Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown
Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown
The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now operating at “overcapacity”(!!).
What is overcapacity, you ask? It’s a new word for me, too—so let’s consult the dictionary together:
overcapacity
noun
o·ver·ca·pac·i·ty: ō′vər-kə-ˈpa-sə-tē
1: When an insolent upstart nation’s surging economic activity totally humiliates the reigning hegemon’s own faltering economy, causing the many expensive dentures and porcelain veneers of the ruling class gerontocracy to rattle and grate with moral outrage and jealousy.1b: An undesirable situation causing Janet Yellen and Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio to droop like a pair of botox-sapped jowls.
Granted…my dictionary might be slightly different to yours, I have a rare edition. That said, are we on the same page? Good.
The above definition may be missing in the new official regime argot pamphlet, but it’s safe to say the inept leaders of the U.S. are down to making up creative new euphemisms for describing China’s total undressing and upending of the economic order.
But if you were skeptical about the meaning behind Yellen’s risible “overcapacity” solecism, her speech from inside of China confirms precisely what’s on the regime’s mind:
“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”
And the bombshell:
“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is put into question.”
Well, I’ll say.
The important distinction to note in the above statement is that for a long time the ‘cheap’ moniker used to describe Chinese goods often underhandedly referred to their quality, in the secondary definitional sense. Here, Yellen is referring to cheap as in price: the distinction is significant because it’s referential to the fact that Chinese manufacturing processes have simply far exceeded the efficiency in the West, as recently highlighted by videos of the Xiaomi e-car factory with its own native Giga Press that’s claimed to be able to pump out a car every 17 seconds.
The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit, deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.
How is China doing this? Let’s run through a few of the most poignant ways:
[1]
First and foremost, it’s become almost a passe bromide to observe: “The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.” But it really is true. Think about this for a moment:
The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11:
And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless, genocidal wars in the Middle East.
The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S. could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting the world and reaping untold benefits.
China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic development and wellbeing for its own people.
China is winning lion’s share of construction projects in Africa
Chinese companies accounted for 31% of African infrastructure contracts valued at US$50 million or more in 2022, compared with 12% for Western firms, according to a new study.
It is worth to be noted that in the 1990s, about eight out of 10 contracts to build infrastructure in Africa were won by Western companies.
The illustrative statistics for this are endless:
What makes this historic malappropriation of American funds most tragic is that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.
China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their presidents (Clinton). China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its own people.
And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.
The fact is, Israel is a destructive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of America, causing the host to wage unnecessary wars on its behalf which have utterly removed every advantageous and competitive edge the country might have had over its Chinese ‘rival’.
[2]
As a corollary of the above, beyond just the simple kinetic nature of the profligately wasteful wars, America wastes an exorbitant amount of money just on maintenance and upkeep of its global hegemony. The reason is, it costs a lot of ‘enforcement’ money to strongarm vassals who hate you into compliance.
China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’ is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear, strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business partnerships.
One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling to abdicate its global domination:
The above was highlighted by Graham Allison, coiner of the Thucydides Trap idiom in relation to U.S./China. The Thucydides Trap, as some may know, describes a situation where an emerging power begins to displace the incumbent global power, and how historically this almost always leads to major war. To popularize the theory apropos U.S./China, Graham Allison used the historical example of the Peloponnesian war, where a cagey Sparta was forced to take on the rising power of Athens.
Allison was recently invited by President Xi to a forum for U.S. business leaders where Xi told him directly:
Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething, guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two countries in mutual understanding, to avoid the Thucydides Trap:
This is the enduring image of what global leadership truly looks like, and the principles it embodies.
Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the world in order to mask its own downfall.
[3]
The U.S. government does a grave disservice to its own development by cooking all of its economic books. Every country does it at times to some degree—and going by U.S.’ notoriously frequent accusations of China in this regard, one would think China to be the most flagrant violator—but in fact, no one does this more than the current U.S. regime.
The recent “jobs” report touted as a major victory by the Biden administration was a disgraceful travesty. The admin touted major jobs figures:
But it turned out every job was either part time, a federal job, or went to illegals:
In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.
Here’s Jesse Watters revealing that:
“The Fed chair just confessed that #Bidenomics is just a migrant job fair. There is actually a million less American citizens working today than there were in 2020.”
Biden created 5 million migrant jobs! So don’t be fooled by his propaganda that’s spewed by the liberal machine. YOU DONT MATTER!
