Xi Jinping just offered the Global South a stark alternative to decades of western diktats, war, and economic duress. 'Peaceful modernization' will establish sovereignty, economy, and independence for the world's struggling states...The Cradle
‘Peaceful modernization’: China’s offering to the Global South
Pepe Escobar
This is another 'rules-based order' with lipstick on it.
ReplyDeleteYou can avoid militarism, but the rules of economic domination haven't changed.
You can avoid militarism, but the rules of economic domination haven't changed.
ReplyDeleteTrue, as far as it goes. But China as develops is the naturally dominant entity owing to its size and military power is a combination of national capability (technology and industrial base) and manpower, which is a function of population. Does this mean that China would be dominant in the same way as the US has been, through "competition," unless, competition is working against the US that is. China says no. While the US emphasizes competition and loads the playing field, we are emphasizing cooperation and the same institutional standard for all.
We are in the process of seeing how that goes down.
Economic competition is all that is left in the toolbox of geopolitics. According to the myth of progress, we will build a better future through co-operation, as well as innovation, which is driven by competition. But well-intentioned futurists aren't in charge of human development. To a surprising degree, no one is in charge.
ReplyDeleteIn physical terms, a renewable energy economy won't support modernization as it is being described in this article.
ReplyDeleteIn physical terms, a renewable energy economy won't support modernization as it is being described in this article.
ReplyDeleteWithout full international cooperation, it is not possible anyway. It is very difficult to get everyone not only to buy in but also to comply, given the economic consequences of the policy.
If climate change is real, they we may as well have a nuclear war and get it over with quickly rather than be boiled slowly.
In my comment of 7:33 PM, the sentence, While the US emphasizes competition and loads the playing field, we are emphasizing cooperation and the same institutional standard for all, should have been in quotes to indicate that it represents China's response.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the harm in competition if workers and entrepreneurs are helped to move on to new opportunities?
ReplyDeleteWhat is the harm in competition if workers and entrepreneurs are helped to move on to new opportunities?
ReplyDeleteThere are times to compete and times to cooperate.
Eddie Lampert put Sears under on the mistaken assumption that intra-firm competition was superior.
Without concerted action internationally, addressing climate change adequately and in a timely fashion is an unreachable goal.
"Eddie Lampert put Sears under on the mistaken assumption that intra-firm competition was superior."
ReplyDeleteThankfully, we don't hear too much about that dude anymore, but still sad all the damage he caused.
An Ayn Randian psycho.
There are times to compete and times to cooperate.
ReplyDeleteCertainly.
Is that also an admission that they are complementary?
Eddie Lampert put Sears under on the mistaken assumption that intra-firm competition was superior.
In this case we are referring to intra-national, intra-regional, or intra-tradeblock competition. This has been superior to 'socialism in one country' or 'soviet bloc' models.
What's wrong with this system?
The answer should be familiar: lack of labour and environmental standards. Beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies. This distorts the competitive playing field.
What opportunities does this system provide?
China went from 3rd world to 1st world status in terms of economic power. Few pundits objected to China's lack of labour rights, or their disregard for environmental issues 40 years ago. For investors, those are attractive qualities. Reducing costs helps firms compete.
China is where it is today because of the exploitative 'rules-based order'. The old men of their ruling party seized an opportunity, discarding ideology for nationalism.
Nationalism is the countervailing force to an imperfect, exploitative system. Without nationalist politics, countries are susceptible to corruption from within and looting from abroad.
Nationalism is the countervailing force to the adoption of international standards. Nationalism is distrustful of globalism. Within nation-states, nationalism promotes cooperation.
On a planet divided into nation-states, nationalism is unavoidable. It is structural.
In a species prone to tribal behavior, nationalism is inevitable.
Without concerted action internationally, addressing climate change adequately and in a timely fashion is an unreachable goal.
That is why climate change, resource depletion, and other ecological crises will not be addressed.
