BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-19 Su: First: On the Usefulness of the “Wilhelmine China” Analogy as a Tool for Thought: Apparently contra the super-brilliant Adam Tooze, I have long thought—because history rhymes—that the analogy between pre-World War I Germany and contemporary China is an interesting one to think about. Wilhelmine China—a rising industrial power with a parasitic upper class, unsure if it truly has and anxious to demonstrate meaningful social role, and a leadership striving for national self-assertion both for its own psychological reasons and to unify a country that might otherwise be riven bye Economic and equality pressures...
Worth noting that Imperial Prussia did pretty well while it had competent administrators like Bismarck, and started losing its mind when the incompetent Wilhelm II took over.
Similarly, China did pretty well under Deng and the generations of his successors, and started losing its mind when the incompetent Xi Jinping took over...
The historical parallel I see is that autocracy is a weakness for a country because idiots can get into power too easily and are too hard to remove. You don't notice the weakness as long as a competent autocrat is in power, but when Wilhelm dismisses Bismarck as Chancellor and decides to rule personally, or Xi Jinping eliminates term limits and turns the Central Committee into sycophants, the governmental errors start happening immediately....
Seems to me the Wilhelmine China analogy really ought to be focused on the British response rather than the German one. That is, the tragedy of WWI was that a fading power elected to duke it out with a rising power and the fight just went on far too long. Had Britain sat it out, the whole affair would have been (probably) nothing more than another Franco-Prussian war. Therefore, to pursue the analogy, we ought to consider more the British calculations and see whether there are parallels to present-day American strategic thinking. I've always thought the biggest blunder for Britain was the Anglo-French naval agreement of November, 1912. By that agreement Britain moved its Mediterranean fleet to the North Sea, to bottle up Germany, and France moved its Atlantic fleet into the Mediterranean to protect British interests there. Effectively, this committed Britain to a joint defense pact against Germany without securing a British voice in French policy. It's generally accepted that Britain did this to avoid the great expense of outgunning a rising power in Germany. My view is that the motivation to save money was because of the great pressures being put upon the old elite (the Liberal Imperialists) to adopt social programs to improve the lot of the lower classes in order to bridge divides within the Cabinet with the Radicals. (The theme of my undergraduate honors thesis from 40 years ago). Therefore, I am asking myself whether the current divisions within the US, and the urgent need to restore employment, renew infrastructure, avoid a turn to authoritarianism (and kleptocracy), etc., will egg us on to adopting strategic policies that will push us into unwinnable conflicts either to bridge internal divides or make resources available for domestic programs. At the moment, I'm thinking maybe not. I do not see how we will loose autonomy of action in East Asia. Are the players there who are important to us (Japan, Australia, Indonesia) going to trap us into conflict with China? (Maybe India, but we never treat India as a serious player, do we?) Will the defense of Taiwan (that is what we are actually talking about, right?), bear a meaningful relationship to our domestic troubles? Only if we make the decision to unequivocally dominate the Formosa Straits, as that decision would require either lots of debt or lots of taxes (both doable in theory but politically impossible). But that decision seems to be ours alone, not one thrust upon us. That is, I think we will either blunder or not based on purely "strategic" considerations, whether or not China is rising or waning. The non-kinetic conflicts (technology pirating and mercantilism), are ones for which we have broad coalitions to oppose China, and given time they should work out without bullets or nuclear weapons. I seem to be coming down on the side that while China may be Wilhelmine (a rising power with a parasitic leadership class looking to impress the peasants with nationalistic bluster), and the US may be (no...is) a fading power trying to avoid the inevitable, I am not sure that dynamic is prescriptive in present circumstances.
Touché… It took two (Germany to provoke, on the grounds that they had to ride or die in the summer and fall of 1914 and would have won or lost by Christmas, so British intervention would be irrelevant) and Britain (because what it saw as its practical realpolitik interest reinforced its global moral order interest and so responded to the provocation)…
The problem with Wilhelmine China as an analogy is that the times have altered.
Leaving aside the very sharp distinction in the construction of military power -- today, there's no such thing as a Power or Great Power; there are nuclear powers, and everybody else -- the construction of industrial power -- those long supply chains and a post-nationalist industry that maximizes profits -- that is, money flows to plutocrats -- above all other concerns, and the futility of gaining by war -- the US hasn't managed to do this despite massive advantages in capability; war is profitable for those positioned to extract profits from the public purse, it's not profitable overall as it could be in the 18th and 19th centuries for those doing the looting -- the construction of a US/China rivalry misunderstands a bunch of stuff.