The data is cooked even more when comparing to China’s economic situation. As the following Tweeter explains:
While Chinese INCOMES are below American INCOMES, Chinese have much higher NET WORTH than Americans. How? They own apartments at a much higher rate and with a lot more equity than Americans. The MEAN and MEDIAN insight is even more beautiful. This graphic here is pretty much the only thing you need to understand about the difference between the economies of China and United States. But you really need to understand it and you need to have a deep understanding of what it means.
U.S. home ownership is on a precipitous decline toward the low ~60s%, while China now has over 90% home ownership rate:
[4.]
The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.
In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under Xi’s government.
This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is where it starts getting important so buckle up.
A good breakdown of that is given here by Chinese academic Thomas Hon Wing Polin, who pulls from this recent article:
The article gives a brief history of financialization, from the Genoese bankers to modern times, observing the historical cycles that have precipitated America’s current deterioration:
Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.
In describing the cycle of financialization and its connection to the death of empires, the article notes about Britain:
For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.
And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.
However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”
In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity, finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt, misery, corruption, and global destabilization.
One thing to note—if you’ll allow me this not-so-brief aside—is that the entire Western system is based on the actual institutionalized economic sabotage and subversion of the developing world. Books like the following go into some of it:
The rise of the underground economy: The book reveals how the United States' underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.
The "dark" side of globalization: Mills challenges the prevailing narrative of globalization as a force for progress, highlighting how it has facilitated the expansion of illicit networks across borders and allowed criminal enterprises to flourish.
The complicity of financial institutions: The author examines the role played by major financial institutions in enabling money laundering and illicit transactions. He underlines the need for stronger regulations and accountability to prevent banks from becoming facilitators of underground activities.
I challenge you to read notes on the National Memorandum 200, if you haven’t heard of it before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Study_Memorandum_200
Incidentally, John Michael Greer just penned a new column (thanks to whoever shouted out this blog in the comments!) about the neologism he coined: Lenocracy, which derives from the Latin “leno” for pimp; i.e. a government run by pimps, or pimpocracy.
His definition of pimps in this case is that of middlemen who are the classic rent-seeking leaches—or rentier class—which extract economic rent without adding any value to the economy—all Michael Hudson territory, for those in the know.
Bear with me, I promise this will all tie together into an overall picture of China.
JMG characterizes the ‘pimps’ as basically all the unelected, bureaucratic, red-tape-weaving, blood-sucking monetary vultures killing growth and livelihoods by each taking their nibbles in turn from the carcass of the working class, exacting some small transactional charge at every step of routine business in Western nations, particularly the U.S. This has served to suffocate the average small business or entrepreneurship in general, not counting the big ticket venture capitalists who are mostly offshoots of global financial and investment firms. This is part and parcel to the lethal ‘financialization’ of the country that has spelled doom for its future.
Now, getting back to Thomas Hon Wing Polin’s precis, and how it relates to this. He notes:
It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style economic financialization.
He pulls from the following article:
Read that last part: “…set pure profit-making aside.”
Pay attention to this big kicker:
Beijing is powering ahead with the epic project.
“China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech race.
Are you beginning to get it yet? If not, here’s the crowning finial:
Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding value for the financial system rather than profitability.
It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency” than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible services in the pursuit of common prosperity.
“Like it or not, banks and other institutions on the supply side should expect top-down directives and overhauls cued by the CFC,” said Zhu Tian, a professor with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).
And there it is. In essence: China is creating a revolution, striking out a new path of finance which steers away from the wild excesses of the West into a bold new direction. Finance to benefit the real economy, the common man, the people. This is what the fig leaf of Rothschild-pushed ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is meant to be, or better yet: pretends to be.
It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.
This is an iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking revolution which ends six centuries of Old Nobility world finance dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere: from Hydra, to Leviathan, to Cthulu, to simply: the Cabal.
All those 600 years are going up in smoke with China’s repudiation of the ‘old standards’, which privilege predatory, deceptive, extractive terms and practices meant to benefit only the Old Nobility elite class. China’s system is true stakeholder finance: the government will forcibly bend the bankers to its will, making sure that finance serves the common good and the people first, rather than speculation, financialization, capitalization, and all the other wicked inventions of the Western Old Nobility class.
It begins like so:
“…bringing greed is good era to an end.”
The big one:
“Government has called for banks to abandon a Western-style ethos and adopt an outlook in line with broader economic priorities.”
