I don't think the author understands what free trade is:
"Regardless of the mystical properties claimed for it, the invisible hand of self-interest depends on the visible and often heavy hand of government. To take only one instance, British gunboats helped impose free trade on 19th-century China — a lesson not lost on the Chinese."
I.e. the gunboats removed the Chinese heavy hand on trade. The "invisible hand" cannot operate when the government restricts it.
The role of government in free trade is to prevent forcible interference with it.
"It was Hamilton’s formula, rather than free trade, that made the United States the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 19th century and into the 1920s."
That's quite a reach. The US's biggest market at the time was itself, and the Constitution ensured free trade between the states. It was the world's biggest free trade zone.
"World War II proved only a brief interruption in Japan’s policy of protection."
Japan was not an economic powerhouse before WW2. It was massively unable to compete with the US economically. It could not replace the combat losses of equipment. Etc.
It doesn't help these days that when you hear a 'free trade agreement' being signed between countries its usually not actual 'free trade'but highly regulated for mutual self interest.
highly regulated for mutual self interest This, except in reality, the TPP was highly regulated trade for US self interest, the mutuality was almost completely lost. The economic analysis of the last trade round showed a huge disadvantage to Australia, and I suspect the other participants by structural trade imbalances, and the TPP looked to repeat the outcomes. We have a Pharma Benefits scheme, which excludes US drug companies because they have to stop raping patients with the price model. The TPP planned to lower the wall, for specious "left hand isomer" alternate drugs of no clear benefit, to favour the US view on drug sales: buy our pharma, because we want you to. This is a shallow analysis statement of the position, but a very real view of the outcome: its not free trade, when you bully us over social policy to sell things.
The North atlantic trade treaty outcomes the UK will face in brexit will go there too. No british person wants to eat ammonia soaked chicken. The Americans want to sell the british Chicken and other meat loaded with antibiotics which is excluded from the EU. The british want a trade deal more than anything else, and will cave on food standards regarding excess antibiotics and washed chicken meat (the US production methods are so disgusting they can't exclude systematic salmonella risks) for cheap meat, to make brexit "work" and as a result, will lose food security and safety. For what? for the chimera of "free trade"
I'm not sure I'm following this conversation correctly, but in a sort of Platonic extreme-libertarian understanding of free trade, allowing the sale of this American meat makes sense, because the market is supposed to then decide to avoid American meat. I, personally, certainly do not believe that's the case, but, still, I don't see how this really ties in with the OP's idea that "free trade agreements" aren't really free enough.
Yes, I suspect that an objectively open, but clearly fictive (the basic information asymmetries here aren't going away because US strategic interest is not actually to have a free market) food market, cheap US chicken which might kill you should have some alternates which wind up being a good choice. But, since we won't all have infinite money, or brainpower, or patience, or jobs, we're going to buy that cheap US chicken and hope some other sucker dies. We are going to be told to buy the chicken, and we're going to be told to remove biosecurity laws which limit the sale of tainted chicken, in "the wider public interest"
Its not a choice between a mythically fully free market and protectionism: its a choice between a US centric distorted market model, and another economies centric but distorted market model.
Many are not, indeed. But if you care about the truth, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. You have to challenge the arguments in the chapter on international trade of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles of Economics, and you have to refute the central point. The New York Times and Hacker News do not require that much.
I don't think you've read so closely. What he claims here is that Britain developed its economy using a protectionist scheme and then, in a predatory fashion, imposed "free trade" (specifically the "right" of the British to sell opium) on the Chinese. This had disastrous effects on them (opium addiction is the most obvious, I suppose). Chinese people are not thankful to the British for liberating them from restraints on the free market in the opium wars.
While I am quibbling, the idea that "Japan was not an economic powerhouse" before the Pacific War because they struggled to keep up with production of materiel is not a good one. In the Meiji Restoration Japan went from, in less than 50 years, a backwater to an imperial power in its own right that was able to win the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War (the latter stunned Europeans at the time). They were the strongest and richest of the various East Asian powers and were able to colonize large parts of Asia and, as the article mentions, the Europeans never did get all their Asian colonies back after Japan lost the war.
Japan's real problem in the war was its lack of natural resources. It was highly dependent on imports -- in particular it was highly dependent on American oil, an obvious problem if you're planning to go to war with America. That's why the Dutch East Indies were important and they moved to capture them early (to some extent the paucity of natural resources in Japan is what motivated the project of becoming a colonist in the first place). It's really hard to see how more trade liberalization would have helped.
Besides that, the productive capacity of the United States, and its insulation from attack, was exceptional among all of the powers in World War II, even the UK. I think we can still acknowledge Japan had significant industry, even if it couldn't keep up with the world's best.
Yes, we can acknowledge that Japan had significant industry. It did well compared with the other East Asian economies which were very un-free at the time.
It did poorly compared with the US free trade economy. Even at the outset of WW2, their military equipment was inferior to the US, except in a few places (the Zero, the Yamato). Japan was economically defeated long before the bombing of Japan got in gear. Early battles inflicted disproportionate losses on the Japanese military due to inadequate equipment and supply.
Japan knew their only hope was a quick, devastating surprise attack followed by a peace agreement.
Can you explain to me why more trade liberalization would have made Japan more able to fight the war? I don't see how your post really answers the objections I have.
The more free market and free trade an economy is, the more it is able to produce.
Recall I mentioned that the US in the 1800s, for example, was the biggest free market and free trade zone in the world. It's hard to argue with the incredible results of that.
That seems like a dubious claim. Also, there are significant other differences between America and Japan. And again, an excessive reliance on trade made the war hard for them to win when belligerents quite logically stopped giving them materials that could be used first war.
How about tariffs? Besides geographical isolation, the United States erected pretty strong barriers to any foreign competition and didn't really go in a strong "free trade" direction until after the second World War, after it had already become a hegemonic power.
> Sure. But the common thread among more successful economies vs less successful ones is free markets and free trade.
This article provides what I find to be persuasive arguments that the opposite is true and that successful countries do not begin to significantly liberalize trade until they are already strongly developed.
They're not a measure of prosperity. They weren't particularly high in the US, either.
> persuasive arguments that the opposite is true
That's because it cherry-picked the data, and never looked at the magnitude of the tariffs. If protectionism produced prosperity, Cuba would be richer than Japan. And we wouldn't place sanctions and embargoes to punish countries, and they wouldn't beg for relief from them.
