I think people are starting to believe that I constantly dump on China and the “Global South” out of a sense of a dislike for them. But that’s completely untrue.
China has enormous potential. I’d love to see it live up to it and not be a source of only COVID, cheap plastic crap, social credit scores, and Putin butt-lickers. I’d love it even more if Africa finally got itself together.
But beyond all for obvious reasons, I’d love it if Latin America did something about itself because somebody else is always to blame, and it’s embarrassing to watch.
It would be a much better world if most of it didn’t just sit there and pout, waiting to be given everything and always feeling disappointed.
Clarissa's Blog 
“China has enormous potential. I’d love to see it live up to it and not be a source of only COVID, cheap plastic crap, social credit scores, and Putin butt-lickers. I’d love it even more if Africa finally got itself together. ”
Clarissa, in regards to China, it’s not that you dump on them but that you underestimate how huge and influential they really are; especially in regards to Russia. They dwarf Russia on just about any metric.
This “enormous potential” that you mentioned has ALREADY been fulfilled.
“But beyond all for obvious reasons, I’d love it if Latin America did something about itself because somebody else is always to blame, and it’s embarrassing to watch. ”
Definitely. Many Latin Americans still complain about things that happened many decades ago and lack serious self-reflection to figure out why their countries are not more successful. Argentina, for example, should be a great power given their resources.
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” you underestimate how huge and influential they really are”
That would make some sense 15 or maybe evern 10 years ago…. Now? Less by the day… Xi has strangled the country with his maniacal cult of personality. According to Peter Zeihan (usual caveats) he has no inner circle of confidantes or advisers. He frames Blinken’s visit not as diplomacy but as intelligence gathering because talking to the most powerful figures you can find is the only way to know what’s happening….
And China has no cultural power… both Japan and South Korea dwarf Chinese cultural influence at present. No one is watching Chinese entertainment or listening to Chinese music or following Chinese writers…
And economically shutting everything down for two years was suicidal and it’s not growing back… look for China economy and there’s lots of alarms about lack of recovery and economic problems….
No one trusts Chinese figures and no one has any idea what the covid casualty rate was….
China is rapidly transforming from emerging superpower to declining power.
I’m not bullish on China…. I could be bullish on Taiwan (which for all its many flaws is still run about 1000 times better than the mainland) but should China invade….
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I like Zeihan, but he is on the doomer spectrum when it comes to China. He used to not even talk about China because supposedly it would fall anytime. Now he’s talking about it constantly, and while it looks like they will diminish a bit, there is nothing to tell how much it will be. For all we know, they may go the way of Japan, and still remain very influential.
The reason why I’m not necessarily super gloomy about China is people have been saying they will be collapsing any time now. I expected the Evergrande collapse to cause serious problems. However, they keep being able to manage things.
I think we underestimate them; they have serious publications and are rapidly surpassing the US and other countries in everything from AI, materials research, robotics, computer vision, etc. Look at any recent AI/Robotics conference and you will see they are the majority of the people there. This is something you don’t read about in the news but has important implications.
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Have you heard of any Americans eager to study or work at Chinese universities? No, none. In the meantime, there are crowds of Chinese trying to beat their way into American universities.
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Actually, I do know several American science professors with appointments at Chinese universities. They pay well. Of course, there are some who finished in prison for their involvement with China for undeclared income, so there is that (look up Charles Lieber). An interesting thing happen at our University. Up to about 4 years ago we received hundreds of applications from Chinese students. Now, the numbers are very low (10-20). There is a shift happening but the reasons are still unclear.
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“we received hundreds of applications … Now, the numbers are very low”
From what I hear, the Communist Party of China (ie Xi) has decided to live up to the name and began a year or so ago making it very, very difficult for people to leave.
Put ‘harder to leave China’ into google and you’ll see….
I haven’t heard if it’s harder for foreigners to enter but I imagine the number that want to has dropped like a stone.
I’ve heard stories of returning Chinese having their passports ripped up by border guards when they return (apocryphal but telling).
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The number of Chinese students at my university has plummeted over the past 5-6 years. I’m not sure about the exact numbers, but it’s maybe a tenth of what it once was. I have friends teaching in our ESL program who have previously taught English in China and also worked with Chinese students in the US. Their explanation for the shift is that multiple things have happened to decrease interest:
– the very top Chinese universities have grown and created more spots for the most ambitious students.
– the reputation/quality of some other Chinese universities has improved so that they are now acceptable choices for ambitious students.
– in the past, foreign degrees from pretty much any US/Canadian/European university were seen as a huge competitive advantage on the Chinese job market. As foreign degrees became more common these became less of an advantage and now a foreign degree really needs to be from a Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Oxford level place to give any real boost to career chances over a good Chinese university.
– after 2016 there was a drop in interest in the US because Trump made some anti-Chinese statements and political tensions increased and there were media reports about anti-Chinese incidents in the US. The government also made it a little harder to leave and cut/ended some scholarship programs that had helped less wealthy Chinese study abroad.
-COVID obviously shut things down for a while and Chinese students are still reluctant to leave to study elsewhere.
Our ESL program was mostly staffed by non-tenure track faculty (a mix of one-year, three-year, and five-year contracts) and it’s been an absolute bloodbath. I believe they have eliminated more than 30 full time positions via non-renewal when contracts were up.
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“I’m not necessarily super gloomy about China”
Check this out (starting at 9:40 if the time code didn’t work) China is going back to Maoist style agriculture that starved millions….
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Oi. Do they feel the need to cull the population?
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” cull the population”
well they already have demographic problems…. the overall sense I get from different sources is just…. system wide disorganization, the concentration of power in Xi’s incompetent hands has disrupted everything and orders downward get misinterpreted or lost or come into conflict with other orders and things work out… or don’t at ground level in a haphazard and irrational and incredibly wasteful way.
Meanwhile Xi has given lots of signs he wants his own version of a cultural revolution…
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Wow. That’s… terrifying.
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“That’s… terrifying.”
Anyone who could see videos like the one below and still think China is an up and coming dynamic power just because it has lots of people and factories and some universities and says it puts lots of money into research…. I dunno. I find it hard to breach that degree of denial of reality….
And this video is more symbolic than anything… the level of dysfunction around every aspect of Chinese covid policy is utterly mind-boggling (there are far more disturbing materials out there).
China is not headed anywhere good for the foreseeable future, and the damage already done by Xi will take decades to undo (massive damage to social and intellectual capital both of which are fragile) and the longer he’s in power the worse the results are likely to be.
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We are talking about a government that, as far as anybody knows, currently enslaves ethnic and religious minorities, and harvests and sells organs from political prisoners. Why anybody thinks there’s anything they wouldn’t do…
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