Reply to China Retaliates Against the U.S. With Its Own Higher Tariffs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I disagree with your assertion that we are in a better position in the long run than China.

[b]China is a civilization that was here thousands of years before us and will survive thousands of years after us.
[/b]
There is more to China than just an economy.

The US on the other hand is it’s economy. It isn’t a civilizational people. A trade war with China would hurt the US much more in the long run as it would accelerate the timetable of a national breakup.

[/quote]

:roll:  Oh my gawd. That's such a self aggrandizing cliche that the Chinese holds about themselves. Thousands of years? So what? China keeps looking longingly to its past but its past is far from being glorious. The traditional Chinese culture valued education and arts for the sake of education and arts, not real actual productivity. They looked down on people who conducted business, even though such people were the economic engine of the society. This is why the country stopped innovating, became insular, and the west rushed past it in terms of technological and economic advancement. In any effective plan of China's future development, looking to the glory days of its past is *not* a part of the equation. Xi may have read San Guo but he realizes that the lessons in those stories don't require the baggage of Chinese history for their deeper meaning. This is decidedly exactly the opposite of the situation in the US, which relies upon the principles of classical liberalism that it was founded on, and will do so for the foreseeable future, because the US has been going through a continuous and coherent evolution.

You talk about "civilization", as if China's current history has some rational attachment to its past. But remember that through communist rule and the cultural revolution, much of the good aspects of China's past has been washed away. The sense of honor and mutual that people used to ascribe to were washed away by decades of poverty and encouraged treachery against each other. There is *NO* moral foundation that gives context to China's current generation. Pursuit of money and wealth is everything. This is why China's current culture is so rife moral corruption, with people selling fakes of everything from hand bags to baby formula. Imagine the mindset of people selling fake baby formula - and we are not talking about some isolated incident, see also the recent vaccine scandal. The young men in China are unmoored in their expectation of reality, all wanting/expecting to attain high levels of wealth in very short order. And the women subscribe to the idea of that no exchange is beyond consideration as long as there is good money in it, to the point that many women in China are open to being a mistress to someone rich, a lifestyle that is celebrated openly. This is also why China is so numb to the authoritarian state that conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, with the population passively accepting their fate like sheep. This is because all of the good foundational beliefs that underpin a culture is completely lost in China.

[b]This is also why Chinese tourists behave so poorly in other countries - because they lack culture, the very thing that they believe they have in abundance through their "thousands of years" of history. [/quote][/b]

They act this way because life is cheap in China. There are so many people competing for the same jobs, housing, schools, businesses, and yes - even pictures of a museum display. They behave poorly because they have been told by their government that their lives are worthless and therefore if they want something they need to take it for themselves whenever the opportunity presents itself.

This why riding the subway is so awful in Beijing: you'll have grown men push aside and trample elderly ladies for a seat on the train. There's no room for social graces in hyper-competitive environments where resources are constrained by a massive population.

In fact, I posit that in the near term the U.S. will evolve to culturally become more like China as government spending is cut and citizens must compete aggressively with each other for a shrinking piece of the pie. [/quote]

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