Great article. Thank you, Unherd, for finally commissioning authors to write about economic issues.
For so long, many in the US, and elsewhere in the West, have been decrying economic inequality, the loss of decent paying jobs, the erosion of our industries, the subversion of universities to diploma mills that now serve mainly as a pipeline into the progressive grievance industry. But they were voices in the wilderness. The financial engineers won the day. So much of our skill base is gone, and the young are so disenchanted with the capitalist system, and the lack of commitment to their future by their own society, that fringe ideologies have taken root.
Yes, we can learn something from China about building a meaningful future for our own population. I wonder if it’s too late for such lessons.
Bit confusing in the writing though – but I suppose I got the gist, which is obvious to anyone who reads on the world and the economy in a serious way.
The thing I would say though, is that since the 2008 QE the USA economy has been so distorted it has left all industry to be more about finance than about production. Borrowing is almost free, but there is little they wish to spend on to develop new production as there is no need. Rather they buy other rising companies, and their own stock.
The thing is some of this is going to pay social programs and so on, but really most of it is spent to keep interest at ZERO and to keep the stock market from falling. Insanity. And only possible as USA is the Global Reserve.
I read about the tutoring thing last week
“In mid-July, China’s government issued new regulations that drastically limit for-profit tutoring services and prohibit foreign investment in Chinese private education companies” (A 150 Billion$ industry!)
China says it is because it overtaxes the parents income so they do not spend consuming and having more children, and overtaxes the children – but I did wonder if it also wants a thumb on all education less Liberalism creeps in. China knows the trade deficit with USA cannot continue, and needs to get the Chinese to consume enough to replace the American market, and that its Demographic clock is ticking FAST – so for parents to have more children they cannot afford to spend $40,000 per child in private tutoring so the one child can pass the national college exams highly –
China and USA at this point are like 2 co-dependent enablers locked in a destructive relationship they cannot leave as they will be even worse off alone.
Giles Chance
2 years ago
The criticisms of the US system are generally correct, but it’s sad that the writer has to laud the CCP-led Chinese system as a means of beating up America. The best solution is an America that worked correctly, not a Chinese alternative.
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
At any one time in China, thirty million people are said to be learning to play the piano. (How many in the US?). The very young in the world who decry video game restrictions on their time will cry out that their contemporaries who are marked out as future concert pianists probably spend “hours and hours daily on the piano”. Not that they know any pianists much less any friends who are learning to play any musical instrument. Unless that video gamer kid is from China perhaps. At the rate the enthusiasm for playing video games all day, every day, continues to grow in the western world, there won’t be any, say, future guitar maestros emerging again let alone flutists or trumpeters. The very young are just not interested. A real talent for something will never be discovered, all because of the obsession for ramping up record scores. Is video-gaming a training ground for playing the stock market? Is video-gaming one reason why girls do better than boys at school exams? In Germany there seem to be plenty of brass bands dotted around the country, with lots of young people involved. It might be interesting to know what the market for video games is there compared with Britain or the US. Even in the olden days, when the very young were “into comics”, nobody spent hours and hours reading them. They did various other things. But people have their worlds and their virtual worlds now, I suppose. The problem is that one is a teenager for only seven short years. Perhaps kids socialised in the pandemic year playing their video games. Perhaps that was even a godsend. If it were, then the pandemic was also a godsend for the gaming industry. God help us in the future trying to get a plumber or electrician! That’s all I can say!
I fish a great deal, most days I am on the water in public places – and the fishermen are mostly older now, 35 and older, some young kids with parents, but I doubt they will be there much once on their own. When I was young I was outdoors all the time, I half lived outside, even though I lived in London then there was always some water to ride my bike to to fish, or woods to run in. We had no cell phones and I was always just gone – somewhere off in London, on bike, foot, public transport, and my parents thought nothing of it – what a different world it was.
We always had some pets, fish, turtles, snakes, rabbits – I think kids today have left nature entirely for electronic I find this very depressing indeed. The young are all about saving nature, but have nothing to do with it, it is a mere abstraction to them.
