[blackjack21]

It’s Time for Conscious Uncoupling With China

I think we'll be hearing a lot of this theme in the wake of coronavirus, even from the most ardent of anti-Trumpers.

The same risks of a rebound are being seen in China, in so far as we can believe a word that murderous dictatorship tells us. Meanwhile, I look around me and see a slow attenuation of social distancing — the park where I walk my dogs is increasingly crammed. Humans are social animals. There is a limit to our capacity to remain alone. In crises, in particular, our instinct is to seek one another, gather strength from our common experience. The virus exploits this mercilessly.

It’s a brutal reality check, this thing — relentlessly ripping the veil off our delusions of control. So much is being laid bare. The promise of a truly globalized world, where government is increasingly international, and trade free, and all would benefit, was already under acute strain. Now, it’s broken, perhaps irrevocably.

Why Brexit and Trump wasn't clear enough to the establishment is anyone's guess, but it's I think very clear to people now that globalization at these levels has been a misguided enterprise. More specifically, the idea that China would evolve into a liberal democracy with human rights has proven to be a disastrous delusion.

The nation-state was beginning to reassert itself before, but COVID-19 has revealed its indispensability. Europeans realized, if they hadn’t already, that a truly continental response was beyond the E.U. Borders were suddenly enforced, resources hoarded by individual nations, and the most important decisions were made by national governments, in national interests. Americans, for their part, saw their own dependence on foreign countries, especially dictatorships, for core needs — like medicine, or medical equipment — as something to be corrected in the future. Japan is now spending a fortune paying its own companies to relocate from China to the homeland.

Indeed it has also shown that response planning must have a robust local and regional component, not just relying on the nation-state at large. Hence, just-in-time supply chains do no good if they get cut off. There is clearly a lack of diversification in sourcing--which is ironic for people who run around claiming "our diversity is our strength."

And for both Europe and America, the delusions that sustained the 21st-century engagement with China have begun to crack. We still don’t know how this virus emerged — and China hasn’t given any serious explanation of its origins. What we do know is that the regime punished and silenced those who wanted to sound the alarm as early as last December, and hid the true extent of the crisis from the rest of the world. There had been 104 cases in Wuhan by December 31, including 15 deaths. Yet as late as mid-January, the Chinese were insisting, in the words of the World Health Organization, that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” On January 18, despite the obvious danger, the Chinese dictatorship allowed a huge festival in Wuhan that drew tens of thousands of people.

This is where I think the problems for China are growing exponentially.

On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump’s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It’s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.

This is from someone who is about as anti-Trump as you can get.

Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off. I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.

The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression. It has also corrupted the World Health Organization, which was so desperate for China’s cooperation it swallowed Xi’s coronavirus lies and regurgitated them. At the most critical juncture — mid-January — the WHO actually tweeted out Communist Party propaganda: “Preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel Coronavirus.” On the same day, another WHO official was telling the world that there was “limited spread” of COVID-19 by human-to-human transmission, and alerted hospitals about the risk of super-spreading the virus. And so the virus has forced us to accept another discomforting reality: Integrating a communist dictatorship into a democratic world economy is a mug’s game. From now on, conscious decoupling is the order of the day.

This is why I think Trump ends up remaining strong in spite of Sullivan excoriating him. Trump uniquely among politicians has differentiated himself from the bog standard establishment politicians who think there can be no debate about trade with China. As Trump runs against Biden, the Democrats and media will try to pin the blame for coronavirus on Trump--it will be unsuccessful in my opinion--while Trump responds with Joe Biden bringing his son along to negotiations with China and the US coming home with shit trade deals and Hunter Biden coming home with $1.5B of investment funds to play with. Even Obama hasn't endorsed Biden at this point, which is telling.

At any rate, those of you who are discounting this also discounted the US becoming energy independent in the wake of 9/11. I think the US will begin decoupling from China in the next economic expansion.

[late]

"In other cases, the cold triumph of reality represented by the virus has been salutary. It’s been remarkable to observe something Donald Trump cannot lie his way out of. He tried. And he’s still trying. He’s gaming out various ways to get himself reelected in a pandemic, but the pandemic keeps reminding us that this is in its control, not his. His daily performances are not informing anyone about anything — they are failing attempts to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative, and doesn’t give two fucks about Trump."

