Asian Century and Future of World Economy
Let's face it. 2020 marked the beginning of the Asian Century.
It seems apparent to me that the Western world is falling apart in so many ways - governmental and societal levels first. Then there will probably be economic failure sooner or later.
Here are my examples.
1) Governmental Level: COVID
European countries barely kept the virus under control. America turned everything into a political shitshow left and right. Meanwhile, many Asian countries actually had their shit together and their economies have been wide open for over a year. In fact, many of them never even shut down. Cases are still extremely low over there for the most part. (You should see my video chat history with my family over there. They've been dining out, vacationing, shopping, and more since last winter. Life as usual. All that changed was people wearing masks).
This was a clear example showing how antiquated and not under control the Western governments are. Institutions are literally falling apart and no one in the West seems to know how to fix things. The West's response to this virus compared to governments of Korea, Japan, Singapore, and even China is child's play. Governments are generally inefficient, but Western governments are REALLY INEFFICIENT. It's like they don't even try.
2) Societal Level: Loss of Civility & Rise of Radical Populism.
Okay I'm Asian. And I still have lots of relatives and friends in the "home country". You know what they all say? They all say "I can't believe how barbaric Europeans and Americans have become compared to way they were". They are referring to the education level, common sense, general intelligence, and basic mannerisms of an average Westerner how behind they are compared to their Asian counterparts.
Every time I go back to my "home country" to visit my family, I feel the exact same way. The quality of conversations people are having and their attitudes towards great many things from politics and economics to everyday life are just strikingly different. Average people in my home country don't sound like bunch of idiots. They can actually reason and not be bound by what some dumb popular activist chants are at the time. Even the topics are kinda constructive. Everyone there seems to have this "growth" mindset. They want to do right for themselves, their families, and their country. And they don't have a single minute to waste on pointless topics that Western snowflakes spend all their times talking about on Twitter or Parler or whatever.
Meanwhile, everyone in the Western world is constantly wasting their times debating over "whether trans-people should be allowed to use what bathrooms", "whether it's offensive to call Native Americans, chiefs", "whether politician XYZ should apologize to politician ABC" or whatever BS.
Well guess what, those Asians are building bridges, new companies, and even new cities.
My guess? The center of the world is no longer the Western world. Asia is the new center of the world. As much as I hate to say, China already won. They just haven't cashed in the checks yet. Fortunately, anti-Chinese Asian countries like Korea and Japan won too. But France, UK, and Italy? They lost too.
Whether it's the "woke" people or radical righties, one side is gonna take power and suppress people's freedoms. That will stifle economic growth and entrepreneurship.
By 2050, Asian countries will have reached peak potential. And all that the West will be able to do is maintain whatever economies they already had while slowly crumble apart. All the major innovation - business, technology, culture, you name it - will come out of Asia.
But don't be scared, that's just history. The Western world had its moment for the last 300 years. Before that it was the Islamic world at the center of things. Before Islamic world, it was Asia. And wayyy before, it was the Levant.
Rant ended. But seriously, start investing into some Asian emerging markets and China before it's too late.
hate to agree but ur right
biden is a sellout btw, this extreme populism was strategically induced by western opposition
Who gives a fuck. Whether you like him or not, his "idgaf about wokesters" attitude is delaying the American decline. But that's just it. He's only delaying it for couple years. He doesn't know how to wokesters nor how to make peace with diehard Trumpsters.
Lol, I missed this gem. Counter-evidence:
evidence 1:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/2…
evidence 2:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9299889/PIERS-MORGAN-Theres-eq…
evidence 3:
https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1348403213200990209
Evidence 4:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mFPXJPVX7EwJ:http…
which results in this:
https://twitter.com/iimigofficial/status/1370373548045430786
Lmao.
And finally, the intellectual powerhouse Ibram Kendi being on the reading list of the US Navy:
https://www.navy.mil/CNO-Professional-Reading-Program/Sailors/#foundati…
while the Russian and Chinese cadets will read Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz.
That's not giving a fuck, amirite? He didn't give so much of a fuck that he pushed it all the way to the head of the military in less than 3 months. But I'm sure you'll bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. I personally can't wait to see the US army suffering a brutal humiliation at the hands of China or Russia. It's not like Putin kicking Obama's butt all over Syria wasn't a dire warning anyway. The next episodes will be comedy.