I imagine there is rather a lot of social and parental pressure for the children to ‘improve’ themselves.! Still, worth living in a totalitarian system for…
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago
I’m a bit surprised that the Chinese Communist Party wasn’t mentioned in this article. A lot of these campaigns in China are basically about reminding everyone to stay on the straight and narrow path where the way forward is laid out by the CCP. “Beijing is prioritising social cohesion” means everyone will live according to the rules determined by the CCP – hardly a model for us.
I think you are right. The author tapped into Chinese propaganda. Just like in the Soviet Union the Communist Party removes people that might get to powerful, and it is always for the same old reason: the Party protects the people.
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
This reminds me of intellectuals visiting Russia after the revolution and being impressed with their economic policies.
Jonathan Ellman
2 years ago
We can agree or disagree with the CCP’s moral principles, they have them. All our leaders seem to have had for decades is the stock market.
GA Woolley
2 years ago
There is another issue where we may, in time, come to re-evaluate China, that of the Uighurs. China, perhaps with good reason, suspects that this Muslim community was increasingly falling for indoctrination by foreign Islamic ideologues, and is pre-empting that by indoctrinating them in its own Chinese ideology. Meanwhile, our own Muslim communities are similarly being indoctrinated, but we afford the source of those ideological beliefs ‘protected status’. Which approach will work out better in the long run?
Some good exculpatory words there – ‘suspects’ and ‘perhaps’. I hope you don’t ever fall foul of the law on that basis!
Mass human rights abuses and internment of millions in concentration camps is hardly a reasonable response to one or two terror attacks many years ago. I have no problem with harsh treatment of those actually responsible, but these are a tiny minority.
Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Alka Hughes-Hallett
2 years ago
At least we in the west can openly talk and criticise our system. Freedom of thought and expression are the cornerstones of our system (although in the recent times the tech giants are trying to squeeze that right, at least it is still spoken about without fear).
However erratic, the western model does allow for change and reinvention. I accept all the criticism you have levied on the west & the markets etc, it IS however changing. But in China there is no room for change from within, only from the top. So what happens when the top is corrupted? What’s the guarantee that CCP will always do right by the people? And if it is doing so, why is it following the west and behaving like a clandestine colonial power?
May be we have have a lot to learn from China, maybe it has a lot to learn from the west yet too.
chris sullivan
2 years ago
Excellent article thanks – one with some actual new info vs the shallow regurgitated crap we usually glaze over to whilst attempting to understand the Chinese.
This is a really important article, which describes a situation which I think many of us sensed, but couldn’t quite pin down. While I understand, and agree with, commenters’ objections to using the CCP model as the better option, it’s what the competition, and primary alternative, happens to be. Yes, I think that its rigid conformity will stifle innovation, but the CCP has put measures in place to tap into what’s left of the West’s technological progress.
‘.. but the CCP has put measures in place to tap into what’s left of the West’s technological progress’.
Yes, by continuing its industrial espionage, otherwise known as theft.
Stephen Rose
2 years ago
I applaud this article, but I have reservations about following the Chinese model.
There was an account by a football/soccer coach recalling the Chinese attempt to build a national team. They spent billions on fostering a national game, but could never consolidate the individual within a team, who could, function as an individual when required. I don’t recall the Soviets having this problem with the game.
Training excellent musicians isn’t a problem, allowing a composer to flourish is. Some years back, a Chinese orchestra played at the London Prom season, rattling through Western classical music, until hitting the buffers with a home grown piece.The Soviets didn’t have that problem either.
Creativity is harder to nurture, China may be moving forward on this, creativity certainly needs discipline,which currently we seem to lack in the West. It also needs financing. I never forget what a German tech startup financier (he helped develope NASDEC ) told me 20 years ago. “I don’t invest in brilliant ideas, but brilliant plans”
I don’t understand gaming, I understand its a billion pound industry, which we are rather good at and that it has generated some very useful spin offs.A misspent youth, wasting time in pool halls and bars has resulted in many a later genius. What is worrying is what is happening in our universities, that might be our death blow.
The kind of intense focus and ability to manipulate mechanical chains of logical outcomes that many gamers have does make them good engineers and programmers. I speak from personal experience and knowing a lot of them. As long as they themselves or their parents push them into growing out of an all consuming obsession with cames and end up learning maths and programming at some point.
Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Chauncey Gardiner
2 years ago
Many thanks for this essay and saying things that need to be said.
Let me ask for elaboration of “hollowing out” in successive essays.
The first time I’d encountered the phrase “hollowing out” was in reference to Japanese industry. (“Deindustrialization”, 産業空洞化) But hollowing out, of course, is not a phenomenon unique to Japan. Downstream from the Three Gorges Dam is production volume serving Japanese, European, and American interests. France is hollowed out. Italy is hollowed out but for small, small manufacturing. The United States is hollowed out. Britain’s industrial north is hollowed out. The shipyards of Northern Ireland and Scotland are hollowed out. And this kind of thing is the subject of film: The Full Monty, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, Trainspotting — anything with reliable Northerner Robert Carlisle in it.
So, the hollowing out of the West was matched with the “financialization” of everything. Or aren’t “hollowing out” and “financialization” the same thing? Everyone shipped off their manufacturing to lower-costs plants in China. And that’s it; the West became occupied with organizing logistical networks — with getting stuff to and from manufacturing sites and then to consumers. That stuff needed to be financed. Voila! “Financialization!”
Last edited 2 years ago by Chauncey Gardiner
david.siu2011
2 years ago
Excellent article. The author has made many valid points. It is not about which system is more superior but rather about learning. The title of the article says it all and the keyword is “Learn”. Many people have very strong views of the CCP and China’s political system is far from perfect but we must give credit where credit is due. Lifting millions of people out of poverty in one generation is no mean feat. It is the West’s loss if we dismiss everything China does, especially out of arrogance. Alas, I am very pessimistic. Even if the western politicians recognise that our system requires some root and branch reforms, I am not confident that they have the political will to make them happen.
Satyam Nagwekar
2 years ago
A superb contrarian view on the CCP’s ‘antics’.
Peta Seel
2 years ago
Brilliant essay and absolutely spot on. There is nothing in the human experience from which lessons cannot be learned. The totalitarian means aside, we ignore what China is doing at our own peril.
Noah Ebtihej Sdiri
2 years ago
This is China’s “L’État c’est moi” moment with the Chinese State reasserting its authority over the national bourgeoisie. The Chinese authorities wanted to send a clear message to its nascent capitalistic nobility: the nation is greater than you.
Great article. Thank you, Unherd, for finally commissioning authors to write about economic issues.
For so long, many in the US, and elsewhere in the West, have been decrying economic inequality, the loss of decent paying jobs, the erosion of our industries, the subversion of universities to diploma mills that now serve mainly as a pipeline into the progressive grievance industry. But they were voices in the wilderness. The financial engineers won the day. So much of our skill base is gone, and the young are so disenchanted with the capitalist system, and the lack of commitment to their future by their own society, that fringe ideologies have taken root.
Yes, we can learn something from China about building a meaningful future for our own population. I wonder if it’s too late for such lessons.
Bit confusing in the writing though – but I suppose I got the gist, which is obvious to anyone who reads on the world and the economy in a serious way.
The thing I would say though, is that since the 2008 QE the USA economy has been so distorted it has left all industry to be more about finance than about production. Borrowing is almost free, but there is little they wish to spend on to develop new production as there is no need. Rather they buy other rising companies, and their own stock.
USA = $ 30 Trillion debt, 113% GDP. $3.5 Trillion revenue, $6.5 Trillion spending.
The thing is some of this is going to pay social programs and so on, but really most of it is spent to keep interest at ZERO and to keep the stock market from falling. Insanity. And only possible as USA is the Global Reserve.
I read about the tutoring thing last week
“In mid-July, China’s government issued new regulations that drastically limit for-profit tutoring services and prohibit foreign investment in Chinese private education companies” (A 150 Billion$ industry!)
China says it is because it overtaxes the parents income so they do not spend consuming and having more children, and overtaxes the children – but I did wonder if it also wants a thumb on all education less Liberalism creeps in. China knows the trade deficit with USA cannot continue, and needs to get the Chinese to consume enough to replace the American market, and that its Demographic clock is ticking FAST – so for parents to have more children they cannot afford to spend $40,000 per child in private tutoring so the one child can pass the national college exams highly –
China and USA at this point are like 2 co-dependent enablers locked in a destructive relationship they cannot leave as they will be even worse off alone.
