I found exactly one phrase in this history of the “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) by Stephen Grenville at The Interpreter worthwhile: “analysis by acronym”. And that was in the slug. After that I didn’t find it particularly insightful. Consider this concluding passage:
O’Neill’s admonition to all emerging economies to “copy South Korea†is pretty useless as practical advice. More specific advice was readily available (for example from the original version of much-maligned Washington Consensus). Sensible fiscal and monetary settings, a general reliance on markets for allocation and price-setting, and openness to foreign trade and investment: this is enough to sustain rates of growth which, while not matching South Korea, will still ensure an ever-larger share of global trade and GDP, ever-more deserving of a bigger role in global governance.
The problem, of course, is that China didn’t have any of those things. I don’t think that either Mr. O’Neill or Mr. Grenville really appreciates China’s enormous size and the potential of an authoritarian government in a country of that size. China presently has enough excess productive capacity in steel, automobiles, solar cells, and dozens, maybe hundreds, of other products not merely to satisfy its own needs for the foreseeable future but to satisfy the entire world’s needs. No market economy would tolerate that sort of malinvestment.
And how is any country to “copy South Korea” when China already has the capacity to produce just about anything at as low a cost as you could possibly meet?
“China presently has enough excess productive capacity in steel, automobiles, solar cells, and dozens, maybe hundreds, of other products not merely to satisfy its own needs for the foreseeable future but to satisfy the entire world’s needs. ”
I think that is wrong. It is generally thought that China has about 29% of the world’s total manufacturing capacity, while the US has about 12%. At least those are the last numbers I saw bandied about. (Wiki?) That is hardly enough to satisfy the whole world. We know for a fact that Taiwan is the only source for high end chips. And China certainly doesn’t dominate automobiles, tractors, earth moving equipment, commercial airplanes…
China is, however, is rapidly integrating true 5G and AI into its already fully modern factories, and is starting what is called the 4th Industrial Revolution. The Huawei 5G it is using has very much higher bit rates, much broader bandwidth, and much smaller latency that the 4+G we are getting in the US. China also has 70% of all the 5G bases in the world. See David Goldman at Asia Times for several posts on this.
The US is flooded with bogus CIA/Pentagon disinformation on China every single day. Nothing that comes out of government outlets, like all of the MSM, can be believed.
The MSM maintains a constant drum-beat for war with China, Russia, and Iran. The WSJ is especially bad. Every day we read about the next evil committed by them. How they violate every standard of international law, threaten war with all their neighbors, run genocide against gays or Muslims or Ukrainians… This is the propaganda war against Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan raised to the nth degree.
The US position is that while we have redlines Russia, China, and Iran do not have the right to redlines, and none of their redlines really exists. Yet all three countries are shouting warnings. We are closer to global war this morning than at any time since 1945. One can only hope that the Biden-Putin conference results in some deconfliction.
The US has to quietly backdown in Ukraine and the Baltics. The threats to base B-1B nuclear bombers in Norway or to send 480 nuclear weapons to Europe and to put them in Poland and the Baltics must stop.
The difference is that the U. S. consumes the preponderance of what it produces and China doesn’t.