Great article.

I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but that is a welcome addition to the discourse that will be sure to follow.

[blackjack21]

Now here's an article with the exact opposite tone: Blaming China for coronavirus isn’t just dangerous. It misses the point

Yet, while it blames capitalism, it is also conceding that globalisation is at issue.

Though it is true that pangolin scales and meat are advertised as a sort of folk medicine in mainland China, statistics suggest the real key variable are the effects of globalisation, which have enriched the country’s business classes.

This is precisely why Trump and Brexit came along.

During February and March cases of the novel coronavirus illuminated economic linkages long hidden from view, such as Chinese investments into infrastructure in Qom, Iran or the ties between Wuhan’s car parts industry and factories in Serbia, South Korea and Germany.

Indeed I think a lot of people will be reassessing the Belt and Road initiative too: Italy for example.

To push back on the anti-China line is not to apologise or defend the state’s actions. It is clear that local officials were wrong to silence Dr Li Wenliang, who alerted friends about the virus as early as possible, and that the government has consistently downplayed the virus’s contagiousness and the severity of deaths.

Yes, but getting the WHO to parrot those remarks and getting other foreign leaders not to take quick action has led to a global pandemic. There is really no getting around this fact. How do you tell leaders in Iran, Italy, the UK or the US that they were wrong if the advice from the WHO itself said that it wasn't scientifically established that it could be transmitted human to human? They thought they could isolate the cases and control the spread easily, and it wasn't true.

This inactivity was partly the product of a western exceptionalism that believed viruses and epidemics only happen “over there”, in poor and non-white countries.

Viruses do not avoid Western countries, but epidemics are rarer due to having controls in place. Norovirus didn't come from Asia or Africa. Neither did Lyme disease. Neither did mad cow. However, Western government are generally a hell of a lot more effective at addressing these issues. They don't just lie about it to the public and the WHO.

This is a crucial point for challenging anti-Asian racism.

Nobody is even criticizing Taiwan or Singapore, Japan, South Korea, etc. It's the Chinese Communist Party that's getting criticized. The WHO leader even criticized Taiwan as being racist, but how exactly? Isn't this getting to be a bit reflexive and meaningless now?

Ultimately, both the pandemic and the accompanying anti-Asian backlash are dynamics that go beyond questions of culture and xenophobia, carrying serious life-and-death consequences.

Generally, the Western media and politicians condemn this sort of thing. However, to a manufacturing worker who had a job outsourced to China and is now out of work again because of China maybe coming to different conclusions. Racism of this sort isn't right, but what underpins it is certainly understandable. 100k people get coronavirus, but 15M people in the US alone lose their jobs? They are understandably going to be angry about this.

In the US, such fears were already manifest in populist claims that China alone – and not the domestic political and business class – was to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs.

On the contrary, Trump was elected because he was seen as not being part of the political class where both parties would be doing China's bidding or the bidding of America's global corporations whilst ignoring the pleas of US workers.

China has also created its own racist response, as China is already a very racist country that refers to everyone who is not Chinese as a foreigner.

[Donna]

People like Andrew Sullivan are beating a very dangerous war drum.

[Hellas me ponas]

They may be beating a very dangerouw war drum. That doesnt remove the fact that they might be talking the truth. This man must have some big balls. If you want my opinion, he is true journalist.

[Donna]

They may be beating a very dangerouw war drum. That doesnt remove the fact that they might be talking the truth. This man must have some big balls. If you want my opinion, he is true journalist.

He's not really a journalist, he's more of a pundit.

[Hellas me ponas]

You get my point though

[Donna]

You get my point though

Yes, but I partially undermined it.

[late]

Now here's an article with the exact opposite tone: Blaming China for coronavirus isn’t just dangerous. It misses the point

Yet, while it blames capitalism, it is also conceding that globalisation is at issue.

Another good article, this is certainly a day for surprises.

His approach is quite different from yours. He is more interested in the rich, and the way they have played the rest of us.

"The coronavirus may have first appeared in China, but the ensuing spread and crisis also belong to the global assemblages of commerce, tourism, and supply chains erected by powerful interests in the 21st century."