Recall that the US itself is the largest free trade zone in the world. Do you think the US would be more prosperous if California protected itself from imports from the rest of the country?
> Japan was not an economic powerhouse before WW2. It was massively unable to compete with the US economically. It could not replace the combat losses of equipment. Etc.
At that time there wasn't any nation in the world that could compete with the US in war production mode. (Well, maybe the Soviet, and that's it.) You might as well say that Germany and Britain weren't economic powerhouses.
Well, being the single industrialized country in the world whose soil is not constantly being bombarded by enemy force should be pretty amazing (compared to the alternatives), but I'm not sure what that has to do with free markets.
The US was effective at preventing other countries from bombing it, and was effective at bombing other countries, ocean or no ocean. To what do you attribute that?
The US was able to sustain a crushing advantage against multiple enemies across two oceans, plus sustain all of its allies with desperately needed arms, fuel, food, and support. The US soldiers were the best equipped, best fed, and best supported.
In the inter-war period the United States passed massive tariffs on foreign goods (and they had substantial ones before that too). The zenith of that was the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930. Also, one reason the US was easily able to go on a war footing was that its grinding depression meant a lot of productive capacity was idle. And once the war started there was much more, not less, government intervention in the economy (introducing price controls and the like and obviously tremendously increasing government spending).
> In the inter-war period the United States passed massive tariffs on foreign goods (and they had substantial ones before that too).
Yup, and that's credited with deepening and lengthening the Great Depression, not making America's economy better.
> much more, not less, government intervention in the economy
All Roosevelt's New Deal interventions failed to get the country out of the GD. What did was a massive influx of money from foreign governments buying arms.
All price controls did was produce a black market.
If planned economies worked, the USSR economy would have been a powerhouse, not a basket case propped up by shipments of grain from Kansas to keep starvation away.
Want a modern example of an unplanned, unregulated free market industry? The software business. It's characterized by incredible innovation, prices dropping to $0, the biggest companies in the world, and a constant stream of billionaires being minted.
> All Roosevelt's New Deal interventions failed to get the country out of the GD. What did was a massive influx of money from foreign governments buying arms.
They couldn't and didn't pay for most of those weapons.
Before Lend-Lease, they did. See Freidman's "Monetary History of the United States" about the massive influx of foreign money buying armaments before the US entry into the war.
That's not really relevant. The paid stuff is dwarfed by the unpaid. The reason World War II ended the depression was it was a massive government stimulus at a level unimaginable politically during peacetime.
The gunboats didn’t create a free trade scenario. They created merchantilist, extraterritorial trade zones.
They bought Chinese goods with opium, not because they were fighting for liberty and free trade, but because they didn’t want to buy silk and other goods with silver. The hard currency was needed to hire the mercenaries (who are all about cash and carry) that kept Indian peasants growing poppies.
The result of this forced trade and loss of control was devastating inflation and collapse of governance within China and the circumstances that led to to horrors of the 20th century.
The "force" in question was forcing China to allow the sale of opium, rather than their preferred policy of not allowing anyone, British or Chinese, to sell opium and create opium addicts. Incidentally, while flying the banner of "free trade" in the two Opium Wars, the British also took Chinese territory (most significantly Hong Kong), secured rights to extraterritoriality for themselves, and expanded the "coolie" system of indentured servitude. Frankly, it's astonishing to me that anybody could try to cast the Opium Wars as the selfless British removing barriers to liberty.
> it's astonishing to me that anybody could try to cast the Opium Wars as the selfless British removing barriers to liberty.
I'm not pretending it as selfless. Free trade benefits both parties. Nor am I claiming other things the British did are free market. I'm only talking about removal of the barriers to the opium trade.
At the very least, you seem to think it was to the Chinese people's benefit to have foreigners force the Chinese government, at the barrel of a gun, to allow opium into the country. But the larger point is, then as now, the concept of free trade was cynically invoked to create a subordinate relationship. A thread running through the original piece is the way insisting on free trade policies in developing economies is a way to keep them from ever becoming serious competitors (the countries advocating them did not use this template to develop themselves).
> you seem to think it was to the Chinese people's benefit to have foreigners force the Chinese government, at the barrel of a gun, to allow opium into the country.
The Chinese people wanted to buy opium. They obviously thought it was to their benefit.
BTW, the US war on drugs has not been of benefit to this country.
The Chinese government thought that allowing that would turn their country into a basket case with a shortage of hard currency and a bunch of opiate addicts. In the event, the first Opium War inaugurated the Century of Humiliation that still forms the basis of wounded Chinese nationalism, so they may have been on to something.
That's an interesting perspective. Sounds like your economic dogma is having a tunnel vision effect on this issue.
This period was characterized by imperialism, mercantilist trade policy, and gross violations of Chinese sovereignty. "Removal of force" from trade wasn't a factor at all -- the other Western powers (France, Germany, US, and later Japan) weren't allowed to trade in the British extraterritorial zones. Britain didn't want "free trade", to the contrary, they wanted exclusivity.
The British wanted to sell opium to Chinese citizens who wanted to buy it. The Chinese government tried to forcibly stop that. Removal of choice is unfree trade, restoration of choice is free trade.
>I.e. the gunboats removed the Chinese heavy hand on trade. The "invisible hand" cannot operate when the government restricts it.
In other words, there was no free choice or democracy about it, and what the people want (which can very well be protectionism, or at least, not to allow opium sales in their country) didn't matter.
I feel the article speaks to my own cultural bias, and I liked it but now I'm suspicious I liked it because I agreed with so much it said.
The last comment, about re-joining the TPP: It is unstated but I feel true (none the less) that if the US rejoins the TPP it will be a vastly different outcome to a US led TPP. Australia was screwed over by the last trade round, and significant economic disadvantage lay in the major US ally in the region (Australia is one of "five eyes" in the secrets sharing intelligence circuit) agreeing to roll over on trade for sectional US interests. The current TPP may suck, but it sucks a lot less regarding US demands on IPR, and other US favouring trade positions.
If the US rejoins, these will not be core issues for the current participants. If they negotiate a China facing TPP you can be sure its both favouring China, and very probably more equitable to the other participants than a US cast one, for clear reasons: It helps China in the long term, to the be the centre of the trading nexus.
