> Rudd falls squarely into the ‘Washington intellectual’ camp.
The views he is expressing are incredibly contrarian right now in DC. In fact, it's likely that he's expressing things that Americans in politics and government are afraid to say with their names attached.
> Parties in the US come in and out of power but the regime of elites and their dispersion between geographies (DC, NYC, LA, SF, etc) and industries (finance, media, tech, oil, etc) seems a much more flexible and stable equilibrium. Not so China, where Xi has ended a decade of purging to concentrate power further in his hands. The economy and the fate of any man within it is entirely subject to his whim.
This is really exaggerated; various statistics (ex 1: tax rate comparisons; ex 2: national government investments vs local government investments vs private investments in China) belie this. But what is true is that Chinese _bureaucrats_ can get promoted and fired. So one country's government is run like NASA; another country's government is run like SpaceX. Who do you want to bet on?
There is also the dynamic that rich American techies love to throw money at risky startups; virtually no other rich Americans or rich people in other countries enjoy doing this. So every government in every place other than SV has a choice: either make those risky, initially-money-losing investments yourself (and do it meritocratically, rather than as a slush fund for your pals!) or get eaten as Silicon Valley eats the world. The reality is that China is, given the difficulty in creating a VC culture, doing the best one can do. And that is why China has the only tech ecosystem that is even attempting to think big and keep pace with SV.
> The CCP has not yet been able to create its own Silicon Valley, at least in part because in China, thou shalt have no other god but the CCP.
The only SV is SV -- every place has struggled to replicate its magic -- but China is the only place that has managed to build a parallel software tech stack. And consider that, absent bans and tariffs, it is likely that TikTok will continue to dominate; that Temu, Shein, and BYD will expand and perhaps win in America's home turf. I've also written about the possibility of Chinese future dominance of AI + bio here: https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/on-ai-biology-and-chinas-prospects .
> and not for the dictator of a one-party state singularly focused on indefinite total rule
It is a neverending struggle to convince my friends and family who've never been to China that it's not "North Korea but somehow mysteriously richer". Instead, when you travel around China, everywhere you see evidence of a government (setting aside its foreign policy) that cares more about its own people than my government in America cares about me. Buildings from 20 years ago have barred doors and windows because burglary was once commonplace; yet new ones are mostly unbarred. In Chinese public bathrooms, the propaganda instructs men to improve their aim to avoid splattering; in American public bathrooms, the propaganda has a rather less pro-civilization focus. Going to the Chinese version of the DMV is not a humiliation ritual. Even the air pollution has been largely fixed; my parents warned me about this when I visited, so I showed them that Shenzhen had better air at that moment than they had in Michigan.
It doesn't even feel totalitarian, compared to the West today. In the hip part of Shenzhen, I saw everything from people wearing Christian-themed fashion to gay couples walking arm in arm. Yes, it is true that you can't go online and notice the visual similarities between Xi Jinping and a certain hunny-loving pantsless bear. But in the UK, there are more important things that you cannot notice. And in the UK, even a regular person who says a Bad Thing can go to jail for what they say; in China a fed-up Boomer poaster will just see their post get automatically deleted, while only dissident community organizers go to jail. (Indeed, if you have to live in a country with censorship, you would prefer to live in one where you get "invited to tea" for a warning first, rather than one where people who didn't knowingly choose the path of political dissidence get sent to jail.) And CCTV news was more-or-less doing reporting about the day's events, instead of doing journalism about the Current Narrative.
> We have principles and the CCP’s brand of ethno-fascist totalitarianism should be repulsive to us
What exactly are those principles? And what exactly is "ethno-fascist"? I could understand hearing that from someone who hates Israel and Hungary, but when I hear this from conservative Westerners, I am confused. Consider the possibility that the narrative-setters who paint a sinister picture of Israel and Hungary do the same to China. Did you know that the CCP continues to favor Uighurs via "affirmative action with Chinese characteristics", and that most (Han) Chinese do not like this? Did you know that actual trigger of the campus protest movement that culminated in Tiananmen Square was a certain campus criminal incident in Nanjing in December 1988? Did you know that the CCP was struggling to contain popular anger in June 2021, yet not about Covid lockdowns (which had been over for a year by that point!), but by what a certain "American scholar" did to a certain Ningbo female college student? And did you know that this "American scholar" was named Shadeed and received an associate's degree in human resources from the University of Phoenix? If you think China is "ethno-fascist", your problem is not with one yellow bear who wears a red shirt: it is with a billion Chinese people.