"In the US, such fears were already manifest in populist claims that China alone – and not the domestic political and business class – was to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs."

"We need to also recognise and confront the political-economic forces behind the west’s anti-China backlash – and the inadequacy of nationalism in responding to the social and public health crises facing us today, which are global in scale."

He used the G word, global... no matter what we do, new diseases will emerge. We need to be ready.

[quetzalcoatl]

I will readily admit that conscious uncoupling with China is preferable to unconscious coupling with China.

[ness31]

I will readily admit that conscious uncoupling with China is preferable to unconscious coupling with China.

QFT

How did you do that you fucking genius!

[blackjack21]

People like Andrew Sullivan are beating a very dangerous war drum.

Maybe. However, China's behavior isn't going unnoticed elsewhere. I just cited him, because he's ardently anti-Trump, strangely a conservative Catholic and a gay man. So he's not the mainstream opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes these sort of quirky people are often more comfortable with stepping outside of the immediate conventional wisdom.

He is more interested in the rich, and the way they have played the rest of us.

Yes, that's why I say that his point is a little behind the times in that the UK is leaving the EU and Trump became president--two political events preceding coronavirus that most would have considered unthinkable before they happened. However, this is a theme that is just as well understood by AfD, the Gilets Jaunes, Lege, etc. The EU response in Europe is seriously undermining confidence in the EU as a supranational institution.

He used the G word, global... no matter what we do, new diseases will emerge. We need to be ready.

Oh no doubt. I used to work in supply chain management. I understand WalMart's vendor-managed inventory, just-in-time replenishment, etc. It's all very neat and tidy and efficient. However, what has been exposed here is that when the supply chain stretches beyond national borders, there is political risk. Back in the mid-2000s when I was in eProcurement and supply-chain management, that's not something they talked about too much. It was constantly about getting the lowest cost--reverse auctions and the like. That has been laid bare now as a potentially dangerous approach. It's not just that it exposed that 95% of the pharmaceutical precursors are made outside of the United States. It's actually technically very easy to insource those industries. It's that they were outsourced entirely for absolute advantage--pure cost. However, in a political crisis, such a situation is quite dangerous.

I've understood this sort of thing, principally because my career has involved me in it--and I mean down to EDI/EDIFACT specifications. I've integrated with ERP systems, etc. I understand the cost and time savings processing orders, invoices, shipping notices, receiving advice, etc. However, I was a bit puzzled by projects like the F35 Joint Strike Fighter and the myriad of partners under so many different countries, as well as Boeing's similar efforts to globalize their supply chain and operations. In the former case, partners like Turkey are still formally in NATO, but nominally becoming much more independent of NATO and perhaps even heading toward a nascent rivalry. In the latter case, divorcing business and engineering decisions allows for serious cluster fucks like the MCAS system in the 737 Max and how difficult it has been to address an otherwise simple problem.

So people are already beginning to consider the longer-term here:

The Long Hard Road to Decoupling from China

The era of globalization may finally be coming to an end. The Wuhan Virus and the attendant misery that the Chinese communist state has unleashed upon the world (very much including its own people) has laid bare a core structural flaw in the assumptions underpinning globalization. It turns out that the radical interweaving of markets—which was supposed to lead to the “complex interdependence” that IR theorists have been predicting for the better part of the century would lead to an increase in global stability as countries’ fates are proven to be dependent on each other’s fortunes—has instead created an inherently fragile and teetering structure that is exacerbating uncertainty in a time of crisis.

I think the thesis statement here is dramatically overstated, but "globalization" like "racist" has come to mean something other than what it appears to mean on its face--i.e., a political/economic faction that fosters increased globalization with general disregard for the interests of types of governments, political classes and the interests of nation states. He elaborates further here:

That this has turned out to be so should not be surprising. The logic that has driven globalized supply chains has all but eliminated redundancies across the world in the pursuit of efficiency. That efficiency has been found by locating links of the supply chain in places where labor costs have been low. In theory, anyway, this should not have been problematic: as one country grew its economy and ascended out of poverty, its low-wage sector would get outcompeted by other poor countries, by which it could be replaced in the supply chain. Similarly, by this logic, if robots become permanently competitive with low-skilled workers, so be it. A more efficient way of producing something is always favorable in this way of thinking.