I more or less agreed with the thesis before reading the piece, but I found this piece quite interesting. I usually like Pankaj Mishra (and have since I read his stinging takedown of Niall Ferguson's work). Thank you for sharing this.
This article makes me sad. Not because I believe its true but because other people will.
I really don't want to write a 3000 word comment in response to this article. After all, only a few people will read it and those that do will not read it with the seriousness of a New York Times article.
I'm very disappointed in this piece. Half truths, omitted details, and bad history all rolled into Communist apologia.
For those who do not have time to read paste the headline: one sided "free" trade agreements benefit one side. Who would have thought? All other "conclusions" the author draws from this fact have no bearing on reality.
I don't really care for commentary like this. Either argue with the piece or don't; don't bore us with how you're sad that people will find it persuasive without bothering to refute any of its ideas.
There are more options than A or B. By expressing displeasure with the article I can at the least demonstrate there are other viewpoints.
There is a large wealth of knowledge and information out there. All of it detailing how China owes its economic success to economic liberalization.
This article stands out for its contrarianism. That's why it will get some many clicks and comments as opposed to yet another study proving what we already know. If anything I should be lamenting the "death" of "popular knowledge". If knowledge isn't constantly in flux its "boring" and not worth reading. Thus knowledge must constantly change for papers like the NYTimes to continue to exist.
Imagine if a Creationist wrote an article in "Nature" (the scientific journal). What would you say in response? What would you say if it was well received? Would you rebut the same old lies over and over and over again or would you just be sad that the world never seems to learn?
Considering the piece is a polemic against a different view, I don't see how you could possibly read and it and walk away confused as to whether a different view exists.
Yes of course but you could be confused as to the popularity of the two views.
Again, why doesn't the journal Nature run a piece detailing how "evolution got it wrong"? Because it is incorrect and unnecessarily muddies the water. Because "Nature" has a shred of credibility and wishes to keep it. It is certainly possible to point to blind spots in our knowledge and say "Hah, you can't explain that!" Or to point at past errors and say "Hah, you're always getting it wrong!"
It is up to the paper or journal to screen such plainly and obviously fallacious information. Or at the very least categorize it in such a way that it is plainly evident that these are emerging or not-widely-held viewpoints.
It is less than "plainly obvious," to me, that Japan, South Korea, and China (not to mention the older historical examples of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, which are mentioned but get less attention in the piece) were all successful in their project of industrialization in spite of, rather than because of, common traits of the paths they all took to get there. Certainly I would not consider it comparable to arguing against evolution to claim the opposite.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or snarky dismissals to HN. All a comment like this is likely to do—and did do—is lead to a tedious back-and-forth that sucks oxygen away from interesting discussion. When feeling annoyed in this way it's much better not to post at all.
It's particularly important to avoid generic commentary about ideological themes like "Communism" and (worse) "Creationism", which is where you went downthread.
I sense a lot of mood affiliation in the title that I'm sure will earn the New York Times a lot of clicks. China is the biggest success story of free trade in the history of the world, and the contrarian take presented here is absurd to the point of silly.
Liberalization is a matter of degree. You can't cherry pick a particular protectionist policy South Korea had and then say, "Oh look see they used import substitution and still had a good outcome." You have to also explain why that import substitution policy didn't ruin the Korean economy the way it did Argentina, or in an extreme example, Maoist China. And what you'll find is that they became much more liberal in other ways.
If you're going to claim that liberalism doesn't matter you need to show your work. You need to show that in aggregate, countries that liberalize their economies do less well than countries with less liberal economies. But when you look at the data, you will find just the opposite: Countries that move in a liberal direction, like China, South Korea, and Chile, tend to improve their outcomes, while those that do not, like Argentina or Zimbabwe, tend to stagnate. And almost every wealthy country in the world is either highly liberalized or sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The fact that even liberal countries have illiberal policies doesn't disprove the benefits of liberalization.
Most likely, Asia succeeded in spite of protectionism, not because of it.
Because Georgia isn't a libertarian dream country.
They suffer from relatively high corruption. Transparency.org lists them as comparable to Grenada, Costa Rica, and Rwanda.
Georgia has been subject to being ripped apart by Russia. Its politics are directly, violently influenced by its giant neighbor.
There are no other highly prosperous nations in the region to trade with. All nations in the region are either extremely low on the per capita wealth & per capita income scores, or a few are barely mid-lower tier. Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Serbia, etc. These are quite poor nations per capita. It's like you expect a Singapore or Hong Kong to pop up out of nowhere amongst the desert, without a Japan + South Korea + China to trade with. Much less being eg Denmark in the midst of economic valhalla, or Canada riding on the world's richest economy.
They get ranked very low on property rights protections, government integrity (ie corruption), and judicial:
You can have low taxes, or flat taxes, as in Russia as well, but if your system is a totalitarian dictatorship and part command & control economy, the results are still going to overwhelmingly tend to be mediocre. Or in the case of Georgia, if you still suffer from weak property rights protections and high corruption, trust is going to be very low when it comes to investing. To say nothing of the risk that Russia will randomly destroy the nation, as it's known today, in any given year. That foreign capital investment is a prerequisite to massive economic development.
Prosperous nations very rarely exist in such circumstances, save for a few extremely resource rich examples, such as Qatar, UAE, Brunei and Saudi. Those few isolated examples are all that have existed in modern history out of the present ~195 nations.
Well, by the same standard, we could say that China was very poor when Mao took over and China had historically been subject to a lot of famines. Poking holes in your examples is just as easy.
> we could say that China was very poor when Mao took over and China had historically been subject to a lot of famines
During China's early development time frame (1980s & 1990s) it had the world's largest population base and the world's largest trading partners in the US and Japan (and world's #1 and #2 economies), to leverage for economic expansion. Your example is supportive of my premise: massive foreign investment is a prerequisite. China didn't develop in isolation, they developed solely due to hundreds of billions of dollars that the US invested. Further, China had to abandon its rigid command & control economic policies, and dramatically liberalize away from Mao's former Communist system.
Which neighboring nation is going to randomly choose to invade modern China (post 1970s) and destroy it, as in the case of Russia & Georgia? Pretending investors aren't extremely concerned about that, is silly.
> Poking holes in your examples is just as easy.
Apparently not, you have yet managed to. Saying something is easy, while then not actually doing it (only saying it is), debases the confidence of your entire argument.