Notice that the competitive system and cooperative model face similar issues. For competition to be ethical, standards are required. For cooperation to work, concerted action is required. It's not that competition is "bad" or that cooperation is a virtue. They are complementary.
Peripheral aspects of the system are the issue. The core approach of competition and cooperation work. It is possible to have a mixed economy when countervailing political forces are in balance. At the international level, there's no balance. We have geopolitical maniacs on one hand, and utopian globalist dreamers on the other.
aCompetition and cooperation have been operative throughout evolution. They are both found is interspecies and intraspecies, and also affect both in-groups and out-groups. Where there is a balance between the two, there is progress and where there is an imbalance there is either stasis or decline.
ReplyDeleteAll contemporary economies, although they different in some respects, are basically mixed economies that combine competition and cooperation. The most striking example of this now is China, which is attempting to do this consciously and intentionally according to plan that is adjust for feedback. If they are creative and agile enough, they will succeed and progress faster than the rest of the pack, as they have been doing for the last several decades.
The US and other liberal countries are still arguing about this even through it is appearing that their time in the sun is passing.
Socialism Is Bad for the Environment
ReplyDeleteAs the Soviet Union began to collapse, the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner admitted that central planning had failed economically but said we needed “to rethink the meaning of socialism.” Now it was the thing that had to emerge if humanity was to cope with “the one transcendent challenge that faces it within a thinkable timespan.” Heilbroner considered this one thing to be “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.” Markets may be better at allocating resources, Heilbroner thought, but only socialism could avoid ecological disaster.
Not long after, however, it became clear that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes. Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher.
And people’s health was suffering as a result. Respiratory illnesses from pollution were rampant. In East Germany, 60 percent of the population suffered from respiratory ailments. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), nearly half of all children had intestinal disorders caused by contaminated water. Children in Poland were found to have five times more lead in their blood than children in Western Europe. Conditions were so bad that, as Heilbroner acknowledged, the Soviet Union became the first industrialized country in history to experience a prolonged peacetime decline in average life expectancy.
As the Iron Curtain lifted, socialism’s dirty environmental secret was exposed: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the most polluted and degraded places on earth. “When historians finally conduct an autopsy of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism,” economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. wrote in 1992, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”
Why Socialism Causes Pollution
ReplyDeleteThe Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union there was a vast body of environmental law and regulation that purportedly protected the public interest, but these constraints have had no perceivable benefit. The Soviet Union, like all socialist countries, suffered from a massive "tragedy of the commons," to borrow the term used by biologist Garrett Hardin in his classic 1968 article. Where property is communally or governmentally owned and treated as a free resource, resources will inevitably be overused with little regard for future consequences.
The Soviet government’s imperatives for economic growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually all property and resources, caused tremendous environmental damage. According to economist Marshall Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, "The attitude that nature is there to be exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet production ethic."
A typical example of the environmental damage caused by the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for housing and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees around the beaches were used for decades as construction materials. Because there is no private property, "no value is attached to the gravel along the seashore. Since, in effect, it is free, the contractors haul it away. This practice caused massive beach erosion which reduced the Black Sea coast by 50 percent between 1920 and 1960. Eventually, hotels, hospitals, and of all things, a military sanitarium collapsed into the sea as the shoreline gave way. Frequent landslides–as many as 300 per year–have been reported.
Water pollution is catastrophic. Effluent from a chemical plant killed almost all the fish in the Oka River in 1965, and similar fish kills have occurred in the Volga, Ob, Yenesei, Ural, and Northern Dvina rivers. Most Russian factories discharge their waste without cleaning it at all. Mines, oil wells, and ships freely dump waste and ballast into any available body of water, since it is all one big (and tragic) "commons."
@ Tom
ReplyDeleteChina faces bigger challenges than the US. Their energy dependence doesn't bode well for their future. Our time in the sun was a one-off thanks to fossil fuel. We'll never revisit those times again.