It’s a revolution in the making.
But if you’re thinking my dramatic flights above verge a touch on hyperbole or idealism, you could be right. I, of course, still proceed with caution; we can’t be sure that China will succeed in its grand demolishment of the age-old paradigm. But all signals point to early success thus far, and more importantly, it’s clear that China has a leader that fundamentally understands these things at the most rooted level. Western leaders not only are incapable of even grasping the complexities involved of reining in capital, they are unable to do so for the mere fact that they’re totally bought and paid for by the representatives of that very capital class. The cabal of Capital is so deeply and institutionally entrenched in Western governmental systems that it’s simply impossible to imagine them being able to see ‘the forest for the trees’ from within the forest itself.
By the way, in light of the above, here’s the West’s truly desperate, pathetically envious, face-saving attempt to tarnish and mischaracterize China’s new direction:
As well as:
The above is particularly astounding in its admissions. Read carefully:
Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade representative has warned, according to Euractiv.
Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.
“I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.
In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to outcompete ours!
But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the two systems:
The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving.”
These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’ style.
Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the top of the pyramid.
You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.
This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S. used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically, disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some breathing room.
But it’s unlikely to work—China is too sagacious to take the bait and fall for the trap. It will patiently wait things out, allowing the U.S. to drown in its own endless poison and treachery.
No, there will be no Thucydides Trap—it’s already too late for that. The Trap worked for Sparta because it was still at its peak and able to thwart Athens. The U.S. is in terminal decline and would lose a war against China, which is why they hope to stage a proxy war instead, cowardly using Taiwan as the battering ram. But China can read these desperate motives with the clarity of finely glazed porcelain.
As a final small announcement, I have been made aware that this our humble blog has risen to a stunning #7 in the leaderboard for the ‘world politics’ category on all of Substack:
https://substack.com/leaderboard/world-politics/paid
Yes, you’ve read that right: we are #7 on all of Substack, wedged between such heavyweights as Chris Hedges and Konstantin Kisin and many others:
I’m particularly pleased given that #2 and #3 above me, Snyder and Freedman, are both staunchly pro-Ukrainian voices, so it’s good to have another balancing force at the top of the heap.
To be honest, I think I’ve reported on this leaderboard once before, but completely forgot about its existence, and can’t remember where we were last time—though for some reason I vaguely recall something like the #15th - #17th spot. So this represents a big upward surge, which is a testament to all of our dedication to the truth, particularly given recent events that have opened my eyes to just how insular and partisan even our own info-space can often be.
I’ve learned over the past few months that my click-through, paid conversion, retention, etc., and other metrics are much higher than the average, which is a further testament to the quality and dedication to the raw facts found here, as people who have become paid members would certainly cancel their memberships if they had discovered afterwards that the content wasn’t up to snuff. But we are continually retaining and growing which to me is evidence of high satisfaction amongst the readership.
And so let this 7th seed be a dedication to you all, who have been instrumental in that growth. I see the blog and articles get posted in all sorts of nooks and corners of the internet—for instance, the comments section of the earlier John Michael Greer article. This means it is you who are spreading the gospel far and wide, to the hills and barrows, so I thank you.
Now let’s take down Chris Hedges. I’m kidding: I’m a fan of his and would prefer looking ‘up’ rather than ‘down’ at him, but as for the other two beneath him, climb ye old legs.
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To add to S's comments please find this from Arnaud Bertrand
9 April 2024 China overcapacity Arnaud Bertrand
https://nitter.poast.org/RnaudBertrand/status/1776486765463048674#m
It’s interesting to think through what Yellen is actually saying when she asks China to address its “industrial overcapacity”, particularly in fields like solar panels or EVs.
First of all, what is “industrial overcapacity”? The official definition for it is “when an industry's production capabilities exceed the demand for its products, leading to inefficiencies and reduced profitability”.
What are the key metrics to assess if a country has “industrial overcapacity”? There are 3:
- Capacity utilization rates: this shows the % of a country’s industrial capacity actually being used. If you don’t use much, you have too much capacity.
- Inventory levels: high levels of unsold goods can indicate that production exceeds demand, suggesting overcapacity.
- Profit margins: declining profit margins in manufacturing sectors might indicate overcapacity, as firms may reduce prices to stimulate sales.
So let’s look at China for all three.