I agree with you about the decline in Western society, but let's not pretend Asian society is the golden child (in this case I am speaking specifically about China, as they obviously make up the vast majority of the population, just like how the US is seen as the "West"). Obviously here in America a lot of people aren't able to separate Chinese people from the country/government of China, so please don't hit me with the "XeNoPhObIa" or "RaCiSm" comments. I think this was mentioned in another thread about China, but they are literal communists who are committing actual genocide right now. The reason that it seems so "orderly" there and they were able to get over COVID despite having a much larger population than the other Asian countries was because of the insane government overreach. I mean it was literally Orwell's 1984 over there (not used as the average right wing talking point on Twitter, I'm 100% serious). Does American have a fuckton of problems that are holding us back from regaining international respect and prosperity that we saw in the late 20th century? Of course. I full agree that political correctness, conspiracy theories, an inflated military budget, crony capitalism, both the far right and the far left, and just mind blowing government incompetence are very real problems and that America is not perfect. But I'd take government incompetence over a regime that is basically one step away from North Korea any day of the week. Ironically, the person that you named your account after would have DESPISED the current CCP. You can make all the arguments you want about how Western society is on the decline because we argue about transgender bathrooms, and you might be right. But until the U.S. dollar is no longer the world's currency, and dozens of countries don't depend on us for protection, we aren't going anywhere. At this point, I don't think you can compare the U.S./Western society to empires in the past. The difference in technology, military, population size, etc. is just too great for anything significant to happen to the U.S. Those anti-Chinese Asian countries that you mentioned? They still put the vast majority of their money in the U.S., so what does that say about how they view the status of America. And I think it's pretty uneducated to say all the major innovation will come out of Asia. Just think of how hostile China is to entrepreneurs and businessmen (cough cough Jack Ma). I think you underestimate how much research and innovation is being done here in the U.S. The difference is that we don't pay our workers 20 cents an hour in literal sweatshops (we just outsource it to China lol). And the vast majority of us are normal people who would thrive just as well in an Asian country. The reason that you see so many idiots on Twitter and the like is because unlike China, we don't censor our citizens. I mean just look at what happened to Trump and all of his social media accounts. You think there's any chance in hell that shit would fly in China? The fact that that was even allowed to happen tells me that we are still far ahead of them simply from a moral perspective. Overall, I think it's just cherrypicking to compare Asian countries as these golden utopias where people discuss their country's "growth" to America as a primitive jungle where everyone complains about how racist Dr. Seuss is. America is still home to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, you name it. The rest of the world depends on these things to survive. I also like how you said that eventually "one side is gonna take power and suppress people's freedoms". Newsflash, take a look at China. I don't care how many fucking bridges they build when their government holds Muslims in actual concentration camps (and I swear to God if someone compares that to police brutality in America I'm going to blow my head off). In conclusion, yes, I agree that we have a lot of problems to address in America that need to be fixed and in many aspects countries like South Korea and Japan are in better states than we are, but America is still the powerhouse of the world and while it might not be "the best country to live in" according to some BuzzFeed article, it's a fuck's sight better than China (once again, obviously not talking about Chinese or Asian people in general). And to end, I'll address your last sentence: I'd rather fuck Justine Tobin after dragging my nuts through hot sauce than invest in China over America.
I'm not just talking about China, but China despite doing terrible things has its shit together. They actually have a long term vision and their leaders actually know how to achieve their goals. Meanwhile the US and the West's leaders are squabbling over petty topics.
America will be good in our lifetime. But our children's and their children's? Most likely not.
If I have kids, I'll make sure they have a solid grounding in both the West and Asia. They'll grow up in the US, get educated here, and spend their early careers here. But once they become middles aged and I have grey hair and arthritis, they'll be better off moving to Asia.
India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines by then would have grown massively while Korea and Japan are trying to maintain their economic supremacy. China will be the new superpower and India will be its contender.
I appreciate your deep, permanent commitment to my country, by the way. America is definitely better off if it's populated by people who plan to take what they can get out of it and then bail when there's trouble.
I’m a non-Asian American, and I agree with a lot of what you say. America and other Western countries are in significant cultural and academic decline. I think it’s correct to say that China and other Asian countries will play a larger and larger role on the world stage going forward.
That said, let me offer some constructive criticism, which I suspect will generate a bunch of monkey shit.
My father works in industrial tech and travels to China periodically for business. His impression, working with Chinese people in Asia, matches my impression as a recent grad student in a target US university where I had lots of Asian classmates.
Europe and America basically created the modern world. China’s rise has been driven by an almost laughable level of obsessive copying of the West’s technology. My dad’s experience is that, if you do a deal with a Chinese company, you need to make all of your profit the first time. With American or many foreign companies, you can lose a bit on R&D but make it up with repeat business. But the Chinese companies have zero concept of intellectual property. They’ll let you do the difficult design work and then reverse engineer it and cut you out going forward.
That’s in some ways similar to the approach that my Asian classmates took in school. Incredible discipline, massive hours spent studying for tests, but a certain lack of creativity.
But the attitude needed to create new things is totally different than the attitude needed to catch up. Thomas Edison didn’t become a great inventor by cramming to get a perfect SAT score and get accepted into the most elite Invention School. He just started experimenting.
