[conspire] (OT) geopolitics

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> There is one thing about  China which I find very concerning.  China
> is willing to wait as long as necessary for an opportunity.

Its problem is that its time is running out, in a number of areas
simultaneously, and none of those problems are any longer within their
control to address.

1.  Demographics.  China has the worst problem of terminal demographics
of any nation, even more severe than Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and Germany.
Their entire economic success relied on half a billion cheap workers, 
which they no longer have.  Their Boomer are now retired, their GenX,
Milennials, and GenZ almost don't exist at all.  Retirees neither
generate capital nor produce exports.  Their factories already have
severe problems maintaining staff.  This will only get worse.  As soon
as 2030, China will have four pensioners for every two taxpayers for
every one child.

And that wasn't just the result of the two-child policy that was
followed by the even more unwise one-child policy, but also China's
breakneck urbanisation starting in the middle 1970s.  Young farm
families have kids because they're help.  Young factory workers living
in tiny apartment don't because they're a problem.  Carry out those
trends in extreme form for almost 50 years, and you have a
country-limiting problem that no policy reversal can (any longer) fix.

2.  Total dependence on imported food and fuel, the latter needed for
fertiliser and agricultural fuel without which _domestic_ food
production doesn't work.  And all those are under near-term threat of
lasting shortages.  Note that most agriculture in China is _heavily_
dependent on artificial fertiliser and pesticides, which requires
foreign oil being shipped in.  China is the largest producer of _every_
type of energy product, which is a problem when that pipeline (pun
intended) is vulnerable, a point that brings us to...

3.  Maintaining the huge import/export cycle that drives China's economy
also depends crucially on the Bretton Woods arrangements[1] where the US
Navy guarantees safe shipping everywhere on the planet, but the USA has
been backing off its Bretton Woods commitments everywhere, e.g., Iran
recently seizing that oil tanker and the US merely putting out a press
release saying "Bad Iran!" and otherwise doing nothing.  This is bad
news for all countries relying on safe, cheap blue-water shipping, of
whom China tops the list.

For reasons mentioned upthread, China's much-vaunted navy doesn't really
have the ability to project force more than about 500 miles away from
China's coast and harbours.  This is a problem when your oil supplies
from the Persian Gulf (now that Russia's supply to China has gone away) 
go right past the Gulf squabbles, past oil-hungry India, and then
through narrow passages near Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, 
Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan -- all countries that mostly hate China's
guts.

4.  Leadership problem.  In his first 5 years, Chairman Xi purged all 
opposing factions completely.  Over the following 5 years, he also
purged all _allies_ potentially able to be a power player.  The result
is he's more solitary than any prior government leader in history.  
Everyone under him fears to bring him information, so he occasionally
finds out something that's been not mentioned to him and orders some
sort of overreaction, but otherwise is in an information void.

5.  History of disunity.  The USA's Bretton Woods pronouncements at the
end of WWII, particularly the Americans' demand for the end of
imperialism as part of the price of admission, gave the CCP the
breathing room to truly unify China and ensure its sovereignty against
colonisers for the first time in hundreds of years, but China's inherent
tendency to fragment is still there:  North China with its agricultural
core and high population has little in common with the Middle China of
the long, constrained Yangtze River valley, which has little in common
with the southern coastal cities, none of which has a productive
hinterland and all of which historically relied on foreign trade and
alliances.

Historically, China was not a country any more than Classical Greece was
a country, but rather a shifting patchwork of competing states in both
cases.  The Americans and the Bretton Woods regime changed that for
China by expelling the foreginers (except from tiny Hong Kong & Macao),
and giving Mao's faction & successors the opportunity to exploit
economics of scale and a sudden greenfield for cheap, safe, worldwide
trade, thus tying China together.  _But_ those unifying conditions 
are rapidly vanishing (as globalisation unravels to regionalisms).

6.  Economy that's poised to fail.  In China, I believe real debt is up
to about 4x the gross national product, and there is no economic
substance to a lot of the alleged economic activity.  Everything is
highly leveraged.  Every time Beijing has made a move to bring debt
under control, there have been convulsion and they backed off, so the
problem remains an accident waiting to happen -- which is why anyone
able to build economic success in China tries, as priority 1, to
exfiltrate as much capital as possible to foreign holdings and secure a
second passport -- because it's even more obvious to them than to all us
foreigners that the only way to win at a Ponzi scheme is to get out
before it blows up.

7.  Few resources.  China isn't the _source_ for much; it's lately
gotten rich just from manufacturing moving goods _through_ China.  On
its own, China has... problems.  The land suitable for greentech power
generation is thousands of miles from the coastal cities.  The country
has never been self-sufficient for food and probably never will be.
One item among many:  phosphates.  China needs it critically for
fertiliser, and lately has embargoed exports to ensure domestic supply,
part of the reason phosphorous has started to be critically short for
fertiliser worldwide.

Any or all of these points of fracture could end up being
country-kilers.  Some of them point towards famine, which _is_ the 
main country-killer par excellence.


> For years there was international discussion about some tiny islands
> in the South China Sea.  Then one day, a fleet of Chinese ships
> arrived and started dredging, building a runway and other military
> facilities.  Before anyone else could respond, they had a permanent
> base on what was previously a reef that was barely above water at high
> tide.

More reefs and shoals than islands (before China's dredging).

And those are annoyances to the Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos,
Malaysians, & Bruneians, and potentially also the Japanese, Koreans,
Indonesians, and Malaysian, especially as China acts like those phony
islands give them sovereignty, expanded fishing zones, and the right to
close international waters -- despite losing the court case at the
Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.  It's a manifestation of
"Tiger Diplomacy", i.e., get ahead by being arrogant, pushy assholes and
seeing how much you can grab.  

_But_, in any shooting incident, those so-called islands would last
about ten minutes, and meanwhile has achieved the amazing goal of
unifying Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines that "The PLA Navy
are assholes and we need to drive them out."  That's amazing because 
the last time the Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Malaysians, &
Bruneians agreed on _anything_ was hating Imperial Japan.

When days of reckoning come, I do think China having systematically
alienated all of its neighbours is going to prove to have been a
strategic error not offset by the value of a few militarised sandbars.


> Or look at Hong Kong.  There were many assurances about "One China,
> Two Systems".  It took 2 decades, but now China has seriously limited
> any dissent in Hong Kong.  During that time there were 5 different
> presidents in the US. 

The worldwide community has no stakes in Hong Kong (nor in Macao).

Yes, the PRC has certainly broken its promise of maintaining "One China,
two systems" for 50 years.  Margaret Thatcher is slowly rotating in
her grave.  Hong Kongers are still trying to become Vancouverites, but 
are largely now trapped (as are Macau people).

This leaves me unhappy, as Victoria, Hong Kong RCC (that was) is (er,
was) my home town, but nobody with enough guns or economic clout cares,
so the world continues to be imperfect and to rotate on its usual axis.


[1] Be your own judge, but personally I'd stay out of discussions of
post-WWII geopolitics until I had a good grasp of what the Bretton Woods
arrangements are/were, why & how they transformed world economics and
built the modern world, and why they are now crumbling.  I'm pretty 
sure most people I talk to on this subject, including without limitation
Ruben Safir, have absolutely no clue.