Both entities are in the early stages of collapse. (that is, there's a central authority, but it's not consistently effectual. The degree to which its writ runs is a matter of ongoing contention.)
The US is incapable of enacting or defending a sufficient construction of the public good to deal with a pandemic; it will certainly fail in respect to climate change. It's been taken over by an apocalyptic death cult and cannot make decisions on a materialist basis. Since the system has to make materialist decisions to function at all, while this inability holds, collapse will continue.
China has bought internal peace through rising prosperity; to do this, they've repeated the Soviet mistake and created an excessively specialized mechanism of industry. (the Soviet version was focused on armaments; the Chinese version focused on exports.) They haven't got and cannot build without thoroughly displacing incumbents a mechanism to secure general prosperity. (they're aware of the problem and they're trying to refocus from money to prosperity, but the definition they're using and the widely agreed definition differ and there's the inherent limits of incumbent-driven reform getting in the way.) Their success has now landed them in a position where they're too large to continue with this strategy, and their internal legitimacy is the source of such confidence that they've resorted to a massive program of social control. (Note that it's only really distinct from the Western credit-based systems in being notionally public and centralized.)
All of that is bad, but none of it is certain. The loss of hydrological stationarity is certain; it's happening, and the system it's happening within is too large for any control signal sent now to alter this outcome. With that loss goes reliable agriculture. All considerations of economy and constructions of power rest on a sufficient food supply.
Could a reliable food supply be secured for the post-agricultural world?
Maybe, given an every-nerve-and-sinew effort. (You have to be done before you need it, you don't know when you're going to need it, and you can today be uneasily confident that you're going to need it soon.)
Is anyone making that effort?
Not on a sufficient scale.
It's _easier_ to worry about spheres of influence and contention and the risk of nuclear war, but none of those are the actual problem we have today.
I would say that the previous Chinese committee leadership did have a coherent plan to secure general prosperity, and frankly I think it was working; they started enforcing the on-the-books environmental and labor laws. Without fear or favor.
But they were forced out by the internal machinations of Xi Jinping, who cares more about personal power and his fragile ego than anything else -- and is also quite stupid. He is very much a Wilhelm II.
I think that's what I meant -- Xi Jinping is the face of incumbency (and thus heredity, and the absence of meaningful change) in the Party. Attempts to secure the general prosperity fail because the general prosperity disadvantages someone whose position rests on (some mix of) corruption, heredity, incumbency, and existing wealth. It takes a lot of sustained exercise of power to overcome incumbency.
(It is also, I think, dangerous to decide someone like Xi is stupid. Narrow, perhaps, but getting and keeping his position is not a trivial success.)
This incumbency problem is widespread everywhere; the US has, in effect, single-party rule because it's nigh-impossible to get into public office without being a mammonite. There are numerate mammonites and monster raving loony mammonites, but everyone's a mammonite. But we can see with the public health failures in a lot of notionally advanced economies that civil authority does not articulate on the substrate very widely in these places; you can't do things that interrupt the flow of profits to the incumbents. (That is, the notionally democratic consent-of-the-governed forms are in practice nearly completely replaced by corporate rule, in the same way feudal estates arose in Late Antiquity, displacing the former system of laws long before this was officially acknowledged.) People want to be CEO because a CEO is a supreme sole autocrat; manage to be CEO of Amazon and you can do anything you want.
China -- which _is_ able to exercise the civil authority -- is doing better than the North Atlantic economies in this respect. (In large part by murdering billionaires who start to treat wealth as an alternative power base.)
And, again, between Thwaites and the loss of hydrologic stationarity all of this is moot. I can't imagine that the Party doesn't know that. I doubt analysis that isn't arising from that basis; is there a consensus that they need autocracy to withstand the shock of whatever economic tradition they imagine will keep people fed, and for the thing to actually happen to produce the necessary consensus?
I wondered why Xi's ego was so fragile. A sensible dictator, upon being compared to Winnie the Pooh, would have just rolled with it. Xi completely freaked out and banned references to Pooh.
I think this is because Pooh is "a bear of very little brain", and Xi *KNOWS* he's stupid. (So at least he isn't Dunning-Kruger level stupid!)
