A fistful of links

I’d very much like to see these pieces, especially the second one, and near-final form would be fine for my modest needs.

Also looking forward to the NI piece. Not a China-expert but have spent a few years working there and your views sound consonant with those of mine and most former-expat’s who don’t plan to go back. The others are a bit compromised, IMHO. I think the best China can hope for is a gradual plateauing of economic growth with a massive clean-up of social and environmental craziness. The worst-case scenarios are very grim indeed, especially in terms of the environment, epidemiology, and economic inequality-induced violence.

I’ll third that re China. The emergent Chinese Century is vastly overrated as near as I can tell. And likely to be rather short-lived.

I’ll 4th re China – 1st article is interesting…

6th China, though I question “what will be different this time” than saying the same statement in 2008, let alone 1998.

” there is no reason to expect a smooth transition to market liberalism, let alone to democracy.” I would say there is a much more likely outcome now, with per capita GDP in the industrialized provinces approaching/exceeding eastern european levels than prior to an unprecedented period of economic growth … but I would love to learn something more …

Note – the Chronicle article is subscribers-only.

What’s the point of linking to articles behind paywalls? Not all of us here have institutional access, or the $$$ for individual subscriptions.

“I think that the current Chinese regime is unsustainable”

… as opposed to what? Market liberalism? We’ll find out in our lifetimes I guess.

The military historian Martin van Creveld has made the argument that we live in the era of drastic decline of legitimacy of the state. He calls it “the new middle ages,” and notes examples around the world of nations imploding into smaller tribal groups as the political legitimacy of the nation-state disappears.

If true, this would suggest that regimes of all nation-states everywhere are unsustainable. Many commentators have certainly suggested this about America. I’m thinking of a Harper’s article in 2008 called High Noon For the Republican Party-Why the G.O.P. Must Die, in which a round table of historians and political commentators concluding that the current political deadlock and near-civil-war level of social divisions, together with all the economically and socially unsustainable policies America continues to pursue (endless unwinnable wars around the world, infinite expansion of U.S. military spending for superweapons that don’t work and an army that rapes 1/3 of our own women soldiers, unending cost increases for health care into the indefinite future, a financial system based on thievery and cronyism whose underlying pathologies have never been corrected and which is building up for yet another global financial meltdown, a higher education system whose costs are escalating even faster after inflation today than housing costs were in the 2000s at the same time that jobs for college grads have gone away), makes the current American political regime wholly untenable and unsustainable.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens 10 or 15 years down the road in both China and America. There’s a general sense among scholars and economists and sociologists that both countries are engaged in radically unsustainable policies and exhibit such explosive internal social ruptures that within the next generation or so, something will have to blow.

From the Harper’s article in 2008:

MITCHELL: The most likely scenario appears to be that the two parties will prop each other up just long enough to ensure the failure of the American experiment. (..)

BAKER: Maybe one of the reasons we can’t come up with a scenario in which one party forces the other into a major realignment is that both parties are skirting the central issues facing us, much like the Democrats and the Whigs did in the years leading up to the Civil War. The only way to break that deadlock was to risk blowing up both national parties. And in the end, the issue of slavery did indeed blow them both up. The Republicans were able to triumph only because the blowup was so all-encompassing. That’s a pretty big risk for a practical politician to take. More likely, the two parties will continue to do what politicians usually do, which is wait on events to force a decision.

MCCONNELL: The United States is currently on an unsustainable track, and if this election doesn’t knock us off of it, then something else is bound to, likely within the next decade.

BAKER: (..) I’m beginning to wonder if America today isn’t more like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “wonderful one-hoss shay”—a contraption so finely constructed that it will never break down but will just wear out. The things we are doing are so unsustainable— occupying an enormous chunk of the most fractious piece of Asia until it learns democracy, driving the working wage relentlessly downward, draining our natural resources as fast as we can—that we simply won’t be able to do them any longer.