chinese like African leaders to slavers. Many Western traditionalists, Christian nationalists etc. have told me they believe China'd be a better hegemon though, and welcome this. How insular. What of striving, Promethean urges? Does myopic Icarus now only build rocket emojis for his stocks?
How can we disagree? Seeing the new paradigm, my little mind just wonders how to amass and secure resources and continue my line, such middling human concerns. I even work finance instead of pushing the envelope. No wonder we've stagnated.
No idea about deepseek specifically but the bosses taking your passport away is absolutely 100% a thing in China right now. And not just for sensitive jobs but alot of pretty normal jobs too.
In addition to the primary role of population control purposes (it's easier to monitor foreign activities by domestic individuals if more stay domestic and fewer go abroad), it's also a (small) part of the post-2010s Chinese capital control policy.
Back in the mid-2010s there was a major surge in capital outflows when China announced a surprise devaluation.. Because the devaluation wiped out the value of the Chinese-held savings, as such devaluations do, it prompted a major exodus of Chinese privately-held wealth as people wanted to get it outside into 'safer' investments less subject to devaluation (or, in the Chinese property market's case, crash).
There are indicators there is currently an... I don't want to say identical, but analogous, outflow. Rather than devaluation, however, this is being driven more by market uncertainty of the Chinese in the domestic economic prospects which- while already heavily dependent on state-led investment for growth- is also dealing with things like, say, the Trump trade war policies, which became more and more credible as last year went on.
Passport control is a (small) part of limiting private savings going abroad, rather than staying inside China. Chinese citizens have relatively limited ability to legally move major sums of money out of the country. For various reasons, it's easier to do so if they are able to go outside of China more easily. Withholding passports is how you can limit things like citizens carrying hard drives of crypto-currency bought inside of China to cash out outside of China.
This isn't the sort of capital control countries boast about, but it is part of why China's foreign investment action plan plan for facilitating foreign investment includes one-way movement improvements under point 19, Facilitate the movement of personnel. The goal is to facilitate the movement of people with money into China, not out.
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Does that happen legally? Would the police do anything if you reported it? Or is all tacitly condoned by the government?
Legally for various civil servants and state-owned enterprises (which dominate the economy in general), generally tacit for the rest.
China approaches foreign travel of citizens as a necessary risk / national security issue to manage in general, and so isn't adverse to curtailment on any number of grounds. Like with many governments with tight business connections, if a business can frame an action in terms favorable to the state's interpretation, it can often get away with things that might have an ulterior motive. Businesses in turn can have their own interests in demanding someone turn over their passport, though I'm not aware of it being any sort of widespread business abuse in China.
Since part of Xi's model for China is that every business or organization of consequence needs strong ties to the party-state, this implicitly favors a two-party veto on foreign travel: the government can restrict passport-travel for its reasons, and/or businesses can restrict it for their own.
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I'm not aware of any law against it specifically, or what general legal principles would make it illegal. I'd even guess that it would be legal in the US, though largely not used because nobody wants to do it.
It's common for government workers especially, so I'm sure the government condones the practice to a certain degree.
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Financial "collapse" leading to severe internal turmoil and/or communist crackdown/extremism is a possibility. China has a severely over-dimensioned property+construction sector and now also a severely over-dimensioned manufacturing base. If they can't get (enough) paying customers for their exports then a lot of these investments will be worthless.
There is a lot of malinvestment in china and as much as people have been wrong so far predicting a Chinese contraction/collapse, it is still very much a question of when the chickens will come home to roost, much like America and the rapidly escalating levels of national debt, deficit and asset inflation.
Perhaps it isn't a question of who's gonna win but if anyone can avoid losing. Perhaps we're heading for a period of global economic contraction and malaise, with at best Japan style anemic growth/contraction everywhere. Unless AGI pans out that is...
In 2015 the Chinese government already stopped emphasizing real estate and announced that it would cut incentives for constructing and investing in it. To stop the "disorderly expansion of capital", they purposefully deflated the bubble, e.g. legislating huge down payment requirements for housing loans, high transaction taxes etc. The expansion stopped a while ago and workers have been reallocated. (Didn't you read all those articles about China's real estate collapse?) (There was a popular narrative around ghost cities too, but they quickly filled up. China urbanized many hundreds of millions of people and still has 150 million to go.) (Freezing real estate, which holds the majority of household savings in China, lets them inject liquidity to specific industries without inflation.)
The industrial base is what you would call an asset. In the absence of trade unions, irksome regulations etc. a greater concentration of capital should reduce production prices (instead of raising them, as e.g. happened in the US) particularly as labor is often quite a modest part of the balance sheet in today's firms.
To paraphrase Rick Rule: "In the super market, when you see tuna half price, you happily stock up. But in the stock market, when your holdings are on sale, you freak out instead of buying more." China did load up on infrastructure. And now commodities are significantly higher than in the past decade, but they just pay their cheap loans off instead of building for 5x the cost.
I think the “ghost city” narrative may have been built out of ignorance, perhaps deliberate, of how China redevelops its land.
In the West cities tend to scale up one project at a time. Typically a single property, sometimes an entire block when the footprint of a building necessitates it.
In China they raze and rebuild entire districts at a time. Imagine San Francisco deciding that the Tenderloin was due for redevelopment. They move everyone out into temporary housing. They flatten every single building. And they build an entirely new set of streets and buildings.
As construction nears completion you have what appears to be a brand new yet eerily depopulated city. There might be a few buildings coming online but residents move in slowly. Perfect for Western media to take pictures of and within bounded distrust represent as a newly constructed city sans residents.
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Now I know your lying, not sure what your motive is exactly but it’s well known that China built more home than could actually be used or purchased
Well, they (China) could also have initiated mass immigration (which they did not), or also started destroying the excess (which they have been to limited extents).
It is certainly a significant fly in the ointment of the China economic narrative, however, particularly the impact it had on private Chinese savings/investments when the market value of housing investments went kaput. Any Chinese economic narrative that waves aside the property bubble is like trying to discuss the 2008 financial crisis without acknowledging that property bubble.
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It is an asset if you have (enough) paying customers, otherwise it's a liability. Overinvestment in industrial capacity is a common and recurring problem not just in China. The difference here is the scale as well as overreliance on external customers.
Exports are less than 20% of Chinese GDP (and domestic GDP is lower because of accounting differences like imputed rent. In China, they use construction cost depreciated over the building's life, so rent is 2% to Chinese GDP, whereas almost 10% of US GDP is imputed rent; much of US GDP growth is just bureaucratically increasing what home owners pay themselves...Oh, and remember, as Trump says, China's artificially weakening its currency, which... decreases domestic GDP!) Japan and India rely more on exports than China. The US, EU and China are roughly equal in total volumes, although China's GDP is 2/3 of the US (or 4/3 if PPP).
And what is their plan for the future? What percentage of GDP is manufacturing? What percentage of global manufacturing is in china? Who are their customers?
China's plan is to increase manufacturing from an already very inflated state in a world where their customers are increasingly hostile to them. This is not a risk free state of affairs.
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