I've been watching Xi's idiot moves. The Xinkiang genocide/prison camps is *stupid*; he's attacking a population which were no threat. Destroying Hong Kong's self-government is *stupid*; not only is he killing the economic goose which laid the golden eggs, he's also overeager; the Sino-British Joint Declaration said China could change the government in 2047, but he decided to hurry because of his fragility. Trying to tell Chinese people to have more children is *extra stupid*; they're just laughing at that. Trying to remove "effeminate" male popstars from the airwaves is *extraordinarily* stupid.
He's stupid, even if he does have a couple of skills at maneuvering politically. Gaining and keeping his position *is* in my view a trivial success, and I don't think he has much more skill than someone who inherited it. The behind-the-scenes machinations are quite obscure, but it looks to me like he was put in as a placeholder by other factions and then seized control from the factions which had put him in as a placeholder. The government is surviving due to the people around him, but he keeps purging the competent.
I'm not sure you noticed his lack of national control; I caught it because I follow energy markets and was following Tesla; but the provincial governors are actually doing whatever they like and ignoring Xi. The Shanghai government assured Tesla that they'd get the national law changed to accomodate what they wanted, and started construction before the law was changed; it was then changed. National orders regarding energy policy are routinely ignored (whether pro-coal or pro-renewables), the provincial governors do whatever they want, and the national government changes the law afterwards to retroactively legalize it.
Xi doesn't have as much power domestically as he pretends to internationally. He can go after the billionaires (who mostly reappear and say "eh, no big deal"), but he's only gone after one provincial governor by my count. I think the Xinkiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan sabre-rattling is intended to threaten the other provincial governors... and it's not working. They're not cowed at all.
One of the other things I've been watching in China is the traditional national party elites quietly maneuvering themselves sideways, into positions (academic, for example) where they aren't in the direct line of fire from Xi but will be ready to move back into power after Xi implodes.
I do think any serious China analyst would be *well advised* to learn the names and backgrounds of every single provincial leader. Just like it was useful to know the leaders of all the SSRs within the USSR just before it broke up, and most people didn't. The centrifugal phenomenon of larger states breaking up and power moving to a provincial level is worldwide, and China is not immune.
Worth noting that Imperial Prussia did pretty well while it had competent administrators like Bismarck, and started losing its mind when the incompetent Wilhelm II took over.
Similarly, China did pretty well under Deng and the generations of his successors, and started losing its mind when the incompetent Xi Jinping took over...
The historical parallel I see is that autocracy is a weakness for a country because idiots can get into power too easily and are too hard to remove. You don't notice the weakness as long as a competent autocrat is in power, but when Wilhelm dismisses Bismarck as Chancellor and decides to rule personally, or Xi Jinping eliminates term limits and turns the Central Committee into sycophants, the governmental errors start happening immediately....
Well, yes. What to do when your authoritarian system puts an idiot into authority has always been the Achilles heel, and is often a fatal one...
Seems to me the Wilhelmine China analogy really ought to be focused on the British response rather than the German one. That is, the tragedy of WWI was that a fading power elected to duke it out with a rising power and the fight just went on far too long. Had Britain sat it out, the whole affair would have been (probably) nothing more than another Franco-Prussian war. Therefore, to pursue the analogy, we ought to consider more the British calculations and see whether there are parallels to present-day American strategic thinking. I've always thought the biggest blunder for Britain was the Anglo-French naval agreement of November, 1912. By that agreement Britain moved its Mediterranean fleet to the North Sea, to bottle up Germany, and France moved its Atlantic fleet into the Mediterranean to protect British interests there. Effectively, this committed Britain to a joint defense pact against Germany without securing a British voice in French policy. It's generally accepted that Britain did this to avoid the great expense of outgunning a rising power in Germany. My view is that the motivation to save money was because of the great pressures being put upon the old elite (the Liberal Imperialists) to adopt social programs to improve the lot of the lower classes in order to bridge divides within the Cabinet with the Radicals. (The theme of my undergraduate honors thesis from 40 years ago). Therefore, I am asking myself whether the current divisions within the US, and the urgent need to restore employment, renew infrastructure, avoid a turn to authoritarianism (and kleptocracy), etc., will egg us on to adopting strategic policies that will push us into unwinnable conflicts either to bridge internal divides or make resources available for domestic programs. At the moment, I'm thinking maybe not. I do not see how we will loose autonomy of action in East Asia. Are the players there who are important to us (Japan, Australia, Indonesia) going to trap us into conflict with China? (Maybe India, but we never treat India as a serious player, do we?) Will the defense of Taiwan (that is what we are actually talking about, right?), bear a meaningful relationship to our domestic troubles? Only if we make the decision to unequivocally dominate the Formosa Straits, as that decision would require either lots of debt or lots of taxes (both doable in theory but politically impossible). But that decision seems to be ours alone, not one thrust upon us. That is, I think we will either blunder or not based on purely "strategic" considerations, whether or not China is rising or waning. The non-kinetic conflicts (technology pirating and mercantilism), are ones for which we have broad coalitions to oppose China, and given time they should work out without bullets or nuclear weapons. I seem to be coming down on the side that while China may be Wilhelmine (a rising power with a parasitic leadership class looking to impress the peasants with nationalistic bluster), and the US may be (no...is) a fading power trying to avoid the inevitable, I am not sure that dynamic is prescriptive in present circumstances.