Such thinking largely ignores geopolitics. By striving to “flatten” the world (in Thomas Friedman’s memorable phrase) into a single, borderless entity in pursuit of nothing but profit and prosperity, this worldview has created huge blind spots.

I used the passenger aircraft analogy that it would be more efficient to simply have a one engine airplane with no flight control redundancies. However, there is no margin of safety. If you lose an engine or a flight control system, there is no backup. Commercial air travel wouldn't be what it is today if people accepted that 99% of sorties would not end in fatalities. People actually demand much higher performance, and those redundant systems play a significant role in ensuring safety in air travel. Yet, in critical supply chains like pharmaceuticals, medical devices (and even fighter and commercial aircraft), our systems are at great risk if the global system destabilizes.

What happens if a world war breaks out or a pandemic strikes? Suddenly, such globalized supply chains are no longer seen as merely ruthlessly efficient, but highly vulnerable.

When bereft of redundancies, networks devolve to hierarchies, which in turn create winners and losers. Hierarchies do not diminish the key importance of state power in international relations. On the contrary, they enable it. As China has grown to become the seemingly irreplaceable core of a globalized economy, the CCP has pursued predatory mercantilism in its commercial relations with the West, in the process tilting the hard power balance in its favor.

This is a very interesting point. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to agree that it creates hierarchies. It certainly creates hotspots, choke points, and single points of failure. China's mercantilist policies, currency manipulation and shipping subsidization has created an unnatural dependency that involves absolute, rather than comparative advantage. So China is in a vulnerable situation too, because they have way too much industrial capacity for their own needs.

In an economic system that allows for the flow of technology and capital across national borders, redundancies in the supply chain are essential to the preservation of state sovereignty and government capacity to act in a crisis.

I think this is what's being laid bare now. I would add that this is also what makes projects like the Joint Strike Fighter potentially risky too. I completely understand why each participating country would want to be able to make as many of the parts that go into their own fighters as possible. However, more advanced states such as the US and UK may want to maintain technological secrets, and states with peculiar integration systems like Israel would want to have some of their own systems. Yet, if say the wings are made in country x, and they decide to leave the military alliance and become an adversary, what does that do to the alliance's ability to produce weapons and continue forward? Capitalists do not think this way, because they are focused on price, cost, fixed costs, variable costs, marginal analysis and the like.

The fundamental question is one of values: Is this kind of globalization compatible with liberty and democratic governance? My simple answer is no.

Indeed. That is also exemplified by the willingness of American corporations to use censorship tools developed for the Chinese market--where censorship is mandated by the government--for use in free countries like the US, where censorship is generally regarded as un-American. When Google dropped it's "Don't be evil" slogan as part of its core values, it should have been a warning.

No citizenry, if asked, would vote for the status quo—their working-class communities gutted, their security endangered, and their country made dependent on an adversarial foreign power.

Exactly.

Michta points to a lot of the pain that is in store for US companies that became over-dependent on China. This is a decades long process not unlike the drive to energy independence that followed 9/11. I'm 52 now. I'll be jimjam's age by the time the effects of the policy changes that will be coming bear their fruit. It'll be starting now.

I remember in the late 1990s when I was working on systems integration for Bank of America. I said to my bosses boss with a view to Global Crossing and the ability to run the new call center apps over the internet, "They'll move entire divisions of corporations overseas." He looked at me and said, "That'll never happen." I remember him saying he wanted a "million dollar idea." Well, that was a billion dollar idea. I think this one will be too.

[late]

1) Yes, that's why I say that his point is a little behind the times...


2) This is a very interesting point. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to agree that it creates hierarchies. It certainly creates hotspots, choke points, and single points of failure. China's mercantilist policies, currency manipulation and shipping subsidization has created an unnatural dependency that involves absolute, rather than comparative advantage. So China is in a vulnerable situation too, because they have way too much industrial capacity for their own needs.

1) You have once again confused policy and politics. I get the feeling you don't think in terms of governance, it's a common failing on the Right these days.