> Does Chinese “analytic framework” strike you as “sophisticated” or… idiotic? I wish “good Marxist” readings of history and strategy on all my enemies
Really? This is lame, but is it worse than SWOT analysis, or any of other the silly B-school frameworks popular here? Wouldn't you rather wish a Whiggish theory of history on your enemies, to lull them into complacency? And if this is what Marxism in China has turned into, it's become rather benign! Even classic Marxism is less radical than contemporary Western progressivism. Marxism in principle limits entitlements to only workers and not bums, and limits government seizures to investment income. Rawlsian progressivism justifies seizures of workers’ earned income and giveaways to parasites. And now you're telling me that contemporary Chinese Marxism is not even classical Marxism: it just means looking to history for patterns of countervailing forces. How can anyone feel particularly threatened and angry at this?
Not sure what he wrote that is taboo in DC? The 'Washington intellectual' comment was riffing on T Greer's definition.
I accept the uniqueness of Silicon Valley, and maybe its correct to say that everywhere it faces political headwinds, including in SV, where it arguably barely managed to grow itself
I'm also open to your critique of Western heavy handedness and Chinese openness. I am shocked at what I see in the West today and don't know enough about China on the ground - as I admit in the piece! I merely critiqued Rudd on his own terms.
There's an old taboo around calling China an "enemy", but also a new taboo around calling China a "competitor", so the PC term is now "adversary", which of course means the same thing as "enemy". A competition is zero-sum, but it's not existential and it's not between absolute good and absolute evil. There's also a major taboo around contemplating the possibility that China can win a competition due to human capital superiority. You're only allowed to say that the US might lose because it doesn't have enough "resolve" and/or because we allowed China to compete unfairly.
Your ignorance of China vitiates your criticisms both of the unctuous little Rudd (who, btw, despite his Mandarin was thrown out of China in 2008, while he was PM. Once a dick...
1. "On China, one might take Peter Thiel’s 'China is weirdly autistic'”. listening to Peter speak, he's clearly on the ASPI curve. China sounds autistic to you because that's how Fox News reports it, and because you cannot imagine a different political system and vastly more successful. 96% of Chinese–who are smarter, richer, better educated and more widely traveled than us–say their country is heading in the right direction. (vs. 31% of Westerners). Last I checked, 139 countries had joined one or all of China's alliances and their politicians, officials and students cannot get enough of the place.
2. "The CCP’s obsession with maintaining power and the subordination of its entire economic and social project to that end makes the CCP appear weak". Why would a government that has never lied to its people nor broken a promise find staying in power hard–especially since the average Chinese net worth is much higher than ours and they live longer, healthier lives than us?
"Parties in the US come in and out”. Don't conflate Capitalist factions with the Communist Party. Mao knew, verbatim, George Washington's farewell address, in which he warned that factions in government leave them vulnerable to foreign takeovers. As has happened in the USA.
3. Finally "Yet Rudd is completely neutral in his description of Xi’s total control over his nation. Harsh words of breaking international norms are reserved for the US politician”. If, by 'international norms' you mean America's 'rules-based order' then why not come out and say that China does not obey us?
Thanks for the Rudd-review, confirmed what I already suspected, now I know I don't need to read it.
Recent Western books on China seem to be either a collection of vacuous platitudes (Rush Doshi) or screaming that the country is going to collapse into warlordism (just wait, any day now) like Zeihan. Samo Burja is one of the few popular talking heads around now who doesn't spout nonsense when it comes to China. Conversely I think Malcolm Fraser's "Dangerous Allies" was quite over-optimistic on China (when it came up), but I'm sure it's still a better read than a born conformist like Rudd's.
A lot of older self-described "Chinahands" aren't much better - Godfree Roberts denies the mass-famine of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" ever happened. He's been arguing this point with the world's leading Jewish anti-semite Ron Unz for nearly a decade now.
Anyway, as someone whose parents came from the Soviet Union, you must be acutely aware how poor Western understanding of cultures can be.
Enjoyable read. Had a chortle over your so true observation that “Rudd really is the autistic technocrat.” Australia would have been better off without him. Cheers!
Ba careful about referring to Ukraine as a positive. Russia clearly has momentum there and it looks like they'll be able to get large chunks of the country. I'm worried about what this will do to NATO's reputation.
And it might have made Europe utterly dependent on the US but that came at the price of much of Europe's industrial sector.
My brother in Noah, this review is quite silly.
> Rudd falls squarely into the ‘Washington intellectual’ camp.
