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it's a scattershot approach. the size of china and it's appetite for growth means it invests everywhere, its concentrated wealth and power is being dispersed globally in order to throw as many seeds as possible and water the ones that seek to grow. they're in africa, south america, eurasia, se asia, oceania, western europe, the middle east. it's very similar to what japan and south korea did domestically with miracle recoveries in their respective post war periods - but on a completely global scale. you give everyone a chance, and reinforce the ones who take it with good faith, the bad self-prune themselves and behavior can now be correlated to outcome. never throw good money after bad, and always work out some deal when you get something in return for something. china needs this to work, or it is facing a real crisis (constitutional, demographic, cultural) in the near future. the middle income trap leads to stagnation and possible revolution unless you can centralize population (it needs 100 tokyos) and largely flatten your wealth distribution before it happens, but avoiding it is preferential to dealing with its effects. the idea that china is doing this alone is also a fantasy, in reality it's working within the global system of international lending and finance to open as many doors as possible to trade, growth, accelerated development and good outcomes for domestic populations. european and american funds can't get through the door fast enough to get behind chinese at scale manufacturing and development of the undeveloped parts of the world. i think they will fail, but for largely unmentioned and unrelated reasons to the ones presently discussed. any system like china will risk total collapse around leadership changeover, and it needs more than 20 years to achieve new stability goals and at that moment - when xi dies - it requires a stable partner to secure the hand off, and at the rate of hysteria in america, two decades from now, i can see capricious opportunism on the part of a deflated western elite take over sound judgement and prudent long term thinking. the quiet horror of the thousands of kilometers of abandoned high speed rail like skeletal bones across the world as we enter some new global minimum is vividly in my mind as i think of the most likely outcomes. |