2) You keep ranting China, China, China. It's a gambit to divert attention away from Trump, and the rich aholes that created this. As I've been saying since the 80s, we need to do a better job at managing trade.

This is on us more than it is on China. We have let the rich buy politicians by the bushel. We've let them evade taxes and we have not dealt with the many problems that have arisen.

But most of all, we have ignored the factory farming that is the primary driver behind the evolution of these new diseases.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Chinese anti forefinger cartoons

those bat eating bastards now blaming foreigners for a virus that have started on their soil

[SolarCross]

Chinese anti forefinger cartoons

those bat eating bastards now blaming foreigners for a virus that have started on their soil

That is so racist. Where is @Pants-of-dog to save us from chinese racists?

[Sivad]

IT’S TIME FOR CONSCIOUS UNCOUPLING WITH CHINA

It's time for more than that. It's time to call out that evil gulagist regime for the vile enemy of the human race that it is and shut it down. Full embargo. Any party member caught outside of the PRC will be arrested, tried, and executed for crimes against humanity. Any individual or corporation caught doing business with that gulagist filth will be arrested, tried, and executed for crimes against humanity. All the Western technocrats, politicians, and corporate executives that worked to set up that slave pit should also be arrested, tried, and executed for treason and crimes against humanity. All the corporations and their shareholders that have profited off that slave pit should have all of their assets confiscated and distributed back to the people.

The PRC is just one giant heinous atrocity, it needs to go.

[blackjack21]

I think that's coming @Sivad. A cardiologist (friend of a friend) said that they have all the supplies they need, because of Trump's response. She's thinking of voting for him in November, and she's a hardcore Democrat.

It's not just the response though, it's that Trump has been hammering this point about China for a long time now, and there is simply no more ignoring it. New York City ignored it at their peril and the New York Metropolitan area has the most cases in the world right now, less the rest of the United States. Liberal central has a reckoning with Trump.

KLAVAN: The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

Even Andrew Klavan is admitting as much after having played a video montage in the last presidential election cycle of how many times Trump mentioned China. It's frankly impossible to miss Trump's stance on China now.

In many respects, Trump is sort of like General Patton: he cuts right to the chase, gets right to the heart of the matter. Yet, the media hates him for his brashness. When Patton shot a few donkeys on a bridge blocking an American column to prevent the troops from getting strafed, the media pilloried him for it in spite of the fact that the owner of the donkeys was compensated. When he slapped a soldier for cowardice, the media outrage was so deafening he had to have his command suspended, while the Germans were shooting their deserters for cowardice. The liberals are soft to a fault, but when they start seeing the bitter harvest of their "open" everything, I think they are eventually going to be a bit more reflective too. The appeal of buying inexpensive shoes and smart phones made with near slave labor whilst acting smug and "woke" will have to wear off at some point as people reflect on the unnecessary horror of China trying to save "face" instead of acting sooner. Now it's not even particularly safe for foreigners in China as their government says all the new cases are coming from outside of China (yet another lie).

[foxdemon]

That is so racist. Where is @Pants-of-dog to save us from chinese racists?

What is so Racist?


PoD will be along shortly to explain to you that racism = power + privilege. Given the Chinese are not white and therefore a minority, they do not have either power nor privilege. Thus you are mistaken in thinking the Chinese could ever be racist. In fact, it is evidence of racist thoughts of your own that you would even consider it.

Now, it is time for you to begin your re-education. Do you see that image posted by @Zionist Nationalist ? You are mistake citizen Solarcross. There is no image on that post you quoted.

[Rich]

strangely a conservative Catholic and a gay man.

There 's nothing strange about a gay man being attracted to Catholicism. Christianity was invented by a gay man, or at least the crucifixion. The crucifixion is a homosexual BDSM fantasy. There's no crucifixion is Buddhism, but Buddhist monasticism has still been rife with homosexual's seeking to "spiritualise" their homosexuality, spiritualise their lack of interest in women.

[Ter]

. The crucifixion is a homosexual BDSM fantasy. There's no crucifixion is Buddhism, but Buddhist monasticism has still been rife with homosexual's seeking to "spiritualise" their homosexuality, spiritualise their lack of interest in women.

Rich cracks me up
His humour is priceless...
It is humour, right ?