Chinese Soft Power and Media Discussion and Updates
- Thread starter tankphobia
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It seems the show is decently popular. Which is a shame since the studio that commissioned it just treated it like backlog they wanted to get out of the way, but the creators with their limited resources really put their souls into it and allowed it to get a decent amount of aclaim.
Sadly, with just a cult following that likely won't be enough for them to greenlight a second season.
What do you expect out of a journalist regurgitating Michael Pettis? Go to the actual source, rather than the person repeating the arguments without much critical thinking. Pettis's Keynesian reasoning has been brought up countless times here, and it's already clear what the limits of his analyses are - ie, data distortion, obsession with investment / consumption gap, US bias/intentional agenda pushing, and so on.
The reality is that the success of China's state led system has proven to be impossible to explain via capitalist orthodoxy, so they turned to blaming it on China (and other trade surplus countries) stealing from the rest of the world and mis-allocating investment. What they persistently fail to bring up is that "capital efficiency" is not the final question in economics - productivity is, and the difference between "useful" productivity and "useless" productivity is not solely determined by the market.
That is to say, consumers are not the objective judge of value, and to the degree that there is an objective judge of value, it is future productivity, measured not in dollar terms but in the mathematical improvement of productive capacity. This is especially true in a world where productivity is dominated by AI and robots. as AI and robots do not consume, yet such a world is bound to have more productivity, not less.
China's historical strategy has been to maximize future productivity, and not just consumer value. This isn't to say that China doesn't care about consumers, but to say that Chinese planners believe they know better than the average person on what will strengthen China's competitiveness, and in that, they are most probably correct.
The investment in green energy is a perfect example of this. That was a strategic investment by China, not a consumer-driven effect. Left to their own devices, consumers would hardly adopt EVs as long as gas was economical, yet strategists know we are at peak oil and that reliance on foreign oil makes China vulnerable to price shocks and political black mail. They also know that, the country that is able to crack green energy first, will get a tremendous advantage in technology & infrastructure over those who are stuck in their ways. Pushing through natural inertia via strategic intervention has always been China's super weapon, and as long as the planners in charge are well educated, smart, and talented, their decisions will on average be consistently better than the consumer's.
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Engineer
Major
The West is operating under feudalism larping as capitalism, focusing on appearance over substance. China puts capitalism theories into practice, and that's why China's economy is running circles around the Western economies. And yes, China practices socialisms too, as there is nothing preventing the two systems from co-existing other than the West claiming they can't.
In short, there is nothing wrong with capitalist orthodoxy, just that the West are the actual heretics.
Any ideological orthodoxy is inevitably wrong if adhered to with blind fanaticism. The ultimate point of all this economic ideology is to produce material results, not to win abstruse debates over ever-finer semantics. That's why it's called "socialism with Chinese characteristics," not "memorize every word in Das Kapital." Any effective ideology is a living thing which evolves over time, as seen for example with Jiang and Hu and Xi each contributing in turn. Every ineffective ideology ossifies into a prison of delusions and dies when it fails to keep up with reality.
If you lose sight of reality, well then, you have lost sight of reality.
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Ironic, AI fuelled productivity boom is meant to help US and bring China to is knees, but instead:
1. It's not helping US outside of pure IT related fields since you actually need physical manufacturing to benefit from productivity gains if you want more physical goods
2. It is helping China to increase productivity, since China actually has real manufactoring power
3. It's bringing India to its knees since India is heavily reliant on IT related service industry, the very industries under threat from automation