Economic development from poverty to prosperity, is nearly impossible without vast foreign investment. The wealthy European powers built up the US economy in its early days, providing immense capital. Without that, the US either would have never properly developed, or it would have taken dramatically longer.
How long has Georgia been separate from the USSR at this point? It was ruled by a backwards, violent, impoverished, broken Soviet system for seven decades. You were what, expecting them to sprout $70k per capita GDP prosperity in just 15-20 years post Soviet slavery, while in the midst of a political and military confrontation with Russia?
My whole issue is the original post says, more or less, that more liberalism is always better and then dredges up examples like Maoist China and Argentina to say if you're going to say anything else you have to explain why those states weren't successful. Well, they had other challenges had nothing to do with how liberal or not their trade regimes were, is my answer. It's a little strange to me that everyone is so willing to consider (not incorrectly) that issue with Georgia but not with states that don't adhere to free-trade orthodoxy.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, first by being snarky and second by not doing this:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
If it had just been the second sentence, the comment would be fine. Please edit the snarky bits out of what you post here.
They trigger this place into lower-quality behavior.
China succeeded because it was in the prime position to take advantage of western manufacturing looking to move production facilities elsewhere for wage arbitrage. Right place, right time to reap massive export surpluses - and they were smart enough to use the opportunity to have built up a domestic market/technical knowledge base when wages inevitably started to raise and manufacturers began to move elsewhere again. You're going to see a lot less 'liberalization', and probably some reversals, in China in the coming years.
Rather mostly China succeeded because it had a population larger than any other country. Production depends primarily on resources and human labor is one of the most valuable resources. It is no surprise that population count is strongly correlated with nominal GDP.
This should be completely obvious.
It also refutes the author’s argument. Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state become the world’s second-largest?! Would Friedman find it hard to explain why China, run by a Communist Party, has emerged as central to the global capitalist economy!? China has 19% of the world population but roughly 10% of the world GDP. It is 79th in GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. We should not evaluate a country’s economic policies by looking at its nominal GDP without also looking at its population—this is nothing Friedman would have difficulty explaining.
Yes, at least in the sense of succeeding the article talks about. India is the third country in the world by GDP at purchasing power parity, which is consistent with its population being second largest.
I am very confused by this explanation. Why was it right place right time? Why not India? Why not Kenya? Why has Bangladesh followed the same strategy but been so much less successful, with wages much lower than in China?
What your thoughts on states like Somalia and Libya? They are, without a doubt, the freest market feasible. There's no government to control any economic policy. Why are they not succeeding?
I would also point out that the author conflate two tightly-coupled but distinct spheres - the political and the economic. China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore have all been massively successful because they acted aggressively in the political realm to foster growth and development (with little to no regard for Democratic norms). Conversely, their economic systems were and are fairly liberal (China being both the least developed of these as well as the biggest laggard on this front). Chinese citizens may not be politically empowered, but it is far easier to set up a company, hire and fire, etc. in Shanghai than in New York.
Japan and South Korea fostered growth and development with little to no regard for democratic norms?
I mean yeah, their democracies look a bit strange to Westerners, what with Japan being governed by mostly one party and South Korea being a fairly new democracy... But what specifically do you mean?
The most recent thing I have heard about china, repeated by people who man editorial positions in news papers you read, is that China is now the dominant super power. America just doesn't know it yet.
I suspect this is entirely true.
And as added ammunition for this article - the poor prime minister, but excellent finance minister of India - Manmohan Singh, focused on the Korean Model a lot earlier on. It influenced the way the Indian markets opened.
There's only 1 book written about MMS, and in that book theres a telling interaction, where Manmohan (Much before his days as PM) was upset that the author (then a reporter), didn't mention Manmohan's stance on the Korean model in an article.
True, but China is also at the very top of it's game, and it's success came at a rather extreme cost. Mind-boggling debt, smog in all the major cities up to LETHAL levels at times (and something like 80% of the time above cancer-in-10-years levels), no army to speak of, legendary levels of corruption (and centuries of history of corruption).
And to top it all off, China's labor market is currently the highest it'll be for the next century or so. It's all downhill from here. China's economic dominance through cheap labor is under severe threat, and they're losing. That loss is causing economic unreast (tens of millions of job losses) in the China.
China also legendary when it comes to outright lying about their accomplishments. From scientific advancements in Fusion energy to amounts of iron ore in ports, China has been caught lying so often that economists seriously think 80%-90% of government statistics are outright falsified, with often strong arguments about the remaining 10%. Unfortunately, their leadership is equally famous for believing the lies, right up to the point that they marched a fleet of ships under British cannons, with substandard hulls and without ammunition. You see, the general of that fleet had assured them the ammunition was there, several of his officers had written the central government that he was lying. Whichever was the truth, the fleet was devastated, the general survived and wasn't even fired. Thousands of soldiers and something like 40% of the total Chinese navy was lost. Legendary.
There are so many things that could go incredibly wrong here. Economists aren't kidding when they say China might start WW3. They might have to.
This. I mean I feel like anyone could make an awesome economy if they were given trillions and trillions of loans, told they could ignore all environmental regulations, and had, at least initially, a bottomless pool of cheap labor with no rights.
Of course it looks like they’re “winning”. They will lose, and ultimately it will be a tragedy for the Chinese people when standards of living collapse and the true ability to repress people with modern technology begins to show.
> This. I mean I feel like anyone could make an awesome economy if they were given trillions and trillions of loans, told they could ignore all environmental regulations, and had, at least initially, a bottomless pool of cheap labor with no rights.
I mean, how is this different from the US or British Industrial Revolutions?
I've seen reports and documents, but am unable to make head or tails of it.
But, extremely credible sources have indicated that 1 in 4 financial transaction takes place in China.
People who have been there and work there do not doubt it.
Its neighbours rue it, and its massive financial clout are allowing it to make inroads in ways and places once the realm of the US and other first world nations.
Pity, MMS didn't learn the real lesson from the Korean story, or any other story for that matter: Half measures get you no where.
Korean model involved the state putting extreme pressure
on the big business houses and at the same time going out of their way to help them as well, with the goal being to become world leaders in their respective sectors by making quality products. Some firms collapse under such weight and others thrive.
Instead though Indian companies were encouraged to focus more on exports, they by and large never managed to establish quality and leadership. Also, though they are renowned for mediocrity, they have still managed to capture large parts of the economy, thanks to government compliance.