The criticisms of the US system are generally correct, but it’s sad that the writer has to laud the CCP-led Chinese system as a means of beating up America. The best solution is an America that worked correctly, not a Chinese alternative.
At any one time in China, thirty million people are said to be learning to play the piano. (How many in the US?). The very young in the world who decry video game restrictions on their time will cry out that their contemporaries who are marked out as future concert pianists probably spend “hours and hours daily on the piano”. Not that they know any pianists much less any friends who are learning to play any musical instrument. Unless that video gamer kid is from China perhaps. At the rate the enthusiasm for playing video games all day, every day, continues to grow in the western world, there won’t be any, say, future guitar maestros emerging again let alone flutists or trumpeters. The very young are just not interested. A real talent for something will never be discovered, all because of the obsession for ramping up record scores. Is video-gaming a training ground for playing the stock market? Is video-gaming one reason why girls do better than boys at school exams? In Germany there seem to be plenty of brass bands dotted around the country, with lots of young people involved. It might be interesting to know what the market for video games is there compared with Britain or the US. Even in the olden days, when the very young were “into comics”, nobody spent hours and hours reading them. They did various other things. But people have their worlds and their virtual worlds now, I suppose. The problem is that one is a teenager for only seven short years. Perhaps kids socialised in the pandemic year playing their video games. Perhaps that was even a godsend. If it were, then the pandemic was also a godsend for the gaming industry. God help us in the future trying to get a plumber or electrician! That’s all I can say!
I fish a great deal, most days I am on the water in public places – and the fishermen are mostly older now, 35 and older, some young kids with parents, but I doubt they will be there much once on their own. When I was young I was outdoors all the time, I half lived outside, even though I lived in London then there was always some water to ride my bike to to fish, or woods to run in. We had no cell phones and I was always just gone – somewhere off in London, on bike, foot, public transport, and my parents thought nothing of it – what a different world it was.
We always had some pets, fish, turtles, snakes, rabbits – I think kids today have left nature entirely for electronic I find this very depressing indeed. The young are all about saving nature, but have nothing to do with it, it is a mere abstraction to them.
I imagine there is rather a lot of social and parental pressure for the children to ‘improve’ themselves.! Still, worth living in a totalitarian system for…
I’m a bit surprised that the Chinese Communist Party wasn’t mentioned in this article. A lot of these campaigns in China are basically about reminding everyone to stay on the straight and narrow path where the way forward is laid out by the CCP. “Beijing is prioritising social cohesion” means everyone will live according to the rules determined by the CCP – hardly a model for us.
I think you are right. The author tapped into Chinese propaganda. Just like in the Soviet Union the Communist Party removes people that might get to powerful, and it is always for the same old reason: the Party protects the people.
This reminds me of intellectuals visiting Russia after the revolution and being impressed with their economic policies.
We can agree or disagree with the CCP’s moral principles, they have them. All our leaders seem to have had for decades is the stock market.
There is another issue where we may, in time, come to re-evaluate China, that of the Uighurs. China, perhaps with good reason, suspects that this Muslim community was increasingly falling for indoctrination by foreign Islamic ideologues, and is pre-empting that by indoctrinating them in its own Chinese ideology. Meanwhile, our own Muslim communities are similarly being indoctrinated, but we afford the source of those ideological beliefs ‘protected status’. Which approach will work out better in the long run?
Some good exculpatory words there – ‘suspects’ and ‘perhaps’. I hope you don’t ever fall foul of the law on that basis!
Mass human rights abuses and internment of millions in concentration camps is hardly a reasonable response to one or two terror attacks many years ago. I have no problem with harsh treatment of those actually responsible, but these are a tiny minority.
At least we in the west can openly talk and criticise our system. Freedom of thought and expression are the cornerstones of our system (although in the recent times the tech giants are trying to squeeze that right, at least it is still spoken about without fear).
However erratic, the western model does allow for change and reinvention. I accept all the criticism you have levied on the west & the markets etc, it IS however changing. But in China there is no room for change from within, only from the top. So what happens when the top is corrupted? What’s the guarantee that CCP will always do right by the people? And if it is doing so, why is it following the west and behaving like a clandestine colonial power?