Touché… It took two (Germany to provoke, on the grounds that they had to ride or die in the summer and fall of 1914 and would have won or lost by Christmas, so British intervention would be irrelevant) and Britain (because what it saw as its practical realpolitik interest reinforced its global moral order interest and so responded to the provocation)…
The problem with Wilhelmine China as an analogy is that the times have altered.
Leaving aside the very sharp distinction in the construction of military power -- today, there's no such thing as a Power or Great Power; there are nuclear powers, and everybody else -- the construction of industrial power -- those long supply chains and a post-nationalist industry that maximizes profits -- that is, money flows to plutocrats -- above all other concerns, and the futility of gaining by war -- the US hasn't managed to do this despite massive advantages in capability; war is profitable for those positioned to extract profits from the public purse, it's not profitable overall as it could be in the 18th and 19th centuries for those doing the looting -- the construction of a US/China rivalry misunderstands a bunch of stuff.
Both entities are in the early stages of collapse. (that is, there's a central authority, but it's not consistently effectual. The degree to which its writ runs is a matter of ongoing contention.)
The US is incapable of enacting or defending a sufficient construction of the public good to deal with a pandemic; it will certainly fail in respect to climate change. It's been taken over by an apocalyptic death cult and cannot make decisions on a materialist basis. Since the system has to make materialist decisions to function at all, while this inability holds, collapse will continue.
China has bought internal peace through rising prosperity; to do this, they've repeated the Soviet mistake and created an excessively specialized mechanism of industry. (the Soviet version was focused on armaments; the Chinese version focused on exports.) They haven't got and cannot build without thoroughly displacing incumbents a mechanism to secure general prosperity. (they're aware of the problem and they're trying to refocus from money to prosperity, but the definition they're using and the widely agreed definition differ and there's the inherent limits of incumbent-driven reform getting in the way.) Their success has now landed them in a position where they're too large to continue with this strategy, and their internal legitimacy is the source of such confidence that they've resorted to a massive program of social control. (Note that it's only really distinct from the Western credit-based systems in being notionally public and centralized.)
All of that is bad, but none of it is certain. The loss of hydrological stationarity is certain; it's happening, and the system it's happening within is too large for any control signal sent now to alter this outcome. With that loss goes reliable agriculture. All considerations of economy and constructions of power rest on a sufficient food supply.
Could a reliable food supply be secured for the post-agricultural world?
Maybe, given an every-nerve-and-sinew effort. (You have to be done before you need it, you don't know when you're going to need it, and you can today be uneasily confident that you're going to need it soon.)
Is anyone making that effort?
Not on a sufficient scale.
It's _easier_ to worry about spheres of influence and contention and the risk of nuclear war, but none of those are the actual problem we have today.
All true...
I would say that the previous Chinese committee leadership did have a coherent plan to secure general prosperity, and frankly I think it was working; they started enforcing the on-the-books environmental and labor laws. Without fear or favor.
But they were forced out by the internal machinations of Xi Jinping, who cares more about personal power and his fragile ego than anything else -- and is also quite stupid. He is very much a Wilhelm II.
