China

Visualizing trade flows and tariffs

Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals. https://portolan.cc/ https://x.com/i/status/2081473121953911112

Gangster imperialism with a side of dick measuring contest

In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s…

Too distracted, too bored, and too stupid to care?

I posted an observation on X yesterday that generated a lot of talk and hate. I wrote that I’d seen a lot of people complaining that there was no propaganda campaign in the lead-up to this war, no effort to convince the American public that we were at imminent risk. There was a rather haphazard, tacked-on attempt by Steve Witkoff to advance the idea that Iran was a “week away” from being able to build a nuclear bomb, but this…

Geopolitical survival guide

The knee-jerk reaction of investors to geopolitical crises is to extrapolate the most recent events into the future and expect an escalation of a new conflict. This is when geopolitical experts are on TV and in the press with their predictions of World War III or a 1970s style oil shock and stagflation, etc. Ignore those warnings and doom and gloom forecasts as in most cases they are based on an assumption that the crisis…

The fundamental problem is complicity

Hannah Arendt wrote that if the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life after 1918 was death, then after 1945 it was evil. Today, the fundamental problem is complicity: reckoning with our acquiescence to a political system that suddenly appears criminal. These shocks all expose something rotten beneath the surface of liberal respectability: how elites participate in atrocity while maintaining prestige; how…

Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the India-US trade deal

But even if we acknowledge that the agreement has some pragmatic economic potential, it does not pass the smell test. For starters, this is not a reciprocal free-trade agreement. As Trump has made clear, America is not playing for reciprocal equality; it is playing for imperial domination. Even on its own terms, the agreement reflects this asymmetry. The new tariff regime is worse for India than what existed before Trump came…

What factors enabled China to dominate so many critical industries?

Did China really ask Western companies to transfer technology in return for market access—and is that why China is so dominant today? Yes, the “market access for technology” pattern was real in important parts of China’s rise—especially from the 1990s through the 2010s, when foreign firms often needed joint ventures, licenses, or approvals to operate in China in sensitive sectors. U.S. government findings around the Section…

Suffering from prosperity

Just why the liberal world has found itself in crisis is a matter of active debate. There are voices on the right arguing that liberalism was never a particularly good idea in the first place: that people need to be ruled, or that true fulfillment only comes through celebration of god and tribe and tradition. As someone who very much enjoys thinking for himself and making his own choices I find these arguments unappealing at…

China derangement syndrome

The reason could be that when you are powerful, people take note only when that power falters. The world was hardly impressed when Trump went on his tariff rampage; what struck people was when China successfully fought back. America demonstrated stunning military power in Venezuela but it was also expected; what people have noticed is Russia’s military failure in Ukraine. People also notice who envies whom. And it is no…

Neo-gangsterism

For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller nations on earth to unite with one another to protect themselves against our aggression, and to seek out competing superpowers—China, most obviously—to align…

On China and chips

The grave dangers AI safety hawks worry about can’t be adequately addressed without extensiveo international cooperation—cooperation tight enough to qualify as international governance. If, for example, your nation regulates AI skillfully enough to keep a bioweapon from being built on your soil, that won’t save you from the global pandemic that originates in a laxer nation; international regulation is needed. If you’re…

The future of global trade

Both economists agree that growth is still possible, but the age of “hyperglobalisation” – with its extraordinary convergence of openness, technology, and trust – is unlikely to return. > “Growth miracles seem less likely because two of the key mechanisms – access to big, lucrative markets and willingness to share technology across borders – no longer seem to be here.” Goldberg As global trade enters a new, more fragmented…

On ritual

Han Byung-Chul says that ritual is repetition without purpose, a way of founding community through shared uselessness. Performance seeks applause; ritual seeks duration. In the performance culture of the West, even grief must be productive, posted, monetised. In the ritual culture of the East, continuity is its own defence: the temple rebuilt, the porcelain recast, the festival repeated until memory becomes weather. Between…

China is playing long games

Beijing also is building a national innovation system — linking academia, industry and defense — designed to bolster China’s military and technological strength. In recent years, dozens of China’s top 60 universities have established an expanding array of labs and research centers dedicated to pushing forward technologies with dual civilian and military uses, according to our research. Some of these initiatives were jointly…

A few good rabbit holes

A few good rabbit holes: 1\. The illusion of knowledge 2\. AI capex boom 3\. China and weaponized interdependence

Welcome to the age of weaponized interdependence

There is a common trope in the literature on globalization that suggests that greater economic exchange has fragmented and decentralized power relations. We, in contrast, argue that these economic interactions generate new structural conditions of power. Complex interdependence, like many other complex systems, may generate enduring power asymmetries. This observation allows us to bring the literature on security, which has…

The Protection Racket: A History of Tariffs and Who Really Pays

On that day, an executive order was signed imposing a sweeping new regime of "reciprocal" tariffs. The action was vast in its scope, targeting nearly 70 countries and territories in addition to the European Union. The tariff rates varied widely, based on justifications ranging from trade imbalances to national security concerns. Rates for some nations were set as high as 41% (Syria) and 39% (Switzerland), while key trading…