May be we have have a lot to learn from China, maybe it has a lot to learn from the west yet too.
Excellent article thanks – one with some actual new info vs the shallow regurgitated crap we usually glaze over to whilst attempting to understand the Chinese.
So what’s best? The guiding Han of the market?
Touche’!
The very Visible Han of the Market.
This is a really important article, which describes a situation which I think many of us sensed, but couldn’t quite pin down. While I understand, and agree with, commenters’ objections to using the CCP model as the better option, it’s what the competition, and primary alternative, happens to be. Yes, I think that its rigid conformity will stifle innovation, but the CCP has put measures in place to tap into what’s left of the West’s technological progress.
‘.. but the CCP has put measures in place to tap into what’s left of the West’s technological progress’.
Yes, by continuing its industrial espionage, otherwise known as theft.
I applaud this article, but I have reservations about following the Chinese model.
There was an account by a football/soccer coach recalling the Chinese attempt to build a national team. They spent billions on fostering a national game, but could never consolidate the individual within a team, who could, function as an individual when required. I don’t recall the Soviets having this problem with the game.
Training excellent musicians isn’t a problem, allowing a composer to flourish is. Some years back, a Chinese orchestra played at the London Prom season, rattling through Western classical music, until hitting the buffers with a home grown piece.The Soviets didn’t have that problem either.
Creativity is harder to nurture, China may be moving forward on this, creativity certainly needs discipline,which currently we seem to lack in the West. It also needs financing. I never forget what a German tech startup financier (he helped develope NASDEC ) told me 20 years ago. “I don’t invest in brilliant ideas, but brilliant plans”
I don’t understand gaming, I understand its a billion pound industry, which we are rather good at and that it has generated some very useful spin offs.A misspent youth, wasting time in pool halls and bars has resulted in many a later genius. What is worrying is what is happening in our universities, that might be our death blow.
The kind of intense focus and ability to manipulate mechanical chains of logical outcomes that many gamers have does make them good engineers and programmers. I speak from personal experience and knowing a lot of them. As long as they themselves or their parents push them into growing out of an all consuming obsession with cames and end up learning maths and programming at some point.
Many thanks for this essay and saying things that need to be said.
Let me ask for elaboration of “hollowing out” in successive essays.
The first time I’d encountered the phrase “hollowing out” was in reference to Japanese industry. (“Deindustrialization”, 産業空洞化) But hollowing out, of course, is not a phenomenon unique to Japan. Downstream from the Three Gorges Dam is production volume serving Japanese, European, and American interests. France is hollowed out. Italy is hollowed out but for small, small manufacturing. The United States is hollowed out. Britain’s industrial north is hollowed out. The shipyards of Northern Ireland and Scotland are hollowed out. And this kind of thing is the subject of film: The Full Monty, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, Trainspotting — anything with reliable Northerner Robert Carlisle in it.
So, the hollowing out of the West was matched with the “financialization” of everything. Or aren’t “hollowing out” and “financialization” the same thing? Everyone shipped off their manufacturing to lower-costs plants in China. And that’s it; the West became occupied with organizing logistical networks — with getting stuff to and from manufacturing sites and then to consumers. That stuff needed to be financed. Voila! “Financialization!”
Excellent article. The author has made many valid points. It is not about which system is more superior but rather about learning. The title of the article says it all and the keyword is “Learn”. Many people have very strong views of the CCP and China’s political system is far from perfect but we must give credit where credit is due. Lifting millions of people out of poverty in one generation is no mean feat. It is the West’s loss if we dismiss everything China does, especially out of arrogance. Alas, I am very pessimistic. Even if the western politicians recognise that our system requires some root and branch reforms, I am not confident that they have the political will to make them happen.
A superb contrarian view on the CCP’s ‘antics’.
Brilliant essay and absolutely spot on. There is nothing in the human experience from which lessons cannot be learned. The totalitarian means aside, we ignore what China is doing at our own peril.
This is China’s “L’État c’est moi” moment with the Chinese State reasserting its authority over the national bourgeoisie. The Chinese authorities wanted to send a clear message to its nascent capitalistic nobility: the nation is greater than you.
the CCP is greater than you
So basically Making China Great Again?