MMS's life has been a saga of half measures, and though people rightly know him as a calm, intelligent man his failure and weakness as a leader will always define him rather than his virtuous character.
Yes, which is why they're not the dominant superpower - the US is. Nobody intervened to stop the many US invasions over the past decades and still ongoing. China isn't able to do that except for tiny uninhabited islands.
How willing would the US be to take action that would invite a certain Chinese military response? Have we all forgotten how poorly that went during the Korean War, when China was much less industrialized and much poorer than now?
I don't know if it's still true, but not that long ago China didn't have the equipment to even do a mass beach landing. Which would be required to invade Taiwan.
They have a strong military manpower wise, but lack the ability to project power in a number of important areas.
I tried to look this up, and only found this article, which suggests that an amphibious landing force exists but would currently have trouble dealing with both the American military (under the probably reasonable assumption that the US would come to Taiwan's defense) and also the defenses Taiwan already has: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...
Not really conclusive, I guess, but I found the article interesting.
The US has been the champion of free trade assuming that it was win-win or that if would win when others loose.
As soon as it looses while others are winning (in some areas) they are trying to bend (again) the rules on their favor.
The American era has been a waste: one country trying by all means to impose its agenda, to claim its divine right to progress and dominance, to unfairly try to control the rest of the economic actors. Let's hope the Chinese era is more fair and balanced.
Ha! Chinese economic policy is proudly mercantilistic. They have no pretentions towards a balanced playing field. China will do what is best for China.
As has the US, to the point (just one example) of lying on the Security Council to justify taking control of relevant geopolitical resources. It didnt even work.
Not only covertly America First, but also incompetent.
The US does not silence you until it does (ask Snowden, if you find him). And, more importantly, its game does not require silencing political oponents as long as they are irrelevant (communism in todays US), but extending soft-power around the world (with some aircraft carries for support). This model worked in the US interest for decades, but is not so effective anymore.
What the US did to the USSR, China is doing to the US: outmanouvering.
I find it just, since I consider the US attitude highly hipocrital, and criminal throughout.
If it was in the US hand, Snowden would be rotting in Guantanamo. As said, the US is criminal and incompetent. Luckily there are other global players balancing power.
Ah, really? You mean the modern world, in which violent conflict is at an all-time recorded low? Wars between major powers have been almost entirely absent for 70 years. Global famine and poverty is at an all-time low. Child mortality has plunged radically and is at an all-time low. Truly vast progress has been made across all aspects of science and technology. The real standard of living at the global median is at an all-time high. Global economic growth and trade has been extraordinarily consistent and enduring. Annexation of territory by powerful nations - a commonality throughout all prior history - has been brought nearly to a stand-still.
Sure doesn't sound like a waste to me. The last ~70 years have been the best 70 years in all of humanity's existence.
Sorry but when you are living through the phase of fastest technological progress in human history, with a huge amount of goodwill after a catastrophic first half of the 20ieth century (in which the US dropped two nuclear bombs, lets not forget); when you emerge as the only global power, leading the world in nearly every aspect, and the best that you can achieve is the current situation, it is a waste.
Not only, it is a disgrace. You have missed the chance to make the world a more just place, and you have probably demonstrated that humanity is hopeless.
Maybe the error was to put so much trust in the US to begin with.
> But to grasp China’s economic achievement, and its ramifications, it is imperative to ask: Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state become the world’s second-largest?
Was China ever really a communist state? They've said so, of course, and talked the talk. But maybe it's more accurate to say the China remains a Confucian state. With an overlay that looks a lot more like fascism / national socialism than communism.
Come on. China is no utopia—it isn’t even a country I would want to live in—but equating them to Nazis instantly discredits your arguments.
The Chinese model is unique, and why shouldn’t it be? They are the first country in history of their size to industrialize and become a world power.
Let’s stop making cute generalizations that only serve to make ourselves feel better and think of what we actually don’t like about their system of government so we can fix it in our own. “The Chinese are Nazis!!” doesn’t help anyone.
OK, so I should have limited it to fascism, given that "national socialism" has become so closely identified with German Nazism. It was opponents who labeled the "National
Socialist German Workers' Party" as the "Nazi Party". And there was a lot more idealistic socialism there, before Hitler and his associates took over and created what we know as Nazism.[0]
What's communist and isn't needs to be defined by what happens in reality, instead of being defined by comparing it to the kindest interpretation of a utopian ideology. One might also tiresomely argue that Nazi Germany wasn't really fascist, given how radically it departed from Mussolini fantasies of a fascist state, or even Hitlers own fantasies of a thousand year Reich. But we don't, because at this stage it's tiresome. Communism is no different.
For both Confucianism and communism, farmers/workers are the core of society. However, communism is, in theory, fundamentally democratic. With collective decision making. Conversely, Confucianism emphasizes loyalty and deference to wise authorities. Which does China most resemble?
Well, maybe that's just because there aren't many real fascists around these days. Or rather, that they use other labels, to avoid negative associations.
I believe that just about all national governments are in fact kleptocracies. The powerful veil themselves in whatever ideology that's required. There are some idealists, of course. Especially at lower levels. But systems reward those who shed their ideals, and play the game.
> Well, maybe that's just because there aren't many real fascists around these days. Or rather, that they use other labels, to avoid negative associations.
Is there any evidence of this? I hear it a lot, but it seems like nothing more then left-wing McCarthyism. What's the far-right version of a pinko?
There are few if any states that actually consider themselves to be communist. China considers itself a socialist state that is the middle of a long process of transitioning to communism. The ruling party is named the Communist party because of what its stated end-goal for governance is, not because of their current methods of governance.
Finally after the middle class in US has been hollowed out and everything that could be shipped over there was, we get the real story. There are scoundrels in (former) US government and industry who sold out this country lock, stock, barrel for their own greed.
I don't think China is the only winner of Free Trade here. China did have a large surplus, but isn't that most of the profits go to American and European companies? Why that money wasn't going back to America is a myth itself.
After three decades of industrialization, China's environment undergoes tragic damage, and the country gradually loses the ability to feed itself. Today China imports more than 20% of its food supply. As the aging workforce retires, China's future outlook is not very bright. I hope you understand, not all the grass is green in China.
Free trade vs protectionism is not a one dimensional spectrum. I can't recommend How Asia Works highly enough as a source of nuance in why protectionism has worked for some and not others.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread"Regardless of the mystical properties claimed for it, the invisible hand of self-interest depends on the visible and often heavy hand of government. To take only one instance, British gunboats helped impose free trade on 19th-century China — a lesson not lost on the Chinese."