I think that's what I meant -- Xi Jinping is the face of incumbency (and thus heredity, and the absence of meaningful change) in the Party. Attempts to secure the general prosperity fail because the general prosperity disadvantages someone whose position rests on (some mix of) corruption, heredity, incumbency, and existing wealth. It takes a lot of sustained exercise of power to overcome incumbency.
(It is also, I think, dangerous to decide someone like Xi is stupid. Narrow, perhaps, but getting and keeping his position is not a trivial success.)
This incumbency problem is widespread everywhere; the US has, in effect, single-party rule because it's nigh-impossible to get into public office without being a mammonite. There are numerate mammonites and monster raving loony mammonites, but everyone's a mammonite. But we can see with the public health failures in a lot of notionally advanced economies that civil authority does not articulate on the substrate very widely in these places; you can't do things that interrupt the flow of profits to the incumbents. (That is, the notionally democratic consent-of-the-governed forms are in practice nearly completely replaced by corporate rule, in the same way feudal estates arose in Late Antiquity, displacing the former system of laws long before this was officially acknowledged.) People want to be CEO because a CEO is a supreme sole autocrat; manage to be CEO of Amazon and you can do anything you want.
China -- which _is_ able to exercise the civil authority -- is doing better than the North Atlantic economies in this respect. (In large part by murdering billionaires who start to treat wealth as an alternative power base.)
And, again, between Thwaites and the loss of hydrologic stationarity all of this is moot. I can't imagine that the Party doesn't know that. I doubt analysis that isn't arising from that basis; is there a consensus that they need autocracy to withstand the shock of whatever economic tradition they imagine will keep people fed, and for the thing to actually happen to produce the necessary consensus?
I wondered why Xi's ego was so fragile. A sensible dictator, upon being compared to Winnie the Pooh, would have just rolled with it. Xi completely freaked out and banned references to Pooh.
I think this is because Pooh is "a bear of very little brain", and Xi *KNOWS* he's stupid. (So at least he isn't Dunning-Kruger level stupid!)
I've been watching Xi's idiot moves. The Xinkiang genocide/prison camps is *stupid*; he's attacking a population which were no threat. Destroying Hong Kong's self-government is *stupid*; not only is he killing the economic goose which laid the golden eggs, he's also overeager; the Sino-British Joint Declaration said China could change the government in 2047, but he decided to hurry because of his fragility. Trying to tell Chinese people to have more children is *extra stupid*; they're just laughing at that. Trying to remove "effeminate" male popstars from the airwaves is *extraordinarily* stupid.
He's stupid, even if he does have a couple of skills at maneuvering politically. Gaining and keeping his position *is* in my view a trivial success, and I don't think he has much more skill than someone who inherited it. The behind-the-scenes machinations are quite obscure, but it looks to me like he was put in as a placeholder by other factions and then seized control from the factions which had put him in as a placeholder. The government is surviving due to the people around him, but he keeps purging the competent.
I'm not sure you noticed his lack of national control; I caught it because I follow energy markets and was following Tesla; but the provincial governors are actually doing whatever they like and ignoring Xi. The Shanghai government assured Tesla that they'd get the national law changed to accomodate what they wanted, and started construction before the law was changed; it was then changed. National orders regarding energy policy are routinely ignored (whether pro-coal or pro-renewables), the provincial governors do whatever they want, and the national government changes the law afterwards to retroactively legalize it.
Xi doesn't have as much power domestically as he pretends to internationally. He can go after the billionaires (who mostly reappear and say "eh, no big deal"), but he's only gone after one provincial governor by my count. I think the Xinkiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan sabre-rattling is intended to threaten the other provincial governors... and it's not working. They're not cowed at all.
One of the other things I've been watching in China is the traditional national party elites quietly maneuvering themselves sideways, into positions (academic, for example) where they aren't in the direct line of fire from Xi but will be ready to move back into power after Xi implodes.
I do think any serious China analyst would be *well advised* to learn the names and backgrounds of every single provincial leader. Just like it was useful to know the leaders of all the SSRs within the USSR just before it broke up, and most people didn't. The centrifugal phenomenon of larger states breaking up and power moving to a provincial level is worldwide, and China is not immune.
Not a placeholder. Say, rather, a person with a very strong network...
Better description. Yeah, he's someone with a very strong network.
Still not strong enough to make the provincial governors do what he wants, though...
Well, he can pick one to threaten and make an example of, and then hope that the others fall into line...
Yes