8 Comments

Most of his points seem reasonable. The charge of hypocrisy in point #4, however, feels misplaced. If the US has “repeatedly condemned and filed WTO complaints against China for its use of state subsidies and market distortions”, and if those sanctions have had little or no effect, what is Washington supposed to do if not retaliate in kind?

Thanks for the summary of this interesting talk. I will try to read the Chinese with it as a crib.

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May 5Liked by Thomas des Garets Geddes

Globalization will never disappear. The US will continue to trade with its neighbors in Mexico and Canada, along with all of Europe, and most of Africa and Asia. Spain and Portugal have deep roots in Latin America. China trades with Latin American, Africa, Australia, and many other places. Trade routes will shift, but globalization will remain forever.

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Yan is not honest on this trade war. During Obama's regime, the US filed complaints for years and won but China still went ahead. As seen here https://bit.ly/3B0NLet

The action of China impacted US businesses. Asides that, US companies cannot operate fairly especially its tech industry. The US since Trump just retaliated since China had refused to trade fairly. China is just a taste of its own medicine. https://bit.ly/42aenWr

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The United States has lost the capacity for maneuver: it cannot even save itself.

It's so broke that Huawei alone will outspend the US CHIPs Act on R&D over the act's 5-year term.

Its military is dispirited, its weapons are outdated, unaffordable or unreliable and its generals – who planned and trained for eight years for the Ukraine war and lost it in one month – made exactly the same mistake that Hitler made in 1941: underestimating Russia's industrial capacity by a factor of 10. Morons, in other words.

The US lacks the military capacity for anything but a suicidal first strike on China.

But, unlike China, it has neither missile defenses nor a public health service for civilian casualties and following a counterstrike by 1000 hypersonic Chinese missiles. Actually, one would do the trick.

Everyone know this.

Deglobalization will be over before 2025. The West can't afford it.

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(我们看现在中美之间的关系,都不如1978年没有建交前).

"We see currently Chinese-American relationships are not as those in 1978, before the exchange of diplomats."

is how I would translate it. maybe i am being wrong, or overly-optimistic. He didn't say 比 or 并不比。 Maybe my Chinese is wrong here? But I read him as saying "it's not at all like what it was prior to 1978" which leaves open whether things have gotten better, worse, both, and if so, which and that sort of ambiguity is typical of Chinese diplomacy or even Chinese generally. Furthermore it's patently ridiculous to say that even as tough as things are now they are worse than 1978. In 1978 I was a schoolboy studying East Asia. Back then China was happily funding guerillas in Africa, and had just gotten done funding guerillas in Vietnam, which btw managed to win yet another war. The cultural revolution had ended, but the gang of four had not even been put on trial, let alone Deng Xiaoping. I just find it hyperbolic and likely mistranslated. China isn't and wasn't funding FARC and stopped funding Sendero Luminoso, if it ever even did, at the very latest by 1990 and really more like 1980. As to trade and investment, back then nil now yuge.

Lots of rich powerful people are gonna spin lies and half truths. They will both talk "decoupling" "internal circulation" but in reality they are both wealth-getters so they will trade and invest.

Again maybe i misunderstood your article or mistranslated the text? Things are NOT as bad as 1978 ro 1980 or 1989. They are perhaps worse than 1996 or, likelier, about that level.

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Thanks for the post. I disagree with his point about bipolarity. The reality is that China is not a peer power of America. China does not have much leverage over the vast majority of the world. It has leverage only in regards to granting access to its shrinking/stagnated market, but it has no global military nor high-end technology that countries can't get from the American led international order. "Bipolarity" only makes sense if he means to indicate some kind of anti-American bloc of misfits who hate each other but are trying to cooperate to escape American uni-polarity.

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Interesting read. Good to know the Chinese are finally understanding that this conflict with USA is going to continue, there will be no multipolarity. Still a rivalry between two world systems, capitalism and socialism.

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