I.e. the gunboats removed the Chinese heavy hand on trade. The "invisible hand" cannot operate when the government restricts it.
The role of government in free trade is to prevent forcible interference with it.
"It was Hamilton’s formula, rather than free trade, that made the United States the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 19th century and into the 1920s."
That's quite a reach. The US's biggest market at the time was itself, and the Constitution ensured free trade between the states. It was the world's biggest free trade zone.
"World War II proved only a brief interruption in Japan’s policy of protection."
Japan was not an economic powerhouse before WW2. It was massively unable to compete with the US economically. It could not replace the combat losses of equipment. Etc.
The North atlantic trade treaty outcomes the UK will face in brexit will go there too. No british person wants to eat ammonia soaked chicken. The Americans want to sell the british Chicken and other meat loaded with antibiotics which is excluded from the EU. The british want a trade deal more than anything else, and will cave on food standards regarding excess antibiotics and washed chicken meat (the US production methods are so disgusting they can't exclude systematic salmonella risks) for cheap meat, to make brexit "work" and as a result, will lose food security and safety. For what? for the chimera of "free trade"
Its not a choice between a mythically fully free market and protectionism: its a choice between a US centric distorted market model, and another economies centric but distorted market model.
One could also say that no ruler is exactly 12 inches long, but that doesn't prevent them from being useful.
Japan's real problem in the war was its lack of natural resources. It was highly dependent on imports -- in particular it was highly dependent on American oil, an obvious problem if you're planning to go to war with America. That's why the Dutch East Indies were important and they moved to capture them early (to some extent the paucity of natural resources in Japan is what motivated the project of becoming a colonist in the first place). It's really hard to see how more trade liberalization would have helped.
Besides that, the productive capacity of the United States, and its insulation from attack, was exceptional among all of the powers in World War II, even the UK. I think we can still acknowledge Japan had significant industry, even if it couldn't keep up with the world's best.
It did poorly compared with the US free trade economy. Even at the outset of WW2, their military equipment was inferior to the US, except in a few places (the Zero, the Yamato). Japan was economically defeated long before the bombing of Japan got in gear. Early battles inflicted disproportionate losses on the Japanese military due to inadequate equipment and supply.
Japan knew their only hope was a quick, devastating surprise attack followed by a peace agreement.
Recall I mentioned that the US in the 1800s, for example, was the biggest free market and free trade zone in the world. It's hard to argue with the incredible results of that.
Pick a measurement.
> significant other differences
Sure. But the common thread among more successful economies vs less successful ones is free markets and free trade.
How about tariffs? Besides geographical isolation, the United States erected pretty strong barriers to any foreign competition and didn't really go in a strong "free trade" direction until after the second World War, after it had already become a hegemonic power.
> Sure. But the common thread among more successful economies vs less successful ones is free markets and free trade.
This article provides what I find to be persuasive arguments that the opposite is true and that successful countries do not begin to significantly liberalize trade until they are already strongly developed.
They're not a measure of prosperity. They weren't particularly high in the US, either.
> persuasive arguments that the opposite is true
That's because it cherry-picked the data, and never looked at the magnitude of the tariffs. If protectionism produced prosperity, Cuba would be richer than Japan. And we wouldn't place sanctions and embargoes to punish countries, and they wouldn't beg for relief from them.
Recall that the US itself is the largest free trade zone in the world. Do you think the US would be more prosperous if California protected itself from imports from the rest of the country?
At that time there wasn't any nation in the world that could compete with the US in war production mode. (Well, maybe the Soviet, and that's it.) You might as well say that Germany and Britain weren't economic powerhouses.
That's right. Aren't free markets and free trade amazing? :-)
The Soviet Union in WW2 was heavily supplied by the US.
The US was able to sustain a crushing advantage against multiple enemies across two oceans, plus sustain all of its allies with desperately needed arms, fuel, food, and support. The US soldiers were the best equipped, best fed, and best supported.
Yup, and that's credited with deepening and lengthening the Great Depression, not making America's economy better.
> much more, not less, government intervention in the economy
All Roosevelt's New Deal interventions failed to get the country out of the GD. What did was a massive influx of money from foreign governments buying arms.
All price controls did was produce a black market.
If planned economies worked, the USSR economy would have been a powerhouse, not a basket case propped up by shipments of grain from Kansas to keep starvation away.
Want a modern example of an unplanned, unregulated free market industry? The software business. It's characterized by incredible innovation, prices dropping to $0, the biggest companies in the world, and a constant stream of billionaires being minted.
They couldn't and didn't pay for most of those weapons.
They bought Chinese goods with opium, not because they were fighting for liberty and free trade, but because they didn’t want to buy silk and other goods with silver. The hard currency was needed to hire the mercenaries (who are all about cash and carry) that kept Indian peasants growing poppies.
The result of this forced trade and loss of control was devastating inflation and collapse of governance within China and the circumstances that led to to horrors of the 20th century.
Nobody was forced to buy opium. The force was in removal of the force preventing people from buying opium.
I'm not pretending it as selfless. Free trade benefits both parties. Nor am I claiming other things the British did are free market. I'm only talking about removal of the barriers to the opium trade.
The Chinese people wanted to buy opium. They obviously thought it was to their benefit.
BTW, the US war on drugs has not been of benefit to this country.
This period was characterized by imperialism, mercantilist trade policy, and gross violations of Chinese sovereignty. "Removal of force" from trade wasn't a factor at all -- the other Western powers (France, Germany, US, and later Japan) weren't allowed to trade in the British extraterritorial zones. Britain didn't want "free trade", to the contrary, they wanted exclusivity.
Once again, nobody made anybody buy opium.
In other words, there was no free choice or democracy about it, and what the people want (which can very well be protectionism, or at least, not to allow opium sales in their country) didn't matter.
The last comment, about re-joining the TPP: It is unstated but I feel true (none the less) that if the US rejoins the TPP it will be a vastly different outcome to a US led TPP. Australia was screwed over by the last trade round, and significant economic disadvantage lay in the major US ally in the region (Australia is one of "five eyes" in the secrets sharing intelligence circuit) agreeing to roll over on trade for sectional US interests. The current TPP may suck, but it sucks a lot less regarding US demands on IPR, and other US favouring trade positions.
