The headwinds acting on the Chinese economy right now are formidable, on top of collapsing housing markets and the risks of Xi’s Zero-Covid policy, add one more anthropocenic shock, extreme heat.
Good read. There appears to be an insoluble dilemma over growing China's economy out of its present crisis and responding to excessive heat driven by climate change. With all significant decision making at the top, how does China respond to goals that appear to be polar opposites?
So there's deflationary pressure and controlled spread of a dangerous pathogen? Imagine slowdown is reducing emissions too. The cat is catching mice even if it doesn't look how you would prefer(?). On the look out for more redistribution + solar geoengineering for the complete package.
In 1897, "The War of the Worlds" came out. It tells the story of the colonizing West, able to conquer the world with technology and industrial might, brought low by new powers from another planet with even greater technologies and machines. These new forces don't respond to reason, they care nothing for religion, really they only seek to take over and impose their will. But like every heedless conqueror before them, these invaders are ultimately destroyed by the humblest of creatures, a deadly microbe. Perhaps had they been more compassionate, or had they coexisted with the people they sought to exterminate, they might have learned to survive or avoided being wiped out, but the moral lesson of the story is obvious, that no human or even alien force is so great that it can conquer science, biological or otherwise.
I don't mean to suggest that China is run by an evil alien force, or that they have anything at all like the designs of the invading aliens, but they are very much in that story all the same. China's leadership has an excessive case of hubris, and despite the recent widespread trend of criticizing democracy in favor of the supposedly greater efficiency and capability of autocracies, it is precisely its lack of messy democracy and all its attendant problems that has sent China hurtling into a collision with basic scientific reality. The party cannot silence nature with GDP numbers, and it cannot simply decide to no longer have a deadly epidemic because it said so. Microbes will not listen to a party slogan any more than they will to tentacled machines shooting lasers.
Re: war of the world's - your point is wonderfully put but does ultimately read to me as unreconstructed fatalism, apologies. Regarding your other points - extremely interesting and thank you (though am not sure GDP is as much a priority as it once was). However I do feel if we really try to consider ends not means then there is arguably a positive frame esp. in the context of a crumbling world.
Good read. There appears to be an insoluble dilemma over growing China's economy out of its present crisis and responding to excessive heat driven by climate change. With all significant decision making at the top, how does China respond to goals that appear to be polar opposites?
wonderful analysis and the proof will be in grain prices as we head into the North American and european harvests
Didn't you write a book about how well China handled COVID? Yes, and I remember laughing at it, and you, in my review, Tooze. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4264316921
So there's deflationary pressure and controlled spread of a dangerous pathogen? Imagine slowdown is reducing emissions too. The cat is catching mice even if it doesn't look how you would prefer(?). On the look out for more redistribution + solar geoengineering for the complete package.
In 1897, "The War of the Worlds" came out. It tells the story of the colonizing West, able to conquer the world with technology and industrial might, brought low by new powers from another planet with even greater technologies and machines. These new forces don't respond to reason, they care nothing for religion, really they only seek to take over and impose their will. But like every heedless conqueror before them, these invaders are ultimately destroyed by the humblest of creatures, a deadly microbe. Perhaps had they been more compassionate, or had they coexisted with the people they sought to exterminate, they might have learned to survive or avoided being wiped out, but the moral lesson of the story is obvious, that no human or even alien force is so great that it can conquer science, biological or otherwise.
I don't mean to suggest that China is run by an evil alien force, or that they have anything at all like the designs of the invading aliens, but they are very much in that story all the same. China's leadership has an excessive case of hubris, and despite the recent widespread trend of criticizing democracy in favor of the supposedly greater efficiency and capability of autocracies, it is precisely its lack of messy democracy and all its attendant problems that has sent China hurtling into a collision with basic scientific reality. The party cannot silence nature with GDP numbers, and it cannot simply decide to no longer have a deadly epidemic because it said so. Microbes will not listen to a party slogan any more than they will to tentacled machines shooting lasers.
Re: war of the world's - your point is wonderfully put but does ultimately read to me as unreconstructed fatalism, apologies. Regarding your other points - extremely interesting and thank you (though am not sure GDP is as much a priority as it once was). However I do feel if we really try to consider ends not means then there is arguably a positive frame esp. in the context of a crumbling world.
More redistribution ain't happening soon, and to riff on your riff on Deng's statement? The mice are getting skinnier.