Let’s start with capacity utilization rates. Look at the graphs: it’s crystal clear they’ve been pretty much constant in China for the past 10 years, standing at roughly 76% right now, which is in the same ballpark as America’s own utilization rates at about 78%. So no issue there.
Now let’s take a look at inventory levels. As of the beginning of 2024, China’s finished good inventory PMI index stood at about 49 (en.macromicro.me/collections… ) vs the US at 48 for manufacturing inventories (en.macromicro.me/collections… ). An index of over 50 is a sign of growing stock levels: this is not the case here for either country, so there is no issue with inventory levels.
Lastly, let's check profit margins. China’s industrial profits rose 10.2% in the first 2 months of the year (bloomberg.com/news/articles/… ), consolidating a gaining streak since August last year. So no issue there either.
So what gives? No matter how you look at it, there is just no sign of industrial overcapacity in China.
By accusing China of “industrial overcapacity”, could the US maybe mean that China is breaking WTO rules by practicing “dumping”, meaning the practice where companies export products at prices lower than what they charge in their home market, or below the cost of production? No, this is not what China is accused of doing here: despite the very low prices for its EVs or solar panels, the companies involved still make a profit (heck, as we just saw, industrial profits are rising at double digit growth), and they DO charge higher prices abroad than at home.
No, the real issue here is in fact not one of industrial capacity but one of competitiveness. What is crystal clear is that the competitiveness of Chinese companies is overwhelming: today, in scores of industries - like solar or EVs - there is simply no way for American or European companies to compete with Chinese ones. This is the real issue: Yellen and Western leaders are afraid that if things keep going, China will simply eat everyone’s lunch.
Contrary to popular belief, this competitiveness isn’t thanks to Chinese "cheap labor". One guy who explained this extremely well is Apple’s Tim Cook (inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/appl…): “There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.” He credits the Chinese education system for this: “I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational [...] China called that right from the beginning.”
Having a huge depth of skills is one thing, but there is also control of the entire supply chain since China is the only country in the world that produces all categories of goods classified by the World Customs Organization (WCO). This gives it a key advantage when it comes to end prices: when you want to build something in China you can literally find the entire supply chain for it at home.
Energy prices is another thing: for instance the International Energy Agency highlights that "low-cost electricity is key for the competitiveness of the main pillars of the solar PV supply chain" (iea.org/reports/solar-pv-glo… ) and "around 80% of the electricity involved in polysilicon production today is consumed in Chinese provinces at an average electricity price of around USD 75 per megawatt-hour (MWh)". For comparison, in 2023 energy prices for industrial customers in Germany averaged 251.21 USD per megawatt-hour (MWh) (statista.com/statistics/1346… ): that's an incredible 234.94% more expensive!
Lastly, China has become an innovation powerhouse. In 2023 it filed roughly as many patents as the rest of the world combined (brevettinews.it/en/patents/w… ) and it’s now estimated to lead 37 out of the 44 critical technologies for the future (aspi.org.au/report/critical-… ). All this too has implications when it comes to the final prices of its products. To take the example of solar panels again, the IEA notes that "continuous innovation led by China has halved the emissions intensity of solar PV manufacturing since 2011" (iea.org/reports/solar-pv-glo… ), which means that not only does China have raw electricity prices which are immensely cheaper than in the West, but it's innovated in such a way that it uses way less electricity in the production of its solar panels...
So “the threat of China’s industrial overcapacity” is a buzzword that actually means that China is simply too competitive, and by asking it to address this, what Yellen is truly asking of China is akin to a fellow sprinter asking Usain Bolt to run a less fast because he can’t keep up.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t some merit in this ask. At the end of the day, it’s understandable that when you see a competitor continuously gaining in strength, you grow quite anxious as to your own future and that of your people. But it needs to be framed the right way: framing it as if China was doing something malign with deliberate “overcapacity” is just a very unfair characterization. China played the game right: as Tim Cook explained, it first and foremost invested in its people, in their education. They also invested big time in innovation and they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to energy prices the way Europe did, among many other policies.
Demonizing this is just not right, and it’s certainly not the right way to ask China for what’s an incredibly big favor: running less fast so the West can keep up… Especially when the West running slow is the result of catastrophic leadership for the past few decades: first and foremost choosing to waste trillions of dollars in killing people abroad instead of investing in its own progress…
I’m afraid this “overcapacity” framing is just another illustration of this poor leadership: when you prefer to blame others for your own failures rather than face reality.
💯
“The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.”