The views he is expressing are incredibly contrarian right now in DC. In fact, it's likely that he's expressing things that Americans in politics and government are afraid to say with their names attached.
> Parties in the US come in and out of power but the regime of elites and their dispersion between geographies (DC, NYC, LA, SF, etc) and industries (finance, media, tech, oil, etc) seems a much more flexible and stable equilibrium. Not so China, where Xi has ended a decade of purging to concentrate power further in his hands. The economy and the fate of any man within it is entirely subject to his whim.
This is really exaggerated; various statistics (ex 1: tax rate comparisons; ex 2: national government investments vs local government investments vs private investments in China) belie this. But what is true is that Chinese _bureaucrats_ can get promoted and fired. So one country's government is run like NASA; another country's government is run like SpaceX. Who do you want to bet on?
There is also the dynamic that rich American techies love to throw money at risky startups; virtually no other rich Americans or rich people in other countries enjoy doing this. So every government in every place other than SV has a choice: either make those risky, initially-money-losing investments yourself (and do it meritocratically, rather than as a slush fund for your pals!) or get eaten as Silicon Valley eats the world. The reality is that China is, given the difficulty in creating a VC culture, doing the best one can do. And that is why China has the only tech ecosystem that is even attempting to think big and keep pace with SV.
> The CCP has not yet been able to create its own Silicon Valley, at least in part because in China, thou shalt have no other god but the CCP.
The only SV is SV -- every place has struggled to replicate its magic -- but China is the only place that has managed to build a parallel software tech stack. And consider that, absent bans and tariffs, it is likely that TikTok will continue to dominate; that Temu, Shein, and BYD will expand and perhaps win in America's home turf. I've also written about the possibility of Chinese future dominance of AI + bio here: https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/on-ai-biology-and-chinas-prospects .
> and not for the dictator of a one-party state singularly focused on indefinite total rule
It is a neverending struggle to convince my friends and family who've never been to China that it's not "North Korea but somehow mysteriously richer". Instead, when you travel around China, everywhere you see evidence of a government (setting aside its foreign policy) that cares more about its own people than my government in America cares about me. Buildings from 20 years ago have barred doors and windows because burglary was once commonplace; yet new ones are mostly unbarred. In Chinese public bathrooms, the propaganda instructs men to improve their aim to avoid splattering; in American public bathrooms, the propaganda has a rather less pro-civilization focus. Going to the Chinese version of the DMV is not a humiliation ritual. Even the air pollution has been largely fixed; my parents warned me about this when I visited, so I showed them that Shenzhen had better air at that moment than they had in Michigan.
It doesn't even feel totalitarian, compared to the West today. In the hip part of Shenzhen, I saw everything from people wearing Christian-themed fashion to gay couples walking arm in arm. Yes, it is true that you can't go online and notice the visual similarities between Xi Jinping and a certain hunny-loving pantsless bear. But in the UK, there are more important things that you cannot notice. And in the UK, even a regular person who says a Bad Thing can go to jail for what they say; in China a fed-up Boomer poaster will just see their post get automatically deleted, while only dissident community organizers go to jail. (Indeed, if you have to live in a country with censorship, you would prefer to live in one where you get "invited to tea" for a warning first, rather than one where people who didn't knowingly choose the path of political dissidence get sent to jail.) And CCTV news was more-or-less doing reporting about the day's events, instead of doing journalism about the Current Narrative.
> We have principles and the CCP’s brand of ethno-fascist totalitarianism should be repulsive to us
What exactly are those principles? And what exactly is "ethno-fascist"? I could understand hearing that from someone who hates Israel and Hungary, but when I hear this from conservative Westerners, I am confused. Consider the possibility that the narrative-setters who paint a sinister picture of Israel and Hungary do the same to China. Did you know that the CCP continues to favor Uighurs via "affirmative action with Chinese characteristics", and that most (Han) Chinese do not like this? Did you know that actual trigger of the campus protest movement that culminated in Tiananmen Square was a certain campus criminal incident in Nanjing in December 1988? Did you know that the CCP was struggling to contain popular anger in June 2021, yet not about Covid lockdowns (which had been over for a year by that point!), but by what a certain "American scholar" did to a certain Ningbo female college student? And did you know that this "American scholar" was named Shadeed and received an associate's degree in human resources from the University of Phoenix? If you think China is "ethno-fascist", your problem is not with one yellow bear who wears a red shirt: it is with a billion Chinese people.
