China publicly announced that it is now in a ‘cold economic war’ with the US for the future of the world. China was so confident of its eventual victory, it clearly articulated the centerpiece of their effort to accomplish it: 1 belt 1 road. Unfortunately, due to a self-inflicted wound (Trump is merely a symptom), the US couldn’t be in a worse position to counter this effort. Decades of blind adherence to economic and social neoliberalism has shattered US cohesion along all 3 vectors: moral, mental, and physical. The result has been intractable economic stagnation, social turmoil, and political chaos. Even worse is on the horizon: the US is careening towards identity authoritarianism. In time, the US may be able to regain stability. Regardless, it’s unlikely the US will find a way through this crisis fast enough to mount a successful conventional counter to China’s challenge. So, what is to be done under the assumption the US will eventually recover, but not soon enough for conventional efforts?
Tag: china
China social credit
black mirror nails another one:
instead of trying to enforce stability or conformity with a big stick and a good dose of top-down fear, the government is attempting to make obedience feel like gaming. It is a method of social control dressed up in some points-reward system. It’s gamified obedience.
Scaling Surveillance
China is building the world’s most powerful facial recognition system to identify any one of its 1.3b citizens within 3 seconds. The goal is for the system to able to match someone’s face to their ID photo with 90% accuracy. However, the project is encountering “many difficulties” due to the technical limits of facial recognition and the sheer size of the database involved. Some totally unrelated people in China have faces so alike that even their parents cannot tell them apart.
China textbooks
the us can always export textbooks on homeopathy, flat earth, creationism and alternate history:
When primary school administrators in the U.K. choose study materials for the fall semester this year, they will have a new option: math textbooks imported from Shanghai, a city celebrated as a global math power. It is a remarkable admission by British education authorities that their own methods have stumbled, and that Chinese educators – after years of racking up world firsts in math scores – have developed something admirable enough to import in whole cloth.
AI taxation
if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable AI companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their AI software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the “parent” nation’s AI companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users. Such economic arrangements would reshape today’s geopolitical alliances.
Chinese Metro Evolution
In 1990, China, then a country with a population of 1.1b, had only 3 metro systems—located in Beijing, Hong Kong and Tianjin. Fast forward a mere 27 years later and the number of urban transit systems has grown 10x.
Size of China
I can think of many instructive explanations for China’s early size and unity that are nonetheless derivative. For instance perhaps a common language for writing played a key role, or perhaps the civil service and the exam system bound the country together. I can think of a few factors that might count as fundamental, and often they involve economies of scale:
- There may be greater economies of scale in Chinese agriculture.
- There may be economies of scale for fighting land battles with horses.
- China had lower climate volatility than did Europe.
- China has 2 main, navigable rivers running east to west.
- China was formed when the prevailing technologies favored size and scale.
- China did a better job absorbing the “barbarians” and thus persisted as a larger political unit.
China trade education
china is now producing videos like these to explain the benefits of free trade to people who might be confused.
Writing about chinese food
Our food is still largely looked on upon from the sidelines as a mysterious cuisine of antiquity. Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet.
Medical Tourism SEZ
The Chinese government have set up a special economic zone for medical tourism. Hainan Boao Lecheng international medical tourism pilot zone, the first of its kind in the country, was approved by the State Council in 2013. It enjoys 9 preferential policies, including special permission for medical talent, technology, devices and drugs, and an allowance for entrance of foreign capital and international communications. The pilot zone also has permission to carry out leading-edge medical technology research, such as stem cell clinical research.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 