10-25-2017, 11:54 PM
(10-25-2017, 10:50 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(10-24-2017, 05:00 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > I think you're getting your Friedmans confused. This is George
> Friedman, not Thomas, and he's anything but left wing.
Sorry about that.
(10-24-2017, 05:00 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > The fact is, Xi's military is now comparable to - slightly weaker
> than - France's. His timetable is realistic; it takes a very long
> time to build up a navy, and he has a long way to go.
The timetable may be realistic in a technical sense, but not in a
political sense. The Chinese people consider themselves superior to
us and their system superior to ours. They consider the US and the
West to be weak and indecisive. They believe that they can defeat us
today, just as Japan thought they could beat us and the South thought
they could beat the North. These things are not rational decisions,
any more than the decision to have a sexual affair is rational, no
matter what the consequences. I also believe that Xi knows that the
Chinese people have no intention of waiting until 2050 to assert
their rightful place as rulers of the world.
In the 1930s, the Chinese people believed that they could all spit and the invading Japanese army would drown. They were wrong. What the people believe sometimes has little to do with reality.
Xi, however, is not so stupid or misinformed, as his technically realistic timetable shows. He knows China will have no chance against the US until 2050. Maybe in 2040, he could convince himself that he could win the way Japan and the Confederacy convinced themselves, but the crisis war will have occurred long before then and his plan will long since have been overcome by events.
On the other hand, Xi does believe that the party can control the people. After all Mao did it during the revolution, and again in the cultural revolution. Under Deng, Tiananmen - incidentally a probable approximate example of your 58 year rule with respect to the gap between the death of Chou En Lai and the death of Yuan Shikai, the latter of which initiated a bloodbath in the form of the Warlord Era - demonstrated that the government could put down a popular uprising. Xi probably believes that he could handle any revolt equally well.
None of those events happened during a crisis era, of course, so Xi is probably mistaken. What would instead happen is an uprising that results in a major revolution or civil war. And that's in fact the most likely resolution of the crisis in China - provided we're not stupid enough to provoke a war with them ourselves, which we would win but which would cost us a lot more cities.
Quote:(10-24-2017, 05:32 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > You might not want to put too much trust in teachers who thought
> Communism was good and capitalism was bad.
> The fact is, National Socialism is not capitalist at all; it's
> socialist. In Germany, it happened to include former "captains of
> industry" in its chain of command, but the only difference from
> Communism was that the central planning apparatus was less tightly
> controlled by the dictator.
Sez u. People on the left absolutely HATE it when you say that
National Socialism is Socialism.
Which is what always happens when the left is confronted with a truth that it doesn't want to believe, as you well know.
Quote:A Socialist economy during a non-Crisis era simply falls apart.
We've seen this happen in Russia, China, East Germany and Cuba,
for example. A country that tries to maintain Socialism gets
defeated by the mathematics of the situation, and the economy
simply gets frozen, as we've seen in all of these countries.
As the Crisis era approaches, the country can go in either of two
directions. The Socialist economy can simply collapse, as happened in
the above countries, and get replaced by capitalism or partial
capitalism. Or the leader can try to maintain the socialism into the
Crisis period -- through nationalism, xenophobia and racism -- blaming
the United States and other Western countries for their economic
troubles.
So instead of collapsing into Capitalism, that's the point when the
Socialist economy takes the second route -- National Socialism
(Nazism).
Which is exactly what happened with national socialist Germany, which I'm sure you're aware of, so you agree with me about national socialism being socialist.
Quote:So the reason that Xi's Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics for a New Era is identical to Hitler's National
Socialism is not because the minute details of the economy are the
same, but because in a generational Crisis era, the Socialism has been
combined with nationalism, xenophobia and racism.
Except that, as you point out, any actual socialism in China has already fallen apart, and China has been more capitalist than the US for a couple of decades now. What we have in China is an authoritarian capitalist regime rather than an authoritarian socialist one, and it's far from clear that the two follow the same path. Rebellion or civil war along the lines of traditional Chinese dynastic collapse is much more likely.