> Does Chinese “analytic framework” strike you as “sophisticated” or… idiotic? I wish “good Marxist” readings of history and strategy on all my enemies
Really? This is lame, but is it worse than SWOT analysis, or any of other the silly B-school frameworks popular here? Wouldn't you rather wish a Whiggish theory of history on your enemies, to lull them into complacency? And if this is what Marxism in China has turned into, it's become rather benign! Even classic Marxism is less radical than contemporary Western progressivism. Marxism in principle limits entitlements to only workers and not bums, and limits government seizures to investment income. Rawlsian progressivism justifies seizures of workers’ earned income and giveaways to parasites. And now you're telling me that contemporary Chinese Marxism is not even classical Marxism: it just means looking to history for patterns of countervailing forces. How can anyone feel particularly threatened and angry at this?
Good response and challenge!
Not sure what he wrote that is taboo in DC? The 'Washington intellectual' comment was riffing on T Greer's definition.
I accept the uniqueness of Silicon Valley, and maybe its correct to say that everywhere it faces political headwinds, including in SV, where it arguably barely managed to grow itself
I'm also open to your critique of Western heavy handedness and Chinese openness. I am shocked at what I see in the West today and don't know enough about China on the ground - as I admit in the piece! I merely critiqued Rudd on his own terms.
Appreciate the thorough response!
There's an old taboo around calling China an "enemy", but also a new taboo around calling China a "competitor", so the PC term is now "adversary", which of course means the same thing as "enemy". A competition is zero-sum, but it's not existential and it's not between absolute good and absolute evil. There's also a major taboo around contemplating the possibility that China can win a competition due to human capital superiority. You're only allowed to say that the US might lose because it doesn't have enough "resolve" and/or because we allowed China to compete unfairly.
Wonderful writing, terrible thinking.
Your ignorance of China vitiates your criticisms both of the unctuous little Rudd (who, btw, despite his Mandarin was thrown out of China in 2008, while he was PM. Once a dick...
1. "On China, one might take Peter Thiel’s 'China is weirdly autistic'”. listening to Peter speak, he's clearly on the ASPI curve. China sounds autistic to you because that's how Fox News reports it, and because you cannot imagine a different political system and vastly more successful. 96% of Chinese–who are smarter, richer, better educated and more widely traveled than us–say their country is heading in the right direction. (vs. 31% of Westerners). Last I checked, 139 countries had joined one or all of China's alliances and their politicians, officials and students cannot get enough of the place.
2. "The CCP’s obsession with maintaining power and the subordination of its entire economic and social project to that end makes the CCP appear weak". Why would a government that has never lied to its people nor broken a promise find staying in power hard–especially since the average Chinese net worth is much higher than ours and they live longer, healthier lives than us?
"Parties in the US come in and out”. Don't conflate Capitalist factions with the Communist Party. Mao knew, verbatim, George Washington's farewell address, in which he warned that factions in government leave them vulnerable to foreign takeovers. As has happened in the USA.
3. Finally "Yet Rudd is completely neutral in his description of Xi’s total control over his nation. Harsh words of breaking international norms are reserved for the US politician”. If, by 'international norms' you mean America's 'rules-based order' then why not come out and say that China does not obey us?
I'll take "wonderful writing"!
The idea that average Chinese net worth is currently higher than ours is... how can I put this?... a bold and novel take.
Thanks for the Rudd-review, confirmed what I already suspected, now I know I don't need to read it.
Recent Western books on China seem to be either a collection of vacuous platitudes (Rush Doshi) or screaming that the country is going to collapse into warlordism (just wait, any day now) like Zeihan. Samo Burja is one of the few popular talking heads around now who doesn't spout nonsense when it comes to China. Conversely I think Malcolm Fraser's "Dangerous Allies" was quite over-optimistic on China (when it came up), but I'm sure it's still a better read than a born conformist like Rudd's.
A lot of older self-described "Chinahands" aren't much better - Godfree Roberts denies the mass-famine of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" ever happened. He's been arguing this point with the world's leading Jewish anti-semite Ron Unz for nearly a decade now.
Anyway, as someone whose parents came from the Soviet Union, you must be acutely aware how poor Western understanding of cultures can be.
Enjoyable read. Had a chortle over your so true observation that “Rudd really is the autistic technocrat.” Australia would have been better off without him. Cheers!
4 children , new fund , and great book reviews 🫡 respect !
Ba careful about referring to Ukraine as a positive. Russia clearly has momentum there and it looks like they'll be able to get large chunks of the country. I'm worried about what this will do to NATO's reputation.
And it might have made Europe utterly dependent on the US but that came at the price of much of Europe's industrial sector.