Monday, July 21, 2025

War with China should be avoided

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILzqlHIy-Lw


What inspired you to write this book?

Well, I see a great tragedy coming and it's a completely unnecessary tragedy. This coming geopolitical contest between the United States and China. And the basic message of my book is a very simple one, which is that a geopolitical contest between the United States and China is both inevitable and avoidable. So I try to explain in the main part of my book why it's inevitable and why also the United States should really think very hard and deep before it plunges into this geopolitical contest with China.

What I try to point out in the book is that there are lots of misconceptions that Americans have about their own strengths and about China's weaknesses. It is taken as an ideological certainty that when a thriving democracy takes on a geopolitical struggle against the communist party system, the thriving democracy will always win as it demonstrated in the first world war against the Soviet Union. But then if you dig deeper and you try to understand what is the core situation of American society today and the core situation of Chinese society, you discover that the United States is actually having to deal with some major structural challenges.

One of the key structural challenges is that the average income of the bottom 50% of the American population has been sliding down over a 30-year period. And as I try to analyze in the book, this is not just an accident. This is a result of deep structural forces in American society that have moved America away from being a thriving democracy towards becoming a plutoaucracy.

And by contrast, China in the 30-year period where the average income of the bottom 50% in America has been sliding down, this in the same 30-year period, the bottom 50% in China have had their best 30 years in 3,000 years. So at a time when the Chinese people are experiencing the most amazing improvements in their standard of living, you must remember also for most of Chinese history, the bottom 50% struggle to survive. They would die in famines and civil wars and they had a very rough life and the last 30 years they have access to education, housing, health care, travel in a way they never ever had before in their lives.

So after China has gone through the best 30-year period ever under the Chinese Communist Party, the United States is telling the Chinese people, why don't you get rid of Chinese Communist Party? And the Chinese people are scratching their head and say, "Excuse me, you know, I've had the best 30 years." And the Chinese Communist Party is succeeding because while in theory it is still a Communist Party, it is a Communist Party that is the exact opposite of the Soviet Communist Party because the Soviet Communist Party was run by all apparatchiks.

The Chinese Communist Party may possibly be the most meritocratic political party in the world and the selection process results in the best minds running China today. You met somebody you know you know Wangi Shan you know how brilliant these people are. So by by going into this old ideological reflex and saying hey democracies can always overcome communist parties. The United States hasn't done a deeper analysis and realize that this is not a contest within a democracy and a communist party system.

It's a contest between a plutoaucracy and a meritocracy. You talked about it being a party of representation, how that is maintained, whether that is stable. It is still true for the last 30 years. You see at the end of the day, running China, keeping a country of 1.4 billion together every day is a massive challenge. Which is why for most of Chinese history, China has more often been divided than united. So the periods like what China has experienced in the last 30 years with the strong central government delivering phenomenal improvement in living standards to its people is very rare in Chinese history.

And so if you compare the record in governance of the Chinese Communist Party especially after Deng Xiaoing launched his four modernizations 40 years ago in 1979. It's quite amazing what China has accomplished and the Chinese must always measure the record of their governance not against what other countries have achieved but what has been achieved in Chinese history. And no Chinese government in ever in Chinese history has improved the living standards of the Chinese people as much as the Chinese Communist Party has.

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