I can’t help but notice that much of today’s cutting-edge technology, whether it’s SpaceX’s rockets or CRISPR, continues to be invented by Western people- with the Chinese following closely behind and adopting it at scale. I suspect that will change, but it hasn’t yet.
This was really only true about 10 years ago. Back then they were still trying get on level with the rest of the world.
But nowadays, they've caught up in variety of areas from industrial, financial, and technology industries. In some sectors, they're actually marginally doing better in innovation.
As for creating completely new business models the Silicon Valley way, China is primed for that kind of growth. Business environment is very vibrant there and entrepreneurship thrives. People are full of ideas and ambition. True innovation (0 to 1 kind) could happen anytime.
Sooner or later, the country will have a huge social and cultural push against the oppressive aspect and the CCP will relax a little on the cultural aspects while still holding on to political power. Once that happens and people become free to think, imagine what will happen. China will have its own Silicon Valley (perhaps multiple of them). This is exactly what they've been preparing for the last couple decades. In fact, 0 to 1 innovation is already happening at smaller scales in the Chinese start-up scene.
They're not copy and pasting existing business models. They're creating new ones.
It's the entrenched bureaucrat civil service mindset vs entrepreneur creator mindset.
It's arguably why South America is so poor compared to North America. If your economic and cultural values are based on attaining a "high post" in society in a rentier, extractive sense, you will always lag behind those who attempt to create and push the boundaries in ingenuity.
Obviously Asia is a different story, and the countries of Asia are not a monolith but there's something to the idea of cultural values determining national destiny - in parallel with quality/structure of institutions.
Yeah, some city states in Asia are excelling, but Asia is a big place mostly comprised of 2nd world countries where everything is still quite chaotic and unorganised. We may be facing fiscal suicide and polarised politics in the west, but many of these Asian countries are struggling with having an operating system of government, rule of law, and their own ethnic and demographic challenges. Chinese genocide? Rohinga? Recent coupe in Myanmar? Tensions between India and China? Japan has been stagnating since the 80s? Long list..
Strongly disagree about your points relating to education. More people are achieving higher degree levels than ever before in the West. If anything higher education is overbooming.
I believe there is a general sense that public discourse has gone to shit because of social media giving anybody a platform. If you surround yourself with educated and curious people, this is a non issue. Politicians will always pander to the lowest common denominator. Useless arguments on twitter don't matter in the real world.
Yeah there is an ongoing shift, but I don't think the west will 'crumble', Rather proceed at a slower pace and in some places stagnate.
Tl:dr Asia is chaotic 2nd world with a handful of exceptions
It will be interesting to see whether the Chinese are able to generate soft cultural power through entertainment, etc. That's been a huge source of US's global influence for the past several generations, and it's arguably increasing even as the US becomes more dysfunctional in many ways. China seems to have been fairly inept at that so far, although South Korea and Japan have done somewhat better.
I'm going to post random examples of who's to blame for the downfall of our civilization.
Exhibit N.1 :
Researchers have found time and again that married people live longer, happier and more prosperous lives — and that although some of this may reflect the sort of people who get married, it also reflects an effect of marriage itself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/11/conservatives-say-i-…
Liberals: booohoo don't get married! The patriarchy! Push women into the workforce, don't have kids! Open relationships! Polyamory!
Exhibit n.2:
Biological Ethnocentrism: The NegativeImpact of Racial and Ethnic Diversity Upon Societies and Individuals.
https://de.catbox.moe/su1vjr.pdf
Liberals: diversity is our strength! Amen and awomen! Be less white!
Exhibit n.3:
Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/books/dr-seuss-books.html
The libs:
To sum it up a perfect example that represents the Western world under liberal leadership:
U.S. diplomats in China subjected to anal swab testing for Covid-19, State Department says
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-diplomats-china-subjected-anal-s…
The truth of the matter is that the Western world is in decline because it has been hijacked by a bunch of traitors, with no loyalty whatsoever towards their own fellow citizens, motivated by narcissim and an extreme desire to be acknowledged as world saviors, supporters of a plethora of extremist asinine ideas ranging from the obvious 3, race, gender and sexual orientation, extending to nutrition, basic freedoms, use of violence, travel, even breathing and virtually anything that keeps society together. It can't be fixed. Most Westerners have become too lax and they notice the radical negative changes too late, nor have the energy to fight back.
you don't get tired of this shit?
In chase of these silly people, you've become silly yourself. How sad
Lmao, yeah, I'm the problem, not this bunch of sociopaths and pedophiles ruining society.
Bill Maher's recent "New Rule: Losing to China" sums it up best:
Here's a newsflash... most people in the West don't care at all about identity politics... turn off the social media.
I do think care either. But unfortunately people making laws for us do. And that's the real problem
Politician's care about identity politics at all. If you think they do, then you need to rethink the narrative and what they are actually doing.
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