If the US rejoins, these will not be core issues for the current participants. If they negotiate a China facing TPP you can be sure its both favouring China, and very probably more equitable to the other participants than a US cast one, for clear reasons: It helps China in the long term, to the be the centre of the trading nexus.
I really don't want to write a 3000 word comment in response to this article. After all, only a few people will read it and those that do will not read it with the seriousness of a New York Times article.
I'm very disappointed in this piece. Half truths, omitted details, and bad history all rolled into Communist apologia.
For those who do not have time to read paste the headline: one sided "free" trade agreements benefit one side. Who would have thought? All other "conclusions" the author draws from this fact have no bearing on reality.
Maybe it's time we all stopped taking New York Times seriously. They do not have a fantastic track record.
There are more options than A or B. By expressing displeasure with the article I can at the least demonstrate there are other viewpoints.
There is a large wealth of knowledge and information out there. All of it detailing how China owes its economic success to economic liberalization.
This article stands out for its contrarianism. That's why it will get some many clicks and comments as opposed to yet another study proving what we already know. If anything I should be lamenting the "death" of "popular knowledge". If knowledge isn't constantly in flux its "boring" and not worth reading. Thus knowledge must constantly change for papers like the NYTimes to continue to exist.
Imagine if a Creationist wrote an article in "Nature" (the scientific journal). What would you say in response? What would you say if it was well received? Would you rebut the same old lies over and over and over again or would you just be sad that the world never seems to learn?
Again, why doesn't the journal Nature run a piece detailing how "evolution got it wrong"? Because it is incorrect and unnecessarily muddies the water. Because "Nature" has a shred of credibility and wishes to keep it. It is certainly possible to point to blind spots in our knowledge and say "Hah, you can't explain that!" Or to point at past errors and say "Hah, you're always getting it wrong!"
It is up to the paper or journal to screen such plainly and obviously fallacious information. Or at the very least categorize it in such a way that it is plainly evident that these are emerging or not-widely-held viewpoints.
It's particularly important to avoid generic commentary about ideological themes like "Communism" and (worse) "Creationism", which is where you went downthread.
Liberalization is a matter of degree. You can't cherry pick a particular protectionist policy South Korea had and then say, "Oh look see they used import substitution and still had a good outcome." You have to also explain why that import substitution policy didn't ruin the Korean economy the way it did Argentina, or in an extreme example, Maoist China. And what you'll find is that they became much more liberal in other ways.
If you're going to claim that liberalism doesn't matter you need to show your work. You need to show that in aggregate, countries that liberalize their economies do less well than countries with less liberal economies. But when you look at the data, you will find just the opposite: Countries that move in a liberal direction, like China, South Korea, and Chile, tend to improve their outcomes, while those that do not, like Argentina or Zimbabwe, tend to stagnate. And almost every wealthy country in the world is either highly liberalized or sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The fact that even liberal countries have illiberal policies doesn't disprove the benefits of liberalization.
Most likely, Asia succeeded in spite of protectionism, not because of it.
If liberalization is all that matters, why isn't a libertarian dream-country like Georgia rich?
They suffer from relatively high corruption. Transparency.org lists them as comparable to Grenada, Costa Rica, and Rwanda.
Georgia has been subject to being ripped apart by Russia. Its politics are directly, violently influenced by its giant neighbor.
There are no other highly prosperous nations in the region to trade with. All nations in the region are either extremely low on the per capita wealth & per capita income scores, or a few are barely mid-lower tier. Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Serbia, etc. These are quite poor nations per capita. It's like you expect a Singapore or Hong Kong to pop up out of nowhere amongst the desert, without a Japan + South Korea + China to trade with. Much less being eg Denmark in the midst of economic valhalla, or Canada riding on the world's richest economy.
They get ranked very low on property rights protections, government integrity (ie corruption), and judicial:
https://www.heritage.org/index/country/georgia
You can have low taxes, or flat taxes, as in Russia as well, but if your system is a totalitarian dictatorship and part command & control economy, the results are still going to overwhelmingly tend to be mediocre. Or in the case of Georgia, if you still suffer from weak property rights protections and high corruption, trust is going to be very low when it comes to investing. To say nothing of the risk that Russia will randomly destroy the nation, as it's known today, in any given year. That foreign capital investment is a prerequisite to massive economic development.
Prosperous nations very rarely exist in such circumstances, save for a few extremely resource rich examples, such as Qatar, UAE, Brunei and Saudi. Those few isolated examples are all that have existed in modern history out of the present ~195 nations.
During China's early development time frame (1980s & 1990s) it had the world's largest population base and the world's largest trading partners in the US and Japan (and world's #1 and #2 economies), to leverage for economic expansion. Your example is supportive of my premise: massive foreign investment is a prerequisite. China didn't develop in isolation, they developed solely due to hundreds of billions of dollars that the US invested. Further, China had to abandon its rigid command & control economic policies, and dramatically liberalize away from Mao's former Communist system.
Which neighboring nation is going to randomly choose to invade modern China (post 1970s) and destroy it, as in the case of Russia & Georgia? Pretending investors aren't extremely concerned about that, is silly.
> Poking holes in your examples is just as easy.
Apparently not, you have yet managed to. Saying something is easy, while then not actually doing it (only saying it is), debases the confidence of your entire argument.
Economic development from poverty to prosperity, is nearly impossible without vast foreign investment. The wealthy European powers built up the US economy in its early days, providing immense capital. Without that, the US either would have never properly developed, or it would have taken dramatically longer.
How long has Georgia been separate from the USSR at this point? It was ruled by a backwards, violent, impoverished, broken Soviet system for seven decades. You were what, expecting them to sprout $70k per capita GDP prosperity in just 15-20 years post Soviet slavery, while in the midst of a political and military confrontation with Russia?
It wasn't a requirement for the US -- itself a very protectionist country until well into becoming a superpower.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
If it had just been the second sentence, the comment would be fine. Please edit the snarky bits out of what you post here. They trigger this place into lower-quality behavior.
This should be completely obvious.
It also refutes the author’s argument. Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state become the world’s second-largest?! Would Friedman find it hard to explain why China, run by a Communist Party, has emerged as central to the global capitalist economy!? China has 19% of the world population but roughly 10% of the world GDP. It is 79th in GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. We should not evaluate a country’s economic policies by looking at its nominal GDP without also looking at its population—this is nothing Friedman would have difficulty explaining.
