I don’t think the trade war will end with Trump, President Pence will be equally if not harder on China. The Dems will not go the other way either come 2020.
Btw, news out of Taiwan is China is facing real GDP growth of 1.6% this year and likely negative GDP next year along with 10 million new unemployed. Things are going from bad to worse over there.[/quote]
I am replying to this from the other thread.
I agree on the anti China sentiment in Washington. It shows how our policy makers are talking from both sides is their mouths. On the one hand, China is a threat; and on the other hand, China cannot succeed because their system is corrupt, inefficient or whatever.
The real fear is that China will succeed and develop an alternative model to the western order, in which case Francis Fukuyama’s end of history will be proven wrong.
A German minister (forgot which one) denounced China’s growing influence but said it’s up to the West to give a more attractive option to any country that wants to do business with China
Do you really think China will go into recession? I know the narrative is that china’s statistics are fake and political. But you can’t lie about growth rates more than 1 year, else the math no longer works and the deception becomes self-evident.
My take on China is that their political model is worse for individual freedom. But their censorship system prevents fake news and irrational populism. Also, at critical stages of economic development (now the 4th industrial revolution) you need large amounts of capital for puclic insfrastructure. Think of what the interstate highway system has done for America, not all good and lots of bad, but it has driven economic growth. The private sector could not have done it.[/quote]
Kevin Rudd in November of this year: “we actually don’t know at the moment what the real growth rate is, when things get really bad on the growth rate, the Chinese statistical claim on the growth rate can border on the creative.”
Also remember why 45 millions of Chinese peasants died during the Great Leap Forward. Starting at the collective farm level there was over-estimate of grain production and granary storage. Moving up to township level, the numbers get padded some more, at the county level, some more padding, at provincial level a bit more padding, so at the end the central government received grain storage and production data that was wildly out of line with reality. Everything was based on central planning, and because central planners planned using hugely inflated data, they didn’t see the shortage coming, the famine happened and people died.
The structural system that was in place then is still in place now. People are promoted based on GDP growth rate. So it pays to cook up the numbers at every level of government. Once the data gets to the central government, it then does the creative statistical game Kevin Rudd describes, the end result is the claim of 6.5% growth rate but actual growth rate of 1.6%.
As for fake news, the People’s Daily and Global Times are the grand daddy of fake news, Fox’s got nothing on them!
