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« Last post by kitano on April 11, 2025, 08:23:57 AM »
I have a theory on this. It's not researched or anything, just my impression so 'it is what it is'
This kind of 'neoliberalism' or 'late stage capitalism' is definitely at the end of the cycle. Whatever you think of capitalism, the 500 years or so that it existed have seen humanity change unrecognisably, and mostly for the better (I know this sentence has a lot of debatable parts, but it's not the main point, and I believe that it's not super controversial in any part).
With Neo Liberalism I think that in a sense we have reached an 'end of history' in that there is not really anything left that capitalism can do. You can see it in western countries where these crises come up and there are solutions that seem obvious, but they are against the rules. China has done a speedrun on capitalism and now they are in the rich parts at least, getting to the point that the west is at roughly where pepole are overeducated and there's not really enough things to do.
I would say that China is better positioned to deal wth this, not because they have a hammer and sickle on the flag or because it's such a vast country, but simply because of their relationship to capitalism. It didn't start in 1978 in China, but at the same time it is foreign thing to them, China was still kind of feudal for the most part until the Revolution, in Europe it's just so old we think it was always there.
But also on the practical level, the government is opaque and you kind of imagine that there are a lot of old guys who are useless but put in the work back in the day quite high up, but especially on the national level, they are able to create and execute plans.
The easiest example is the high speed rail system. That was only a couple of lines when I first moved here in 2009, and it was still a thing that spring festival was one of the most insane things in the world and 'don't go anywhere on spring festival' because the bus and train stations were just full of really poor workers and really shady people preying on them.
No other country in the world could do that. Like one of the reasons that the USA doesn't have high speed trains is that it would be impossible to organise for them.
One more thing then I'll stop lol
When the US had the crash in 2008, that summed it up, there was this huge structural problem that people had been talking about for the whole decade, but it still caught the government unawares, and they didn't have a solution they just printed money.
In China, if they had a similar crash, they would/will struggle, you wonder how long this can go on. I do think though, that they would never just double down on the mistake. It would either be the government has a good solution and recovers, or a bad one and things get worse, it's just not in the system to have a crisis and then continue with the same path and pretend it's ok. You could argue that is why Xi is the opposite of Hu, they knew there is something in the pipeline and they weren't going to keep pretending that it was 2005 forever.