…is that also why India "succeeded"?
I mean yeah, their democracies look a bit strange to Westerners, what with Japan being governed by mostly one party and South Korea being a fairly new democracy... But what specifically do you mean?
I suspect this is entirely true.
And as added ammunition for this article - the poor prime minister, but excellent finance minister of India - Manmohan Singh, focused on the Korean Model a lot earlier on. It influenced the way the Indian markets opened.
There's only 1 book written about MMS, and in that book theres a telling interaction, where Manmohan (Much before his days as PM) was upset that the author (then a reporter), didn't mention Manmohan's stance on the Korean model in an article.
And to top it all off, China's labor market is currently the highest it'll be for the next century or so. It's all downhill from here. China's economic dominance through cheap labor is under severe threat, and they're losing. That loss is causing economic unreast (tens of millions of job losses) in the China.
China also legendary when it comes to outright lying about their accomplishments. From scientific advancements in Fusion energy to amounts of iron ore in ports, China has been caught lying so often that economists seriously think 80%-90% of government statistics are outright falsified, with often strong arguments about the remaining 10%. Unfortunately, their leadership is equally famous for believing the lies, right up to the point that they marched a fleet of ships under British cannons, with substandard hulls and without ammunition. You see, the general of that fleet had assured them the ammunition was there, several of his officers had written the central government that he was lying. Whichever was the truth, the fleet was devastated, the general survived and wasn't even fired. Thousands of soldiers and something like 40% of the total Chinese navy was lost. Legendary.
There are so many things that could go incredibly wrong here. Economists aren't kidding when they say China might start WW3. They might have to.
Of course it looks like they’re “winning”. They will lose, and ultimately it will be a tragedy for the Chinese people when standards of living collapse and the true ability to repress people with modern technology begins to show.
I mean, how is this different from the US or British Industrial Revolutions?
But, extremely credible sources have indicated that 1 in 4 financial transaction takes place in China.
People who have been there and work there do not doubt it.
Its neighbours rue it, and its massive financial clout are allowing it to make inroads in ways and places once the realm of the US and other first world nations.
That money and munition is coming from somewhere.
Korean model involved the state putting extreme pressure on the big business houses and at the same time going out of their way to help them as well, with the goal being to become world leaders in their respective sectors by making quality products. Some firms collapse under such weight and others thrive.
Instead though Indian companies were encouraged to focus more on exports, they by and large never managed to establish quality and leadership. Also, though they are renowned for mediocrity, they have still managed to capture large parts of the economy, thanks to government compliance.
MMS's life has been a saga of half measures, and though people rightly know him as a calm, intelligent man his failure and weakness as a leader will always define him rather than his virtuous character.
Dominant in the region? Sure, but that's been true since the rise of the Communist party.
They have a strong military manpower wise, but lack the ability to project power in a number of important areas.
Not really conclusive, I guess, but I found the article interesting.
As soon as it looses while others are winning (in some areas) they are trying to bend (again) the rules on their favor.
The American era has been a waste: one country trying by all means to impose its agenda, to claim its divine right to progress and dominance, to unfairly try to control the rest of the economic actors. Let's hope the Chinese era is more fair and balanced.
Not only covertly America First, but also incompetent.
What the US did to the USSR, China is doing to the US: outmanouvering.
I find it just, since I consider the US attitude highly hipocrital, and criminal throughout.
If it was in the US hand, Snowden would be rotting in Guantanamo. As said, the US is criminal and incompetent. Luckily there are other global players balancing power.
Ah, really? You mean the modern world, in which violent conflict is at an all-time recorded low? Wars between major powers have been almost entirely absent for 70 years. Global famine and poverty is at an all-time low. Child mortality has plunged radically and is at an all-time low. Truly vast progress has been made across all aspects of science and technology. The real standard of living at the global median is at an all-time high. Global economic growth and trade has been extraordinarily consistent and enduring. Annexation of territory by powerful nations - a commonality throughout all prior history - has been brought nearly to a stand-still.
Sure doesn't sound like a waste to me. The last ~70 years have been the best 70 years in all of humanity's existence.
Not only, it is a disgrace. You have missed the chance to make the world a more just place, and you have probably demonstrated that humanity is hopeless.
Maybe the error was to put so much trust in the US to begin with.
> But to grasp China’s economic achievement, and its ramifications, it is imperative to ask: Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state become the world’s second-largest?
Was China ever really a communist state? They've said so, of course, and talked the talk. But maybe it's more accurate to say the China remains a Confucian state. With an overlay that looks a lot more like fascism / national socialism than communism.
The Chinese model is unique, and why shouldn’t it be? They are the first country in history of their size to industrialize and become a world power.
Let’s stop making cute generalizations that only serve to make ourselves feel better and think of what we actually don’t like about their system of government so we can fix it in our own. “The Chinese are Nazis!!” doesn’t help anyone.
Are you implying that a very large country becoming a world power is somehow an impressive achievement?
0) http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_19_04_06_znamenski.pd....
What's communist and isn't needs to be defined by what happens in reality, instead of being defined by comparing it to the kindest interpretation of a utopian ideology. One might also tiresomely argue that Nazi Germany wasn't really fascist, given how radically it departed from Mussolini fantasies of a fascist state, or even Hitlers own fantasies of a thousand year Reich. But we don't, because at this stage it's tiresome. Communism is no different.
Say what you will about fascists, but at least I've never heard them say "Yeah but Nazi Germany wasn't real National Socialism".
I believe that just about all national governments are in fact kleptocracies. The powerful veil themselves in whatever ideology that's required. There are some idealists, of course. Especially at lower levels. But systems reward those who shed their ideals, and play the game.
Is there any evidence of this? I hear it a lot, but it seems like nothing more then left-wing McCarthyism. What's the far-right version of a pinko?
There are few if any states that actually consider themselves to be communist. China considers itself a socialist state that is the middle of a long process of transitioning to communism. The ruling party is named the Communist party because of what its stated end-goal for governance is, not because of their current methods of governance.
After three decades of industrialization, China's environment undergoes tragic damage, and the country gradually loses the ability to feed itself. Today China imports more than 20% of its food supply. As the aging workforce retires, China's future outlook is not very bright. I hope you understand, not all the grass is green in China.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe-Studwell/dp/080212...